A Journey Through DevOps with Tara Hernandez – Tech.Strong.Women. EP 9

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of tech strong women where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in Tech. I'm Jody Ashley executive producer here at techstrong and I'm joined by my co-hosts Tracy Reagan and Rebecca August.

But before we introduce today's guest I want to give you a quick update on. What's Happening Here at Tech strong. Coming up on October 4th.

We have our Cloud container security Summit. tv every day for great shows and interviews. Hey, Rebecca, what do you have on top for this week?

Sure. Nope, so my biggest thing with this week. My greatest find was a cyber security girl our cybersecurity underscore girl on Instagram.

She was giving out great tips on how to tell if your data has been compromised. So I really loved how she was ranked how she's been spreading great information about cybersecurity and also bringing in like droves and droves of crowds of people just saying think you follow information that she's been sharing lately and hoping to have her on the show with us pretty soon here. All right, that's amazing Trace.

What's your news for the week? Well, Rebecca, what is her name? I want to watch.

Yes. What is her name? Her name is Caitlin, but on Instagram you find her as cybersecurity underscore girl and got it.

I'm gonna check her out because cybersecurity is awful. You know, it's it's a pretty big conversation right now. Finally.

We are having that conversation. Um, so I've been watching the news lately and the Linux Foundation has been kind of busy with creating New Foundations two came across one is called pytorch and it is being donated by meta which AKA Facebook and it is similar to tensorflow for basically managing workflows around machine learning. That's the best way to describe it.

I find it pretty fascinating that the pytorch itself is gonna have a complete Foundation. It should be a interesting one to watch. There are I think Google and Microsoft as well are part of that Foundation.

And the goal is to start making AI easier to program tensorflow already housed on that apparently pytorch is a little different in that it is more specific to python programmers. So making it easier for python programmers. The other thing that came up which I think is totally fascinating is the the Linux Foundation started another foundation around a wallet.

so they have created a basically a And not a foundation. For managing and what they call the open Wallet Foundation. They are not going to be creating a blockchain eat themselves, but they want to build a blockchain ecosystem through access to open source technology.

This one I think is the one to watch. I have just recently started getting into the fun of blockchain. It's always fun to learn new things.

That's kind of what I'm doing right now. I just went to a blockchain conference last week and my brain was really full after the first half day. But the idea of these open source Tools around an open wallet.

I find pretty fascinating because I as I learned even though we have a blockchain technology. There is quite a bit of work to be done around supporting that blockchain technology particularly around programming in it. And our artillious the artillius project which is part of the CD Foundation received a grant to build out an immutable s-bomb using blockchain technology, which is how I ended up at this conference.

So those are the two things to watch the the pytorch as well as the open Wallet Foundation through the Linux Foundation. So those are my tips going on. They've got a lot going on over there.

They're relaunching the CDF as well to continuous delivery. That's a we're actually going to be doing a show with them that I'm getting ready to launch. So they're so busy over there for sure.

Which is where I met Torah, is that haha. Great. Yeah, we're excited to be part of their relaunch.

So I'm I'm excited to get that show started for for them. So we like to partner with them. They're a great team over there.

Well speaking of Tara I'd like to interview star Hernandez. She's Our Guest today Tara. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hello. Hi. I'm thanks for having me on the show.

So as you said, my name is Tara Hernandez. I am currently the vice president of developer productivity at mongodb that's relatively recent previously. I was at Google and US swath of other companies been around almost 30 years now in the industry and it's been really wild to see how it's evolved particularly in my space coming in.

My first job was at a company called Borland International which did compilers and databases back in the day. I think it was my I started there at 1993 something like that and I got a job and something I had never heard of which is build engineering or release engineering and I found my my true passion, which is development infrastructure. So I've written a lot of make files and written a lot of Pearl and Python and other types of scripts and developed tools while I was at Netscape.

org. We also open sourced a web-based bug tracking system, which I think was first examples of web-based developer tooling out into the wild and that was in 1998. I think.

I've worked at a variety of different companies with the primary focus around development infrastructure was a Pixar Studios helping a lot of their software proprietary. So I've been develop good development software software development best practices and support of the movies that are being developed. It's all CG animation dentist Google where I was not doing development infrastructure and was an opportunity to kind of test out being more product aware and and trying new roles and I learned a ton and one of the things I learned was I really love development infrastructure.

So here I am at mongodb back to back to where I belong and one of the cool things about mongodb is it has an open source CI system called Evergreen which was custom built in order to support database development. So mongodb is the corporation that wraps around mongodb the open source. No SQL database.

So the development infrastructure around how do you develop that in a highly scalable way as an interesting technical challenge? And that's what I'm working on right now. Industry mentioned it was one of the while I was at Google.

I was privileged to be part of the founding of the continuous delivery foundation and it's an organization. I am very pleased to be part of and getting to meet Tracy was one of the certainly one of the benefits. Well, thank you.

And you know that is a fascinating topic CI around databases. Yeah, it's how long have we had that conversation? He's like why is the database never part of the of the CI workflow?

How did that get left behind because half the time you can't do a deployment if you can't track the database changes as well. So I'm I didn't I had never heard of that. So I'm super glad to have heard that today because makes me very excited.

It doesn't take much I'm usually amused but that is really cool. Yeah, it's so you can go to get home look for Evergreen and you know, it's not part of the CDF yet, but I was just gonna ask that question you thank you guys could contribute that to the CD Foundation. We should have that conversation at some point.

We definitely should have that conversation. I am so open to that. So taught, you know, let's just to get this party really started tell us what you're seeing, you know kind of where you're at where your headspace is at right now.

What are some of the challenges you're seeing and what are some of the pivots that you're starting to see in the space in your area of expertise? So, you know, that's a great question. You know, like I said, I got into development infrastructure of some form all the way back to the 90s.

And at the time it was the thing that was like, oh, well, that's what you do and you're not a real engineer. Right? So you're just the build monkey or whatever.

org. We hired this guy by the name of Paul bigger who was The Tinderbox maintainer from Mozilla at the time and he looked at it at tenerbox and he was like Wow, this is kind of a cool idea. But oh my God.

The terrible code base which is true. I mean, I don't I'm paraphrasing what I'm sure he was thinking when he looked at this Pearl CGI with inline HTML and yes, that's really horrific implementation, but he didn't turn around and found it Circle CI right because he actually was an entrepreneur had an entrepreneur spirit and recognized that there was a value proposition in developer tools. And since then you look around and you see companies, you know kosuke, you know invented Hudson then Jenkins and now there's Cloud bees and their Circle CI and there was that I think Travis CI sorry GitHub right?

It's when when dvcs became a thing or get lab or and now developer tools is actually real engineering. First of all, it finally has the respective deserves because shipping software is actually really hard and it takes a lot to do it properly and then you had coming out sort of the what does it mean to successfully ship software and you had things coming out like Dev And and to me more importantly the state of devops report and then of course, Nicole and Jean and Jazz wrote accelerate to really talk about that and the research and and then that evolved into more recently Nicole and her team had the space framework for developer productivity. And so now developer productivity is the new hotness.

And you see companies like code climate or get the x or and very Haystack, you know, there's now dozens of companies that are emerging solely to solve the problem of how do you develop a productivity as efficiently as possible? Right? And so we've kind of come all the way around to it being this thing.

That was like that's just details. All right, it's not that important to this is one of the hottest areas of the industry from a technical standpoint because we have gone also from you know, 18 months 24 month release Cycles to continuous deployments where you could go out, you know, her commit potentially if you're super aggressive about your hosted SAS platform, and I think it's just the the speed of which this area has evolved is just tremendous and it seems like every time I took turn around there's some new things that somebody's trying right and it and developer stack has had Enormous impact on the industry as a whole, you know, the Linux Foundation exists because companies realize that that using operating systems as a mechanism to sell Hardware was not a good long-term strategy. Okay, let's let's all decide that Linux is actually in the Unix space the way to go and let's all collectively agree to fund, you know, Linus Torvalds and his team to to maintain it.

That was like a really interesting sort of Milestone. And then you as you evolve then you have. Oh, well, here's this container thing that this company Docker is has encapsulated and tried to create better abstractions for to I mean that it was always there but it wasn't very accessible.

Let's make it more accessible. Oh well now how do you do that at scale? And you had companies like messphere?

Giving it a try but that was a little bit too much overhead. And then Google released kubernetes. And of course when kubernetes first came out it wasn't super usable, but then eventually they realized hey, there's something there.

Hey, let's use this model with the Linux Foundation to really try to create an industry standard. Okay. Now we have the cncf and that spawned, you know, a wealthy look at the cncf landscape.

There's like thousands of elements and this is all based on not necessarily. You know what we think of when we think of high-tech industry is providing, you know, Business Solutions or consumer Solutions, but it's really around just how do we provide the solutions as a process? Right?

And so that's I think the thing that really gets me excited that this thing that I love and find the most interesting is so critical now to how we think as an industry. So nothing in game it's the process of how we get to the end game productivity is such an important part of what we're doing when it comes to what you're talking about developer tooling the pipeline some years back when I was really pushing our Meister product through open mic software which generated build control files instead of coding and make file. I had one developer tell me but you know, this is a craft like Cobb in like cobbling shoes.

They have to be a perfect make file and my response to him was but I don't want just one pair of shoes a quarter. I wouldn't lots of shoes. And I think that has been a challenge for us.

And I think it's going to continue to be as we go into Cloud native. What do you see especially around the database problem? Because you know, we're going to get distributed databases now and I mean really decompose database a database per container.

How is the how is that going to be solved or you guys thinking about that or have you put your head around it and how that will be how that's going to be changing and making this productivity model more difficult. That's a great question and let me just you know caveat this with I am not a database person. Though I now work at database company.

So I'm learning and no sequel was something I hadn't really poked at at all. But, you know, if you look at things like sharding and no sequel itself and then also the evolutions of the different ways of, you know, the creation of Aurora or spanner as as you know, this highly scalable Solutions a lot of there's a lot of different approaches to it and I don't know that there is a A one size fits all for all business cases as a possibility because when it gets down to the end of it, you have to think about what are the what are kind of the key elements you want to be able to support correctness? a scalability and latency Right and regardless of whether using something like spanner or you're using something like sqlite, you know that you're you're trying to pick a solution that's going to dial in those three things the most usefully to your immediate business need but, you know one could argue that data store.

is in a sort of a weird way is sort of like infrastructure there was that well, you got a DBA Right and or maybe you've got some software developers who kind of have a decent understanding but it should just work right? Let's you know, we the main thing is the app. Right, it's the app.

It's the user experience and not all companies historically maybe invested as much as they needed to or should have been in optimizing databases now. Part of that could be that you were either like an oracle. Or what was some of the other Oracle better side base, you know, it's like, okay.

Well, we're gonna you know, we're gonna go all in with Larry and we're going to hire a DBA and oh my gosh aren't those Oracle DBS expensive and is they were yeah still are probably but you know, and so maybe there was also than a reaction against that like we don't want to be, you know tied the Oracle and you know, maybe we can all just be good enough with the my sequel DBS because those are free and it's just custom maintenance and I I will admit that knowing almost nothing have acted as a my sequel DB admit and going in and manually how to calendar event once a month or I would log in and I'd rotate the bin files for the backups, right because I didn't really know what I was doing and you know, I think a lot of companies really have an appreciated. The level of investment that you need to have around data management, which is ironic because data management. I mean without your data you don't have a business.

Right, and it's a really critical detail. Maybe it's not as interesting and it's harder to talk about than some cool new user-facing thing that you can demo. I remember at reinvent back and I don't know 2017 and they were talking about Aurora and Verner was up there and demoing it and I'm like this is the most boring demo ever because we're looking at a terminal file 2000 people are staring at I'm like, you know, I can appreciate something in terminal but it's not very compelling right?

So, I don't know it's interesting and I like I said, I'm almost purely focused on. The the development infrastructure for mongodb, but I will say that one of the cool things about Evergreen for example is it's dog fooding. So we've got mongodb in the back end.

a couple of them for various parts of it and you know One of the the really interesting things about a cease CI system is that if it's successful people start wanting to use it more and more and you have a scalability issue, right? And so it's not just your compute scalability. It's also your data scalability.

And so I have been learning a lot. I've been there about three months. I've been learning a lot about some of the really fascinating scale challenges that that we've had as a business around supporting database development and how to how to ensure that the quality once it hits.

Our customers has been vetted as much as possible. It's a it's a fascinating problem. All right, I have to ask you you are so passionate about your whole career.

I mean what got you as a young person excited about this this kind of thing back in the 90s, right? This isn't a secret, but I think a lot of people don't necessarily know this. I was not meant to be in computer science.

I was a computer science major UC Santa Cruz. Not by choice. I I had gone to University intending to be a History Literature double major.

Humanities person But my my parents were like you got to do a stem major, you know, we're not gonna pay for it. Like wow, so I I didn't I didn't think so. It and I'm still not completely convinced.

I'm completely convinced. I don't know. Well, I barely graduated.

I was a terrible student. It was really hard for me to get engaged. It wasn't something I was super passionate about and so one of the things I love about development infrastructure actually is again not having heard of it.

You know, I some friends of my airport you see Santa Cruz at the time most students got internships either at Borland, which was just up the road in Scotts Valley OR at another company called SEO or Santa Cruz operations, which back then was actually an operating system company later, you know, some some people might know it turned into a patent troll litigator, which is a terrible and to what started out as an auspicious company, but and everybody wanted to go to SEO because SEO had the hot tub. Oh, it was a converted beach house. It's But but I ended up at Borland and I ended up on the team that I was in which the build team on the languages division because I had some classmates of mine are like, hey, we got an internship opening up come try it out.

And that was you know, running the bills making the Golden Master floppies. I don't know if you can see it. 0.

It's got it weighs like 30 pounds that has has fifty three and a half inch floppies and 85 Master. Obviously that's haven't heard in a while. Yeah, and it has physical.

books Because this is pre-internet, right? So the box is huge. It was a ton and so it's like, you know figuring out how do we how do we make this better and started to do tools development?

And and then when Borland I don't think this I mean it's 30 years old is not this isn't a secret either but the Windows 95 developer SDK went out with a Portland compiler. Because at the time the windows compiler was just a garbage. And that in that led to angst and acrimony within Microsoft because the compilers and my people in Microsoft are like what the hell?

So anyway, Microsoft came in and basically hired out the Borland languages team including sending ridiculous offer Letters by limo to the headquarters to like andersburg who at the time was the author of The Pascal compiler Orlandi went to Microsoft and was you know, created ActiveX and or DirectX. I don't know critical technology. So that was all born on people like Microsoft became the compiler Powerhouse the whole people which also is the first lawsuit.

I was aware of companies suing Microsoft for unfair practices. And then after that I went to Netscape because a bunch of Portland people went to Netscape. And at Netscape went for you know was Borland was a very well established more traditional company, you know, the 18 month to 24 month development life cycles heavy QA investment, very slow and stay it was a great place to learn and then go to Netscape which is the beginning of the internet era.

It's Madness and Mayhem and Coke can towers and you know, people not going home or bathing, you know, the whole like startup lifestyle. I mean that was it that was a big time. I mean, I remember just The computers that I worked on the very first like TRS 80 the trash 80s that radio.

And being like whoa, It's a computer. Yeah what you know, I was working on 80 m3as and VT 100s it at school. And then I had a Mac SE.

That was my personal computer. You can do that much with didn't you have a terminal? So I'm a Borland and like okay, I don't really know anything about anything.

And I know that I'm not really interested in application of elements. It just doesn't interest me. But but oh, okay.

I'm actually I have people who are like on the cubes in either side of me and they have problems and I can help solve their problems like they're immediate problem. So there was that instant gratification nature of oh, this is broken. How is this broken?

Okay. Let me help you figure it out. Okay.

I can write a little tool that will prevent that in the future that will help us to bug in the future and it kind of expanded from there, you know, and a lot of my classmates ended up there. As well and you know, so this familiarity of a team of like nobody knows what the rules are. So we're just gonna make them up the first version of Tinder Box for example.

So again, this is a it's meant to pull from a CVS repository. So this is pretty good. And it would pull it to a local machine with a pearl script.

It would and also by the way the CVS repository was on a Unix platform and we had Mac and windows. We had to run software to emulate the file systems on Mac and windows to pretend to be Unix system so we could run the CVS commands, right? So that was a whole thing.

I mean, this is like really primitive. So we have these, you know, actually in the first clients it was Pearl on on the Unix platforms, but it was bash scripts on Windows because we didn't have anything else that we could use at the time and it was Apple script on the Max and this is the 68k power PC days. Right?

And so everybody had a little custom scripts and it would pull the CVS repository execute the build command and then send a little text. To the mail server, which would then grab that incoming mail parse the text and then append it to an HTML file that you could then look at with a browser. So the first continuous integration web-based news integration system was basically rows of text in Reverse chronological order with either red or green.

Why right and that's you know, Tara even though you just described isn't terribly far from what a lot of companies are still doing that is the scary part. We still have such a long way to go to mature our pipeline. But here's kind of the thing that really cemented me as a tools person.

So the sky Lloyd tab who at had went went on to most recently. He founded looker if you're familiar with that company and they required by Google a couple years ago. They were doing data visualizations, but he was one of the authors of early HTML right?

He invented HTML tables he and Jack paulus and a couple of other folks so he came over and he's like, all right. So here we have this like these this incoming text and he had just invented tables in in the browser. And so he wrote the the file was called Lloyd not CGI.

That of course it is right and it was you know in his honor and and gosh and God bless him for this and it created a table that had commits. Over time by operating systems and then would also do the offsets now on HTML offset at the time. There was no CSS.

Nothing right that was really hard to do. But we then we could see for each column. You know, there's the check-in.

Okay, these 15 operating systems started failing after that commit. Okay what the hell happened with that commit and that was and that was like, whoa. Like that's something that's so cool.

I mean I'm working on I'm working on the browser team like I'm shipping the browser the Netscape Navigator like the beginning of the internet era and the thing that we did with Tinderbox was so much more exciting to me than just oh the browser. Okay, that's fine. Like no interest in working on that.

But this this is cool. Right and just from there. Everything went mad.

Bugzilla. Bugzilla is still being used to this day. Which is just a fascinating to me.

Some of these tools are very very sticky. Once they get in there and that is part of the problem with being able to evolve. The pipeline is that some of these tools get super super sticky?

I mean just, you know, Rebecca brought up the cybersecurity discussion with her fluids or and one of the one of the big problems that I continue to see companies have is we have such static devops workflows. Regardless of what tool you're using they're pretty static. If you don't have the generation of the s-bomb in there, you're going to go have to go revisit a lot of workflows.

And that's why I'm so excited about the CD events from the CD Foundation because everything that you've been talking about if we can build it through an event based like through Cloud events boy, does it sure allow us not to be so invested and so sticky so we can actually pivot because it's not been something we've been able to do. Well we do not pivot. Well on the devops side, everything makes us so scripted.

Yeah, and everybody thinks that that, you know, the snowflakes are required and they're really not they don't have they're not right and I think you know beyond even Cloud events. I point a lot at what open Telemetry is doing on the other side on the logging side, right and and enabling things like observability but also and, you know enabling a investment for Prometheus and all these other tools honeycomb. To have standards that these stickify but also it's not just a matter of these not these stickifying but all so enabling broader and more robust Integrations because you have this common quicker as common layer, right?

And what does that open up? And so we'll get there we'll get there eventually but it is a I think this is probably one of the hardest challenges of development infrastructure is over that is overcoming that need to look but my you know, my use case is unique among millions of use cases, like actually really it's not it's really not and you know when it just but it comes to any event plane you have you have a payload you're passing a payload off and that's really all it boils down to is just passing a payload off through that event plane. So hopefully we'll get there because we have been preaching Agile development for I don't know how long but are devops is certainly not agile whatsoever.

Well, there's a there's an ironic thing there is, you know, I Talks about this. I gave one at CTO Summit called angst Aikido, you know, it's like the art of influencing culture change with development organizations in a rule. Number one is an Engineers hate change, even if they have a balances even if that system hey change but you are change agents themselves, but they don't like change exactly.

It's like even a bad system. They're familiar with it. They know how to work with it and they feel efficient.

Right? And so I think that was things that state of devops report and developer productivity really talking about is like you might feel efficient. But are you actually efficient change is hard?

Yeah change there's still coggling those makes grips. Yeah. Okay Tara.

I want to know about your T-shirt. Tell us about yeah, there we go. Sorry.

Yes, so women who code is an organism, you're being excited. We can see it. Yeah, I should have shouldn't wear my CD Foundation t-shirt, but I have sorry about women who code right?

So yeah, this is a great organization. I've been associated with it off to varying degrees. It's about 2014.

It's been around since about 2012. So I guess yeah, this is a 10 year anniversary started out. It was founded by a couple of women one who is now the CEO Elena Percival and This organization was about building a strong community of enabling women to support each other to have successful Tech careers.

It is oriented around technical topics, but not exclusively slow. We've you know got project managers and product managers and that type of thing who are also participants and it has particularly since pandemic when everything kind of got upended there's now hundreds of thousands of members worldwide supporting each other through, you know on ongoing learning opportunities Mentor programs what they call the what they call it the There's the the local networks and again worldwide. One of the fastest growing is in Colombia.

For example, a huge huge Tech in latam and Nairobi and Africa also a huge emerging Tech communities something good always comes out of crap. And yeah, I'm excited but there's so many of these organizations that have formed and grown because people were sitting in front of their computers and they wanted to change what they were doing. I have a child it wasn't in Tech but she completely reinvented herself because she didn't have a choice during the pandemic and now she's thriving so it's it's really cool to see all these like girls who code and women who code and trying to get my granddaughter involved she wants to learn how to code and she yeah 13 and so we're trying to find a program here.

She doesn't like to listen to Grandpa very much who's very good at it. But finding your tribe is important and a lot of a lot of the really successful communities within women who Around either career transitioners or returnees women who code had a great or a partnership with VMware the Tara not Tara mightara, but Tara t-a-r-a program in India that I think the goal was to return 15,000 women who might have stepped back from Tech careers because of you know, parent or other personal reasons, you know how to get them back into high tech and it's been enormously successful and it's it's so important that we we really sort of demystify tech as a as a career choice. For anyone not just women but for anyone because there are never enough people for the roles even in as you said, you know, your your daughter was doing something else and is now in Tech is always hiring and Tech can be done remotely which you know, and now we we have shown through pandemic that it can be truly done remotely.

And the more that we can build an awareness of anybody can get into Tech including me who never should have been in Tech. I should have been a history Professor somewhere, you know, we can be in Tech and we can be successful and we can change the world. You know, we're changing the world all the time.

What kind of age does women Encompass that that where it is it? College High School what how no, it's it's it's adults. It's adults.

It's quote. I mean, you know, you could certainly there's no restrictions, but I think that the target demographics are maybe towards the end of college but more post College there was wondering yeah, there's other organizations that are younger. I was actually part of one called chick Tech which I hate the name, but which was targeting actually middle school and young high school girls who might not consider stem at all as a as a future possibility.

So actually it would have been targeted people like me at the same age. So that was really fun, too. But yeah, there are a lot of organizations out there.

And here's the CEO of the the CEO is I've heard her speak before she's super Dynamic. Maybe you can make an intro and she could be one of our guests. I think that would be amazing.

I would happy to do that. We're back at what we're gonna say. No, I was gonna say now Tara because I've noticed that I mentioned it earlier that you started out in 1993 and you've seen you've been through several changes throughout in the industry.

What is the biggest change that you're hoping to see in the next few years to come in this industry and how it will affect women coming into this industry and minorities. Just everybody overall the next few years. Yeah.

Oh, that's an interesting one. Well, let's go back to the an earlier premise which is change is hard. And it happens slowly.

I I was talking about this at women techmakers back in 2019 where when I was in school at the time about 40 45% of the of the students in CS programs were women. And around 30 35 somewhere in there percent of high-tech industry, which at the time was much smaller than it is now, but at the time we're women maybe as much as 40% and also women in technical roles. Not not just you know, HR sales marketing that kind of stuff.

But then he fast forward to the early 2000s after the first tech crash and also the emergence of programming culture you saw that drop enormously both in women and also people of color. And we're only now getting back to the the pre crash numbers from a demographic perspective at least in the United States. And so What's that?

What caused that drop? Well, I think it was a combination of that big crash in 2001. Right?

And you know, I was hit by that crash. I was seven million on paper once you know it. We went IPO and I was like, I'm rich and then, you know a month four of the six-month employee blackout.

Oh well, bye. That was a whole bunch of zeros just disappeared. anyway Yeah, I just I think that the industry change it got a lot faster more aggressive.

You know a lot of and we still see it to this day where we have people who have are very charismatic and could be selling you BS, but they can get VC funding because of who they are. Right? Let's I that's the rhymes with Gracie's just going in.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, let me just say this and you can edit it out if you need to but like I think we all threw up in our mouths a little bit when we saw Andreessen Horowitz giving you know, 500 million dollars to end up Adam Newman, right?

Like what what was that all about? So Do we you know, what do I see in the near term? I think the foundation has been lean.

I don't know how fast it will happen. But you have VCS that are either run by women and people of color or focus on opportunities for Founders who are women and people of color and we're starting to see some some successes. That is one thing that is huge.

And then also again for one organizations like women who code or code 2040 which is a university oriented organization to get people of color better Landings into internship programs and then substantly, you know, hired into full-time positions, you know as a demographics change. We're also putting through things like developer productivity understanding the impact of culture on business success the understanding of heterogeneous employee bases on financial success. There's Boston Consulting and McKinsey have been producing in Harvard Business been producing parts for years that an all white male industry is not as successful as one that is not.

Right. And so that that I think the momentum is building it slow and we're going to backslide but that is evolving and I think that's super powerful and then beyond that. I think the power of cloud computing.

For all the things that it can do ill and for all the problems that you can have like, you know, the cloud vendors make it really easy for all the sudden you have a fifteen thousand dollar credit card bill that you weren't expecting. That's a whole other problem. But you know you no longer have to go into, you know, max out your credit cards buy all the the hardware at fries and then borrow some lady's garage to found a new company.

You can pay for Resources by the second and code on your smartphone. And take an idea to Market and I think that also is a fascinating evolution of how we think about technical Innovation and the opportunities that it have and then the final thing that I think we used to make the joke that every company is a Healthcare Company because you know figuring out how to do health care for your employees was considered a really hard challenge, but everybody had to do it right now every company is a tech company. Mm-hmm, right and so you don't you know working at Google.

Google is a big company or Microsoft or Amazon, but let me tell you there's companies that are bigger like financial institutions that have more technical. Employees than any of the fan companies do but we don't really think about them necessarily as tech companies, right but they're using Tech because Tech is now becoming a Common Language all the companies, you know, my tiny little town here. Everybody's got a website.

Everybody can do order online. Everybody's got a payment system that requires somebody somewhere to be doing technical work on their behalf. It is now pervasive so you have to add the whole level of cyber cyber security that has to be wound and every single even in my own house, right?

I have to have a level of protection for my company because I'm doing stuff that can impact and it is it's it's amazing though to think about being able to code on your phone, you know to be able to To do things that you could never think of doing in the past because you don't get all that extra Hardware. Absolutely. So I you know, it's Tech is part of our human existence now for good or ill.

So, you know those of us who are in Tech and are in positions of leadership as much as possible. It's part of our responsibility and it sounds a little goofy, but I believe it firmly it's part of our responsibility like what are we enabling? All right.

And when and what are we enabling for the positive? We have to be thoughtful about that and you could look at like the whole cloudflare Fiasco. You can't be neutral truly being neutral is actually picking aside.

Right? And so it's it's important but you can you know, you can also point at some truly amazing things that happen the Arab Spring and people putting the Google DNS servers as graffiti because they were trying to shut down the internet and the companies and in those countries like that's powerful right but it can also be used for you know stocking and God only knows what right so it's Tech and I guess another way of looking at is Tech is is taking all of our human humaneness and putting it on steroids. So the amazing things are that much more amazing and maybe the knot amazing, you know negative things or that much worse.

Oh, well, we got to wrap up here. I can't believe we've been going for 45. Oh my goodness.

That was an amazing place to land and I really appreciate that was a great you guys agree. That was a great great play. I was gonna ask you to kind of sum it up, but you did it without it any prompting.

So we are so excited that you were here. This is the first time the three of us have have kind of kicked off and relaunched this show. So you were an amazing guest for us.

Oh gosh. Thank you. Really appreciate you being here.

Tracy Rebecca, you guys have anything you want to say here to wrap up before we go today? No, I just want to say the absolute. Thank you to Tara for being here and sharing her her background and her experience because it really does tell a story not just about Tara.

I mean a lot of the things you talked about. I have we have I'm surprised we didn't meet before CD Foundation to be quite honest, but it's it it's a journey that we've taken in devops and it was a really really fascinating view of what that Journey looks like and where we're going. wonderful And that's all right.

I was a pleasure. Well, hopefully one of these days we can all get together in person and have a couple of drinks and keep talking about, you know solving the world's Tech problems you bet. Well, thank you so much Tara, and thanks for everybody who tuned in today.

Look forward to seeing you all at our on our next tech strong woman episode. Thanks. Have a good one.