Making “Devrelopment” Your Own with Priyanka Vergadia

Episode Summary

Periodically Corey speaks with people from various aspects of “Devreloper.” Today’s guest Priyanka Vergadia, Staff Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, provides her own functional definition of where the role starts and stops. More so, Priyanka has written a highly successfully, visually stimulating book! Priyanka offers up a lot of her definitions about the various modes of “Devrelopment,” and the different styles each brings forward. Priyanaka started her own take on DevRel by creating videos, and how it has evolved into ways to connect through visual mediums. More so, she has written a book, Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects, which is not like most technical books! It's a visually driven guide that anyone can connect to! Check out the conversation for Priyanka's creative take on visuals, relaying information, and more!

Episode Show Notes & Transcript


About Priyanka
Priyanka Vergadia is currently a Staff  Developer Advocate at Google Cloud where she works with enterprises to build and architect their cloud platforms. She enjoys building engaging technical content and continuously experiments with new ways to tell stories and solve business problems using Google Cloud tools. You can check out some of the stories that she has created for the developer community on the Google Cloud Platform Youtube channel. These include "Deconstructing Chatbots", "Get Cooking in Cloud", "Pub/Sub Made Easy" and more. ..

Links Referenced:

Transcript
Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.


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Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. Periodically, I get the privilege of speaking to people who work in varying aspects of some would call it developer evangelism, some would call it developer advocacy, developer relations is a commonly accepted term, and I of course call it devrelopers because I enjoy annoying absolutely everyone by giving things terrible names. My guest today is Priyanka Vergadia, who is a staff developer advocate at Google Cloud. Priyanka, thank you for joining me.


Priyanka: Thank you so much for having me. Corey. I’m so excited to be your developer—what did you call it again?


Corey: Devreloper. Yes indeed.


Priyanka: Devreloper. That is the term I’m going to be using from now on. I am a devreloper. Anyway.


Corey: Excellent.


Priyanka: Yeah.


Corey: I’m starting to spread this out so that eventually we’re going to form a giant, insufferable army of people who pronounce it that way, and it’s going to be great.


Priyanka: It’s going to be awesome. [laugh].


Corey: One of the challenges, even as I alluded to different titles within this space, everyone has a slightly different definition of where the role starts and stops, just in terms of its function, let alone the myriad ways that can be expressed. In the before times, I knew a number of folks in the developer advocacy space who were more or less worldwide experts in accumulating airline miles and racking up status and going from conference to conference to conference to more or less talk about things that had a tenuous at best connection to where they worked. Great. Other folks have done things in very different ways. Some people write extensively, blog posts and the rest, others build things a sample code, et cetera, et cetera.


It seems like every time I talk to someone in the space, they have found some new and exciting way of carrying the message of what their company does to arguably a very cynical customer group. Where do you start and stop with your devrelopment?


Priyanka: Yeah. So, that is such—like, all the devrelopers have their own style that they have either adopted or learned over time that works for them. When I started, I think about three years ago, I did go to conferences, did those events, give talks, all of that, but I was also—my actual introduction to DevRel [laugh] was with videos. I started creating my first series was deconstructing chatbots, and I was very interested in learning more about chatbots. So, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to teach everybody, and learn.


So like, learn and teach at the same time was my motto, and that’s kind of how I got started into, like, okay, I’m going to create a few videos to learn this and teach it. And during the process I was like, “I want to do this more.” And that’s kind of transitioned, my move from being in front of customers, which I still end up doing, but I was doing more of just, you know, working with customers extensively to get their deployments done. This was a segue for me to, you know, think back, sit back and think about what’s working and what I personally enjoy doing more, and that’s what got me into creating videos. And it’s like, okay, I’m going to become a devreloper now.


And that’s kind of how the whole, like, journey started. And for me, like you were pointing out earlier—should I just stop because I’ve been talking too long? [laugh].


Corey: No, keep going. Please, [unintelligible 00:04:10] it’s fine.


Priyanka: [laugh]. For me, I started—I found my, I would say, in the last two years—it was all before the pandemic, we were all either writing blogs or doing videos or going to conferences, so it was, you know, the pandemic kind of brought us to a point where it’s like, “Okay, let’s think about—we can’t meet each other; let’s think about other ways to communicate and how can we make it creative and exciting?”


Corey: And the old way started breaking down, too, where it’s, “Yay, I’m going to watch an online conference.” “What is it?” “Oh, it’s like a crappy Zoom only you don’t have to pretend to pay attention in the same way.” And as a presenter, then you’ve got to modify what you’re 
doing to understand that people’s attention spans are shorter, distraction is always a browser tab away, and unlike a physical event, people don’t feel the same sense of shame of getting up from the front row and weaving in front of 300 people, and not watching the rest of your talk. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll still do it, but I’ll feel bad about it.


Now it’s, “Oh, nope, I’m sitting here in my own little… hovel, I’m just going to do and watch whatever I want to do.” So, you’ve got to—it forces you to up your game, and it—


Priyanka: Yep.


Corey: Still doesn’t quite have the same impact.


Priyanka: Yeah. Or just switch off the camera, if you’re like me, and just—uh, shut off the camera, go away or do something else. And, yeah, it’s very easy to do that. So, it’s not the same, which is why it prompted, I think all of us DevRel people to think about new ways to connect, which is for me that way to connect is art and visual aspects, to kind of bring that—because that—we are all whether we accept it or not or like it or not, we’re all visual learners, so that’s kind of how I think when it comes to creating content is visually appealing, and that’s when people can dive in. [laugh].


Corey: I am in the, I guess opposite side of the universe from you, where I acknowledge and agree with everything you’re saying that people are visual creatures inherently, but I have effectively zero ability in that direction. My medium has always been playing games with words and language. And over time, I had the effectively significantly belated realization that wait a minute, just because I’m not good at a thing doesn’t mean that other people might not be good at that thing, and I don’t have to do every last part of it myself. Suddenly, I didn’t have to do my own crappy graphic design because you can pay people who are worlds better than I’ll ever be, and so on and so forth. I don’t edit my own podcast audio because I’m bad at that, too.


But talking about things is a different story, writing about things, building things is where I tend to see a lot of what I do tend to resonate. But I admit I bias for the things that I enjoy doing and the way that I enjoy consuming things. You do as well because relatively recently, as of time of this recording, you have done what I don’t believe anyone actually wants to do. You wrote a book. Now, everyone wants to have written a book, but no one actually wants to write a book.


Priyanka: So, true. [laugh].


Corey: But it’s not like most technical books. Tell me about it.


Priyanka: Yeah, I actually never thought I would write a book. If you asked me two years ago—three years ago, I would say, I would have never thought that I would write a book because I am not a text person. So, I don’t like to read a lot of texts because it zones out. So, for me, when I started creating some of these sketches, and sharing it on social media and in blogs and things like that, and gotten the attention that it has gotten from people, that’s when I was like, okay, ding, ding, ding. I think I can do a visual book with these images.


And this was like, halfway through, I’d already created, like, 30 sketches at this point. And I was like, “Okay, maybe I can turn this into a book,” which would be interesting for me because I like doing art-type things along with teaching, and it’s not text because I wanted to do this in a very unique way. So yeah, that’s kind of how it ended up happening.


Corey: I have a keen appreciation for people who approach things with a different point of view. One of your colleagues, Forrest Brazeal, took a somewhat similar approach in the in his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, where it was illustrated, and everything he did was in rhyme, which is a constant source of envy for me, where it’s, “Mmm, I’ve got to find a way to one-up him again.” And it’s… he is inexorable, as far as just continuing to self-improve. So, all right, we’re going to find a way to wind up defeating that. With you, it’s way easier.


I read a book, like, wow, this is gorgeous and well-written that it’s attractive to look at, and I will never be able to do any of those things. That’s all you. It doesn’t feel like we’re trying to stand at the same spot in the universe in quite the same way. Nothing but love for Forrest. Let’s be clear. I am teasing. I consider him a friend.


Priyanka: He is amazing. Well honestly, like, I actually got to know Forrest when I decided to do this book. Wiley, who’s the publisher, sent me Forrest’s book, and he said, “You should look at this book because the idea that you are presenting to me, we could lay it out in this format.” Like, in the, you know, physical format. So, he sent me that book. And that’s how I know Forrest, honestly.


So, I told him that—this is a little story that I told him after. But anyway, yeah. I—the—[sigh]—I was going to make a point about the vid—the aspect of creating images, like, honestly, like, I designed the aspects of, like, how you layout information in the sketches, I studied a bunch of stuff to come up with, how do I make it precise and things like that. But there’s no way this book was possible without some design help. Like, I can’t possibly do the entire thing unless I have, like, five years. [laugh]. So—


Corey: Right on top of all of this, you do presumptively have a day job as well—and while—


Priyanka: Exactly.


Corey: This is definitely related. “I’m just going to go write a book.” “Oh, is it a dissertation?” “No, it’s going to look more like a children’s book than that,” is what they’re going to hear. And it’s yeah, I’m predicting some problems with the performance evaluation process at large companies when you start down those paths.


Priyanka: Exactly. So, I ended up, like, showing all these numbers, like, of the blog views and reads and social media, the presence of some of these images that were going wider. And in the GCPSketchnote GitHub repo got a huge number of stars. And it was like, everybody could see that writing a book would be amazing. From that point on, I was just like, I don’t think I can scale that.


So, when I was drawing—this is an example—when I drew my first sketch, it took me an entire weekend to just draw one sketch, which is what—I was only doing that the entire weekend—like, assume, like, 16 hours of work, just drawing the one sketch. So, if I went with that pace, this book was not possible. So, you know, after I had the idea laid out, had the process in place, I got some design help, which made it—which expedited the process much, much faster. [laugh].


Corey: There’s a lot to be said, for doing something that you enjoy. Do you do live sketchnoting during conference talks as well, or do you tend to not do it while someone is talking at a reasonably fast clip, and well, in 45 minutes, this had better be done, so let’s go. I’ve seen people who can do that, and I just marvel in awe at what they do.


Priyanka: I don’t do live. I don’t do live sketching. For me, paper and pen is a better medium so that’s just the medium that I like to work with. So, when the talk is happening, I’m actually taking notes on a pen and a paper. And then after, I can sketch it out, faster in a fast way.


Like, I did one sketchnote for Next 2020, I think, and that was done, like, a day after Next was over so I could take all the bits and pieces that were important and put it into that sketch. But I can’t do it live. That’s just one of the things I haven’t figured out yet. [laugh].


Corey: For me, I was always writing my email newsletter, so it was relatively rapid turnaround, and Twitter was interesting for me. I finally cracked the nut on how to express myself in a way that worked. The challenge that I ran into then was okay, there are thoughts I occasionally have that don’t lend themselves to then 140—now 280—characters, so I should probably start writing long-form. And then I want to start writing 1000 to 1500-word blog posts every week that goes out. And that forced me to become a better writer across the board. And then it became about one-upping myself, sort of, live-tweeting conference talks.


And the personal secret of why I do that is I’m ADHD in a bottle. Someone gets on stage—you say you zone out when you read a giant quantity of data; you prefer something more visual, more interactive. For me, I’m the opposite, where when someone gets on stage and starts talking, it’s, “Okay, get to—yes, you’re doing the intro of what a cloud might be. I get that point. This is supposed to be a more advanced talk. Can we speed it up a bit?”


And doing the live-tweeting about it, but not just relating what is said, but by making a joke about it, it’s how I keep myself engaged and from zoning out. Because let’s face it, this industry is extraordinarily boring, if you don’t bring a little bit of light to it.


Priyanka: Yeah, that is—


Corey: And that how to continue and how to do that was hard, and it took me time to get there.


Priyanka: Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Like, that’s exactly why I got into, like, training videos and sketches. Like, and videos and also. Like, I come up with, like, fake examples of companies that may or may not exist.


Like, I made up a dog shoe making company that ships out shoes when you need them and then return them and there’s a size and stuff, like, you have to come up with interesting things to make the content interesting because otherwise, this can get boring pretty quickly, which is going back to your example of, “Speed it up; get to the point.” [laugh].


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Corey: It’s always just fun to start experimenting with it, too, because all right, once I was done learn learning how to live-tweet other people’s talk and mostly get it correct because someone says something, I have three to five seconds to come up with what I want to talk about and maybe grab a picture and then move on to the next thing. And it’s easy to get that wrong and say things you don’t necessarily intend to and get taken the wrong way. I’ve mostly gotten past that. And—I’m not saying I’m always right, but I better than I used to be. And then it was okay, “How do I top this?”


And I started live-tweeting conference talks that I was giving live, which is always fun, but being able to pre-write some tweets at certain times, have certain webhooks in your slide deck and whatnot that fire these things off. And again, I’m not saying that he this is recommended or even a good idea, but it definitely wasn’t boring. And—


Priyanka: Yeah.


Corey: And continue to find ways to make the same type of material new and interesting is one of the challenges because the stuff is 
complex.


Priyanka: Also bite-size, right? Like, it’s—I think Twitter is, like, the [unintelligible 00:15:54] words are obviously limiting, but it also forces you to think about it in bite-size, right? Like, okay, if I have a blog post then I’m summarizing it, how would I do it in two sentences? It forces me to think about it that way, which makes it very applicable to the time span that we have now, right, which is maybe, like, 30 seconds, you can have somebody on [unintelligible 00:16:18]


Corey: Attention is a rare and precious commodity.


Priyanka: Yeah. Yeah.


Corey: People who [unintelligible 00:16:21] engagement, I think that’s the wrong metric to go after because that inspires a whole bunch of terrible incentives, whereas finding something that is interesting, and a way to bring light to it and have a perspective on it that makes people think about it differently. For me, it’s been humor, but that’s my own approach to things. Your direction, it seems to be telling a story through visual arts. And that is something we don’t see nearly as much of.


Priyanka: Yeah. I think it’s also because it’s something that you—you know, like, I grew up drawing and painting. I was drawing since I was three years old, so that’s my way of thinking. Like, I don’t—I was talking to another devreloper the other day, and we were talking about—


Corey: It’s catching on. I love it.


Priyanka: —[laugh]. Two different ways of how we think. So, for me, when I design a piece of content, I have my visuals first, and then he was talking about when he designs his content, he has his bullet points and a blog post first. So, it’s like, two very different ways of approaching this similar thing. And then from that, from the images or the deck that I’m building up, I would come up with the narrative and stuff like that.


My thinking starts with images and narrative of tying, like, the images together. But it’s, that is the whole, like, fun of being in DevRel, right? Like, you are your own personality, and bringing whatever your personality, like you mentioned, humor and your case, art in my case, in somebody else’s case, it could be totally different thing, right? So, yeah.


Corey: Now, please correct me if I’m wrong on this, but an area of emphasis for you has been data analytics as well as Kubernetes, more or less things that are traditionally considered to be much more back-end if you’re looking at a spectrum of all things technology. Is that directionally accurate, or am I dramatically is understanding a lot of what you’re saying?


Priyanka: No, that’s very much accurate. I like to—I tend to be on the infrastructure back-and creating pipeline, creating easier processes, sort of person, not much into front-end. I dabble into it, but don’t enjoy it. [laugh].


Corey: This makes you something of a unicorn, in the sense of there are a tremendous number of devreloper types in the front-end slash JavaScript world because their entire career is focused on making things look visually appealing. That is what front-end is. I know this because I am rubbish at it. My idea of a well-designed interface that everyone looks at and smiles at [unintelligible 00:19:12] of command-line arguments when you’re writing a script for something. And it’s on a green screen, and sometimes I’ll have someone helped me coordinate to come up with a better color palette for the way that I’m looking at my terminal on my Mac. Real exciting times over here, I assure you.


So, the folks who are working in that space and they have beautifully designed slides, yeah, you tend to expect that. I gave a talk years ago at the front-end conference in Zurich, and I was speaking in the afternoon. And I went there and every presentation, slides were beautiful. And this was before I was working here and had a graphic designer on retainer to make my slides look not horrible. It was black Helvetica text on a white background, and I’m looking at this and I’m feeling ashamed that it’s—okay, I have two hours to fix this. What do I do?


I did the only thing I could think of; I changed Helvetica text to Comic Sans because if it’s going to look terrible and it’s going to be a designer thing that puts them off, you may as well go all-in. And that was a recurring meme at the time. I’ve since learned that there is an argument—I don’t know if it’s true or not—that Comic Sans is easier to read for folks with dyslexia, for example. And that’s fine. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but I stopped making jokes about it just because if people—even if it’s not true, and people believe that it’s, “Are you being unintentionally crappy to people?” It’s, “Well, I sure hope not. I’m rarely intentionally crappy. But when I do, I don’t want to be mistaken for not being.” It’s, save it up and use it when it counts.


Priyanka: Yeah, yeah. I’ve—yeah, I think, when it comes to these big events—and like front-end for me is—I would think, like, I actually thought that I would be great at front-end because I have interest in art and stuff. I do make things that [crosstalk 00:20:57]—


Corey: That’s my naive assumption, too. I’m learning as you speak here. Please continue[.


Priyanka: Yeah. And I was just—I thought that I would be and I have tried it, and I only like it to an extent, to present my idea. But I don’t like to go in deeper and, like, make my CSS pretty or make this—make it look pretty. I am very much intrigued by all the back-end stuff, and most of my experience, over the past ten years in Cloud has been in the back-end stuff, mainly just because I love APIs, I love—like, you know, as long as I can connect, or the idea of creating a demo or something that involves a bunch of APIs and a back-end, to present an idea in a front-end, I would work on that front-end. But otherwise, I’m not going to choose to do it. [laugh]. Which I found interesting for myself as well. It’s a realization. [laugh].


Corey: Every time I try and do something with front-end, it doesn’t matter the framework, I find myself more confused at the end than I was when I started. There’s something I don’t get. And anytime I see someone on Twitter, for example, talking about how a front-end is easier or somehow less than, I read that and I can’t help myself. It’s, “You ridiculous clown. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”


I don’t believe that I’m bad at all of the things under engineering—just most of them—and I think I pick things up reasonably quickly. It is a mystery that does not align with this, and if it’s easy for you, you don’t recognize—arguably—a skill that you have, but not everyone does, by a landslide. And that’s a human nature thing, too. It’s if it was easy for me, it’s obviously easy for everyone. If something’s hard for me, no one would understand how this works and the people that do are wizards from the future.


Priyanka: Yep. So true.


Corey: It never works that way.


Priyanka: Yeah. It never works that way. At least we have this in common, that you don’t like to work on front-ends. [laugh].


Corey: There’s that too. And I think that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of technology, I would argue that something that we all share in common is, it doesn’t matter how far we are down in the course of our entire career, from the very beginning to the very end, it is always a consistent, constant process of being humbled and made to feel like a fool by things you are supposedly professionally good at. And oh my stars, I’ve just learned to finally give up and embrace it. It’s like, “So, what’s going to make me feel dumb today?”


Priyanka: Exactly.


Corey: It’s the learn in public approach, which is important.


Priyanka: It’s so important. Especially, like, if you're thinking about it, like that’s the part of DevRel that makes it so exciting, too, right? Like, just 
learning a new thing today and sharing it with you. Like, I’m not claiming that I’m an expert, but hey, let’s talk about it. And sure, I might end up looking dumb one day, I might end up looking smart the other day, but that’s not the point. The point is, I end up learning every day, right? And that’s the most important part, which is why I love this particular job, which is—what did we call it—devreloper.


Corey: Devreloping. And as a part of that, you’re talking to people constantly, be it people in the community and ecosystem, people who—you say you’ve talk to customers, but you also talk to these other folks. I would challenge you on that, where when you’re at a company like Google 
Cloud, increasingly everyone in the community in the ecosystem is in one way or another, indistinguishable from being your customer; it all starts to converge at some point. All major cloud providers have that luxury, to be perfectly honest. What do you see in the ecosystem that people are struggling with as you talk to them?


And again, any one person is going to have a problem or bone to pick with some particular service or implementation, and okay, great. What I’m always interested in is what is the broad sweep of things? Because when I hear someone complaining that a given service from a given cloud provider is terrible. Okay, great. Everyone has an opinion. When I started to hear that four or five, six times, it’s okay, there’s something afoot here, and now I’m curious as to what it is. What patterns are you seeing emerge these days?


Priyanka: Yeah. I think more and more patterns along the lines of how can you make it automated? How can you make anything automated, right? Like, from machine learning’s perspective, how do I not need ML skills to build an ML model? Like, how can we get there faster, right?


Same for, like, in the infrastructure side, the serverless… aspect? How can you make it easy for me so I can just build an application and just deploy it so it becomes your problem to run it and not mine?


Corey: Oh, the—you are preaching to the choir on that. I feel like all of these services that talk about, “This is how you build and train a machine learning model,” yadda, yadda, it’s for an awful lot of the use cases out there, it’s exposing implementation details about which I could not possibly care less. It’s the, I want an API that I throw something at—like, be it a picture—and then I want to get a response of, “Yes, it’s a hot dog,” or, “That’s disgusting,” or whatever it is that it decides that it wants to say, great because that’s the business outcome I’m after, and I do not care what wizardry happens on the back-end, I don’t care if it’s people who are underpaid and working extremely quickly by hand to do it, as long as it’s from a business perspective, it hits a certain level of performance, reliability, et cetera. And then price, of course, yeah.


And that is not to say I’m in favor of exploiting people, let’s be clear here because I’m pretty sure most of these are not actually humans on the back-end, but okay. I just want that as the outcome that I think people are after, and so much of the conversation around how to build and train models and all misses the point because there are companies out there that need that, absolutely, there are, but there are a lot more that need the outcome, not the focus on this. And let’s face it, an awful lot of businesses that would benefit from this don’t have the budget to hire the team of incredibly expensive people it takes to effectively leverage these things because I have an awful lot of observations about people in machine learning space, one of them is absolutely not that, “Wow, I bet those people are inexpensive for me to hire.” It doesn’t work that way.


Priyanka: It doesn’t. Yeah. And so, yeah. I think the future of, like, the whole cloud space, like, when it started, we started with how can I run my server not in my basement, but somewhere else, right? Now, we are at a different stage where we have a different sets of problems and requirements for businesses, right?


And that’s where I see it growing. It’s like, how can I make this automated fast, not my problem? How can I make it not my problem is, like, the biggest [laugh] biggest, I think, theme that we are seeing, whether it’s infrastructure, data science, data analytics, in all of these spaces.


Corey: I get a lot of interesting feedback for my comparative takes on the various cloud providers, and one thing that I’ve said for a while about Google Cloud has been that its developer experience is unparalleled compared to basically anything else on the market. It makes things 
just work, and that’s important because a bad developer experience has the unfortunate expression—at least for me—of, “Oh, this isn’t working the way I want it to. I must be dumb.” No, it’s a bad user experience for you. What I am seeing emerge as well from Google Cloud is an incredible emphasis—and I do think they’re aligned here—on storytelling, and doing so effectively.


You’re there communicating visually; Forrest is there, basically trying to be the me of Google Cloud—which is what I assume he’s doing; he would argue everything about that and he’d be right to do it, but that’s what I’m calling it because this is my show; he can come on and argue with me himself if he takes issue with it. But I love the emphasis on storytelling and unifying solutions and the rest, as opposed to throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks to it. I think there’s more intention being put into an awful lot of not just what you’re building, but how you’re talking about it, now it’s integrated with the other things that you’re building. That’s no small thing.


Priyanka: Yeah. That is so hard, especially when you know the cloud space; like, hundreds of products, they all have their unique requirement to solve a problem, but nobody cares, right? Like, as a consumer, I shouldn’t have to care that there are 127 products or whatever. It doesn’t matter to me as a consumer or customer, all that matters is whether I can solve my business problem with a set of your tools, right? So, that’s exactly why, like, we have this team that I work in that I’m a part of, which has an entire focus on storytelling.


We do YouTube videos with storytelling, we do art like this, I’ve also dabbled into comics a little bit. And we continue to go back to the drawing board with how else we can tell these stories. I know—I mentioned this to Forrest—I’m working on a song as well, which I have never done 
before, and [laugh] I think I’m going to butcher it. I kind of have it ready for, like, six months but never released it, right, because I’m just too scared to do that. [laugh] but anyway.


Corey: Ship and then turn the internet off for a week and it’ll be gone regardless, by the time you come back. Problem solved until the reporters start calling, and then you have problems.


Priyanka: I might have to just do that, and be, like, you know what world? Keep saying whatever you want to say, I’m not here. [laugh]. But anyway, going back to that point of storytelling, and it’s so—I think we have weaved it into the process. And it’s going really well, and now we are investing more in, like, R&D and doing more of how we can tell stories in different ways.


Corey: I have to say, I’m a big fan of the way that you’re approaching this. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to—and arguably, as I argue they should get a copy of your book because it is glorious—where’s the best place to find you?


Priyanka: Thank you. Okay, so LinkedIn and Twitter are my platforms that I check every single day, so you can message me, connect with me, I am available as—my handle is pvergadia. I don’t know if they have [crosstalk 00:31:11]—


Corey: Oh, this is all going in the [show notes 00:31:13] you need not worry.


Priyanka: Okay, perfect. So yeah, I don’t have to spell it because my last name is hard. [laugh]. So, you’ll find it in the show notes. But yeah, you can connect with me there. And you will find at the top of both of my profiles, the link to order the book, so you can do it there.


Corey: Excellent. And I’ve already done so, and I’m just waiting for it to arrive. So, this is—it’s going to be an exciting read if nothing else. One of these days, I’d have to actually live-tweet a reading thereof. We’ll see how that plays out.


Priyanka: That would be amazing.


Corey: Be careful what you wish for. Some of the snark could be a little too cutting; we have to be cautious of that.


Priyanka: [laugh]. I’m always scared of your tweets. Like, do I want to read this or not? [laugh].


Corey: If nothing else, it at least tries to be funny. So, there is that.


Priyanka: Yes. Yes, for sure.


Corey: I really—


Priyanka: No, I’m excited. I’m excited for when you get a chance to read it and just tweet whatever you feel like, from, you know, all the bits and pieces that I’ve brought together. So, I would love to get your take. [laugh].


Corey: Oh, you will, one way or another. That’s one of those non-optional things. It’s one of the fun parts of dealing with me. It’s, “Aw crap. That shitposter is back again.” Like the kid outside of your yard just from across the street, staring at your house and pointing and it’s, “Oh, dear. Here we go.” Throwing stones.


Priyanka: [laugh]. I’m excited either way. [laugh].


Corey: He’s got a platypus with him this time. What’s going on? It happens. We deal with what we have to. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.


Priyanka: Thank you so much for having me. It was amazing. You are a celebrity, and I wanted to be, you know, a part of your show for a long 
time, so I’m glad we’re able to make it work.


Corey: You are welcome back anytime.


Priyanka: I will. [laugh].



Corey: An absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks again.


Priyanka: Thank you.


Corey: Priyanka Vergadia staff developer—but you call it developer advocate—at Google Cloud. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on whatever platform you’re using to listen to this thing, whereas if you’ve hated it, please do the exact same thing, making sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes because that’s where it is. But if you did hate it, also leave an insulting, angry comment but not using words. I want you to draw a picture telling me exactly what you didn’t like about this episode.


Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.


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Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

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Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. Periodically, I get the privilege of speaking to people who work in varying aspects of some would call it developer evangelism, some would call it developer advocacy, developer relations is a commonly accepted term, and I of course call it devrelopers because I enjoy annoying absolutely everyone by giving things terrible names. My guest today is Priyanka Vergadia, who is a staff developer advocate at Google Cloud. Priyanka, thank you for joining me.

Priyanka: Thank you so much for having me. Corey. I’m so excited to be your developer—what did you call it again?

Corey: Devreloper. Yes indeed.

Priyanka: Devreloper. That is the term I’m going to be using from now on. I am a devreloper. Anyway.

Corey: Excellent.

Priyanka: Yeah.

Corey: I’m starting to spread this out so that eventually we’re going to form a giant, insufferable army of people who pronounce it that way, and it’s going to be great.

Priyanka: It’s going to be awesome. [laugh].

Corey: One of the challenges, even as I alluded to different titles within this space, everyone has a slightly different definition of where the role starts and stops, just in terms of its function, let alone the myriad ways that can be expressed. In the before times, I knew a number of folks in the developer advocacy space who were more or less worldwide experts in accumulating airline miles and racking up status and going from conference to conference to conference to more or less talk about things that had a tenuous at best connection to where they worked. Great. Other folks have done things in very different ways. Some people write extensively, blog posts and the rest, others build things a sample code, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems like every time I talk to someone in the space, they have found some new and exciting way of carrying the message of what their company does to arguably a very cynical customer group. Where do you start and stop with your devrelopment?

Priyanka: Yeah. So, that is such—like, all the devrelopers have their own style that they have either adopted or learned over time that works for them. When I started, I think about three years ago, I did go to conferences, did those events, give talks, all of that, but I was also—my actual introduction to DevRel [laugh] was with videos. I started creating my first series was deconstructing chatbots, and I was very interested in learning more about chatbots. So, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to teach everybody, and learn.

So like, learn and teach at the same time was my motto, and that’s kind of how I got started into, like, okay, I’m going to create a few videos to learn this and teach it. And during the process I was like, “I want to do this more.” And that’s kind of transitioned, my move from being in front of customers, which I still end up doing, but I was doing more of just, you know, working with customers extensively to get their deployments done. This was a segue for me to, you know, think back, sit back and think about what’s working and what I personally enjoy doing more, and that’s what got me into creating videos. And it’s like, okay, I’m going to become a devreloper now.

And that’s kind of how the whole, like, journey started. And for me, like you were pointing out earlier—should I just stop because I’ve been talking too long? [laugh].

Corey: No, keep going. Please, [unintelligible 00:04:10] it’s fine.

Priyanka: [laugh]. For me, I started—I found my, I would say, in the last two years—it was all before the pandemic, we were all either writing blogs or doing videos or going to conferences, so it was, you know, the pandemic kind of brought us to a point where it’s like, “Okay, let’s think about—we can’t meet each other; let’s think about other ways to communicate and how can we make it creative and exciting?”

Corey: And the old way started breaking down, too, where it’s, “Yay, I’m going to watch an online conference.” “What is it?” “Oh, it’s like a crappy Zoom only you don’t have to pretend to pay attention in the same way.” And as a presenter, then you’ve got to modify what you’re doing to understand that people’s attention spans are shorter, distraction is always a browser tab away, and unlike a physical event, people don’t feel the same sense of shame of getting up from the front row and weaving in front of 300 people, and not watching the rest of your talk. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll still do it, but I’ll feel bad about it.

Now it’s, “Oh, nope, I’m sitting here in my own little… hovel, I’m just going to do and watch whatever I want to do.” So, you’ve got to—it forces you to up your game, and it—

Priyanka: Yep.

Corey: Still doesn’t quite have the same impact.

Priyanka: Yeah. Or just switch off the camera, if you’re like me, and just—uh, shut off the camera, go away or do something else. And, yeah, it’s very easy to do that. So, it’s not the same, which is why it prompted, I think all of us DevRel people to think about new ways to connect, which is for me that way to connect is art and visual aspects, to kind of bring that—because that—we are all whether we accept it or not or like it or not, we’re all visual learners, so that’s kind of how I think when it comes to creating content is visually appealing, and that’s when people can dive in. [laugh].

Corey: I am in the, I guess opposite side of the universe from you, where I acknowledge and agree with everything you’re saying that people are visual creatures inherently, but I have effectively zero ability in that direction. My medium has always been playing games with words and language. And over time, I had the effectively significantly belated realization that wait a minute, just because I’m not good at a thing doesn’t mean that other people might not be good at that thing, and I don’t have to do every last part of it myself. Suddenly, I didn’t have to do my own crappy graphic design because you can pay people who are worlds better than I’ll ever be, and so on and so forth. I don’t edit my own podcast audio because I’m bad at that, too.

But talking about things is a different story, writing about things, building things is where I tend to see a lot of what I do tend to resonate. But I admit I bias for the things that I enjoy doing and the way that I enjoy consuming things. You do as well because relatively recently, as of time of this recording, you have done what I don’t believe anyone actually wants to do. You wrote a book. Now, everyone wants to have written a book, but no one actually wants to write a book.

Priyanka: So, true. [laugh].

Corey: But it’s not like most technical books. Tell me about it.

Priyanka: Yeah, I actually never thought I would write a book. If you asked me two years ago—three years ago, I would say, I would have never thought that I would write a book because I am not a text person. So, I don’t like to read a lot of texts because it zones out. So, for me, when I started creating some of these sketches, and sharing it on social media and in blogs and things like that, and gotten the attention that it has gotten from people, that’s when I was like, okay, ding, ding, ding. I think I can do a visual book with these images.

And this was like, halfway through, I’d already created, like, 30 sketches at this point. And I was like, “Okay, maybe I can turn this into a book,” which would be interesting for me because I like doing art-type things along with teaching, and it’s not text because I wanted to do this in a very unique way. So yeah, that’s kind of how it ended up happening.

Corey: I have a keen appreciation for people who approach things with a different point of view. One of your colleagues, Forrest Brazeal, took a somewhat similar approach in the in his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, where it was illustrated, and everything he did was in rhyme, which is a constant source of envy for me, where it’s, “Mmm, I’ve got to find a way to one-up him again.” And it’s… he is inexorable, as far as just continuing to self-improve. So, all right, we’re going to find a way to wind up defeating that. With you, it’s way easier.

I read a book, like, wow, this is gorgeous and well-written that it’s attractive to look at, and I will never be able to do any of those things. That’s all you. It doesn’t feel like we’re trying to stand at the same spot in the universe in quite the same way. Nothing but love for Forrest. Let’s be clear. I am teasing. I consider him a friend.

Priyanka: He is amazing. Well honestly, like, I actually got to know Forrest when I decided to do this book. Wiley, who’s the publisher, sent me Forrest’s book, and he said, “You should look at this book because the idea that you are presenting to me, we could lay it out in this format.” Like, in the, you know, physical format. So, he sent me that book. And that’s how I know Forrest, honestly.

So, I told him that—this is a little story that I told him after. But anyway, yeah. I—the—[sigh]—I was going to make a point about the vid—the aspect of creating images, like, honestly, like, I designed the aspects of, like, how you layout information in the sketches, I studied a bunch of stuff to come up with, how do I make it precise and things like that. But there’s no way this book was possible without some design help. Like, I can’t possibly do the entire thing unless I have, like, five years. [laugh]. So—

Corey: Right on top of all of this, you do presumptively have a day job as well—and while—

Priyanka: Exactly.

Corey: This is definitely related. “I’m just going to go write a book.” “Oh, is it a dissertation?” “No, it’s going to look more like a children’s book than that,” is what they’re going to hear. And it’s yeah, I’m predicting some problems with the performance evaluation process at large companies when you start down those paths.

Priyanka: Exactly. So, I ended up, like, showing all these numbers, like, of the blog views and reads and social media, the presence of some of these images that were going wider. And in the GCPSketchnote GitHub repo got a huge number of stars. And it was like, everybody could see that writing a book would be amazing. From that point on, I was just like, I don’t think I can scale that.

So, when I was drawing—this is an example—when I drew my first sketch, it took me an entire weekend to just draw one sketch, which is what—I was only doing that the entire weekend—like, assume, like, 16 hours of work, just drawing the one sketch. So, if I went with that pace, this book was not possible. So, you know, after I had the idea laid out, had the process in place, I got some design help, which made it—which expedited the process much, much faster. [laugh].

Corey: There’s a lot to be said, for doing something that you enjoy. Do you do live sketchnoting during conference talks as well, or do you tend to not do it while someone is talking at a reasonably fast clip, and well, in 45 minutes, this had better be done, so let’s go. I’ve seen people who can do that, and I just marvel in awe at what they do.

Priyanka: I don’t do live. I don’t do live sketching. For me, paper and pen is a better medium so that’s just the medium that I like to work with. So, when the talk is happening, I’m actually taking notes on a pen and a paper. And then after, I can sketch it out, faster in a fast way.

Like, I did one sketchnote for Next 2020, I think, and that was done, like, a day after Next was over so I could take all the bits and pieces that were important and put it into that sketch. But I can’t do it live. That’s just one of the things I haven’t figured out yet. [laugh].

Corey: For me, I was always writing my email newsletter, so it was relatively rapid turnaround, and Twitter was interesting for me. I finally cracked the nut on how to express myself in a way that worked. The challenge that I ran into then was okay, there are thoughts I occasionally have that don’t lend themselves to then 140—now 280—characters, so I should probably start writing long-form. And then I want to start writing 1000 to 1500-word blog posts every week that goes out. And that forced me to become a better writer across the board. And then it became about one-upping myself, sort of, live-tweeting conference talks.

And the personal secret of why I do that is I’m ADHD in a bottle. Someone gets on stage—you say you zone out when you read a giant quantity of data; you prefer something more visual, more interactive. For me, I’m the opposite, where when someone gets on stage and starts talking, it’s, “Okay, get to—yes, you’re doing the intro of what a cloud might be. I get that point. This is supposed to be a more advanced talk. Can we speed it up a bit?”

And doing the live-tweeting about it, but not just relating what is said, but by making a joke about it, it’s how I keep myself engaged and from zoning out. Because let’s face it, this industry is extraordinarily boring, if you don’t bring a little bit of light to it.

Priyanka: Yeah, that is—

Corey: And that how to continue and how to do that was hard, and it took me time to get there.

Priyanka: Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Like, that’s exactly why I got into, like, training videos and sketches. Like, and videos and also. Like, I come up with, like, fake examples of companies that may or may not exist.

Like, I made up a dog shoe making company that ships out shoes when you need them and then return them and there’s a size and stuff, like, you have to come up with interesting things to make the content interesting because otherwise, this can get boring pretty quickly, which is going back to your example of, “Speed it up; get to the point.” [laugh].

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Corey: It’s always just fun to start experimenting with it, too, because all right, once I was done learn learning how to live-tweet other people’s talk and mostly get it correct because someone says something, I have three to five seconds to come up with what I want to talk about and maybe grab a picture and then move on to the next thing. And it’s easy to get that wrong and say things you don’t necessarily intend to and get taken the wrong way. I’ve mostly gotten past that. And—I’m not saying I’m always right, but I better than I used to be. And then it was okay, “How do I top this?”

And I started live-tweeting conference talks that I was giving live, which is always fun, but being able to pre-write some tweets at certain times, have certain webhooks in your slide deck and whatnot that fire these things off. And again, I’m not saying that he this is recommended or even a good idea, but it definitely wasn’t boring. And—

Priyanka: Yeah.

Corey: And continue to find ways to make the same type of material new and interesting is one of the challenges because the stuff is complex.

Priyanka: Also bite-size, right? Like, it’s—I think Twitter is, like, the [unintelligible 00:15:54] words are obviously limiting, but it also forces you to think about it in bite-size, right? Like, okay, if I have a blog post then I’m summarizing it, how would I do it in two sentences? It forces me to think about it that way, which makes it very applicable to the time span that we have now, right, which is maybe, like, 30 seconds, you can have somebody on [unintelligible 00:16:18]

Corey: Attention is a rare and precious commodity.

Priyanka: Yeah. Yeah.

Corey: People who [unintelligible 00:16:21] engagement, I think that’s the wrong metric to go after because that inspires a whole bunch of terrible incentives, whereas finding something that is interesting, and a way to bring light to it and have a perspective on it that makes people think about it differently. For me, it’s been humor, but that’s my own approach to things. Your direction, it seems to be telling a story through visual arts. And that is something we don’t see nearly as much of.

Priyanka: Yeah. I think it’s also because it’s something that you—you know, like, I grew up drawing and painting. I was drawing since I was three years old, so that’s my way of thinking. Like, I don’t—I was talking to another devreloper the other day, and we were talking about—

Corey: It’s catching on. I love it.

Priyanka: —[laugh]. Two different ways of how we think. So, for me, when I design a piece of content, I have my visuals first, and then he was talking about when he designs his content, he has his bullet points and a blog post first. So, it’s like, two very different ways of approaching this similar thing. And then from that, from the images or the deck that I’m building up, I would come up with the narrative and stuff like that.

My thinking starts with images and narrative of tying, like, the images together. But it’s, that is the whole, like, fun of being in DevRel, right? Like, you are your own personality, and bringing whatever your personality, like you mentioned, humor and your case, art in my case, in somebody else’s case, it could be totally different thing, right? So, yeah.

Corey: Now, please correct me if I’m wrong on this, but an area of emphasis for you has been data analytics as well as Kubernetes, more or less things that are traditionally considered to be much more back-end if you’re looking at a spectrum of all things technology. Is that directionally accurate, or am I dramatically is understanding a lot of what you’re saying?

Priyanka: No, that’s very much accurate. I like to—I tend to be on the infrastructure back-and creating pipeline, creating easier processes, sort of person, not much into front-end. I dabble into it, but don’t enjoy it. [laugh].

Corey: This makes you something of a unicorn, in the sense of there are a tremendous number of devreloper types in the front-end slash JavaScript world because their entire career is focused on making things look visually appealing. That is what front-end is. I know this because I am rubbish at it. My idea of a well-designed interface that everyone looks at and smiles at [unintelligible 00:19:12] of command-line arguments when you’re writing a script for something. And it’s on a green screen, and sometimes I’ll have someone helped me coordinate to come up with a better color palette for the way that I’m looking at my terminal on my Mac. Real exciting times over here, I assure you.

So, the folks who are working in that space and they have beautifully designed slides, yeah, you tend to expect that. I gave a talk years ago at the front-end conference in Zurich, and I was speaking in the afternoon. And I went there and every presentation, slides were beautiful. And this was before I was working here and had a graphic designer on retainer to make my slides look not horrible. It was black Helvetica text on a white background, and I’m looking at this and I’m feeling ashamed that it’s—okay, I have two hours to fix this. What do I do?

I did the only thing I could think of; I changed Helvetica text to Comic Sans because if it’s going to look terrible and it’s going to be a designer thing that puts them off, you may as well go all-in. And that was a recurring meme at the time. I’ve since learned that there is an argument—I don’t know if it’s true or not—that Comic Sans is easier to read for folks with dyslexia, for example. And that’s fine. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but I stopped making jokes about it just because if people—even if it’s not true, and people believe that it’s, “Are you being unintentionally crappy to people?” It’s, “Well, I sure hope not. I’m rarely intentionally crappy. But when I do, I don’t want to be mistaken for not being.” It’s, save it up and use it when it counts.

Priyanka: Yeah, yeah. I’ve—yeah, I think, when it comes to these big events—and like front-end for me is—I would think, like, I actually thought that I would be great at front-end because I have interest in art and stuff. I do make things that [crosstalk 00:20:57]—

Corey: That’s my naive assumption, too. I’m learning as you speak here. Please continue[.

Priyanka: Yeah. And I was just—I thought that I would be and I have tried it, and I only like it to an extent, to present my idea. But I don’t like to go in deeper and, like, make my CSS pretty or make this—make it look pretty. I am very much intrigued by all the back-end stuff, and most of my experience, over the past ten years in Cloud has been in the back-end stuff, mainly just because I love APIs, I love—like, you know, as long as I can connect, or the idea of creating a demo or something that involves a bunch of APIs and a back-end, to present an idea in a front-end, I would work on that front-end. But otherwise, I’m not going to choose to do it. [laugh]. Which I found interesting for myself as well. It’s a realization. [laugh].

Corey: Every time I try and do something with front-end, it doesn’t matter the framework, I find myself more confused at the end than I was when I started. There’s something I don’t get. And anytime I see someone on Twitter, for example, talking about how a front-end is easier or somehow less than, I read that and I can’t help myself. It’s, “You ridiculous clown. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I don’t believe that I’m bad at all of the things under engineering—just most of them—and I think I pick things up reasonably quickly. It is a mystery that does not align with this, and if it’s easy for you, you don’t recognize—arguably—a skill that you have, but not everyone does, by a landslide. And that’s a human nature thing, too. It’s if it was easy for me, it’s obviously easy for everyone. If something’s hard for me, no one would understand how this works and the people that do are wizards from the future.

Priyanka: Yep. So true.

Corey: It never works that way.

Priyanka: Yeah. It never works that way. At least we have this in common, that you don’t like to work on front-ends. [laugh].

Corey: There’s that too. And I think that no matter where you fall on the spectrum of technology, I would argue that something that we all share in common is, it doesn’t matter how far we are down in the course of our entire career, from the very beginning to the very end, it is always a consistent, constant process of being humbled and made to feel like a fool by things you are supposedly professionally good at. And oh my stars, I’ve just learned to finally give up and embrace it. It’s like, “So, what’s going to make me feel dumb today?”

Priyanka: Exactly.

Corey: It’s the learn in public approach, which is important.

Priyanka: It’s so important. Especially, like, if you're thinking about it, like that’s the part of DevRel that makes it so exciting, too, right? Like, just learning a new thing today and sharing it with you. Like, I’m not claiming that I’m an expert, but hey, let’s talk about it. And sure, I might end up looking dumb one day, I might end up looking smart the other day, but that’s not the point. The point is, I end up learning every day, right? And that’s the most important part, which is why I love this particular job, which is—what did we call it—devreloper.

Corey: Devreloping. And as a part of that, you’re talking to people constantly, be it people in the community and ecosystem, people who—you say you’ve talk to customers, but you also talk to these other folks. I would challenge you on that, where when you’re at a company like Google Cloud, increasingly everyone in the community in the ecosystem is in one way or another, indistinguishable from being your customer; it all starts to converge at some point. All major cloud providers have that luxury, to be perfectly honest. What do you see in the ecosystem that people are struggling with as you talk to them?

And again, any one person is going to have a problem or bone to pick with some particular service or implementation, and okay, great. What I’m always interested in is what is the broad sweep of things? Because when I hear someone complaining that a given service from a given cloud provider is terrible. Okay, great. Everyone has an opinion. When I started to hear that four or five, six times, it’s okay, there’s something afoot here, and now I’m curious as to what it is. What patterns are you seeing emerge these days?

Priyanka: Yeah. I think more and more patterns along the lines of how can you make it automated? How can you make anything automated, right? Like, from machine learning’s perspective, how do I not need ML skills to build an ML model? Like, how can we get there faster, right?

Same for, like, in the infrastructure side, the serverless… aspect? How can you make it easy for me so I can just build an application and just deploy it so it becomes your problem to run it and not mine?

Corey: Oh, the—you are preaching to the choir on that. I feel like all of these services that talk about, “This is how you build and train a machine learning model,” yadda, yadda, it’s for an awful lot of the use cases out there, it’s exposing implementation details about which I could not possibly care less. It’s the, I want an API that I throw something at—like, be it a picture—and then I want to get a response of, “Yes, it’s a hot dog,” or, “That’s disgusting,” or whatever it is that it decides that it wants to say, great because that’s the business outcome I’m after, and I do not care what wizardry happens on the back-end, I don’t care if it’s people who are underpaid and working extremely quickly by hand to do it, as long as it’s from a business perspective, it hits a certain level of performance, reliability, et cetera. And then price, of course, yeah.

And that is not to say I’m in favor of exploiting people, let’s be clear here because I’m pretty sure most of these are not actually humans on the back-end, but okay. I just want that as the outcome that I think people are after, and so much of the conversation around how to build and train models and all misses the point because there are companies out there that need that, absolutely, there are, but there are a lot more that need the outcome, not the focus on this. And let’s face it, an awful lot of businesses that would benefit from this don’t have the budget to hire the team of incredibly expensive people it takes to effectively leverage these things because I have an awful lot of observations about people in machine learning space, one of them is absolutely not that, “Wow, I bet those people are inexpensive for me to hire.” It doesn’t work that way.

Priyanka: It doesn’t. Yeah. And so, yeah. I think the future of, like, the whole cloud space, like, when it started, we started with how can I run my server not in my basement, but somewhere else, right? Now, we are at a different stage where we have a different sets of problems and requirements for businesses, right?

And that’s where I see it growing. It’s like, how can I make this automated fast, not my problem? How can I make it not my problem is, like, the biggest [laugh] biggest, I think, theme that we are seeing, whether it’s infrastructure, data science, data analytics, in all of these spaces.

Corey: I get a lot of interesting feedback for my comparative takes on the various cloud providers, and one thing that I’ve said for a while about Google Cloud has been that its developer experience is unparalleled compared to basically anything else on the market. It makes things just work, and that’s important because a bad developer experience has the unfortunate expression—at least for me—of, “Oh, this isn’t working the way I want it to. I must be dumb.” No, it’s a bad user experience for you. What I am seeing emerge as well from Google Cloud is an incredible emphasis—and I do think they’re aligned here—on storytelling, and doing so effectively.

You’re there communicating visually; Forrest is there, basically trying to be the me of Google Cloud—which is what I assume he’s doing; he would argue everything about that and he’d be right to do it, but that’s what I’m calling it because this is my show; he can come on and argue with me himself if he takes issue with it. But I love the emphasis on storytelling and unifying solutions and the rest, as opposed to throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks to it. I think there’s more intention being put into an awful lot of not just what you’re building, but how you’re talking about it, now it’s integrated with the other things that you’re building. That’s no small thing.

Priyanka: Yeah. That is so hard, especially when you know the cloud space; like, hundreds of products, they all have their unique requirement to solve a problem, but nobody cares, right? Like, as a consumer, I shouldn’t have to care that there are 127 products or whatever. It doesn’t matter to me as a consumer or customer, all that matters is whether I can solve my business problem with a set of your tools, right? So, that’s exactly why, like, we have this team that I work in that I’m a part of, which has an entire focus on storytelling.

We do YouTube videos with storytelling, we do art like this, I’ve also dabbled into comics a little bit. And we continue to go back to the drawing board with how else we can tell these stories. I know—I mentioned this to Forrest—I’m working on a song as well, which I have never done before, and [laugh] I think I’m going to butcher it. I kind of have it ready for, like, six months but never released it, right, because I’m just too scared to do that. [laugh] but anyway.

Corey: Ship and then turn the internet off for a week and it’ll be gone regardless, by the time you come back. Problem solved until the reporters start calling, and then you have problems.

Priyanka: I might have to just do that, and be, like, you know what world? Keep saying whatever you want to say, I’m not here. [laugh]. But anyway, going back to that point of storytelling, and it’s so—I think we have weaved it into the process. And it’s going really well, and now we are investing more in, like, R&D and doing more of how we can tell stories in different ways.

Corey: I have to say, I’m a big fan of the way that you’re approaching this. If people want to learn more about what you’re up to—and arguably, as I argue they should get a copy of your book because it is glorious—where’s the best place to find you?

Priyanka: Thank you. Okay, so LinkedIn and Twitter are my platforms that I check every single day, so you can message me, connect with me, I am available as—my handle is pvergadia. I don’t know if they have [crosstalk 00:31:11]—

Corey: Oh, this is all going in the [show notes 00:31:13] you need not worry.

Priyanka: Okay, perfect. So yeah, I don’t have to spell it because my last name is hard. [laugh]. So, you’ll find it in the show notes. But yeah, you can connect with me there. And you will find at the top of both of my profiles, the link to order the book, so you can do it there.

Corey: Excellent. And I’ve already done so, and I’m just waiting for it to arrive. So, this is—it’s going to be an exciting read if nothing else. One of these days, I’d have to actually live-tweet a reading thereof. We’ll see how that plays out.

Priyanka: That would be amazing.

Corey: Be careful what you wish for. Some of the snark could be a little too cutting; we have to be cautious of that.

Priyanka: [laugh]. I’m always scared of your tweets. Like, do I want to read this or not? [laugh].

Corey: If nothing else, it at least tries to be funny. So, there is that.

Priyanka: Yes. Yes, for sure.

Corey: I really—

Priyanka: No, I’m excited. I’m excited for when you get a chance to read it and just tweet whatever you feel like, from, you know, all the bits and pieces that I’ve brought together. So, I would love to get your take. [laugh].

Corey: Oh, you will, one way or another. That’s one of those non-optional things. It’s one of the fun parts of dealing with me. It’s, “Aw crap. That shitposter is back again.” Like the kid outside of your yard just from across the street, staring at your house and pointing and it’s, “Oh, dear. Here we go.” Throwing stones.

Priyanka: [laugh]. I’m excited either way. [laugh].

Corey: He’s got a platypus with him this time. What’s going on? It happens. We deal with what we have to. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.

Priyanka: Thank you so much for having me. It was amazing. You are a celebrity, and I wanted to be, you know, a part of your show for a long time, so I’m glad we’re able to make it work.

Corey: You are welcome back anytime.

Priyanka: I will. [laugh].

Corey: An absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks again.

Priyanka: Thank you.

Corey: Priyanka Vergadia staff developer—but you call it developer advocate—at Google Cloud. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on whatever platform you’re using to listen to this thing, whereas if you’ve hated it, please do the exact same thing, making sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes because that’s where it is. But if you did hate it, also leave an insulting, angry comment but not using words. I want you to draw a picture telling me exactly what you didn’t like about this episode.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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