A Journey to Tech Success – Tech.Strong.Women. EP 22

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jodi Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong, and I'm here with my co-host Tracy Ragan, creator, and c e o of Deploy Hub.

And in her free time, she's super active, busy working with the Linux Foundation. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a quick update about what's going on here at techron. ai, so be sure to go check that out.

There's a lot of great content up on there. We have a couple virtual events coming up you can check out. Uh, August 16th is Data Ops Day, where we're gonna take a deep dive into the world of data and data ops, and you're gonna hear from data and business leaders who've adopted data ops to achieve their goals for quality, security, and speed.

And on September 13th, we will be having a digital C X O summit, which is gonna be amazing. We've got a bunch of industry leaders who are gonna share their insights from their own digital transformation journeys, tips on how to become future ready technology businesses that sustain long-term growth. So important right now, they'll address common challenges c-suite executives face in driving digital initiatives and provide practical strategies to overcome them.

So we can always use great tips. So definitely tune into that. com, and be sure to tune in every day to Textron TV for great shows and interviews.

Okay. Tracy, what's on your mind today? Well, you know, I've kind of been on this AI kick, and it's probably because I have my, I have some Google SEARCHs set up, so I get all these news, um, events.

But today, something interesting happened with Salesforce. Um, Salesforce is sort of doubling, literally doubling down on ai. They, um, to announced today that they're gonna increase their, uh, venture capital for generative AI startups, um, to 500 million.

Um, which is, it's a statement, you know, so now I just want to tell everybody I'm so tired of hearing about the technology recession because there's not a technology recession, there's a technology pivot going on. There's still tons of money out there, there's great jobs, and we're just learning new things and we're doing new things. They, uh, so Salesforce has always had this, uh, service called Einstein that, um, I'm not really sure how it worked on the backend, but it provided you, so it, it helps you kind of harvest the information that you're gathering in, in, in Salesforce.

But they have now an AI cloud that is really going to focus on these large language models. So there, there'll be a, um, it'll host a, a, a, a large language model service, uh, around ai. So this stuff is happening, it's happening, and it's happening really, really fast.

When you get these kinds of, uh, notices and things popping up in your Google search on such a regular basis, you know that this is a very busy industry. So for all of you out there who maybe just graduated from college or looking for a way to really fire up your career, and we talked about tensor last time, this is your generation. This is what's happening.

So keep an eye on it. Absolutely. I just, it's, it's everywhere.

You can't turn anything on without hearing about ai. Good, bad, and everything in between. Yeah.

Well, I would love to introduce you to our guest today. Her name is Christine Abernathy. Christine, welcome.

And tell us a little bit about yourself. Thank you, Jody, and thank you, Tracy. Thanks for having me on this show.

So, um, I currently re lead, um, open source at F five. I've been here probably of just about 18 plus months, coming up two years in September. And I've been in sort of like open source land for kind of close to a decade, seriously, obviously using it beforehand.

And I grew up, I was born and I was raised in Kenya. Uh, so I came to the US for school, and I've been here ever since in all kinds of tech fields. And you never know where things are gonna go.

So it's always been an exciting, exciting world of, like you say, pivot. And sometimes when you look back at your life, it's like a series of pivots. That's the way I could say it.

Well, just so all of you know, I literally, I, I heard Christine talk at a Linux, um, foundation event, and from that I immediately tried to connect with her on LinkedIn. I poked her and poked her and punctu her. And then I saw her again at open s ss f and I kind of grabbed her and I said, Christine, and as Tracy, we would love to have you on to talk about, um, open source and something that I know is really passionate to you and, and, and I love the talk topic and that's mentoring.

But before we get on that topic, don't you think that right now for, and that, 'cause I know you've worked with people in, you know, career development and, you know, kind of exploding technical skills. Don't you think that AI is where if you were, if you were starting out brand new, where would you wanna get a job? I, you know, it would be that I've seen seasoned folks who have been doing like great projects, whether it's like these Java strip libraries kind of feeling this fear of missing out this fomo.

Like, you're like, oh, can I go back and start again and start, because it's just so exciting. I think it's more like the possibility of seeing so endless. Even earlier today as I was listening to an AI podcast, I try to spend time on that a couple of an hour or so, at least per day.

And I was like, I wish I could tell people who even have no tech background, even just like, come check it out. I mean, your imagination can kind of go crazy and this is like the place to do it. I agree.

Yeah. And if you, if you're just getting out of college, this is your generation's tech, right? Yes.

You know? Mm-hmm. It is where the, it's where the money is, it's where the growth is gonna be.

It's where the, um, all of the, it, it's where all the brains are gonna be, to be quite honest. I think it's a fascinating turn of events that, uh, if we, if we just looked a year ago, we heard, you know, Facebook or Metaverse and, uh, you know, the whole debacle around Twitter and that a w s was laying off. And at the same time we had this massive explosion in the ideas and the abilities around ai.

Uh, so that's why I say don't get caught up in this silly discussion about a technology recession because it's just a technology pivot Yeah. And Time to get involved. I agree.

And, uh, even if you look back in history, it's usually during these sort of lull times where the, the people are pulling back and hiring is going in the opposite direction. This is where the next, um, set of startups are actually formed. So if you think about it, you've got this AI pivot, and you've also got these, uh, uh, tech workers who are out there on mass.

It's just like a great storm of like, I can't wait to see what gets actually burst out of this. I am in the same, I feel this same exact way. I cannot wait to see what happens with, um, technology in the next two to three years and probably sooner.

What do you think that, you know, and I know you haven't been at Facebook for a while, but you were there for quite some time. Yes. Do you think that the kinds of data that Facebook is gathering, what kinds of, you know, what kinds of AI models could be built from that?

I, I, I was the closest I got to some of, like the AI work was when as a team we were supporting PyTorch, which at that time, um, and PyTorch is a tool for if you are doing like, research, and they were trying to pivot to not only be used for reaches, but all the way to production. So spent kind of like a year and the team trying to, um, assist the team with kind of like going into like the next level. So on that stage, there is obviously quite a, a, a bit of data and just like the, the people talking and discussions and when you're thinking about everything from like, languages and there's like some really cool, uh, things that have come out of Facebook.

And, and, and then the other thing that's actually pretty interesting, at least from my time there, I remember when it was like a trickle of a few research papers that were being shared to when it became like the top most things that people were talking about. So I've seen like the openness of, uh, Facebook kind of like become very evident, and you can see it playing around with stuff like the Lama models that kind of came up within the last couple of months that are also kind of like revolutionizing sort of like the open source model. So, but in terms of like the data, there's definitely, there's definitely, uh, more data than you can see.

There's Gotta be a ton of data around, um, what with what Facebook's been gathering for such a long time. We did an interview with, uh, the c e O of Jelly. I can't think of her name.

Maybe Jody could bring it up for me. Nora Jones. Nora Jones, that's right.

And they, uh, she had an interesting idea around just tracking tickets and predicting, uh, the potential, uh, outages or failures or problems based on the chatter that's coming through on support tickets. io that, uh, oh, yeah. So, you know, if you think about just that, the amount of information that comes from like, I don't know, any of the chat, you know, any of the chat, uh, services, any chat service is gonna create a huge amount of, uh, of potential, uh, data to start reacting to.

I, it, it, it's, again, you, I'm sure you work at Facebook, you must be thinking, I wonder what they're cooking up. I wonder what they're gonna do. There's always gonna be something interesting.

Um, even like when you talk about like the chatter and tickets. There's even like the chatter when you go back to the AppSec that are being, uh, uh, created like the chatter of, of of telemetry data that's out there that all of these different, like, uh, AppSec kind of send out, like, how can you like instrument that? So you start to kind of hear that chatter and say, okay, something's about to go, go down.

And there's a lot of different companies that are also starting to think, and some of that is just simple data analysis. It might not need to get into generative ai, but you never know. Yeah.

Well, I think it's, it's a big topic right now is generative ai. I just keeps popping up a lot. It'll be super useful to have an AI cloud platform that's ready for you.

And so I think Salesforce is making a pretty smart decision to move into that area. Since they already had Einstein, I'm sure it's, they're building up on top of what they had there. So interesting times, interesting new products coming out.

And of course if your technique, you get really excited about it. Yeah. And there are other companies like ServiceNow who are also, like you're saying in terms of like the ticketing.

And I believe, I don't know if they are actually like, uh, partnered with s uh, with Salesforce, but I know that they were building a large language model that's specifically gonna be tailored to, um, I don't know if it is actually support tickets, but every company is, is, is thinking of similar for the most part about a couple of things. How can we train these models or create, like, smaller models that are on our data, and how can we do it in a way that's, that is like, uh, secure and private? So I'm actually also excited to see, uh, some of those companies are gonna be around like the tools and thinking about like the privacy and even, um, within, even if you have a lot of data and you want other teams to experiment, you have to think about like, what are you exposing to these different teams that are, even if you're in the same company, so you actually can maintain that privacy, but still be able to work and do all this machine learning.

So I think even just like those companies that think about how do I anonymize data, how do I make it private so that I'm not sharing it out in the cloud? So that's another space that I think it's gonna be pretty big as well. So you are now, you work now with fi Yes.

And you a the director, senior director for, um, open source evangelism. Um, why don't you give us a little bit of your history and how you ended up at that level? You know, we work really hard to find women at the, the senior levels.

Um, and especially women of color, you are not a, a common commodity, I can promise you. So why don't you give us a little bit of your, your background, um, and give some insights in how you got to where you are. Yeah.

So, um, I kind of got pulled into open source when I, uh, at some point I was looking for a different role within, uh, Facebook. And at that time, um, I wanted to work with a particular manager that I worked with that we worked pretty well together. And he had been working on open source James Spears for a couple of of years, almost like the sole person trying to revitalize, uh, Facebook open source.

And he wasn't the only one. He had like folks around him, but he was the one person that was leading it. So I joined it, we became a team of two, and then we became a team of three basically re leading the open source team.

And I, reason why I wanted to kind of get into that was also to get a sense of when you are in open source, especially, uh, on an overall company level, you get a chance to see what is being built across different parts of the organization. And I thought that would be like really exciting because up till then I had been working on just like one small piece of where what Facebook was working with, with developers. And immediately when I kind of got into it and got a chance to see a lot of open source projects grow, uh, it, for me it was exciting 'cause you got to hear and talk to different developers.

And not only in the company, but because the tech that we were building was being shared across developers. I just saw the value and, um, the power of open source to get people who previously may not, may have to like, pay a whole bunch of licensing or just it'd be a lot harder to build. But when we had open source and if, when we shared whatever we had at Facebook, it actually, um, helped power up a lot of, uh, smaller developers.

And I've always been like the underdog. I've always been for the underdog. And for me it just fit really well with open source.

So I would go and do these talks at some of these community events and I might be talking about say, here, you can use React this, uh, JavaScript library to build your web AppSec. And when I would explain it to some people, the thing that kind of like got me really excited was talking to some folks and they would say things like, I never really thought about a career in software engineering. In fact, I ran away when I tried it, but the way you explained it, it makes us really easy to do.

I wanna go home and like figure out how to build a mobile app, build this, build that. And that was exciting to me, especially when I, I went to other parts of the world, um, places where people, uh, may not be thinking that they could be building the next open source library and hearing them say things like, yeah, that's interesting, but I don't think I could be in that league. I don't think I am smart enough to build that open source library.

And I'd be like, oh, you are that smart. And then coming back and because it was open source, them going off learning by themselves, creating their own conferences, and coming back three or five years later and seeing those same people now be on the forefront of being like the fastest growing open source in particular countries. I think that was exciting.

And I saw that as the power of open source if done right to basically speed up. But the question is like, the if done right is not always true because it, it can also, it needs to be sometimes know how to actually act, act really well. So that's where like the diversity and inclusion kind of comes in where I kind of get passionate about how do we, with all the promise that, um, open source can get us, how can we actually marshal it and build it in such a way that it is inclusive?

And sometimes it doesn't take ma much to get to that point, but it is still a lot of work. So as Jody will now understand why I was so excited to have you on, I talk about this so much. Oh yeah.

Open source is her jam. I talk about it. Yes.

And you know, I talk about open source from the perspective of being, uh, creating a very diverse and inclusive global community. Um, more so than just really focus on the technology. I love to focus on the people and the culture and then the technology.

And I felt when I first, 'cause I, I helped start the Eclipse Foundation, and when I was at the Eclipse Foundation, it was a very, it felt very closed to me. You know, you had the, I call 'em the Giants. You had I b M in there, obviously you had Red Hat, you had Oracle, you had the Giants in the room, and they would bring people on to work on these open source projects.

But I wouldn't really call it an open source community. I, I feel like Jenkins, even though CloudBees eventually took it over and it was funded, Jenkins really was a good representation of what can be done with open source. But even when Jenkins, I've spoken to women and people of color who, and I've told them, why don't you contribute to Jenkins?

And they're like, well, I submitted a poll request. I didn't hear from anybody, so I didn't try anymore. So when I started Artelia, I made it a focus that, that it would be about community and about education.

You know, encouraging people who have never done a poll request in their entire life to go out and actually take on an issue and try it and create a poll request and see what happens. And go ahead and feel free to break things. Yes, break things, please.

Uh, and mentorship is so important. Now, that's the one area that we have struggled with. I think with the Orillia project.

While we've had some small successes with mentorship, we struggle with getting, uh, a, a proper mentorship program together. Is there a model that we should be looking at that maybe, maybe large enterprises take on or other open source communities have done it well? Yeah, that's a good question because like, uh, like you say, when, when I thought about open source, I also thought about education.

In fact, there was a time in between my open source, uh, gigs at Facebook where I went off and joined the education partnerships team within, uh, Facebook. 'cause I, I, I was also thinking about, I, I've always thought that education and open source kinda went hand in hand. And even before I joined the education partnerships, uh, team, I had actually tried like, uh, proof of concept, an open source mentorship, uh, program within, uh, Facebook because again, to your, to your point, I just saw that as a way to again, bring people and make open source more inclusive around the world.

And we had at that time a developer community that was, um, that had been done with, that had been put in place within Facebook called, uh, Facebook developer circles. And, uh, and so I wanted to kinda like tap into those Facebook developer circles. It's kind of like, um, like, um, Microsoft, uh, like the M V P program from Microsoft or Google has something equivalent.

I think Mozilla may also have one. So this Facebook developer circles was communities around the world. It might 120 plus cities across the world.

And we wanted to tap into those leadership to kind of build mentorship. And the way we wanted to set it up is have one or two, uh, open source project maintainers within Facebook, uh, match up with a couple of folks within those communities and hopefully over time grow it up. Uh, and, and, and kind of like start off this like process where we would, uh, have mentorship sort of trickle down.

Um, the thing that was interesting is that, uh, I found that a lot of people within, uh, Facebook who may not even have anything to do with those open source projects, but had a passion for being mentors would sign up and then would actually work really well with one or two community members. And then, uh, I also found the same thing happened for me. I actually mentored people on a project, which I had was not even an expert on.

It seemed like what people wanted a son in terms of mentees is they just wanted a sounding board of somebody who they was actually close to the project. Or you can just like give them a, like, you know, you're doing the right thing. I'll check out your PR or your pull request before you submit it.

You are on the right track. I can find somebody to unblock you. You did not even have to be an expert in that project to actually be a good mentor.

And some of the best mentors when were not even originally, uh, key project maintainers. In fact some mentors, uh, some people became mentors eventually became like key maintainers on that project because they both loved mentoring so much and then they got attached to that project. But what I found as that we kind of run this proof of concept is like mentorship you may already know is really hard to scale, to make that, um, that kind of like high touch, um, best practices and then like scale it up.

That's where I found that it was always the challenge. I don't think I, That is, you know, that is exactly the challenge with Orillia. It's the, it's the scaling.

We struggle with scaling. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's almost like you have to have the mental, whether it is coming in, have the mentality that you're not gonna, uh, have people burn out. Because some of the best mentors who maybe like somebody, I remember once somebody said, maybe not in this context, but they say that I don't do it too well because I care too much. And it was like, like I was like, is care too much A bad thing?

They said, I care so much that I burn out. So if you've got that one person who's always going back and they're always being the mentor and you're not really spreading, that's what I found was really hard. Do you know, you know, I should know the answer to this 'cause I do a lot of work with the Linnux Foundation, but only through a few of their, like the CD Foundation, some with the C N C F and A and Open SS s F.

But does, does the Linux Foundation have any kind of venture programs? They do. It's called L F X mentorship and, uh, and if you go down there, they might have like, um, cohorts like maybe twice a year.

I might have got it wrong, but they do have a L F X mentorship program. And, and that's been pretty good. I've heard people talk about how it's been really useful.

And the other thing that's really hard when it comes to open source mentorship, and I'll be, I'll talk about major league hacking in a little bit, but, uh, when it comes to mentorship, it's like you've got the mentors, you might need the projects, but you also, there's like different parts of it. So sometimes when we were running a mentorship uh, program, we actually later on within the open source team partner up with the major league hacking. And what they're doing is they have a focus on, uh, on uh, bringing in diverse folks into open source and other projects.

But open source is one of the things that they looked at. So initially, um, I think one of the initial programs was, uh, Facebook, GitHub and, uh, m l H got together to put together a cohort of people they would have like Facebook projects and other projects. And then, uh, they would Major M l H, which in itself has a huge, uh, set of folks from university backgrounds.

They've got that, that, that base of folks. And so they were able to bring in the, the folks and then pick the right folks and then partner with GitHub and Facebook to get those folks mentored. And, uh, it was like a six week, was it six weeks?

Something like a 12 week program, I believe 10 to 12 week program. They get to work with maintainers on a bunch of different projects. And that was actually pretty, pretty good.

Um, again, what was kind of like a challenge at that time, maybe it's been solved, but the challenge at that time was getting enough of the projects kind of coming in from the project maintainers that were enough of a, a meaty project so that people could actually go in and continue to, um, to do like a good project because people do wanna work on something that's a really good and meaty. And then at the end of the day, another thing that M l H was wanted to focus on and which the open s s f um, education sig, uh, I'll talk about that also a little bit, is they also wanted to focus on beyond just being able to go through the project, what were the good outcomes that came out of that? Did people actually go back?

Were they able to get, uh, a career, build a career or get a job? I think that's just as important as a mentorship as well. But M l H is actually trying to think about, uh, tackling this at scale as well.

Well, Google Sum summer of code helps somewhat with that. I, I mean we, I've participated in it, but we've never, we've never gotten, um, Orillia included in it. It's been, we may be, if we try, we probably should have tried it this year, but in the past we have been too small of a project, too small.

I don't know what that really even means, but to get attention and for people to know what we were doing. But I think that, uh, in terms of how they structure it, uh, you know, and there's money involved. So if it kind of helps, right?

It helps bring new open source contributors into kind of the, the open source family. I, I don't know from the mentorship, from the mentee side, how much support did they get? I'm assuming the projects work with them, isn't that correct?

That's correct. And it just also depends on how it is. 'cause I remember when we put together, like remember I talked about a proof of concept mentorship program that I put together at Facebook.

I remember one person who had gone through Google sum of code. Um, and even though the one that we put together was literally only about six weeks long, uh, just the attention that we gave to that particular individual, they said it just blew the, uh, Google sum of code out the window. But then again, it doesn't mean that one person's experience can be translated to everyone else, but it's just like, just having that one touch with that particular, uh, mentors.

What's key. The other thing that I think m l H does really well is I believe they give a stipend to the, there's like a men, there's, there's a, there's a men, there's a project mentor. So that could be like project, say like a reactor, any project or the alius.

But then they also have somebody that is hired within the M L H that acts as more like that middle mentor as well to take a lot of the pressure off of say the Alius project maintainer. And then that person then, uh, works with the, the bunch of mentees, a certain number of mentees. And because that, um, mentor the M L H mentor is a paid program as well as the mentee also gets some kind of like, uh, funding around that that's a little bit more sustainable, I would say.

At least that's a model that they're trying to, trying to work with within. Well, what I would like to see is, and you mentioned the universities, but I, and, and there's, so we have, I mean there's community colleges that have programming classes. Now you can get certifications.

Uh, obviously we have, you know, university level, uh, folks, you know, women and men graduating every day. Uh, but a lot of 'em have never thought about, especially in the US contributing to an open source project. It feels to me like what would be a great program would be one quarter or one semester where they have to contribute to an open source project.

Yeah. Yeah. I I agree totally.

And uh, maybe it helps that some universities are putting, are putting together the equivalent of open source program offices. But I know the one thing that I used to do also at Facebook is I would, I would do sort of like these roadshows. And so sometimes they were like connected with recruiting, but I would go to universities and maybe just do a, uh, we are gonna contribute to an open source project today, and I'll show you how to do your very first pr.

Because what tends to happen in a lot of colleges is, number one, they may get a lot of, like if you're a computer science student, you may get a lot of information about like very theoretical, but they may not get hands-on. So they go into the real world and the real world is doing a lot of things with open source. And they may have used it, but they may not have contributed.

So I really love doing this. Your first pr, this is the first time you contribute to open source. And it would just be like a half hour, like, um, a half hour, um, exercise or a workshop that people would use.

And even within the open s s F I mentioned previously, uh, there's like, uh, there was a mobilization plan around education. And part of that, uh, there was a, an a line item in there related to how do we work with diverse, uh, underrepresented communities. But even within that plan, there has been like an education special interest group that has taken over that mobilization plan.

And within that there's a diversity equity and inclusion piece of it that's also thinking about how do we partner with, with some of these different, uh, universities. But overall, how do we actually even partner with the universities in general? And one thing that we're discussing around there is can we get workshops and some of these things put together?

Because we've also been having these o office hours within these d e i six and invariably one or two people, we've only had a couple, but invariably somebody comes in and asks all these questions about open source cyber security, how do you contribute? But in there we always hear this nugget of like, how do I get started? And whenever I go talk about open source, especially with university students, they're always asked, how do I get started?

Because it's kind of intimidating making that very first pr. But once you've done that very first PR And the university should be, you know, they, they'll tell in terms of job getting their first job, they'll say, well, let's make sure you have a good LinkedIn profile. Yeah.

But we know the next step for the en an employer, they're gonna look at their GitHub profile. GitHub profile. Yeah.

I, I would do that, that I would do that. 'cause I would go and talk to these university students and I remember when I was looking at somebody's resume and they had the GitHub profile, I could click on that profile right away and click on that project. So I would go and do these talks and talk about your GitHub profile is just as important.

This is what you wanna put in there. These are the places where you can find these friendly communities. This is how you kind of, uh, uh, get started and going.

And, and literally, I, I still have that in somewhere else and I would love to like get people talk about it. But like you're saying, it needs to be a curriculum. And I even, it Has to be, be a, it needs to be a proper course.

It needs like to be a three unit or a a three credit or a four credit with the lab kind of course that says you have to do 10 pull requests. And then in this, during the semester, you pick your own project. And as you just described, you sort of had a middle layer, a middle tier that kind of helped that professor that, that, uh, could be that middle tier.

'cause they're, they should be watching the GitHub that all the pull requests that the students are doing, they should be aware of the projects. And maybe they even know the projects I've talked to, to, um, oftentimes, uh, especially community college, uh, instructors and they, they're not involved in a, in an open source themselves. But if they were aware of some of the programs and we could put a curriculum together, it would be fascinating.

And you know, we have a couple of college students, um, on their atill project, and some of them do get ex they, they get, uh, credit for being part of an open source project. Oh, they do? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, of course India would figure that out sooner than later. Right?

I know, I know. Because, because what I used to do as well, because I've even, uh, sort of taken the same message to, um, some of like the high schools. Um, 'cause when I was part of the education and partnerships program, I'm like, let's, let's try to get this open source thinking early on.

And so I'll talk about, um, 'cause there are like, I forget the name of these, um, similar to GitHub, but it's more for like a younger generation where you get to remix and you get to like create these things. And it's for people who are learning how to get, uh, how to actually learn how to code. And so I would talk about like, this is one way where you got like, this is how you remix something.

But remix is almost like a GitHub pull request. And I would just talk to these teachers about, this is how you can get started with people thinking about with an open source mindset really early. And the cycle is pretty common when how you do with open source, firstly, you use an open source project, then you can contribute to that, and then you can actually create your own.

And there's all these different things in between. But if that became like a, a, a course where you kind of study all of these three different like points of how you use open source and at the end of the day you create your project and you are, you're good to go. And then maybe that project feeds the next generation in that particular college school, community college where now they get to use some open source project that somebody created and you pick some good ones that can actually last a pretty long Oh my goodness, Christine, you gotta pull that together.

Do you gotta pitch it? You must pitch it. I'm not kidding you.

It's so needed. It really is. It's so needed.

Yeah. And you know, it, you could even do it younger. 'cause they have like, uh, you know, we've judged the supercomputing challenge in New Mexico and every state has one, but none of the instructors were having the students have a a, a GitHub repo.

You know, they were working on things. I have no idea how they were able to pull it all together, but they did. And a lot of times it's the tooling that they use and some of it simplifies the programming.

But even if the, even at a supercomputing challenge, it should be like, do you have a GitHub profile? How many, how, how, how are you managing your repo? All of that brings so much awareness and real life kind of strategy that's so needed in enterprises today.

It's what, what's, that's what companies are looking at. It's, it's the first step of DevOps, right? Is checking your code in.

Yeah. And, and, and maybe 'cause a lot of people, I remember I kind of had like a, a moment when I went and I was at, uh, um, a college, um, I think it was in somewhere in Santa Cruz. And I was basically doing something with GitHub and I was doing in command line, and all of the students were looking at me.

They were like, what is that? And then I, I re I, I realized that, oh, I, okay, so I, I mean I learned something really, really good during that experience. That's some, and, and it, the point I was trying to make is like when people go into the, into the corporate world and then they're suddenly brought in and they have to think about all of these tools and, uh, get, and it's just a little bit overwhelming.

And so even if we could just ease the process of onboarding where people are already familiar with some of these concepts when they get to the, um, to an actual tech company, they don't have to like learn all of those different concepts. Again, I'm with you. I'm telling you, you gotta pull that, that those thoughts together and you need to pitch that.

We'd love to get some funding just to put a program together at some of the, you know, community colleges in rural areas. I agree. 'cause that, yeah.

'cause that, that that's, we're doing outreach in the areas that we are haven't kind of harvested for, you know, all the smart kids, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Let's go find them. Let's go find them. That's true.

That's really, like I say, it doesn't take long. And, and that was part of the thing I used to enjoy a lot, is just going out and talking to the different universities. Again, part of like the recruiting team at Facebook, a lot of them went to these, uh, universities and we'd just talk about what is open source, break it down, how do you get involved?

And, but we never talked to the professors. I mean, we did some, some conversations with some of the professors to try to get them to do and use some of our open source projects, but we never got it to the point of like, this is how you should build, like, the culture of open source within your community college. And I think that could be done on the heels of, like I said, uh, there are some universities who are starting to think about creating like open source program office.

I know the US government is also has in mind to create open source program office. So this, even when we talk about like, say generative AI and some of the new career opportunities, there are a lot of career opportunities in open source. And I also like to talk about open source, not just being for people who are coding, but it's like a whole ecosystem of community managers, um, people who just like, develop advocates.

And when people hear about that, they're like, oh, I can do that too. I'm like, yeah, open source is not just for people writing code. There's like, there's a whole ecosystem around resource that We need.

We need artists, we need people who can produce videos. We need all kinds of roles. Yeah.

It's like having a startup with absolutely no funding. Um, and it, and it's growing. And there's so many roles in the open source community that people Can so many roles.

So many roles. And when you go to a say like a company and, uh, you want to say you had a dream that I wanted to become a product manager, you'd have to kind of learn the ropes and do a lot of things. But if you hit that right open source community or you actually create your own open, open source project and it's popular, you are learning so many startup, uh, I mean it's like so many startup, uh, roles in there.

And you can actually become a product manager much faster going the open source route than if you go to the actual corporate route. So these are, these are real stories that I've heard from people. It's so important for careers.

So let's, uh, shift and talk about F five. What's, what's happening at F five? What's new and exciting?

Um, well at F five it's, uh, like I said, my role is just to kind of get, um, um, at F five F five's, been thinking a lot more about open source recently, and this is after the acquisition of nGenx, which is one of, uh, one of like the, the top web servers. So, and F five for those who don't know, is a company that thinks about making AppSec faster and secure and a lot of the things that they've been building around that, or one of it is like called F five distributed cloud. And, um, another part is like Nginx.

So what we've been focusing as part of the open source team is where can we kind of like fit to bring in more of that open source culture into the way that F five works? Because historically, other than the most recent part, uh, recent past, there were a lot of companies that have been acquired by F five were increasingly because, uh, it's the world we live in using and creating more open source projects, how we also within F five, marry a lot of those companies together and actually work within our silos, which open source is like primary knows how to do that really well. So, um, another thing that F five is, has been doing is traditionally when F five, um, is known for this, uh, product called Big ip, which is a firewall, which primarily was, uh, consumed through hardware, but as the world is becoming more SaaS, um, F five is become more of a SaaS led company.

So through the acquisitions and some of the other projects that, that, uh, have been, uh, uh, have been acquired over time, it's become more of a hybrid SaaS. So people are not thinking about just like, I want my AppSec or my servers all locally, but thinking about things in the cloud. And they're thinking about all the workloads in various areas.

And so where that is pretty important, F five is uniquely positioned just through the acquisitions and what they've had in the past to address all of these different places. So F five again is thinking a lot about how do we continue to secure workloads? And there's a, so I've been coming up to speed in the last year a half about, uh, F five products because traditionally I came from Facebook where I had to focus a lot more on like the front end.

So that's been my four days. So kind of coming back to some, uh, at some point I did do some networking and, and one of the jobs I had was, uh, with Nokia, which had like a hardware division. So I'm like trying to like remember some of those routes to figure out what is doing.

But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's exciting times. And then obviously with generative ai, just trying to like figure out what that kind of fits in. But one of the products that F five had acquired, uh, is called, uh, was a company called Shape, which does bot and fraud detection, which had a lot of AI and ML components.

So there's like thoughts around that. And another project that, uh, F five has been talking a lot about, which fits with like, sort of like the generative AI is something called adaptive application. So adaptive application is like, you've got applications, your traditional applications, like something happens kind of like reactive, but with adaptive application is like, how do we, how do the, uh, applications themselves adapt to the environment such that whether through telemetry or data, they can either self-heal.

So there's a lot of, of, of things that we're thinking around how do we play in that? How do we kind of play and lead in that space? And there's all these pieces that are being put in place, but the question is like, F five wants to sort of like, we wanna lead in that area of like, how do you create applications that kind of like recognize what's going on?

So these are things that I'm still kinda like learning in terms of where F five is going, but it's, it's a lot of exciting times, especially, uh, as you think about data, which is like the new thing with generative AI coming back to the, where we started off, data is one thing that's really key. And that's where, um, that's where F five I think can, can, can potentially help lead. 'cause when you're thinking about like data APIs, making them fast, making them secure, the more data you have in in there, the more this is gonna be more and more important.

Yeah. I have a funny story about, this is about F five. This is way, this is way before covid when, um, yeah, I, I can't even remember now.

I was at a conference, I was at a partner kind of dinner and they were handing out awards for their top partners. And I was sitting kind of in a circle and chatting with, well mainly men and it was F five and a bunch of the F five sales reps and a senior sales vp. And they started talking about their load balancing technology.

And my, sometimes I have trouble controlling my inside voice and I said, not you. I said, oh no. I said something like, well, that technology's gonna all go away.

Just you better watch out for Engine X. Oh, you did. I did.

I did. I, the guy looked at me and they said, it better not be going away. And I was like, it will, it's this, you're, this is cloud native is is upon us.

So I was not surprised that if I, uh, made that acquisition, I personally believe that that company has done a great job of staying relevant. It's been, it's a hard road when you start from the architecture, right. And the hardware.

Yeah. It makes it, it's a very hard road to stay relevant and they've done a really, an amazing job stay staying relevant. So I'm sure it's fun to work there.

Yeah. And especially like you say, uh, you kind of called it earlier, but you know, coming from like if, if you are, if you are about AppSec and security, whatever, you just kind of like follow the road where the road is leading and like you say, cloud native and Engine X is the next one and it's, it's gonna be like a continuous shift and just have to just be on the lookout for what's happening. So it, it, it, it's, it's definitely a, a fun thing to kinda like see where things are shaping up, where things are going and uh, um, uh, I think another thing that I'm more excited about as well coming, coming back to like the open source is like with Nginx being open source and with a lot of CIOs and a lot of people calling for open source projects, it's one, it's something that we always have to keep mind mindful of.

Like what's the, what's the next thing the c o wants to buy and how do we stay relevant? How do we stay one step ahead of where things are going? So that part is like the fun stuff.

Yeah. It's, and and again, from where F five started, it's not, it was, it's not a hard, it's a real, it was a hard place to stay relevant because the technology around the, the hardware changed so fast. Yeah.

And we're gonna do it again. We're gonna see it again. That's why I've told everybody go there, you know, what it, uh, uh, what is right, A G P U instead of a G P U, we have to start learning that stuff because it's, it's headed our way and it's gonna hit us really fast.

No faster than you think. Because like even, uh, I remember when I joined, uh, F five and I was like chatting with my assistant who comes from a security background, uh, and I was like, could you just gimme the base? Very basics of security.

And it's just always interesting when you tack on something to what, you know, how much, just richer because like now knowing a lot more about security and getting involved with the open S s F and then having an open source background, I can see how a lot of those things should be more tightly wound together. Like they all make sense together. So like GPUs, GPUs, all new stuff to learn A lot.

Yeah. And do So what, uh, so right now F five is part of open s s f you guys are members? Yes, we are members.

Are you, are, are you members of any of the other, uh, foundations within the Linux Foundation? I know we are looking, we're definitely, um, I, so we were definitely C N C F for sure. Um, uh, Linux Foundation, obviously two D Group we're active in.

I know we're looking at CD Foundation. I'm not sure if that's in play or not, but yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of things that we are, uh, looking at, but those are the, like the key ones. And I know at some point we were also part of like the LF networking, uh, as well.

I'm not sure if we're still in that part in, in that, uh, foundation. I think that the CD foundation is unfortunately overlooked, uh, quite a bit, but it is, they have some projects in that, and I, I talk about CD events a lot that has the ability to really disrupt the way we do CI/CD and deployments. And that is what we need to disrupt that right now.

It is the area that needs the most disruption because what you were talking about earlier, just understanding what's, you know, what's happening within the pipeline, the self-healing, all that's gonna come in, the data that comes across the pipeline. Mm-hmm. So it's that it's the pipeline right now on that delivery mechanism that really should, we should be really kind of looking at how do we leverage it?

How do we harvest the data out of it? Because that's, that's where the predictive analysis is gonna come from. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I think the CD foundation is still out there and I, I'm rooting for it really am because I think there's so much to be done in that We have a partnership with the CD Foundation here. I actually produce a show called the CD Pipeline.

Mm-hmm. We're actually about to record an episode on there, the state of continuous delivery report that just got released in May. So, um, I'm, I'm looking forward to that and kind of hearing about what they're up to.

But yeah, Tracy definitely talks about the under underrepresentation and utilization of the CD Foundation for sure. It's definitely the underdog of the Alytic Foundation in many ways, but it has one of the most critical roles. And, you know, if it's not a shiny new object, we don't tend to look at it.

Um, C N C F has been so, um, amazingly successful around Kubernetes. The open SS s f has got a lot of attention, uh, mainly because long for j it's the reason for their existence. But the C D F just keeps plugging along trying to actually improve the way we deliver software.

Well, yeah. Yeah. And that is in essence the problem.

Yeah. I think, I think one of the things that's gonna be good is that we have within, uh, some members within, uh, nGenx and some of those folks who are much very much aware of, of CD foundation. In fact, I think a couple of them, one of them may have spoken at the CD Foundation conference that happened just before the Open Source summit.

So I know, I know some folks within the teams have been plugging away from CD Foundation, so I don't think within we're ignoring it, but it's good to kind of know from the outside how important it is as well. I think there, CD events project is probably one of the most important projects in terms of the software factory, if you wanna call it that. I think the events project is the one of the most important, honestly, because let's, let's put it this way, if you want to, uh, Steve Taylor, my partner, did a little bit of research and, uh, he learned it in 2018.

It was reported that there was over 20 million Jenkins workflows. Okay. So now we have a security issue and we want put SBO generation and all those workflows, we gotta go edit 20 million workflows.

Wow. It's not gonna happen. But an event based process, kind of like cloud events, we'll say you've got, you know, a trigger, you gotta payload and you can define what you want, what tool you want to support, that, that, that triggered payload.

Uh, but you don't have to update a workflow. You just put a tool, a new tool in, in the, in the process, in the Workflow. Oh, gotcha.

Gotcha. And so they're, they've been working on standardizing vocabulary around that. Um, and I'm hoping that the, um, open s s f can get involved and define securities, uh, vocabulary and standards.

You know, what are the steps and what needs to be passed across that event, uh, that that event lister. Okay. Okay.

Makes sense. Yeah, it makes a lot. Hey guys, we are getting going long here.

Oh, Sorry. We so long. I know.

I'm like, where can I, but it just keeps going and I hate, but I'm gonna get yelled at if we keep talking. Too much luck. Gotcha.

Christina, it has been a pleasure. I'd love keeping out with you. Yeah, It's just, it says a lot that we can just keep going.

That's why we're here. Yeah. That's why we're doing this is conversations are great, and, um, people enjoy listening to them.

And obviously we have great guests like you, and people love listening to you. So thank you for being here with us. We really appreciate it.

We thank you. We'll be watching out for all the fun stuff you guys are up to. It's, it is a crazy world right now, like you both said.

Yeah. People need to really be thinking ahead and be very adaptable because, uh, things are moving fast and we throw the AI into it. Mm-hmm.

It's just gonna move faster. Right. Okay, good.

And I really enjoyed this, uh, conversation. Thanks Jody. And thanks Tracy.

Thank you. Loved it. Thanks you guys.

Thanks for being with us today. Um, stay tuned for some more great programming here on Textron tv. And we'll see you back here in a couple more weeks with a new episode of Techstrong Women.

Thanks for being here.