About the Guest

After many years of ghostwriting, Emily Freeman made the bold (insane?!) choice to switch careers into software engineering. Emily is the author of DevOps for Dummies (April 2019) and the curator of JavaScript January — a collection of JavaScript articles which attracts 30,000 visitors in the month of January. A former VP of Developer Relations, Emily is a CloudOps Advocate at Microsoft and lives in Denver, Colorado.

Links

• Website: emilyfreeman.io
• Twitter:  @editingemily

Links Referenced

• Book recommendations: 
  • Monitoring with Graphite by Jason Dixon
  • Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale by Jennifer Davis and Ryn Daniels
• Emily’s talks: 
  • Humpty Dumpty + DevOps
  • Scaling Sparta
  • Dr. Seuss Guide to Code Craftsmanship

Transcript

Mike Julian: Running infrastructure at scale is hard. It's messy, it's complicated, and it has a tendency to go sideways in the middle of the night. Rather than talk about the idealized versions of things, we're going to talk about the rough edges. We're going to talk about what it's really like running infrastructure at scale. Welcome to the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm your host, Mike Julian, editor and analyst for Monitoring Weekly and author of O’Reilly's Practical Monitoring.

Mike Julian: All right folks, I've got a question. How do you know when your users are running into showstopping bugs? When they complain about you on Twitter? Maybe they're nice enough to open a support ticket? You know most people won't even bother telling your support about bugs. They'll just suffer through it all instead and God, don't even get me started about Twitter. Great teams are actually proactive about this. They have processes and tools in place to detect bugs in real time, well before they're frustrating all the customers. Teams from companies such as Twilio, Instacart and CircleCI rely on Rollbar for exactly this. Rollbar provides your entire team with a real-time feed of application errors and automatically collects all the relevant data presenting it to you in a nice and easy readable format. Just imagine — no more grappling logs and trying to piece together what happened. Rollbar even provides you with an exact stack trace, linked right into your code base. Any request parameters, browser operating system and affected users, so you can easily reproduce the issue all in one application. To sweeten the pot, Rollbar has a special offer for everyone. Visit rollbar.com/realworlddevops. Sign up and Rollbar will give you $100 to donate to an open source project of your choice through OpenCollective.com.

Mike Julian: Now folks, welcome to the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm here with Emily Freeman, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily Freeman: Thank you, thank you so much for having me.

Mike Julian: Yeah, so for the folks who aren't as familiar with developer advocacy or developer relations or developer evangelism or the 50 bajillion other names that they go by, can you tell us what is that you do? What are you doing for Microsoft?

Emily Freeman: Yeah, absolutely. Along with the 50,000 names for developer relations, there are also 50,000 interpretations of the actual job. It will vary company to company and person to person. For me in Microsoft I like to say that, because I have a background in writing and I was a writer before I was a developer, I like to tell stories. My job is to tell the stories of the developers in the communities I am in and serve and represent. The most important role I think I play at Microsoft is bringing customer feedback back to the product teams. When I go to a conference, I am never one to just like helicopter in, give my talk and then peace out. I think that's just poor form and it doesn't benefit anyone at that point but my ego. My job really is to go and talk to people and to hear all their feedback, positive and negative. It's not personal, it's about making the product better for the community.

Mike Julian: That sounds like a much more reasonable job than you would hear from like reading shit shows on Twitter.

Emily Freeman: Yes, absolutely.

Mike Julian: That might be a good segue to the recent total shit storm that happened on Twitter about developer relations. I don't even know how these things started. It just suddenly appeared one day.

Emily Freeman: Yeah, and the criticisms from this last one aren't new. This is just one iteration of the sort of dev overall hate, which is like, on a very personal point, it's hurtful because it's like, “Okay this is my work, this is what I care about. I'm passionate about this and obviously I dedicate all of the time I spend at work to this role.” To hear that it just has no value or that we are simply low-key Twitter celebrities that our company shields and drink champagne on planes and party.

Mike Julian: That sounds like a fantastic life, can I get that job?

Emily Freeman: I know. I was telling someone I'm going to Milan next week for Microsoft Ignite | The Tour. It's very exciting, I've never been in Italy, I'm thrilled. I was just telling them like, "I sound a lot cooler than I am. I just got from Toronto and I'm going to Milan." No, I'm just on the plane sad. Yeah, the travel is part of it, I think it's the part that people cling on to. I also think that we as an industry have not done a great job recently at actually representing what the work is. Yeah, I think so much of the emphasis has been around Twitter and a lot of the developer relations folks especially the people Microsoft is picking up, have really — if not enormous Twitter following — substantial ones.

Mike Julian: Well they are already super well-known people to begin with in their own right.

Emily Freeman: Yeah, but there's a cult of personality thing happening. I think when we have that and when we focus so much on the persona and that sort of Twitter platform, then we lose the actual benefits of developer relations, both for the community and the company that they work for.

Mike Julian: Yeah, so some of the criticisms that I saw, you alluded to this one, that you are the representative of a company, but when you're speaking on behalf of the company, you're not saying that you are. Therefore, it's like influencer stuff, but you're not saying that you are. You're not divulging where you're getting your pay from. To me this sounds like a dubious argument, because your employer is right there on your profile.

Emily Freem...