Rosemary Wang

Machines made this, mistakes and all:

[00:00:00] Chris: Hello and welcome to the Imposter Syndrome Network Podcast where everyone belongs, especially if you think you don't. Welcome imposters. My name is Chris Grundman and I'm here with the real reason you all tune-in each week, Zoe Rose. Hey. This is the Rosemary Wang episode and I think you're going to love it.

[00:00:29] Chris: Rosemary is a constantly evolving engineer, writer, and speaker of cloud networking and more. She's the author of Infrastructure as Code Patterns and Practices. She's a builder, a contributor, and an educator of open source technologies, including Kubernetes, Terraform, Vault, Console, and Docker. 

[00:00:49] Chris: Hey, Rosemary, would you like to introduce yourself a bit further to the Imposter Syndrome Network?

[00:00:53] Rosemary: Hi everyone. I'm Rosemary. Thanks for having me here. I think that was a fantastic intro. I can't think of anything I would add other than I do like my house plants. Um, you know, unfortunately they're withering because of other commitments. So if anybody has any tips for reviving a fern, I would appreciate that.

[00:01:12] Chris: Awesome. We will send those to your Twitter link in the show notes. People can, uh, weigh in on Fern Health. I had the pleasure of meeting you through a network field day presentation that you gave recently that was really impressive. So it's obvious you know your stuff and that you're a great technology communicator, and obviously you've risen to this point in your career fairly quickly, which we'll cover in more detail later.

[00:01:34] Chris: But first, it seems that your career has really been focused around infrastructure as code and, and cloud adoption. And that's really interesting to me because, you know, I am of, I guess maybe an older generation or a different, you know, perspective where I came from networking infrastructure was, you know, physical boxes.

[00:01:50] Chris: You had to go bolt them into racks and, and plug them in. And I talk to a lot of folks now who, when they talk about infrastructure, they're talking about AWS or Azure or gcp and it's just very foreign to me. So, you know, the term is kind of being redefined and I wonder if you can tell us. How that came to be.

[00:02:06] Chris: Maybe not necessarily like how the industry switched from full infrastructure to calling, you know, code infrastructure, but for you, you know, how did you get involved in all of this and, and why focus on infrastructure as code.

[00:02:16] Rosemary: Yeah, so I started in what you would say infrastructure. Infrastructure, meaning I was an electrical engineer.

[00:02:22] Rosemary: Uh, so you know, when I came out of university, I was really determined to do something with really low level networking. At the time I was studying was called heterogeneous networks. So switching between mobile networks and wifi on your phone. And so of course, like in terms of real world experience, I'm like, who actually needs this stuff?

[00:02:43] Rosemary: Right? It's very retreat, it's very much research oriented and uh, maybe on the consumer technology side, but I don't know. I wasn't in love with it, and so I was thinking like, okay, what do I do with my life then? And at some point someone reached out to me and they said, Hey, we have this position in a cloud DevOps team.

[00:03:02] Rosemary: I did not know what DevOps meant. I mean, again, didn't know anything about software. It was sort of like, Hey, I know stuff about, you know, packets, wires and stuff, but other than that, you know, bits and bytes. What am I supposed to do with this cloud DevOps thing? And I ended up working for a bank, helping them with their private cloud and automating, surprisingly, their cloud infrastructure.

[00:03:26] Rosemary: So I had to learn a little bit about the physical infrastructure, what a data center meant, because at the time, Public cloud really wasn't that popular. And I think this firm, you know, private cloud was really the, the investment they wanted to make. So they said, okay, we need people to help run it. We need people to automate it.

[00:03:43] Rosemary: We need people to help build it. And that's how I got started in the space. Over time, I think as public cloud got more popular, a lot of what I had to learn became public cloud oriented and what we see as the aws, Google, G C P, Azure, you know, any of the other cloud providers today. So it's changed a lot, but I always go back to the data center roots mostly because I remember sitting on a weekend and like trying to make changes to a console and like manually copying, pasting things over and thinking like, oh man, there could be better things I could do with my weekend.

[00:04:19] Rosemary: But, you know, still a great experience because I got to learn the foundations of how all of the underpinnings for a cloud provider would work. Um, but then learn the automation side and the software side too. 

[00:04:30] Chris: I like that a lot. I like that. Like that's interesting to me, right? Because I think I was born in 1981 and so I'm kind of like, I guess I'm like the oldest of the millennials according to like strict.

[00:04:40] Chris: Whatever, you know, the, the generational gap things. But you know what, what that meant to me is I was born into a very analog world and then grew up through this transition to digital kind of from the consumer side. And it sounds like career wise you almost did the same thing, right? You were kind of born into quote unquote this, you know, electrical engineering, right?

[00:04:57] Chris: A as infrastructure as it gets, as hardware focused as it gets, and then kind of saw this shift to cloud through your career, which is, which is pretty interesting and gives you a neat perspective, I would guess.

[00:05:05] Rosemary: Yeah, and there were many times where I, you know, it was so niche at the time, right? Because how many people were saying like, oh yeah, we wanna hire for pub, like private cloud skills and private clouds were really proprietary in technology was like a really custom, and so any time I would talk to other people, the skillset that I'd had just never matched to what they were looking for.

[00:05:28] Rosemary: So I never felt like I fit anywhere. And so it was a struggle for me to say, yeah, I was going to try to learn software, I was going to try to learn how to be a better programmer if, just so that way I could at least fit in somewhere and I could talk with different people and, and get their perspective.

[00:05:43] Rosemary: But coming from a background where it was pretty much like, you know, hooking things up at the transistor level, programming at pga, you know, all of these things that. Today no one really talks as much about, but you know, it's nice to, to say you've done it. But coming from that background, I felt like I couldn't really talk to people about what I was doing.

[00:06:03] Rosemary: And it cuz exacerbated I think a bit cuz the technology was so specific to an organization. So it made it hard sometimes. 

[00:06:11] Zoe: Yeah, for sure. And, and also like, uh, interviewing, even if you're like trying to pursue a career in a different organization, Getting through the HR interview is so hard if you can't say, well, I've got these certifications that you recognize.

[00:06:24] Zoe: Right? If it's it's proprietary technology or proprietary setup, it's, well, I know how to do this in this scenario, but you're HR and no, have no idea what I'm talking about. So I'm curious, did that lead you into more of the kind of direction you're in now? Because from what I see, you're a developer advocate at HashiCorp.

[00:06:46] Zoe: And I imagine part of that is almost education of what developers are doing. 

[00:06:52] Rosemary: Definitely. I can't, I would say that it started because I, I wanted to learn myself and I didn't really have anybody teaching me at the time, open standards, open source standards, even in open source tooling wasn't a norm. A lot of people were still.

[00:07:07] Rosemary: Really thinking, okay, you know, there's a security concern with us adopting open source. There really weren't too many projects from a community standpoint that had strong support. So there was a reluctance from a risk standpoint as well. So I felt I was hungry. I was like, I want to know more about all these ecosystems and things.

[00:07:24] Rosemary: And the people who taught me, I wish they were more public with it, but they weren't, they were in the company and they knew all, all of these things. And I found myself asking them questions all the time and I sort of said, Hey. Isn't it great if I could just, you know, go to something that you wrote and self-serve that knowledge myself without necessarily having to ask you directly?

[00:07:45] Rosemary: And they were always happy to answer my questions, but I felt like I was wasting their time. And that's where I sort of realized, hey, as developer advocate, um, now at least in this industry, it's really helpful because we scale knowledge, right? Um, we identify what are ways that people don't really understand the tools or the ecosystems or the integrations.

[00:08:03] Rosemary: And we find ways to scale how we educate people about that and where we're distributing that knowledge. 

[00:08:08] Chris: Yeah, I love that. I love that idea of like scaling knowledge and scaling education, especially today, right? Because again, that's another thing that I think has shifted the. Maybe not as much as we would've liked, but I think, you know, some of the things I see, you know, when I talk to folks who, again, you know, started in technology even before I did around the same time I did, we really had to learn on our own unless we got lucky enough to like, sit next to a gray beard.

[00:08:31] Chris: Right? Or, or, or, you know, some woman who had done this, you know, before and had already built all the stuff and could, could teach us what was going on otherwise, I know there, there really wasn't like YouTube and, and I guess now TikTok and blogs and, and all this stuff kind of came up. You know, as we were building it.

[00:08:44] Chris: And so that focus on education and, and being able to bring other folks in and teach them is, is really interesting. And as, as part of that education, I'm guessing I already, I mean, I'm assuming that maybe part of the inspiration behind you writing your book, you have a book on infrastructure as code. Um, and maybe you could talk to us a little bit about, about that, right?

[00:09:02] Chris: I mean, maybe you know that what inspired it or where did that come from and what have you seen the results? 

[00:09:07] Rosemary: Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't me, uh, put in ChatGPT in there, by the way, everybody's somehow, somehow worked that in for some reason. And everything that I've talked about in, you know, either education or tech education.

[00:09:17] Rosemary: So the book actually was a compilation originally, I was thinking, okay, I'm gonna write a compilation of everything I know about infrastructure as code and a set of blogs. I didn't hold myself accountable to that. It was really hard to get that done. And eventually someone came to me and said, Hey, maybe you should talk to a publisher that'll hold you accountable for producing these chapters.

[00:09:39] Rosemary: And maybe it will help because they'll help have reviewers and, and public, you know, the editors give you feedback on how to structure all of this information that you have inside of your head. And I said, why not? Because. You know something, I need someone, I need an accountability buddy. Someone to just make sure that I could get this done.

[00:09:58] Rosemary: And all of this knowledge that I put into the book was because people kept asking me the questions and I found myself repeating them over and over. And you know, at some point, it's not that I don't wanna answer the questions, I do wanna answer the questions, but I want more people to feel like they're empowered to get those answers.

[00:10:14] Rosemary: So it certainly was the inspiration for writing the book in the first place. And I had a lot of this accumulated knowledge from the software space. Became a consultant with ThoughtWorks at one point, and I got to learn from fantastic software engineers and I learned all of these amazing concepts in software development, and I realized we didn't make it very accessible for infrastructure folks or security engineers to understand what these were.

[00:10:40] Rosemary: So I said, I'm going to try to write it in a language that, you know, someone who's not a software developer can maybe understand. And that's why the book is Patterns and Practices. It isn't really focused on a tool because the tools change and it's really focused on distilling. What are the important general practices you should be applying when you do infrastructure as code?

[00:11:00] Zoe: I've known a couple people that have written books, and I've always felt like. That just seems like the most daunting task. Cause not only are you writing your essential, your, your skills, your experience, your opinion in some uh, cases, but then you're also being held as kind of an expert. You know, you, you're selling a book that says, this is my opinion and this is my experience.

[00:11:27] Zoe: How do you get over? I imagine it was probably one difficult and two. Probably a little bit scary. How do you get through that? Um, that feeling of, is what I'm writing good enough? Because that's, that's the part I always struggle with, even in just writing silly blog posts, is am I actually right?

[00:11:46] Rosemary: I was terrified.

[00:11:48] Rosemary: I was terrified to release this book because I felt like there was going to be controversy with everything I said and did. And, you know, I, at some point I was, I doubted myself every, pretty much, every sentence I doubted myself. And I, I'm lucky to have a community with me who, who's there to encourage me.

[00:12:07] Rosemary: And there were times when I didn't get positive reviews and positive feedback from people. And I would oftentimes refer to my coworkers or my teammates or former coworkers and be like, you know, I feel awful because this person says this. And they're like, well, that's their opinion. And so having a support system behind me as I wrote the book and just being public about how vulnerable I felt writing it.

[00:12:30] Rosemary: It was really helpful because they were encouraging me along the way. I, this group of people, they, you know, they'll tell me if something wasn't right or if something didn't sound right to them in the book, but ultimately they were there to tell me like, yes, you can do it. No, what you're saying is very reasonable.

[00:12:49] Rosemary: And the result, I had to think of myself, not as an expert, but when you write a technical book, it's easier to position yourself as. Quite literally a storyteller, right? You know, this book be, was sort of the story of how I, I guess, grew my career in infrastructure as code. And while it was so personal, it made it a lot easier to articulate that, you know, all these technical concepts did work at some point in time in my career.

[00:13:18] Rosemary: And there's, they're still valid. It may not be valid to every use case and valid to everybody, but they're still valid. And I felt like a, as a result, I don't see it as much of, um, sort of my, a book about my expertise. It's a book that are short stories of all of those experiences that I had. 

[00:13:34] Chris: I really like that.

[00:13:34] Chris: And that does seem like it, you know, takes the pressure off a little bit, right? Instead of saying, Hey, this is the way to do something. You're instead saying, you know, this is how I happened to do it. These have worked for me. Right. And you kind of almost get to do that little, your mileage may vary piece in there.

[00:13:47] Chris: Like, Hey, this, this, this worked at the time I wrote it when I, you know, for, for me, Instead of trying to be the authority on all things all, all the time, which I definitely think is what traps so many of us in, in like that paralyzing fear of I don't Yeah. What to say. 

[00:13:59] Rosemary: Yeah, exactly. What I have learned and, and being, I guess online and, and being, uh, some, you know, publishing a lot of material and content over the years was that, People can tell me I'm wrong and I'm like, okay, yeah, I might be wrong, but at some point it worked.

[00:14:15] Rosemary: So I'm like a certain percentage, maybe just a little right. And that sometimes makes me feel better. The other thing that I go into and I, I keep repeating it to myself and I always write it on a post-it note, stick it there on my computer as I'm working. But it's like if, if one person comes to me and tells me, Hey, something that you wrote or, or put out there helped me.

[00:14:35] Rosemary: That's my goal. I'm not looking for the most popular book or top of the bestseller list. I'm looking for the book to help one person and for them to say like, this really, you know, advanced my career, or I applied these patterns and I was able to solve a technical problem, and that makes me feel great to hear that.

[00:14:54] Zoe: That's really wonderful. Yeah, I think, I think going in with the right intentions makes a difference. Not wanting to be the best of the best, but simply wanting to share the knowledge and educate people. I think that's really important. I had another bit about knowledge share. I mean, it sounds like your career is quite focused on knowledge share.

[00:15:15] Zoe: You're very focused on. You know, building the community and raising the community. So on that, I see you are also a blogger and a podcaster. And I'm curious on your thoughts on being consistent in blogging or being able to create content that is worth other people reviewing. Cause that's one thing I always struggle with is one, being consistent.

[00:15:37] Zoe: I'm not, and two, thinking. I often think what I'm saying is too simple, you know, it's not really beneficial. So I'm curious on your kind of perspective there. And then also podcasting. Cause you know it's, it's bigger now I think, and also, Getting a unique perspective in a podcast can be a bit challenging with all of the other ones out there.

[00:15:57] Rosemary: Yeah, I will acknowledge I'm not always the best with consistency either. Um, that's why I have my accountability buddy system, and so I'm not good with deadlines. Right. I hate the word deadline. I'm not good with like, I must have this done by this day. I like having someone though, like, Hey, you know, message me and say like, Hey, how's it going?

[00:16:17] Rosemary: And then the two of us. I'll pick someone and usually the two of us will have a goal in mind, and if we're not done by that date, that's okay, but we'll set up a little bit of time to work together, right? And so one of us will work on one thing and the other person will work on another thing. And I think it's a lot more comforting for me because when I hear, ah, I need to get it done by this date, there's this shame of not meeting that deadline and it makes everything worse.

[00:16:39] Rosemary: So I ju I try not to do that anymore. In terms of consistency, I try to, again, like having someone else pair with you on it, is a great way to just make sure that, you know, you're, you're getting to a goal. It doesn't have to be perfectly on that day, but maybe within that month is great. Um, and that's the way I think about it.

[00:16:57] Rosemary: What I have learned of in the past is having a content pipeline is really helpful, especially when you commit to like a podcast or a blog, a regular blog, having. Now, not all automation solves every problem, but sometimes you know, releasing something does does take time just because of the manual steps in involved.

[00:17:17] Rosemary: So automating some of that is really useful. For example, so some of my blogs are automated not using chatGPT. Second time I brought it, I promise I'm not purposely bringing it up, but some people have been telling me, oh yeah, we've been like automating our blog process with ChatGPT. I have not done that to that extent.

[00:17:34] Rosemary: Um, but what I do is I do the templating, you know, in a repository and I make sure that the publication of it and the structuring of it and editing is going through a api. So it's a little bit more automated. Um, that's helped me personally. And the podcasting. I think podcasts are really tricky because there's so many of them now.

[00:17:54] Rosemary: It used to not be so popular, but I think that people are looking for a way to listen to someone's voice. And their perspective, and that's why it's nice to have the variety of podcasts we do now. Standing out as a podcast is a lot harder. I think people look for a personality rather than the content directly these days.

[00:18:14] Rosemary: So having a podcast personality is hard to build, but I've noticed that it's more interesting for people to listen to a fun perspective and someone with a voice. And that's been something I've noticed with our podcast, the podcast that I help run, as well as, um, some of the other ones that I've been on.

[00:18:31] Chris: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, education is great and I think it's a worthy goal, but it's, but to your point, right, I think maybe more so now than ever, but, but I think this has always been true, right? The, the best way to get someone to, you know, stay tuned for the entire message and definitely to recall it later is, is for it to be entertaining as well, right?

[00:18:48] Chris: I mean, I think we've seen that through. Through years and years of content. I mean, you know, way back, right? If you talk about like children's books and, and you know, original radio shows and all that stuff. I mean, it, it always comes back to that a little bit. You don't wanna just, most people aren't willing to sit there and grind through a terribly boring blog post or book or, or movie just to get the information right.

[00:19:05] Chris: They're, they'd much rather have it. Be fun on the way, which makes sense. 

[00:19:08] Rosemary: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, what, no one can ex it's, I mean, some people might be able to, but it's really hard to explain like a technical system without like a whiteboard or some kind of like diagram there. At least personally. So from an Audi, you know, at least from a podcast standpoint, those are not maybe that interesting.

[00:19:26] Rosemary: But I think with podcasts, for me it's like I'll put it on while I'm in the car. I'll put it on. You know, in the background, and I'll listen in and it's nice to be able to say, yeah, I'll, um, I'll get some information. Uh, and it doesn't have to be necessarily the, the structured system walkthrough, but I still get a lot of interesting tidbits and information that I can incorporate in my day to day, um, without the overhead of needing to focus on something visually.

[00:19:50] Zoe: And that's really good point that you made a couple times is the storytelling aspect. That's what's really attractive to me is hearing people's stories and that's kind of how I present as well because I get really bored. I'm probably the worst audience member ever cuz I'll just like, um, I'm bored now, but when somebody has a, like a story that I can like either relate to or at least be excited for them, I find that much more effective.

[00:20:16] Zoe: And I also find it easier to then. Be consistent in my message because I like to ramble. So the other thing I was gonna ask about, uh, was your, you mentioned earlier at the very beginning, you actually started as an electrical engineer and then your journey into where you are now. But, um, my question is, why did you go into electrical engineering originally and did you find that even though you did shift from that career, Slightly Was the schooling you took really beneficial in the long term anyway? 

[00:20:54] Rosemary: I went into electrical engineering because I, when I went into university, I was determined to be a civil engineer. There was a, I was really interested in this concept called tensegrity. We can look it up. It's very intriguing. It was an art concept and I was trying to apply it from a civil engineering perspective.

[00:21:14] Rosemary: And I got into my first general physics, advanced general physics class in mechanical physics, and I was bored. It just really wasn't my interest. I found myself just not interested in it all and at at that point I realized, wow, civil engineering must involve a lot of physics, general physics, at least in the mechanical space, and I'm not terribly interested in it.

[00:21:41] Rosemary: So I was like, okay, I like engineering. I do know that I like building things. I like exploring a problem and many other fields explore problems. But I specifically liked the math part of it. I liked the sort of the science aspect of it. So I said, okay, what else can I look at? And I took a, um, transistor programming course and I was like, wow, this is different.

[00:22:05] Rosemary: This is interesting. And I liked the abstract concept of. Electricity and magnetism. So I said, why not go into electrical engineering? Thus committed myself to an electrical engineering degree and wasn't really sure what I was getting into at that point either. Most of the time I'm just meandering, unsure about what I'm getting into.

[00:22:26] Rosemary: So clearly I don't look before I leap. Um, and so, you know, from that point on, I just said, okay, electrical engineering is really interesting. I can do a lot of very cool things with it. You know, I can solder, I can, you know, program transistors. I understand how a modern computer works at, you know, a very, very low level, which is great.

[00:22:47] Rosemary: I don't really apply to that, that as much day to day. Now, I would say maybe the, the programming aspect and understanding domain specific languages as well as interestingly enough, drag and drop programming applies now because we're, we're talking a lot about. Making infrastructure as code more accessible, right.

[00:23:05] Rosemary: To someone who's not interested in code. So that actually applies cuz I think in the electrical engineering space, they've done really in, they've done some fantastic work creating interfaces that are for folks who are not programmers by nature. So that's interesting. I, I think I apply that more day to day and I think that maybe the most, I apply my electrical engineering outside of work.

[00:23:27] Rosemary: Tends to be whenever the fire alarm goes off and I need to disable it so I know which wire to snip. Um, you know, and there's also like a dancing crab toy that, um, my son likes, and I'm able to explain what the dancing crab is doing because it's a control loop and it has sensors on the sides. So, other than that, that's maybe the, the most I've applied it, um, the, uh, day to day.

[00:23:50] Rosemary: Professionally though, I think I apply at least the problem solving aspect as well as, Just the appreciation for the lower level nuances. But yeah, I wouldn't say I take all of the knowledge I had there and apply it directly. 

[00:24:04] Chris: Yeah, that's, that's pretty common. And I, I think that definitely seems like a theme through folks who work in technology is that whatever that drive or spark around problem solving is, right.

[00:24:12] Chris: I think that's really a big piece of it is kind of using, using logic to work through these problems. Finding, you know, root cause and, and working things out. It's something that definitely. Infrastructure engineers share with developers may, maybe one of the few things that's really shared there is, is kind of that iterative problem solving, working through stuff and, and, and getting it to work well.

[00:24:28] Chris: Um, I like that a lot. 

[00:24:30] Rosemary: Oh wait. I actually know one time in which I did apply during my job, we were doing a demo. It was a, it was a remix of dance, dance revolution. Um, and we had the floor. I don't know why we didn't just like use the dance Dance revolution floor pads that came with the console. I don't know why we didn't do that.

[00:24:47] Rosemary: Instead, someone pre like fabricated these tiles for dancing and so I'm at this hotel trying to solder at the con on the conference room floor. So my soldering and electrical engineering degree did help me put together that demo. 

[00:25:01] Chris: Nice. Yes. Building dancing games, fixing children's toys, and uh, it sounds like maybe.

[00:25:07] Chris: Anytime a bomb needs to be diffused, we're gonna, we're gonna call you in. 

[00:25:11] Rosemary: I wouldn't go that far. No, no, no, no. I'm not confident on that. 

[00:25:14] Chris: Know which wire to cut. That's always the move, right?

[00:25:16] Rosemary: Yeah. It's not always the blue one or the green one, or the red one. 

[00:25:21] Chris: Well, unfortunately we are running out of time for today.

[00:25:24] Chris: Are there any projects that we have not mentioned yet that you'd like the Imposter Syndrome Network to know about Rosemary? 

[00:25:30] Rosemary: Um, you know, nothing immediate that comes to mind, but if you ever have any questions about the HashiCorp tools, always reach out to me. I'm happy to probably, uh, bring the feedback to the team at HashiCorp.

[00:25:41] Rosemary: Um, but if you ever have any questions about the problem you're trying to solve with them, you can always reach out to me. I'm happy to help answer them. 

[00:25:48] Chris: Awesome. And, uh, yeah, we'll have your Twitter and LinkedIn and GitHub, uh, as well as your book all linked in the show notes so folks can figure out how to reach out if they do have those questions.

[00:25:57] Chris: I do want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story with the Imposter Syndrome Network. This has been amazing, and also thank you to all of our listeners out there for your most valuable time and attention. If you found this episode insightful or interesting, please consider paying it forward by letting others know about this show and the great guests we have on.

[00:26:17] Chris: Now Rosemary, I am still really curious about your journey and what you've learned so far. Like, like I mentioned earlier, I, I really do think you're kind of part of this newer generation of infrastructure engineers and architects. And because of that, I'm hoping you can share a fresher perspective on the space for the imposter syndrome network.

[00:26:35] Chris: And, and what I mean is, do you have any advice, uh, for folks who might be right now considering, uh, a career in technology, maybe even thinking about infrastructure? Uh, As opposed to just being a full on developer or something else, you know? Wh where would you start if you were gonna do it all over again today?

[00:26:50] Chris: Or if you had, you know, I don't know, your, your, when your kid is ready or if you had a little, a sibling or somebody. I mean, if somebody was starting right now, where should they start and what should they think about to, to get into technology right now? 

[00:27:00] Rosemary: Um, you know, be brave and it's hard to, to tell someone to be brave because I think in technology more than any other industry right now is going through, you know, a lot of change.

[00:27:11] Rosemary: And it's also, Lot of new innovations that we have to think carefully about as well. Um, so be brave and think outside of technology too. I think more than ever we need people with skill sets who are not necessarily focused on writing code. We need people who are. Able to understand the implications of what that code is gonna do, and more importantly, how it's positioned within either customers, anybody who's using it, it's going to be more important.

[00:27:37] Rosemary: So what you think is difficult oftentimes in technology is not the technology, it's oftentimes the people. So if you are able to navigate with the people and understand them and empathize and uh, I think you are welcome in this industry. 

[00:27:51] Chris: Awesome. I think that's great advice. It reminds me also of, you know, something that comes up from time to time when you're deep in the technology weeds, like at the I E T F and things where technologists tend to try to figure out how to solve a problem before we step back and ask if it should be solved or if it should be done at all.

[00:28:09] Chris: And, and that, that's what I, I mean when you were talking about kinda the human aspect and kind of thinking outside of technology, that's what it reminded me of as well, is just this idea of, you know, do people actually need this? Is this gonna serve people or am I just building this cuz it's, you know, a cool new tech 

[00:28:20] Rosemary: And if it is, you know, it's great.

[00:28:22] Rosemary: Just acknowledge maybe like its not here yet. It may be, it may be useful a little bit while, you know, a little bit down the line, who knows.

[00:28:30] Chris: Exactly. Exactly. And if you're gonna have a long career, you know, it may come back around. Yeah, exactly. To use it for more useful purposes. Well, awesome. Um, this has been great.

[00:28:37] Chris: And, uh, we will be back next week.