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**Carlisia Thompson:** Hi! I'm here, definitely. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And our special guest today is Cindy, also known on Twitter as [copyconstruct](https://twitter.com/copyconstruct), and I'm sure many of you have probably read a lot of her operations and devops posts that have been gaining some popularity recently. Welcome to the show, Cindy. |
**Cindy Sridharan:** Thanks for having me. |
**Erik St. Martin:** See, she's not on mute, Brian. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[laughs\] Thanks, Erik. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So for anybody who's not familiar with you or some of your work, do you wanna give just a little rundown, your history? |
**Cindy Sridharan:** Sure. It's kind of a little strange for me, because I have been programming for over half of my life. I started back in 2003-2004 when I was 13 years old, and it started with me programming for school, because we had computer science classes. I remember being really, really bad at it. I wasn't very... |
What happened was I spent 6-8 weeks doing quite literally nothing else but programming. At the end of it it wasn't really a struggle anymore, it just became extremely enjoyable and it just became really fun. 13, 14 years later it still remains the same. That's really how I got my start. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So here's a question, because a lot of us talk about this type of stuff, too. So you said when you got started you didn't think you were very good at it... How do you feel about your work now? Because I know personally I went through this cliff, like -- you know, through teenage years trying to lea... |
**Cindy Sridharan:** I still don't think I'm particularly good at it... I just like to think that I'm improving; I've definitely improved a lot over the years. Back when I started, I wasn't really building stuff out, it was just programming. I think there's a huge chasm between just writing some code and actually doing... |
\[04:09\] I don't particularly think I am the best programmer right now, and I also don't think I'm necessarily the best at software engineering, but what I strive to do is try to get better, because just like you said, I think there are just so many people we can learn from and just so much that pretty much anyone sti... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think that's why so many people call it a practice instead of something else. You have to continually practice and improve. |
**Cindy Sridharan:** Pretty much. But I also think it's plausible for some -- and some people actually do this, where they go very deep into one particular field. It can either be security, or it could be web development, or it could be systems programming, or very low-level programming, or even for instance JavaScript... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think having a broad view of the landscape is kind of fun. It allows you to not get bored. You can kind of switch over to stuff. But then you wish you were really super knowledgeable, like more knowledgeable in a particular area, especially when it starts gaining popularity or people are st... |
I think people beat themselves up a little bit, too... Like, you become the world's best brain surgeon, but then you're upset that you're not the world's greatest heart surgeon. It's impossible to be both, right? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Cindy, tell us what it is that you're doing now. What are you working with? |
**Cindy Sridharan:** I'm a part of a startup for an image-processing company, but I don't really work on any image processing software. Like I said, I'm a fairly generalist software engineer, which means I do a whole bunch of different things, including API development, infrastructure development, and also a lot of ope... |
I write about some of the things that I work on or some of the things that I learn about. Primarily, it's more for my own benefit than to actually write. I really just started writing maybe a few months ago this year, because for the longest time I didn't believe that I had anything important to say, or that I was even... |
\[07:50\] So it really began with me starting to write more for my own understanding. Writing isn't something new... I have an extensive series of notebooks and just things that I've jotted down on the side all the years as I have been learning things, but it just wasn't something I ever thought was even worth making p... |
But I kind of started writing, again, more for my own benefit. I think with platforms like [Medium](https://medium.com/), they just make it really -- they just lower the bar to just sort of publish it, because you're just writing something for yourself, literally copy/pasting to something else and hit _Publish_, and a ... |
So that's kind of how I really even started writing, and I still don't really consider myself a blogger. It's just writing about things that I learned, or writing about things that seem interesting to me. |
Currently, I'm going through what I call an operations phase. It's kind of weird, because I really am not an operations engineer. I do operations for the code that I write, but it is, I would say, about -- not more than 15% of my time is spent working on things like monitoring, or deployments, or any of the things that... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Now, do you think that's the reason why a lot of your posts - like [Julia Evans'](https://twitter.com/b0rk) posts and stuff like that - resonate with people, because it's really this developer transitioning into the operations space, which is what a lot of what the devops stuff is doing? You're sha... |
**Cindy Sridharan:** I've actually never thought about it that way. I'm even completely surprised that some of the posts that I've written have sort of gotten the attention that they have. It's very new to me, it's also very surprising, because like I said, a lot of those things were more for my own understanding, and ... |
I'm not sure why that happens or what it is that resonates... I mean, I'm happy to hear that it resonates with a lot of people, but I don't know. For me, a lot of things -- I'm not the first person to say this, but what I believe is happening right now is a lot of conversation, especially about a lot of tools and a lot... |
\[11:53\] I think probably - I'm guessing - the reason why some people think that some of the things that I say make sense or have merit is because it just presents this alternative viewpoint that probably isn't being talked about a lot otherwise. I think that's very true with -- let's for instance take [the post that ... |
One of the reasons why my service was picked was because it was like a fresh greenfield project that I was working on, so it sort of made sense to pick that - it's brand new; if it fails, it's probably not the worst thing, because it gives us a lot of time to test. We weren't really changing anything that's currently i... |
Like I said, I work at a startup, which means that not a lot of things are well-documented. I didn't really have our SREs sit me down and explain everything from the beginning to the end, saying "Okay, this is how we are doing it, this is why things are not working, this is what needs to change and this is why we're us... |
I think understanding that, that that kernel was very important to even understand why we need a scheduler, and then to sort of understand how things are gonna be changing. So the whole post sort of originated as me trying to just sit down, understand all these different moving parts that no one had really documented o... |
So I thought it would make sense to make it public, because that way I could get other people's opinions. Maybe even if there was just one other person who read it, maybe I'd find out just what they think, and even see if some of our assumptions and some of the way in which we approach these problems really made sense. |
Then I published it and then it sort of took a life of its own, which is still extremly surprising to me. So that's how that came about, and the reason I believe those who liked it did so is again because it was just a different perspective, it was just a different voice. It was more about actually solving problems, as... |
\[16:09\] I think that a lot of tools, especially the standard opinions and the standard narrative that you get about a lot of these technologies is about, you know, "Hey, here's this cool mutex. This is what it does, this is how it does it, this is how it's super cool and this is why you should be using it." And under... |
Yes, I think that's pretty much what I do. If all these things make any sense to other people, I'm guessing it's because this kind of from the trenches story isn't very widely told. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** That is a very good point, I love it... Talking about the actual problems and solutions that you are working with, and using these tools to help solve is completely different than just talking about the tools in a vacuum. I agree with you, I'm sure that that's the main reason why people are so dr... |
I also wanted to say that your posts are extremely well-written. It's really rare to find blog posts that are so well-written... And not even to judge people's intelligence - I think people write posts in a hurry, just because they have something they wanna put out there, and everybody has a job, so... I don't know how... |
**Cindy Sridharan:** Oh, thank you... It really depends. The post on clusters took a couple weeks to write, mainly because, like I said, it was just meant to be an internal post and I was just understanding how these things even worked as I was sort of working with it... And I wasn't even full-time working on scheduler... |
There was this other 15%-20% of the time where I was sort of learning these things, because it was very new. As I was learning, I was sort of writing things down. So that post took several weeks to write, actually, because writing that post wasn't the only thing that I was doing. I was learning things, and as I was lea... |
Some other posts that I've written probably have been cracked out in a matter hours. I would say that's the case for most of them. Especially that was the case for [a post that I wrote on function length](https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/small-functions-considered-harmful-91035d316c29)... Because I was having a Twitte... |
\[20:07\] Pretty much everyone calling me an idiot for writing that and for thinking that way. But it was fun. It was probably the most read post of mine, and it's also the most polarizing, because I've got a whole bunch of people agreeing with me, but Jesus, a whole bunch of people also completely disagreed with me. S... |
Maybe had I spent more time writing that post, it could have been more -- I certainly think it could have been a little shorter, and that's true with all of my posts; they're probably way too long. I mean, I'm a professional software engineer, I'm not a writer, so this is part of what I do in my free time. Again, I'm n... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** That's very impressive; I'm impressed. I'm impressed both because you're saying you don't really pay attention to editing and yet, to me, they come out really well written, even the posts you're saying you didn't spend more than two hours on. And also because you're saying two hours, I'm thinking... |
Another thing that I wanted to say to you is that I personally love the different takes that you have on things. I think it's welcome just for the sake of the opinion being different or contradictory, but you made me think in different ways from reading your posts. I think it's beneficial to me, definitely, I appreciat... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think that's true. A lot of people follow the dogma, and I think we need people to challenge that sometimes, and for us to at least question... Even a difference of opinion - it can do one of two things. It may make you more empathetic to why other people choose different tooling... Even th... |
\[23:57\] There's a lot of stuff, especially as trends -- like [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/)... I love Kubernetes, but if you're running three Digital Ocean boxes or something like that, it may be a bit of overkill. In Cindy's example - you're working for a company that has a small enough team already and your d... |
**Cindy Sridharan:** Yeah, that's very true. That brings me back to my original point of actually solving problems... Because that's what I do, and that's what most professional software engineers are doing - they're solving business problems for their employers, using tools, some of which they may build, and some of w... |
At the end of the day, it really boils down to solving problems, and I think a lot of people tend to forget that, because it's very easy - and I've been guilty of this myself - to just get swept over by hype, or just how cool something is, or just how amazing a piece of technology is from a technical perspective, and y... |
At the end of the day, it's about making decisions as to "Is this complexity even warranted? What's it gonna buy us, and what happens if we don't do this? What really is the opportunity cost here? Are we willing to make this investment, and what are its biggest benefits?" And even if you decide to do this, how will it ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** This isn't new, right? We've been adopting bleeding edge software for ages and putting it in production... Especially Brian and I - we are terrible about it. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Mostly me, though. I usually just talk Erik into it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Remember my addiction with the fact that we needed the GPU database, even if we had to build one? |
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