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**Justin Garrison:** Kinvolk, that's right. With Flatcar... You were doing a lot of stuff in this space. How'd you get started here? What were you doing before? |
**Lili Cosic:** I got into it by accident. So I was at an Airbnb clone here based in Berlin. That was one of my first jobs; my first technical jobs. I did other jobs. And I was working in Berlin, and at the time there were beginning to be a lot of infrastructure meetups, and things like that. So I went to a random one,... |
\[32:12\] So I really got inspired and I managed to get a job there. And then I just -- you had to do stuff; we were a Linux consultancy, so you had to figure things out as you went. So that was really nice. I enjoy just being put into things, and then I'll dig myself out of it, essentially. |
**Autumn Nash:** It sounds like you've had an amazing career. What's the favorite job that you've had out of all of these different places? Because you've worked at a lot of places. |
**Lili Cosic:** I have to say my latest now... |
**Justin Garrison:** We can assume the current job, right? We'll put that one aside and say "Before this job, what was the one that you look back on --" |
**Autumn Nash:** Also, if a company wants to get acquired, they should hire you. |
**Lili Cosic:** Well, it depends. Is that a thing people aim for? I don't know. I don't know. It depends. So I think that there were two, I would say... I definitely really enjoyed my time at Red Hat, because I got to work on upstream things, while also working on using the upstream projects. So I was a maintainer of -... |
But I would say besides Red Hat, I really enjoyed HashiCorp. It was really one of my favorite times, because we got to build a brand new service from scratch, a cloud-hosted -- |
**Autumn Nash:** That's so fun. |
**Lili Cosic:** It's really nice. Greenfield work is probably the best, when you still don't have customers... |
**Justin Garrison:** Was that the HashiCloud, or was this before? |
**Lili Cosic:** I worked on Cloud Boundary. So that was really -- |
**Justin Garrison:** The access service, right? |
**Lili Cosic:** Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I joined when we had zero code on the cloud side. There was a product, the Boundary product, and we were a two-person team... And yeah, we managed to get to seven people or something, at the end... And we shipped everything within six or nine months, or something. We went from ze... |
**Autumn Nash:** That's still an achievement, though. |
**Lili Cosic:** Yeah, that was really rewarding. It was really nice to be able to design something like that. |
**Justin Garrison:** I think more than anything, that also -- it's a testament to how good you are as a software engineer, but also how good the company culture is to get out of your way and let you do stuff. |
**Lili Cosic:** Exactly, definitely. |
**Justin Garrison:** The low process overhead, and... |
**Autumn Nash:** Because sometimes it takes longer to get approved, than -- |
**Lili Cosic:** To just build things? Yes, definitely. I would say HashiCorp has such a variety of products... For a company that is that young - I think they've been around for 12 years, 13 years... I don't know. Something like that. There's such a variety of different developer-focused products, which is so rare to g... |
**Justin Garrison:** Was the open source challenges at both... Like, if we're just looking at Red Hat and HashiCorp, both of them are open source-first companies, whether Hashi is open source licensed right now, whatever. You're writing code in the open, that people can see. But it feels like it's opposite to me, in th... |
**Lili Cosic:** \[35:59\] Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it was a shared responsibility. We had quite a lot of projects in that team, because the monitoring stack really needs a lot to be able to fully function, and to be able to get the full experience of observing a system, whether it's functioning or not. But it was re... |
**Justin Garrison:** People don't understand -- again, back to getting process out of the way, right? Taking something that is generically open source and integrating that back into a project is really difficult... Because even just the KEP process in Kubernetes, and all this stuff, you're like "I need to go tell five ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I don't think people talk about the politics of open source and incorporation and trying to get projects approved while you're balancing a business'es stakeholders and open source maintainers is very complicated. |
**Lili Cosic:** Yeah, definitely. I think it's really hard to also manage the people who want to do -- everyone gets paid by a company, right? At the end of the day, it is all business, right? While you are trying to put your open source project first, and you're trying to advocate for that within your company, and say... |
**Autumn Nash:** The amount of -- because you need to think about what your customers need, right? But then that gets lost in the "What do the maintainers want to agree to?" and "What do the corporations want to agree investing in?" So it's wild. |
**Break**: \[38:15\] |
**Autumn Nash:** It's cool that you've worked in databases and infrastructure. Those are both my interests. How do you do that without getting burned out? Because those are two -- those are very key to business things, right? Those are some of the worst pager, because if your infrastructure goes down, it's not good. If... |
**Justin Garrison:** Getting paged for a database is the scariest page you can get. I don't know of another -- website down, okay, we can figure this one out. I know where to start. Database down? I might have to drive somewhere. |
**Autumn Nash:** Like, we accidentally dropped a table, you know... |
**Lili Cosic:** \[unintelligible 00:42:19.10\] yeah, definitely. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. So how have you managed to grow and work and learn in those spaces and still maintain not being super-burnt out? I feel like those are hard spaces to get into, so for other people that want to get into it or grow their career, do you have any advice? |
**Lili Cosic:** I always just try it. I try not to think too hard about it beforehand... Because if you do, that's where you, I think, lose the momentum, essentially. But definitely, I am going on call very soon... Apparently, I'm ready to go on call. At least as a shadow. |
**Justin Garrison:** One month. Wow, that's a quick... |
**Autumn Nash:** I mean, did you hear her career? She could probably fix anything, okay? |
**Lili Cosic:** Not anything, no. No, no, no. Definitely. |
**Autumn Nash:** I have faith in you. I just listened to you talk about your career, and I'm just like "Wow" the whole time. Like... |
**Lili Cosic:** But I think that the key is to just try things. It's easy to say... There's no magical solution, or anything. It's just, you give it a try, and if it doesn't work, you try something else, and then at some point you figure it out. I'm trying to learn not so much downwards the stack, but just get an overa... |
**Justin Garrison:** Figuring out where the pieces fit together is a very hard thing, to read marketing docs and get the understanding of. You have to build some things to say "Oh, this is why this fits here, or why it doesn't fit here." You could shape just about anything to fit together, whether they should or not. S... |
**Autumn Nash:** Trying new things is scary, and I think a lot of times -- I think there's a balance, right? It is good to use reliable things that you know, but also, especially in this market and these weird times, I think people are going to have to try more new things, and try things outside of their comfort zone. |
**Justin Garrison:** The pressure is different, right? The pressure today in 2024 is way different than it was even 10 years ago, when if you were trying something 10 years ago, there wasn't nonstop hustle bros saying "You have to turn this into your --" |
**Autumn Nash:** If somebody else says on Twitter about how we're all supposed to work the weekends, and "Why aren't you building five projects?" I'm like, I know we all own six domains... |
**Justin Garrison:** Multiple streams of income, all that stuff. Like, no. |
**Autumn Nash:** Are we ever supposed to enjoy our life? No? Like... |
**Lili Cosic:** Oh, I definitely do. I'm not one of those people who tends to build things on the weekend. I try to avoid that as much as I can. I'm not a classical "build things over the weekend." I work really hard during the week, and focus. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. Every now and then, if it's something really cool that I want to build for me and my friends, or just something, like, maybe. Or building something for my kids. But that's not sustainable. Let's stop telling younger people or people that are new to the industry that that is sustainable, because i... |
**Justin Garrison:** Especially in open source, where there is no weekend in open source. If you don't have boundaries, it's not going to be set for you. |
**Autumn Nash:** Well, in infrastructure and databases, too. You are a system administrator. If you get paged, you get paged. If the system goes down, they don't care if it's Saturday... |
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