The POPCAST with Dan POP

Episode 82 - iCarlisia with Vmware Tanzu's Carlisia Thompson

Episode Summary

In this episode.. CARLISIA THOMPSON! Carlisia works as a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware. She's a maintainer of the open source project Velero, a cloud native disaster recovery and data migration tool for Kubernetes applications. She currently hosts The Podlets podcast about cloud native. Carlisia holds a MS in Computer Science from Boston University. We talk her journey, GO, Open Source, Kubernetes, Heptio , VMware Tanzu and much much more! The crown jewel of Brazil and an absolutely wonderful person in our community, Carlisia shares so much this episode!

Episode Notes

POPCAST SHOW DETAILS  

YouTube:  https://bit.ly/3xgmmCj

Audio Podcast (Apple, Spotify, and others):  http://bit.ly/35MXfte

Follow us on (Twitter):  https://twitter.com/PopcastPop  

Follow us on (Linkedin): https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-popcast-with-danpop

Timeline/Topic  

00:00 -  Opener/Sponsors

00:14 -  Intro to Carlisia Thompson

00:52 -  Carlisia's Journey (from Brazil t the US)

05:03 -  Carlisia's unconventional path to Development and Computing.

11:58 - Carlisia's First IT job

12:56 - Absorbing Knowledge and being a generalist

14:10 - from Marketing to Heptio/VMware

26:24 - Open Source... its Appeal.  

32:44 - Heptio and its Culture

39:42 - Project Velero (Link below)

42:03 - What work is Carlisia most proud of?  

Please like and leave a comment if you enjoyed the episode!  it helps the show!

Episode Links  

https://grokkingtech.io/

https://twitter.com/carlisia

https://tanzu.vmware.com/

https://velero.io/

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Episode Transcription

- [Announcer] This episode of the POPcast is brought to you by these sponsors.

 

- Hello, everyone, and welcome to the POPcast. Today, I have a dear friend. This is Carlisia Thompson. She's a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware, welcome, Carlisia.

 

- Hello, Pop, and I have to ask you why people call you Pop, but I already jump in and start interviewing you. See how I roll? I'm very glad to be here.

 

- I know, you're already taking over, and I love it! We did the Ask Me Anything, you took over. We do this right here, it's cool. My last name is Papandrea, and so people just call me Pop.

 

- Makes sense.

 

- So enough questions from you, Carlisia, this is POPcast, okay? No, just kidding. So all right, I wanna know your journey. Like anytime we start up a POPcast, I really wanna understand your journey, 'cause it's a very, very cool story. I wanna know all of it, so let's start from first time you touched a keyboard and where were you born? Let's go that route.

 

- All right, great, so you can tell I have an accent. Everybody can tell that, and I always like to say I'm Brazilian, just in case you keep the whole time, you're listening to me wondering. Let's just get that out of the way. So I was born and raised in Brazil, I moved to the U.S. when I was 19, and I really hadn't touched a keyboard at all, ever, but I was always curious about technology. I grew up with hearing people say, "Technology is the future," and I think I have a personality that's future-looking, so that really got my interest there, but I just didn't grow up around computers at all. So when I came to the U.S., I didn't know English.

 

- Let's take a step back. So it was basically 'cause computers weren't as prevalent in Brazil, pretty much, right?

 

- So Brazil-

 

- At the time.

 

- Back when I was growing up, it was like East Berlin. It was closed off to the world, and anything that would be a machine like that would have to be either imported, which imports would cost a ton of money because of taxation, so people didn't have imported things, or it would be made in Brazil. There were some computers made in Brazil, some cars made in Brazil, but it wasn't super large-scale and it would be, again, very expensive, not as expensive as importing, but still. And I grew up poor, too, so there's that. And there was nobody around me that had a computer. I have a sense that, when I was growing up, everybody was poor, so there's that, but I always had the interest to learn. Actually, I did an internship when I was around 18, and there was an IT department in this company. This was a big petroleum company in Brazil, and I did my first internship, and they liked me, they renewed it, and I asked to go intern in the IT department because I was like, "There are a ton of computers in there. "I'm gonna learn a ton, I'm really curious," but they denied and put me as a secretary to this guy.

 

- Those times were awful. People that have that tenacity to be able to wanna do computers, and they're like, "Oh, no, be an assistant." That's so awful. We went on a sidebar, so you came to the States.

 

- Yes.

 

- Okay, let's talk about that.

 

- So I came to the U.S. because family situation. My mother moved here, and I didn't know English, so from there, that's a different story, but it was a-

 

- No, let's talk about that. As somebody coming to this country, was it hard to pick up the language and stuff?

 

- Like anything, when you wanna know something, it's not as hard. I'm not going to say it was super easy, but I was so vested. I would look at magazines and newspapers and I wanted to know what was being said in those medium, and I just I really wanted to know. So I immersed myself in the culture and learned. It was just a process, it just took time. So if you really wanna get into it, I started dating this guy. I hope he doesn't listen to this. He's from a different country, not from Brazil and not from the U.S., and he's back in his country, so I'm hoping he's never gonna listen to this.

 

- Was he from Canada?

 

- No, it was not on this continent.

 

- Just kidding.

 

- Not in the Americas.

 

- Okay.

 

- And he was going to Boston University as an undergrad. He was doing engineering, and I'm like, "Yeah, sure." I was working in the restaurant industry, and tons of people were going to college, and I was very envious because I really wanted to do that, too, but I'm like, "I'm not good enough." So I don't know English enough. I just have no idea how to even navigate that situation, but I really wish I could do it. So one day, I saw on my boyfriend's desk an English paper with a C, and I read the paper. I wasn't snooping, it was just right there. His writing was horrendous. Okay, so he's a foreigner. He's not a native English speaker, but this guy is in university, and that paper got him a C, which is a passing grade. And I'm like, "I can write like this," and I swear to God, that was the moment I'm like, "I can do this, too." So I went around and I'm like, "Okay." Day college wasn't for me, cost, and so I went to try to figure out how to get into the night school college. It's the same, a lot of the professors are the same. And because I was around a lot of people who were going to college, people would always say, "Accounting is really hard," and I said to myself, "I'm going to enroll." So I got myself enrolled. There was a bit of luck there. I was able to get myself enrolled, and I said to myself, "I'm gonna take one class. "I'm gonna take accounting, and if I pass that class, "I'll feel competent enough to tackle college," because for me, it was a lot of money, too. I was able to get some loans. I mean, I got a lot of loans I'm still paying off, 'cause I wouldn't been able to afford even night college, but I was putting money, too, and I was just like, "Well, if I half-ass this and half-fail, "how am I even going to pay this back as a waitress?" That was my thinking. So I'm like, "If I pass this class, I am capable, "so let's just test it out." I got an A in that class, and then the rest is history. So my undergrad is business administration/MIS, like a second degree in MIS, and I did a sub program that involved programming and database. I wasn't confident so I didn't know what I wanted to go, but I really liked the technology-related classes, and from there, I went to work as an online marketing manager, and there was a lot of spreadsheets and I felt, "Oh, I'm not building anything," and I missed building the projects that I was building for my school.

 

- Can we talk about that, what kind of projects were you working on at school? Is there anything you remember that was like, "Wow, this is an accomplishment for me?"

 

- Yes, I don't remember, it was an application. So this program that I was talking about, at least back then, it was an actual certificate that Northeastern offered, and some of those classes were counted as credits, but I took extra because I wanted to finish and go through all of the classes. So I had two database classes. So one was introduction and the other was advanced, so I learned how to design and implement the databases. And then another one was application, and you had to use Java to do the application. And the other one, it was just pieces. And each class, of course, had tests and projects. And then the final project was putting everything together. It was a system that you had to design with the front end and the database and hook everything together. Listen, that was long time ago. I don't remember, but just the whole idea of thinking through everything, how everything connects, and input/output, I loved it.

 

- Let's talk about, again, we go from reading the paper on the boyfriend's desk to literally putting together a front-end/back-end application.

 

- Yeah.

 

- You gotta give yourself some props on that, you gotta give yourself a hand. That's not a common path for folks.

 

- No, yeah.

 

- And so that's something that, again, you can't teach, these innate abilities, and that's why hiring people, when you're hiring folks, obviously, if somebody has a degree and all those things, but go by the virtue of that person. That person has the persistence that Carlisia had, in terms of going to night school and in figuring these things out, they have a propensity to do even more if they're given the opportunity. So there, I'll get off my soap box real quick.

 

- No, I love soap box. I'm gonna make sure I jump on a couple myself, during our talk. but that is a very good point. I mean, sometimes, people want to do things, and they literally don't know how to do it. They literally don't know where to start. I mean, if I hadn't had a curiosity and that paper wasn't there, how many more years I would have spent thinking? I don't know what college looked like. I didn't know what kind of things people did in college, but if I hadn't seen that paper, and, "This writing? "I can write like this. "Even my broken English, I can do this and get a C? "That's a passing grade, !" So sometimes, helping people out just to get through that is so worthwhile to do. I'm always looking for opportunities to do that with people. You know what I mean?

 

- Yeah, it's always good to pay it forward.

 

- Sometimes people just need. They don't know what they don't know, and a lot of times we tend to think we can't do things, but we actually don't know what it looks like. We totally can do things. It's just crossing that bridge.

 

- Yeah, just having the grit to be able to do that. Yeah, so let me ask you this. Done with school, we get out in the workforce. Tell me about your first IT-related job.

 

- Yeah, so I took this job as a online marketing manager, which was sort of IT-related. I was just using a lot of IT systems, but I wasn't building anything, and that's why I wanted out, because I wanted to build things. I wanted to see, run something and see it happen immediately, immediate gratification kind of thing. So I decided that it was going to be programming or bust. I'm like, "Okay, programming is what I want to do," because, just so you understand, when I was in college, I wanted to graduate with every single degree they had. I wanted to do marketing, philosophy, sociology, everything. Everything was interesting to me, and I just didn't know what was my calling.

 

- Let's go into that.

 

- Okay.

 

- Is that part of your personality? Is it because you like absorbing things, different stimulus? 'Cause I look behind you right now and I see a billion different books on completely different subjects. Is that just how you are, you just love to absorb different things?

 

- Yeah, you can call me a generalist. I am a variety of different interests. Sometimes I do go deep on things, but I do have a curiosity about different things, yeah.

 

- Got it, Civo is an alternative to the big hyperscale cloud providers. They've launched the world's first Madge Kubernetes service, powered exclusively by K3s. With sub-90-second cluster launch times, a simplified Kubernetes experience, and predictable billing, Civo's on a mission to create a better developer experience. Get $250 free credit to get started. Sign up today at civo.com/popcast. That's C-I-V-O.C-O-M/P-O-P-C-A-S-T. Go check them out! Got it, okay, so we do the marketing thing. Okay, bring me to now. I need to know how we got from there to the Heptio/now VMware. I wanna understand that.

 

- All right, so that's a very, very long journey.

 

- Let's skip a couple, but let's get into it.

 

- All right, so at this moment was when I felt my calling. I was missing that thing, the building. So I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna go into programming," and hello, the dot-com bubble burst. That's back in 2002, and then I could not even get an interview for programming, 'cause before I could, I didn't have to have the experience. People were just calling me, and I'm like, "I don't wanna do this." So I figure I have to get a computer science degree because I don't have the job experience, but if I have the degree instead, I have a shot. If I have neither, there's no chance. I mean, of course, years later, things change, but I'd be like, "I don't wanna wait," and plus I need the knowledge anyway. So I decided to enroll and do a master's degree, and as soon as I enrolled, as soon as I got my confirmation, I was able, through a friend, to get an internship programming, and I was like, "Thank you, God."

 

- Nice.

 

- So that was my first programming job, and it was great.

 

- And what language were you programming in? It was Java?

 

- It was Java.

 

- Got it, okay.

 

- There was some system that interfaced with my system in C++, so I touched that a little bit, too, some messaging stuff.

 

- Wow, awesome.

 

- So computer science, got a job, worked, worked, work, and then I pause, ran my own company, ran my own software company.

 

- Carlisia, you're such an overachiever, it's killing me. It's incredible.

 

- That's funny. I don't look at it as a being an overachiever. It's one thing at a time. I am definitely ambitious and I'm definitely a risk-taker. So with that, I'm like, "Sure, "running a company sounds like a good idea." The payoff that we were looking at with this company was gazillion of money. I'm like, "Might flop, "but what if it doesn't flop?" So it flopped. We were able to sell, but I lost the money I was saving to buy a house, gone. And afterwards, I was really having regrets, but at the same time, I learned so much. It was life-changing for me. Do I recommend it for anyone? I cannot recommend it, it was hard. Because of my personality, I was 24/7, so afterwards, I was hugely burned out, but it changed me. I am completely different. I'm more assertive, more confident, I feel like, "Wow." All these competencies I have that I never had a chance to try and I tried 'cause I had to to get things done, and they worked. I'm like, "Wow, I never knew I could do this!" I never knew I could talk to people like this and be influential, et cetera. I mean, I'm not perfect, I'm still learning, but it was a window for me to have the opportunity to try out a bunch of skills that, otherwise, I don't know how I would have done that. So it changed me as a person. Was it worth the amount of money that I lost? That is the question. Afterwards, I was like, "I'm not sure." I wasn't saying no, but I wasn't sure, but now I think it was worth it. I'm saying this because I turned around and I've considered that I'm in a good place and I have recovered financially, and so now I can say yes, it was worth it, but if I wasn't able to recover financially, I don't know if I would be saying that.

 

- But it was a life lesson, and again, if you think about it, you were so assertive. You didn't have those character traits before, personality traits, and having that entrepreneurial thing, 'cause it also helps, I think, when you get into a larger company. It's because you have to be able to be an entrepreneur. If you're a product manager, you have to own all the aspects of it and you have to think of the things that other people aren't thinking of. So that's a great learning experience.

 

- Yeah, and I wouldn't say that I didn't have those character traits. It's the opposite. I had them, but I was never in a situation that it was called for-

 

- Where you had to use them.

 

- Or even allowed for me to put them on display.

 

- Right.

 

- 'Cause sometimes, you step over the line and you get penalized, but when I was running my show, I'm like, "We're gonna get things done here." I don't wanna say that I was a mean person. People like working with me, so let's just leave it at that.

 

- No doubt.

 

- I'm not gonna sit here and brag, but there are ways you can be influential and still be a good person.

 

- No doubt, okay.

 

- All right, so from there, burned out, had to get myself back on the horse, job. So I went to work for this company, and I was doing Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and I was doing that because, when I want my company's software, we chose Ruby and Ruby on Rails to build the software with. So my next job, it was just very natural to look for that, 'cause I knew it and it was fresh.

 

- Right.

 

- Anyway, so I got a job programming Ruby/Ruby on Rails. My company sent me to the second GopherCon. That was back in 2015. I fell in love with it, and I'm like, "This is what I need to do. "I need to be programming Go. "I need to be building applications with Go "for companies that are looking for that kind of performance "and that kind of development style." I just needed to do it, so I spent a year learning, and then I was able to get a job at Fastly programming Go. That was my first Go programming job.

 

- Can we talk about Go a little bit? I mean, Go is-

 

- Yeah.

 

- Just an amazing language. Ketelsen's been on my show, and so let's talk about this. Uninitiated, somebody listening to this, it's in everything, in terms of what we do from the cloud native perspective. Tell me what the advantages are.

 

- Wow. Go is a modern language, so why Go and not C? Well, what do you need? If you don't need C, why would you use that convoluted language? C has a very tiny print, but you have to deal with memory allocations. When you're a programmer, and you know this, you wanna spend time being creative, not doing grunt work that you have to do over and over and over again. What is that? What's the bright point in my code where the memory is overflowing? 'Cause it's there. Now I have to go and trace it. That's not creative. That's not satisfying, is it problem-solving? Yes, but you do it five times and you're like, "Okay, I don't need to do this again. "I wanna do some new things," but sometimes, you need C. You need a tiny footprint, something to burn on the edge. Yeah, that's the language, and C is not terrible. Go has the small footprint, in terms of syntax. There is a more modern philosophy behind it, and I'm saying a small footprint, in terms of syntax, as if that is a good thing, because for me, it's a good thing. So coming from Ruby, for example. Ruby has a gazillion ways to do every single thing, and I always found myself Googling, "What's the best way to concatenate a string in Ruby?" Because there is always the not-so-good ways and the better ways, and then the best ways. And I've been on code reviews, with my code being reviewed by other engineers, and people will stop everything to argue with each other, like, "Oh, it should be done this way." "No, but I don't think so." "The other way to do code concatenation." And I'm like, "Can we just move on? "I just wanna build shit." I don't wanna be like, "Okay, let's pick one and move on." I don't even care at this point. So sure, I am all for best practices and understanding trade-offs, but come on, string concatenation? I'm not saying that's what it was, but it's stupid things like that, who cares, it's concatenating. Anyway, so with Go, you don't have that. There's no point to move on from. You're always moving on because you're not stuck in that kind of thing, and coming from Ruby, I appreciate that so much, and it's just easy. I almost never have to Google things, like, "Yeah, I remember," because there's just one way to do things. That's why I remember the syntax, except when I'm being in a tech interview. Then I don't remember anything. I have to Google everything. It's terrible. Anyway, that was just a parentheses.

 

- Go.

 

- Sorry, Go has a lot of qualities that have to do with it being a modern language, and having concurrency as a primitive is a big, big advantage. And I think, when we look at cloud native 12-factor, it's a new way to do things, and you want a language that keeps up with that.

 

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- Okay, I was wondering from whose perspective.

 

- Well, somebody listening to this who's like, "Yeah, I've heard of this thing, open source."

 

- Yes.

 

- You and I have had a career in this, pretty much the last 10 years of our life or whatever.

 

- Yes, so I never really thought I would work on open source, as in I would get a chance to, because it seems like such a dreamy job. You're interacting with all kinds of people. Not everybody likes that, but I do, so it just seems really cool. And so I had a lot of ideas about what working on open source would mean, and they all seemed really positive. So turns out, I got a chance to join a company that did open source and report on an open-source team, and I absolutely loved it. I mean, it's not for everybody, and there are a lot of work that's not great work that comes with it, and you handle it, but then there is so many things that are positive. So having worked in open source for three years now, I just suggest that, if you don't like interacting with people, it's not for you. Move on or fast forward this podcast, but there are so many positives that can come from working in open source. Everything opens up. Everything increases, your opportunities increase. You have a lot more choices on where you work on. You have more opportunities to come up with ideas for things to be built. There's a lot less constraints, as compared to a commercial product, where everything's closed and your team is your team and that's it. With open source, you have your team and then you have another team, maybe external maintainers, let's say your VMware sponsors, a bunch of open-source projects. Some projects have external maintainer, so that's another layer. They're now your colleagues, but they are maintainers with you. And then you have another layer, which are the contributors. And then you have another layer who are the users.

 

- And those are community. I mean, like you said, it's people people. You have to be a people person because you have to build out that community, so yeah.

 

- Yes.

 

- So I'm sorry to cut you off, go ahead.

 

- Yeah, no, absolutely, and that is your entire team, which is huge. And then from there, it's like, "What do you wanna do?" It's like working as startup or a small company. It's like, "Wow, if I'm really good at this, "I can focus more on this," 'cause, for example, you have that access with the users, as well. You can envision what sort of problems they are having. You can predict what sort of problems they will have. So it's up to you. Do you wanna take that and run with it? Do you wanna design for something that can be useful? The opportunities are unlimited, but that's as someone being paid to do the work, but there's an advantage, too. I wanna say to people to consider that if you contribute to open source without that being your paid job. Now listen, not everybody can. Not everybody has that privilege. I know when I wasn't working with open source as a paid job, I didn't have time. I have a lot other things. I have kids. I just never prioritized that because I had so many other things on my plate. So it wasn't really something that was easy for me to prioritize, and that is going to be true for everybody, I mean, for a lot of people. Now if you are able to prioritize moving your career forward, if you want to do that and you are going to put some time aside to do it, open source is such a great venue. Now that I'm working in this, it's, again, one of those things. You don't know because you haven't seen it, so it's up to us to share that message, and I'm trying to start to want to share that message that the payoff is so big because it's the same idea. You can jump in. You have to do some research and you have to be savvy about focusing on the right things, but you can find the thing that's your jam and just run with it. Nobody's gonna stop you. If it fits with the project, it's going to be welcome, you're going to build a bigger network that's outside of your current bubble. Your current team is completely different people, so that's just extending your network of people you collaborate with. Everybody has something to bring to a project.

 

- Awesome.

 

- And you don't have to be a programmer. There are open-source projects that need tech writing or even UI skills and a lot of projects to have shadow programs or mentoring programs. Kubernetes has that, it's wonderful.

 

- Yeah, it's definitely a great community. So I wanna talk to you about Heptio. I've had Godfather McLuckie and Godfather Beda on.

 

- I listened to that episode. I always love listening to those guys. Your episode is really good.

 

- Thank you, so I just think one of my favorite parts was when Craig McLuckie talked about being a product manager and being under that tree. I loved listening to him and, obviously, Joe talk about that time. And the culture at Heptio they always talk about, can you talk to me about the culture at Heptio, being there and all of that? Talk to me about your interview and getting in there. Let's talk about that, 'cause being inside to that thing that they talked about, I wanna understand that.

 

- Yes, so the way I even applied to Heptio was Heptio had a moment when they were really putting out the signal, "We are hiring," and I have a very good friend of mine. He's in tech, as well, and he kept saying, "You need to go to Heptio, you need to do Kubernetes. "Kubernetes is hot, it is the next thing, "and you should be doing that, "and you should be doing that at Heptio, "and Heptio is gonna be such a good fit for you." And I'm like, "Okay, but I don't wanna interview." I suck at interviewing, between you and I.

 

- And the audience listening now.

 

- Whoops! So I knew Brian Lyles, I knew Dave Cheney who were at Heptio. Kevin Stewart, I didn't know him personally, but we were Twitter friends, I wanna say. So I knew a couple of very good people, people who I really admire. Let's not make it a secret. Brian Lyles and Dave Cheney, I really admire them. They're really good people, and it's like, wow, if they are there, there must be something good going on, in terms of culture, besides the technology, 'cause that's important for me. It should be important for everybody. So my friend kept nagging me, and two months go by, maybe three months, and I'm like, "Yeah, okay, I'll check it out. "What's the worst that can happen? "I just stress myself out interviewing "and I don't get an offer." So I pinged Kevin Stewart and said, "Hey, you still hiring?" So fast forward, interviewed and got an offer. They're crazy, no, joking.

 

- But let's talk about that. Again, it's getting into this space where it's like, "Oh, these are "the guys that created Kubernetes." You're like, "What's Kubernetes?" 'Cause nobody knew at the time what that was gonna be.

 

- I had no idea.

 

- So I'm sorry, go ahead.

 

- After I learned that, I was like, "Oh, that's what it is!" So I knew, but I didn't know I knew, and it was very confusing and I thought it was completely different, and I totally got into the misleading roads. Anyway, so my final interview was on-site, and I had had interviews with Jovita on Zoom, which was so intimidating. I was like, "Yes, if you will have me," which made him think that I was not confident, so he was concerned that I wasn't confident enough because I was like, "Oh my God, "I'm so intimidated right now," but I kept moving to the next step. And then I flew in and on site, I had an interview with Craig. I can never pronounce his last name. Please pronounce it for me.

 

- McLuckie.

 

- McLucklie.

 

- McLuckie.

 

- McLuckie.

 

- You got it.

 

- Yes, so with Craig. Joe Beda is very impressive, but when I sat down to talk to Craig, the conversation was amazing. It was a conversation. They're both very smart, but Craig was the one who addresses the business side of things, and so we were having a conversation about the business. It wasn't all about can I do the tech work? It was about is this a good match here, culturally speaking? Are you on board with the direction? And when you talk to people who are smart like that, man, take the job.

 

- Yeah, 'cause you'll learn-

 

- And I was like-

 

- Something from it.

 

- "Wow, game over, I just wanna be here." At that point, I was already there. I was like, "It looks pretty good." I think I had already made up my mind, but after I talked to Craig, I was like, "Wow, this is impressive, very impressive. "This company's going to go somewhere."

 

- The dynamic between those two, their personalities are such, they mesh so well, and again, I've talked to them at conferences and talked to them, obviously, on my show, but just being there, did you see that? How they manage, it takes a special kind of personality to co-lead a company, and so did you see a lot of that in them?

 

- No, I was not around them. I was working remotely. My exposure was communication coming from Craig, for example, as you would expect, communication coming from a really smart, really tuned-in person, and Jovita is more out there on Twitter, doing more talks. I think Craig, he goes in his cave, he does his thing, and then here it is. I mean, he was working with people, but I was not working within the vicinity of either one of them.

 

- Got it.

 

- I didn't see their dynamics, but obviously, I listened to them when they do conjoined talks, like on your show.

 

- Got it.

 

- You can see that they work well together. I mean, proof is in the pudding.

 

- No doubt.

 

- [Announcer] Learn how to operationalize open-policy agent at scale with Styra. To get started, go to the link at https://H-U-B-S.L-Y/H-0-P-N-K-M-2-0.

 

- And then out of that, so when you were there, you worked on Ark, now Valero. Can we explain to folks what Ark or Valero is at high level?

 

- Yes, of course. So Valero, open-source, created at Heptio, and now sponsored by VMware. So Valero does backup and recovery of Kubernetes clusters, and should be a no-brainer. Everybody needs this.

 

- It's so funny, we did Kubernetes office hours, and we get the question every week, and every week we just say, "Yeah, Valero. "That's it, you're done, that's all you need. "If you wanna back up, it's fantastic. So shameless plug, Kubernetes office hours. Go ahead.

 

- Yes, absolutely. Now Valero is very popular, has a huge amount of involvement from the community. There are the VMware maintainers, we have external maintainers, and a lot of people think that the backup solution is done, that Valero is done, it's mature, but it actually isn't. There is a re-architecture plan to separate things and add things to make it into work for enterprise, as well as every other size of companies' clusters, so there are a lot of really amazing changes coming. It's in the design phase right now, so of course, it's going to take a while.

 

- Awesome.

 

- Yeah. It looks very promising.

 

- So that's something, again, in the liner notes of the episode. We'll have links to Valero, so for everyone, check it out. I'm sure you already know about it already, but yeah, it's definitely something to check out. Teleport allows engineers and security professionals to unify access for SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. You can download teleport right now at goteleport.com. That's G-O-T-E-L-E-P-O-R-T.com. All right, so Carlisia, we spent a fun afternoon talking, morning, whatever, evening. My last question for you, what work are you most proud of?

 

- Oh, man, it's like you're asking me to pick my favorite child. We have a bias to lean on the most recent thing, whatever that thing is, so I don't know if I'm having a biased reaction, that kind of bias right now, but I think I'm really proud of the work I've done with Valero because there was a lot of helping people build Valero, helping people use Valero, and that's in addition to actually doing technical work, and that really rocks my boat.

 

- Awesome, well, Carlisia, I wanna tell you for being on the show, I appreciate it, and thank you. You're always welcome to be on our show.

 

- This was so great, thank you.