Episode #102: Creating and Evolving Technical Content with Amy Arambulo Negrette

About Amy Arambulo Negrette

With over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo!, Fantasy Sports, and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. She has built APIs for enterprise clients for cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Currently, she works as a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group doing bill analyses and leading cost optimization projects. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.

Website: www.amy-codes.com
Twitter: @nerdypaws
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/amycodes

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xc2rkR5VCxo

This episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.

Transcript
Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Amy Arambulo Negrette. Hey, Amy thanks for joining me.

Amy: Thank you, glad to be here.

Jeremy: You are a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at the Duckbill Group.

Amy: Sure thing. I used to be an application developer, I did a bunch of AWS stuff for a while, and now at the Duckbill Group, a cloud economist is someone who goes through cost explorer and your usage report and tries to figure out where you're spending too much money and how the best to help you. It is the best-known use of a small skill I have, which is about being able to dig through someone's receipts and find out what their story is.

Jeremy: Sounds like a forensic accountant, maybe forensic cloud economist or something to that effect.

Amy: Yep. That's basically what we do.

Jeremy: Well, I'm super excited to have you here. First of all, I have to ask this question, I've known Corey for quite some time, and I can imagine that working with him is either amazing or an absolute nightmare. I'm just curious, which one is it?

Amy: It is not my job to control Corey, so it's great. He's great to talk to. He really is fully engaged in any conversation you have with him. You've talked to him before, I'm sure you know that. He loves knowing what other people think on things, which I think is a really healthy attitude to have.

Jeremy: I totally agree, and hopefully he will subtweet this episode. Anyways, getting into this episode, one of the things that I've noticed that you've done quite a bit, is you create technical content. I've seen a lot of the talks that you've given, and I think that's something that you've done such a great job of not only coming up with content and making content interesting.

Sometimes when you put together technical content, it's not super exciting. But you have a very good way of taking that technical content and making it interesting. But then also, following up with it. You have this series of talks where you started talking about managing FaaS, and then you went to the whole frenemies thing with Fargate versus Lambda. Now we're talking about, I think the latest one you did was about Lambda and the container support within Lambda. Maybe we can just go back, or start at a point where, for people who are interested in maybe doing talks, what is the reason for even creating some of these talks in the first place?

Amy: I feel a lot of engineers have the same problem, just day-to-day where they will run into a bug, and then they'll go hit the all-knowing software engineer, which is the Google search engine, and have absolutely either nothing come up or have six posts that say, I'm having this problem, but you won't ever get an answer. This is just a fast way of answering those questions before someone has to ask.

Jeremy: Right. When you come up with these ... You run into this bug, and you're thinking to yourself, you can't find the answer. So, you do the research, you spend the time digging through, and finding the right way to solve it. When you put these talks together, do you get a sense that it's helping people and then that it's just another way to connect with the community?

Amy: Yeah. When I do it, it's really great, because after our talk, I'll see people either in the hallway, or I'll meet someone at a booth, and they'll even say, it's like, I ran into this exact same problem, and I gave up because it was such a strange edge case that it was too hard to fix, and we just moved on to another solution, which is entirely possible.

I also get to express to just the general public that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about, because someone has given me a stage to talk for 30 minutes, and just put up all of my proofs. That's an actually fun and weirdly empowering place to be.

Jeremy: Yeah. I actually think that's really interesting. Again, for me, I loved your talks, and some of those things are ... I put those things at the back of my mind, but I know for people who give talks, who maybe get judged for other reasons or whatever, that it certainly is empowering. Is that something where you certainly shouldn't have to do it. There certainly should be that same level of respect. But is that something that you found that doing these talks really just sets the tone, right off the bat?

Amy: Yeah, I feel it does. It helps that when someone Googles you, a bunch of YouTube videos on how to solve their problem comes up, that is extremely helpful, especially ... I do a lot of consulting, so if I ever have to go onsite, and someone wants to know what I do, I can pull up an actual YouTube playlist of things that I've done. It's like being in developer relations without having to write all of that content, I get to write a fraction of that content.

Jeremy: Right. Unfortunately, that is a fact that we live with right now, which is, it is completely unfair, but I think that, again, the fact that you do that, you put that out there, and that gives you that credibility, which again, you should have from your resume, but at the same time, I think it's an interesting way to circumvent that, given the current world we live in.

Amy: It also helps when there are either younger engineers or even other younger professionals who are looking at the tech industry, and the tech industry, especially right now, it does not have the best reputation to be able to see that there are people who are from different backgrounds, either educationally or financially, or what have you, and are able to go out and see someone who has something similar being a subject matter expert in whatever it is that they're talking about.

Jeremy: Right. I definitely agree with that. That's that thing, where the more that we can amplify those types of voices and make sure that people can see that diversity, it's incredibly important. Good for you, obviously, for pushing through that, because I know that I've heard a lot of horror stories around that stuff that makes my blood boil.

Let's talk to some of these people out here who potentially want to do some of these talks, and want to use this as a way to, again, sell themselves. B...