Interview with Natalie Godec, contributor to Google's Dev Library
foreign good afternoon Natalie is this the way to pronounce your name it's the first question I always ask just to make sure I have the correct intonation for your name Natalie how do you pronounce it hi Sebastian yes it's Natalie Natalie perfect first or second question now who are you and usually I like to ask for three key words or three numbers but really just share anything you want to tell us a little bit about yourself like to call myself a system slash develop slash cloud slash platform engineer because what I do is all those things and depending on the company and the year we live in it has taken different names throughout this to the history so I do systems I architect platforms I architect clouds and I have a particular thing for security and data platforms fascinating what led you to go into that field in particular ly randomly I was finishing my Master's studies in Switzerland in telecommunication systems I spent seven years studying networks and Wireless Communications and cryptography and all of those things and I needed a a place to do my Master's thesis in I wanted to do it in an industry and the deadline to find a project was fast approaching and I started applying to different places in Geneva even French speaking places even though my French wasn't that great at the time and I found this place in a private bank they were looking for a devops engineer and they were looking for someone to write configurationist code for their like physical internal Data Center and they were looking to use puppet and run deck and they were looking also to use logstash for logs and I didn't know any of those words but I nodded during the interview and then spoke to my best friend who was already working in the industry and she was like oh my God devops cool you're gonna be using puppet that is so awesome oh if you use openstack that would be even better and so I started doing that project working in that company and I really loved it I am a creative person by Nature Aida loads of creative things and I find that the field of devops and platform engineering really allows you to be creative which is an unusual thing to say about systems and clouds but it is you are given problems and you have all the Solutions in the world to solve those problems with let's backtrack a little bit even before getting into your studies what led you into the more the scientific or the tech area and the reason I'm asking is as you probably are aware the industry suffers from a lack of women we have a way we have a male dominated industry so I'm very curious what led you in the first place what inspired you or is it again an accident because you were just very good in science and you thought oh that's a natural thing to do I'm just don't put words in your mouth I'm curious to know your path even before that was which then you you explained yeah um actually my mum was a systems system administrator to Southern and ended up leading the team of this admins at her work and so when there was time where my parents asked me what what I want to study at University I said I T because I thought that my mom would be able to help me and my dad is an engineer and a physicist so he could he would be able to help me as well and then I so that was like a very broad decision and my mom was like okay what do you want to study in I.T it's a very broad like Tech is very Broad and I originally chose graphic design and then I did like a in my last year of school of high school I did like a Sunday weekend Academy where I wanted to study graphic design but the first semester was actually an overview of what exists in Tech and we did a little bit of programming we learned C plus plus I believe and PHP for the world of graphic design and I detested it and we also had a little course in in system administration and we learned about networks and routers and kind of topographies of networks and how like the internals of a computer work and what Hardware exists and so on and it was in 2007 I believe and I really enjoyed that so when I it became time to go into uni um I actually failed to enter my preferred course in graphic design in the unit that I preferred because funny enough I was not and still I'm not good in math and you needed math for that particular University but I did enter to systems engineering in a different uni and so I went on to study that and enjoyed specifically the subjects that were more so around systems and databases and like what what is now platform engineering everything that exists in the infrastructure World underneath any application or any system that somebody else writes the code for and so I enjoyed it and I continued studying that and I did a masters like I said in communication systems and stayed in the field interesting it's funny how an accident of not being admitted for the graphic design course LED you to continuing that path and be excited about it so in summary is what you said right you had this family background but then you also had your own curiosity with this boot camp or the summer course and then you continued in in that path if I may if you have any any thoughts in that regard what is there any piece of advice you would have for any girl or woman who would be interested to explore the field of technology or you to feel that you're in specifically is there any piece of advice when you look in hindsight that you wish you'd have known maybe before entering the field or maybe to encourage them to not hesitate and go into that area um I think with well with like the years of experience the most important thing is how you portray yourself and how you present yourself within the within the room you're entering um and like that that internship that I did when I was doing my master thesis I was the only woman on the floor apart from the executive assistant I was a 21 year old little student in a team of people who could have been my my grandfather um in terms of age they had been with the company for 30 35 years and my job was to teach them a new technology like imagine how challenging that is but I think having been in the in the field since I was like 16 I've always introduced myself as an engineer first and everything else second and if you present yourself like this and if you believe that and you know what you're worth I'm entering the room I'm an engineer I know what I'm worth and I know what I can bring and I communicate that it is obviously a lot about confidence and and how how to hold yourself um and how to not be scared but believe it or not if if you enter a room and you're like hello I'm the engineer that is going to do great things that's how others will perceive you as well this is very valuable advice thank you for sharing how you're doing it let's talk about Google Technologies a little bit what surprised you if anything when you started using various Google Technologies and in particular Google Cloud which is your area of expertise is there anything that surprised you in good or bad ways by the way um I work with AWS and Google Cloud at the same time in the same company in the same role so obviously there is a lot of comparison and a lot of cross-section of knowledge what surprised me in a good way is how well everything integrates in within Google Cloud and what I mean by that is if you are developing a system or deploying a platform what what about logging do you have logging do you need to deploy anything about logging no you don't everything is already there can I monitor my instances and see my CPU loads or my network input requests yeah it's already there you don't need to do anything if I need a cloud function that will like react to a bucket event and do something in bigquery sure it's really really easy to do everything just integrates really seamlessly specifically compared to AWS where you kind of have to know a little bit more about the the little bits of the systems and configure every single thing separately in Google Cloud it's just a lot easier to stand up and go and learn the platform and build something nice really quickly and you said anything anything negative otherwise you don't have to but you start with the good ways any challenges that you're faced with or remaining uh to solve um in my personal experience and that goes to the industry I'm in we very often use cutting-edge technology so things that I had that might have not been brushed out quite quite so yet and we Face challenges sometimes when systems are not quite ready to be to be used and presented um but it it works that like it works better and better the long the longer the products exists and from the experience of others my other friends in the industry who work with Google Cloud sometimes how easy everything is in is integrated and how well everything works together is actually a downside to give you an example if someone needs to fine-tune their kubernetes clusters and really really tweak the configurations and tweak the hardware setup it's not that easy to do with gke because it's so nicely managed and you don't need to do much yourself with kubernetes engine everything is managed for you there is even autopilot where you literally don't think at all about what what is running and how it's running but if you do need to think and if you do need to configure things it becomes difficult got it so it's the curse of having something that works very nicely integrated when you want to customize things completely understood very clear thank you for the example when you're confronted with a specific coding challenge what do you usually go to where do you go to or what kind of resources do you use I'm curious how do you solve your problems I prefer both I'm that engineer who has never read a technical book in their life yet I work and I'm sort of successful I think I prefer learning from other people and especially in the in the industry where the community is so big and the open source world is so big and so important to what we do the community has probably already solved all of your issues so if I'm facing a challenge I will Google how other people have solved it already I'd inspired myself from their lessons from their mistakes and from their Solutions let's talk precisely about the blog post that was selected on their library and we will put the link to your Dev Library profile in the description of this video let's talk about this blog post in particular it's all about audit logs and forgive my ignorance and this is why I'll let you speak about it but I'm curious to hear what prompted you to write this blog post and maybe can you share with us a little bit what it is about and we'll tease our viewers for them to go and then read the blog post itself go ahead of course first of all thank you for selecting it for for the content of the month I'm really pleased um audit logs and security the blog post is all about audit audit logs and security um when you work in a regulated industry I know it's not even a regulated industry when you care and you should always care about your security and your organization's stance in terms of compliance and regulations and data management you should really think about how security integrates with everything that you do with all of your platforms but then equally you sometimes need to store your audit logs especially if you deal with data and I work in healthcare we deal with data all the time and it's very sensitive data so in theory you can just set up logging syncs which is which just means that your logs from all of the services that run will be put in a single place and stored in a single place and Google Cloud provides a very easy way to do that logging syncs they're really easy to configure they exist on multiple levels and you can find how to configure that in my blog post but then comes in security and sometimes you need to tighten your security in such a way that locks you out of the conventional ways of configuring certain things and that's what we were facing we had a pretty complex setup in within our Google Cloud organization and we needed to audit log everything and we also needed to automate it so we didn't want to manually have to do anything we didn't want anyone who is creating something new to have to think about audit logs to have to think how to how to configure it with the security so we needed to automate it and since we have infrastructure as code with terraform available to everyone also really nicely integrated with Google Cloud thanks to the team at Google that that writes I think terraform modules and Magic modules we were able to actually achieve it and we had to find some clever ways of of configuring things in such a way that nobody has to ever think about audit logging again but everything is audit logged and everything is secure and going through the correct paths within the network and so on so you've told me all about the rationale for the specific aspect of audit logging and centralizing it but you didn't tell me what prompted you to write a blog post you could have kept your knowledge for yourself solve the problem in your company and then you know ignore the rest of the world what's prompting you to share with everyone right well because I love learning from blog posts and videos and people's experience myself I think it's really important to contribute back to the community when you have solved something quite complex and we often that's what that's what prompted me to write not only this blog post but all of the others that I've written and to be active in the community sometimes we solve challenges that that we couldn't find answers on the internet for and sometimes we invent curious Solutions and curious kind of decisions about our platforms make curious decisions about our platforms and I wanted to share them with other people who will be facing the same problems because that's how I learned myself I wanted to give back to the community and give others the opportunity to also learn from our lessons and our ways of doing how how has the reaction been to your blog posts or to your involvement in the community or maybe another question or a separate question if you prefer the second one which is is there anything you'd like to see in terms of how the community should evolve over time or something that you feel would be nice if maybe more people would contribute to it or any any thoughts around how the broader community at large should evolve um I think it's it's it's nice how um how active people are um there is a lot of people who who are contributing who are writing blog posts who are sharing their experience and not only like I like to write blogs about something specific very specific like a problem that we faced and we solved and I like to write it up for that specific thing but there is also a lot of people who are writing up uh tutorials for people who are just starting out for people who don't know anything about the technology and that is super valuable as well sometimes as a as a content creator in a way I think oh but like what if what if someone else has already written the blog on the same topic but that's okay because you will still have different thoughts um and I think it's important to continue creating content um of your own knowledge regardless of whether you think someone else has already done it because you will have thoughts that others don't you are a unique human being and it's important to to grow the expertise and the variability of thoughts and ideas within the community in terms of future and how I would like to see the community evolve well firstly I think that the dev library is a very cool idea um because it assembles articles and content from different platforms something that we see very often is someone will write blogs on their website someone will write blogs on medium on dev2 on YouTube on other on all of these different platforms and it might be tricky for people to keep track and to kind of find everything in the same place so having like a catalog of content is really cool having I'm having themes to it is is really useful as well so like on an own medium there are communities about specifically about Google Cloud um or there are communities specifically about a type of AI research that group of content of of a particular subject and I think that's interesting for people who want to kind of learn more about that subject but don't know specific personalities who are active in the community who to follow you know imagine you're in front of someone who's barely starting or would like to get started coding or using some Google Technologies let's say gcp what would you recommend for them to start with today would you have specific blog posts or YouTube videos or the documentation I don't want to put words in your mouth once again but I'm curious what would you say to someone who's curious but hasn't started yet someone who's a complete beginner um I would say get hold of Google Cloud skills boost I think it's called Google skills boost it has loads of labs and and little tutorials and and like learning materials and it's very nice or otherwise get hold of a subscription for things like pluralsight or Cloud Guru I like those two platforms specifically because they have a whole variety of content and courses on all sorts of Technology and you can find different levels of of tutorials and lessons as well starting from very beginner very kind of basic knowledge fundamental knowledge and going to like how to architect a particular solution for a particular industry loads of content that you can learn from and create it in a very nice way that that I personally find easy to digest but also very useful so it's a Google Cloud skills boost and I'll put the link in the description so thank you for sharing this and by the way thank you for the nice words about Dev Library this is not scripted I'm not forcing you to save this so thank you for the kind words what is the worst advice or if it's too difficult to think about it the worst piece of advice what is the best piece of advice that you've heard in our industry in the tech industry or maybe specifically around the cloud domain it's up to you any worst piece of advice that you've heard that really makes you mad when you hear it or what's the best piece of advice that you think everyone should be aware of worst piece of advice is I will just build it and think about security later don't do that don't do that please don't do that build security into everything you do from day one from Day Zero think about security before you think about architecture it will make your life easier it's so difficult to build security as a as a back thought as a secondary state it is nearly impossible to build it into a platform that has naturally and organically evolved over the time so think about it first and build it into every single thing that you do and the best piece of advice probably would be keep it simple the full quote is Kiss and if you don't know it Google it um I think it's the like it's my favorite engineering principle and it helps it helps you keep things simple but also maintainable and future proof and someone else will come in and how we'll have to maintain what you what you have written and they will have to look at it and understand it after you're gone so keep it simple and we'll let everyone use their favorite search engine to see the acronym for KI double s kiss keep it simple what the last s is uh to make your point around security do you know how many ransomware attacks are happening on an annual basis let's say in 2021 or in 2022 what's the projected number do you know I was just looking through this yesterday just a coincidence too many I don't know the number but too many so the number in 2021 was 600 million 600 million ransomware attacks and the reason I mentioned this and you know this better than I do is all about security and securing your uh infrastructure in in different ways so it's just to give you a sense I was stunned by the number and it seems that for the just for the first half of 2022 we're already above 200 million uh ransomware attacks so just to make your point that security should not be enough to thought uh in anything that you're designing any final thoughts that you would have for anyone watching this video any final thoughts whether for encouraging other fellow developers or anything else that you'd like to say or share keep building keep being creative and build security into everything you do I think the message is well received thank you very much Natalie thank you for having me [Music]
2022-12-17 20:08
