Episode Details

Key takeaways:

• Job hopping at a young age can help you better understand what you like and what you're good at
• Doing meaningful and impactful work keeps us engaged and not bored at work and hating our lives
• Burnout happens more often in tech than we care to admit, and one way to cope with it is by doing an activity that you're not good at
• Normalizing talking about mental health at work gives others a safe space to take care of their own mental health
• Tips for concentrating: activities with low cognitive load can help you concentrate better on primary activities
• Discovering your own leadership style and what works for you helps you become a successful manager
• Jumping off the IC track too early to get into management can hurt you as a manager in the long run

About our guest:

Denise is an Engineering Manager at HashiCorp and a professional margin-scribbler. She's been using sketchnotes and comics for the last few years to make concepts in engineering more accessible and fun.

Find our guest on:

• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• LinkedIn

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Rails Active Record Query Interface
• Spaces vs Tabs debate
• Video game music can help with attention span
• Audioslave (supergroup)
• Broken Social Scene (supergroup)
• Neha Batra (GitHub)
• MySpace
• Book: Work Won't Love You Back

Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Okay. Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today is Denise Yu of HashiCorp. Welcome, Denise.

DENISE:
Thanks so much, Adriana. Very excited to be here.

ADRIANA:
I'm excited too. And where are you calling from?

DENISE:
I'm also in Toronto. We're neighbors.

ADRIANA:
Yes. Yeah. I always say on the podcast, I always get very excited when I have a fellow Torontonians on. We need, you know, we need to get some good representation in Canada.

DENISE:
Yes, yes, we are only 10% of the Cana... Actually, no, I think I think the GTA is 20% of the Canadian population.

ADRIANA:
AV: Oh, damn. That's. Yeah.

DENISE:
I mean, we are there's a lot of us, actually.

ADRIANA:
There are a lot of us. Well, with that, I think this is a great segway to get into our lightning round questions.

DENISE:
Let's do it.

ADRIANA:
Ready... Okay, let's let's see how lightning they are. They may or may not be. I roll with it. Okay, first question, are you a lefty or a righty?