Episode Details

Key takeaways:

• Humans are delightfully malleable! As a right-handed person being taught sports by a left-handed person, Cortney learned to play many sports left-handed!
• Devs who shifted into the ops space have a unique perspective because they have done it all - not just the dev work, but also the ops work.
• QAs bridge the gap for Dev and Ops, because they have had to make everybody communicate with each other and they feel everybody's pain.
• Admitting that you don't have all the answers and asking for help is a superpower, as it "liberates" others around you to ask questions.
• Being unafraid to ask questions and ask for clarifications is how Cortney was able to level up in tech, in spite of not having a technical background.
• People are willing to help you if you're willing to put in the effort and if you show them that you've been trying.
• The fact that tech constantly changes means that we have new opportunities to learn and gain expertise in new areas.
• When we're in the midst of feeling like we're not doing enough, sometimes we need others to remind us that yes, we ARE.
• We tend to be incredibly hard on ourselves. There are other people who see the effort that we make, and they appreciate what it is that we get done.
• Tech moves so quickly that whether you take a break for 6 weeks or 1 year, by the time you get back, things have changed.
• When you're raising a child and working, having a partner, spouse, or someone else you can lean on for support makes a huge difference. Support can be physical or emotional.
• We need to have conversations to normalize support for working moms.
• Once we have kids, people ask how our kids are doing, but now how we're doing. And yet, our kids' wellbeing depends on our wellbeing.
• Context is queen. We assume that people hold it together because they're just that good, but it reality, we don't realize that they have a whole village of people helping them out.

About our guest:

Cortney is Head of Community at Nirmata. As a CNCF and Civo Ambassador, she helps co-organize the CNCF Bilbao Community, various Kubernetes Community Day events, and KubeJam. Additionally, she is a recognized voice in the cloud native space. Initially, a non-techie, she turned techie as employee 7 at a startup acquired by DataDog while writing content for the Data on Kubernetes Community. When not talking tech, you can find her talking DEl, sharing about her struggle with imposter syndrome, and trying to wrestle her kids to bed at a normal time.

Find our guest on:

• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• X

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:

• MySpace
• Dial-up modem
• AltaVista (search engine)
• Ask Jeeves (search engine)
• Dial-up modem sounds
• Monokle
• “We love YAML so you don’t have to”
• Cortney’s KubeCon China 2025 keynote

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