Screaming in the Cloud - Making “Devrelopment” Your Own with Priyanka Vergadia

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

About PriyankaPriyanka Vergadia is currently a Staff  Developer Advocate at Google Cloud where she works with enterprises to build and architect their cloud platforms. She enjoys building en...gaging technical content and continuously experiments with new ways to tell stories and solve business problems using Google Cloud tools. You can check out some of the stories that she has created for the developer community on the Google Cloud Platform Youtube channel. These include "Deconstructing Chatbots", "Get Cooking in Cloud", "Pub/Sub Made Easy" and more. ..Links Referenced:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pvergadia/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pvergadiaPriyanka's book: https://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Google-Cloud-Illustrated-References/dp/1119816327

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck. And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS without such things, forget about it.
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Starting point is 00:01:23 of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't the monthly bill? Further, what if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't the monthly bill? Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing, unmanaged, or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing. Visit snark.cloud slash firefly to learn more. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn.
Starting point is 00:01:59 Periodically, I get the privilege of speaking to people who work in varying aspects of, some would call it developer evangelism, some would call it developer advocacy, developer relations is a commonly accepted term, and I, of course, call it developers because I enjoy annoying absolutely everyone by giving things terrible names. My guest today is Priyanka Vergadia, who is a staff developer advocate at Google Cloud. Priyanka, thank you for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Corey. I'm so excited to be your developer. What did you call it again? Dev reliper. Yes, indeed. Dev reliper. That is the term I'm going to be using from now on. I am a dev reliper. Anyway.
Starting point is 00:02:45 Excellent. I'm starting to spread this out. So eventually we're going to form a giant insufferable army of people who pronounce it that way, and it's going to be great. It's going to be awesome. One of the challenges, even as I alluded to the different titles within this space, everyone has a slightly different definition of where the role starts and stops just in terms of its function, let alone the myriad ways that that can be expressed. In the before times, I knew a number of folks in the developer advocacy space who were more or less worldwide experts in accumulating airline miles and racking up status and going from conference to conference to conference to
Starting point is 00:03:22 more or less talk about things that had a tenuous at best connection to where they worked. Great. Other folks have done things in very different ways. Some people write extensively in blog posts and the rest. Others build things as sample code, et cetera, et cetera. It seems like every time I talk to someone in this space, they have found some new and exciting way of carrying the message of what their company does to arguably a very cynical customer group. Where do you start and stop with your development?
Starting point is 00:03:53 Yeah, so that is such like all the developers have their own style that they have either adopted or learned over time that works for them. When I started, I think about three years ago, I did go to conferences, did those events, gave talks, all of that. But I was also, my actual introduction to DevRel was with videos i started creating my first series was deconstructing chatbots i was very interested in learning more about chatbots so it's like you know what i'm just gonna teach everybody and learn so like learn and teach at the same time was was my motto and um that's kind of how i i got started into like okay i'm to create a few videos to learn this and teach it. During the process, I was like, I want to do this more. That's transitioned my move from being in front of customers, which I still end up doing,
Starting point is 00:04:58 but I was doing more of just working with customers extensively to get their deployments done. This was a segue for me to think back, sit back, and think about what's working and what I personally enjoy doing more. And that's what got me into creating videos. And I was like, okay, I'm going to become a DevReloper now. And that's kind of how the whole journey started. And for me, like you were pointing out earlier, should I just stop? Because I've been talking. No, keep going. It's fine. For me, I started, I found my, I would say in the last two years, it was all before, before the pandemic,
Starting point is 00:05:48 we were all either writing blogs or doing videos or going to conferences. And it was, you know, the pandemic kind of brought us to a point where it's like, okay, let's think about, we can't, we can't meet each other. Let's think about other ways to communicate. And how can we make it creative and exciting? And the online started breaking down too, where it's, yay, I'm going to watch an online conference. What is it? Oh, it's like a crappy Zoom, only you don't have to pretend to pay attention
Starting point is 00:06:15 in the same way. And as a presenter, then you've got to modify what you're doing to understand that people's attention spans are shorter. It's distractions, always a browser tab away. And unlike a physical event, people don't feel the same sense of shame of getting up from the front wall and leaving in front of 300 people and not watching the rest of your talk. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'll still do it, but I'll feel bad about it now. It's oh,
Starting point is 00:06:37 no, I'm sitting here in my own little hovel. I'm just going to do what to watch, whatever I want to do. So you've, you've got to force you to up your game and it still doesn't quite have the same impact yeah or just switch off the camera if you're like me i'm just gonna switch off the camera go away or do something else and yeah it's it's very easy to to do that um so it's not the same so which is why it prompted i think all of us devro people to think about ways a, new ways to connect, which is, and for me, that way to connect is art and visual aspects to kind of bring, because we are all, whether we accept it or not, or like it or not, we're all visual learners. So that's kind of how I think when it comes to creating content. Is it visually appealing? And that's when people can dive in.
Starting point is 00:07:32 I am in the, I guess, opposite side of the universe from you where I acknowledge and agree with everything you're saying that people are visual creatures inherently. But I have effectively zero ability in that direction. My medium has always been playing games with words and language. And over time, I had the effectively significantly belated realization that, wait a minute, just because I'm not good at a thing doesn't mean that other people might not be good at that thing.
Starting point is 00:08:02 And I don't have to do every last part of it myself. Suddenly, I didn't have to do my own crappy graphic design because you can pay people who are worlds better than I'll ever be and so on and so forth. I don't edit my own podcast audio because I'm bad at that too. But talking about things is a different story. Writing about things, building things is where I tend to see a lot of what I do tend to resonate. But I admit I bias for the things that I enjoy doing and the way that I enjoy consuming things.
Starting point is 00:08:31 You do as well, because relatively recently, as of time of this recording, you have done what I don't believe anyone actually wants to do. You wrote a book. Now, everyone wants to have written a book, but no one actually wants to write a book. So true. But it's not like most technical books. Tell me about it. Yeah. I actually never thought I would write a book. If you asked me two years ago, three years ago, I would say I would have never thought that I would write a book because I am not a text person. So I don't like to read a lot of text because it zones me out.
Starting point is 00:09:09 So for me, when I started creating some of these sketches and sharing it on social media and in blogs and things like that and gotten the attention that it has gotten from people, that's when I was like, okay, ding, ding, ding. I think I can do a visual book with these images. And this was like halfway through, I've already created like 30 sketches at this point. And I was like, okay, maybe I can turn this into a book, which would be interesting for me because I like doing art type things along with teaching. And it's not text because I wanted to do this in a very unique way. So yeah, that's kind of how it ended up happening.
Starting point is 00:09:55 I have a keen appreciation for people who approach things with a different point of view. One of your colleagues, Forrest Brazeal, took a somewhat similar approach in his book, The Read Aloud Cloud, where it was illustrated and everything he did was in rhyme, which is a constant source of envy for me, where it's, hmm, I've got to find a way to one-up him again. And he is inexorable as far as just continuing to self-improve.
Starting point is 00:10:23 So, all right, we're going to find a way to wind up defeating that. With you, it's way easier. I read a book like, wow, this is gorgeous and well-written and it's attractive to look at. And I will never be able to do any of those things. That's all you. It doesn't feel like we're trying to stand at the same spot in the universe in quite the same way. Nothing but love for Forrest. Let's be clear. I am teasing. I consider him a friend. He is amazing. Well, honestly, like I actually got to for Forrest, let's be clear. I am teasing. I consider him a friend. He is amazing. Well, honestly, I actually got to know Forrest when I decided to do this book. Wiley, who's the publisher, sent me Forrest's book.
Starting point is 00:10:56 And he said, you should look at this book because the idea that you are presenting to me, we could lay it out in this format, like in the, you know, the physical format. So he sent me that book. And that's how I know Forrest, honestly. So I told him that this is a little story that I told him after. But anyway, yeah, I was gonna make a point about the aspect of creating images. Like, honestly, I designed the aspects of how you lay out information in the sketches. I studied a bunch of stuff to come up with how do I make it precise and things like that. But there's no way this book was possible without some design help.
Starting point is 00:11:46 Like I can't possibly do the entire thing unless I have like five years. So- Right, on top of all of this, you do presumptively have a day job as well. And while this is definitely related, I'm just going to go write a book. Oh, is it a dissertation?
Starting point is 00:12:03 No, it's going to look more like a children's book than that is what they're going to go write a book. Oh, is it a dissertation? No, it's going to look more like a children's book than that is what they're going to hear. And it's, yeah, predicting some problems with the performance evaluation process at large companies when you start down those paths. Exactly. So I ended up like showing all these numbers of like the, of the blog views and reads and and social media um presence of some of these images that were going viral um and g and the gcp sketchnote uh github repo got a huge number of stars and it's like everybody could see that writing a book would be amazing um from from that point on i was just like i don't think I can scale that. So when I was drawing, this is an example, when I drew my first sketch, it took me an entire weekend to just draw
Starting point is 00:12:55 one sketch, which is what I was only doing that the entire weekend, like assume like 16 hours of work, just drawing one sketch. So if I went with that pace, this book was not possible. So after I had the idea laid out, had the process in place, I got some design help, which expedited the process much, much faster. There's a lot to be said for doing something that you enjoy. Do you do live sketchnoting during conference talks as well? Or do you tend to not do it while someone is talking at a reasonably fast clip? And well, in 45 minutes, this is better be done. So let's go.
Starting point is 00:13:34 I've seen people who can do that. And I just marvel at all what they do. I don't do live. I don't do live sketching. For me, paper and pen is a better medium. That's just the medium that i like to work with so um when the talk is happening i'm actually taking notes on on a pen and a paper and then after i can sketch it out faster in a fast way like i did one sketch note for next 2020 i think and that was done like a day after Next was over. It could
Starting point is 00:14:08 take all the bits and pieces that were important and put it into that sketch. But I can't do it live. That's just one of the things I haven't figured out yet. For me, I was always writing my email newsletter. So it was relatively rapid turnaround. And Twitter was interesting for me. I finally cracked the nut on how to express myself in a way that worked. The challenge that I ran into then was, okay, there are thoughts I occasionally have that don't lend themselves to then 140,
Starting point is 00:14:39 now 280 characters. So I should probably start writing long form. And then I wound up starting writing a thousand to 1500 word blog post every week that goes out. And that forced me to become a better writer across the board. And then it became about one-upping myself, sort of live tweeting conference talks. And a personal secret around why I do that is I made the HD in a bottle. Someone gets on stage. You say you zone out when you read a giant quantity of data, you prefer something more visual, more interactive.
Starting point is 00:15:07 For me, I'm the opposite, where when someone gets on stage and starts talking, it's okay, get to, yes, you're doing the intro of what a cloud might be. I get that point. This is supposed to be a more advanced talk. Can we speed it up a bit? And doing the live tweeting about it,
Starting point is 00:15:23 but not just relating what is said, but by making a joke about it, it's how I keep myself engaged and from zoning out because this industry is extraordinarily boring. If you don't bring a little bit of light to it and how to continue and how to do that was hard. And it took me time to get there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Like that's exactly why I got into like creating videos and sketches, like in videos. And also like, I, I totally agree. That's exactly why I got into creating videos and sketches. In videos also, I come up with fake examples of companies that may or may not exist. I made up
Starting point is 00:15:57 a dog shoe making company that ships out shoes when you need them and then return them and there's a size and stuff. Like you have to come up with interesting things to make the content interesting because otherwise this can get boring pretty quickly. But just going back to your example, speed it up, get to the point. This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB.
Starting point is 00:16:30 EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years, and now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL, on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called Big Animal. All one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves.
Starting point is 00:16:53 Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money. They can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud. To learn more, try Big Animal for free. Go to biganimal.com slash snark and tell them Corey sent you. It was fun to start experimenting with it, too, because, all right, once I was done learning how to live tweet other people's talks, I'd mostly get it correct because someone says something, I have three to five seconds to come up with what
Starting point is 00:17:21 I want to talk about, maybe grab a picture, and then move on to the next thing. And it's easy to get that wrong and say things you don't necessarily intend to and get taken the wrong way. I've mostly gotten past that. And I'm not saying I'm always right, but I'm better than I used to be. And then it was, okay, how do I top this? And I started live tweeting conference talks that I was giving live, which is always fun, but being able to pre-write some tweets at certain times, have certain web hooks in your slide deck and whatnot that fire these things off. And again, I'm not saying any of this is recommended or even a good idea, but it definitely wasn't boring.
Starting point is 00:17:55 And trying to find ways to make the same type of material new and interesting is one of the challenges because this stuff is complex. Also bite size, right? I think Twitter is like, the Twitter words are obviously limiting, but it also forces you to think about it in bite size, right? Like, okay, if I have a blog post, then I'm summarizing it. How would I do it in two sentences? It forces me to think about it that way, which makes it very applicable to the time spans that we have now, right? Which is maybe like 30 seconds you can have somebody on the post. Attention is a rare and precious commodity. Yeah, yeah. People view it as engagement.
Starting point is 00:18:37 I think that's the wrong metric to go after because that inspires a whole bunch of terrible incentives. Whereas finding something that is interesting and a way to bring light to it and have a perspective on it that makes people think about it differently. For me, it's been humor, but that's my own approach to things. In your direction,
Starting point is 00:18:55 it seems to be telling a story through visual arts. And that is something we don't see nearly as much of. Yeah. I think it's also because it's something that you, you know, like I grew up drawing and painting. I was, I was drawing since I was three years old. So that's my, my way of thinking. Like I don't, I was talking to another developer the other day, and we were talking about- That's country God, I love it.
Starting point is 00:19:26 Two different ways of how we think. So for me, when I design a piece of content, I have my visuals first. And then he was talking about, when he designs his content, he has his bullet points and a blog post first. So it's like two very different ways of, of approaching the similar thing.
Starting point is 00:19:49 And then from that, that's from the images or the deck that I'm building up, I would come up with the narrative and stuff like that. My thinking starts with images and narrative of tying the images together. But it's like, it's that, that is the whole like fun of being in DevRel, right? You are your own personality
Starting point is 00:20:10 and bringing whatever your personality is, like you mentioned humor in your case, or in my case, in somebody else's case, it could be a totally different thing, right? So, yeah. Now, please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but an area of emphasis for you has been data analytics as well as Kubernetes, more or less things that are traditionally considered to be much more back-end, when you're looking at a spectrum of all things technology. Is that directionally accurate, or am I dramatically misunderstanding a lot of what you're saying? No, that's very much accurate.
Starting point is 00:20:45 I tend to be on the infrastructure back end, creating pipeline, creating easier processes sort of person. Not much into front end and dabble into it, but don't enjoy it. This makes you something of a unicorn in the sense of there are a tremendous number of DevRelabr types in the front end slash JavaScript world
Starting point is 00:21:12 because their entire career is focused on making things look visually appealing. That is what front end is. I know this because I am rubbish at it. My idea of a well-designed interface that everyone looks at and smiles at is the strong ordering of command line arguments when you're writing a script for something.
Starting point is 00:21:31 And it's on a green screen. And sometimes I'll have someone help me coordinate to come up with a better color palette for the way that I'm looking at my terminal on my Mac. Real exciting times over here, I assure you. So the folks who are working in that space and they have beautifully designed slides, yeah, you tend to expect that.
Starting point is 00:21:48 I gave a talk years ago at the Front End Conference in Zurich and I was speaking in the afternoon and I went there and every presentation slides were beautiful. And this was before I was working here and had a graphic designer on retainer to make my slides look not horrible. It was black Helvetica text on a white background. And I'm looking at this and I'm feeling ashamed
Starting point is 00:22:13 that it's, okay, I have two hours to fix this. What do I do? Yeah. I did the only thing I could think of. I changed the Helvetica text to Comic Sans because if it's going to look terrible and it's going to be a designer thing that puts them off, you may as well go all in. That was a recurring meme at the time. I've since learned that there is an argument, I don't know if it's true or not, that Comic Sans is easier to read for folks with dyslexia, for example. And that's fine. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I stopped making jokes about it just because if people, even if it's not true and people believe it, it's, are you being unintentionally crappy to people? It's, well, I sure hope not. I'm rarely
Starting point is 00:22:48 intentionally crappy, but when I do, I don't want to be mistaken for not being. It's save it up, use it when it counts. Yeah. Yeah. I've put, yeah, I think when it comes to these events and like front end for me is is i would think like i actually thought that i would be great at front end because i have interest in art and stuff right to make things that is my naive assumption too i'm learning as you speak here please continue yeah and i was just i i thought that i would be and i have tried it and i only like it to an extent to present my idea, but I don't like to go in deeper and like make my CSS pretty or make this, make it look pretty. I am very much intrigued by all the backend stuff.
Starting point is 00:23:36 And most of my experience over the past 10 years in cloud has been in the, in the backend stuff, mainly just because I love APIs. I love like, you know, as long as I can connect or the, the idea of creating a demo or something that involves in my bunch of APIs and a backend to present an idea in a front end, I would work on that front end, but otherwise I'm not going to choose to do it, which is, which I found interesting for myself as well. It's a realization. Every time I try and do something with front-end,
Starting point is 00:24:08 it doesn't matter the framework. I find myself more confused at the end than I was when I started. There's something I don't get. And anytime I see someone on Twitter, for example, talking about how front-end is easier or somehow less than, I read that and I can't help myself. It's, you ridiculous clown.
Starting point is 00:24:23 You have no idea what you're talking about. I don't believe that I'm bad at all the things under engineering, just most of them. And I think I pick things up reasonably quickly. It is a mystery that does not align with this. And if it's easy for you, you don't recognize arguably a skill that you have that not everyone does by a landslide. And that's a human nature thing too. It's, it's always easy for me. It's obviously easy for everyone. If something's hard for me, no one would understand how this works. And the people that do are wizards from the future. Yeah. Never works that way. Yeah. Never works that way. At least we have this in common that we don't like to work on front ends. There's that too. And I think that no matter
Starting point is 00:25:02 where you fall on the spectrum of technology, I would argue that something that we all share in common is it doesn't matter how far we are down in the course of our entire career, from the very beginning to the very end, it is always a consistent, constant process of being humbled and made to feel like a fool by things you are supposedly professionally good at. And, oh, my stars. I just learned to finally give up and embrace it. to feel like a fool by things you are supposedly professionally good at.
Starting point is 00:25:25 And, oh, my stars. I just learned to finally give up and embrace it. It's like, what's going to make me feel dumb today? It's the learning in public approach, which is important.
Starting point is 00:25:35 So important. Especially like if you, if you, if you're thinking about like that, that's the part of general that makes it so exciting to write. Like just, just learning a new thing today and sharing it with you. Like I'm not claiming that I'm an expert,
Starting point is 00:25:49 but hey, let's talk about it. And sure, I might end up be looking dumb one day. I might end up looking smart the other day, but that's not the point. The point is I end up learning every day, right? And that's the most important part, which is why I love this particular job,
Starting point is 00:26:07 which is, what did we call it? Dev reliper. Dev reliping. And as a part of that, you're talking to people constantly, be it people in the community, in the ecosystem, people who you say,
Starting point is 00:26:18 you talk to customers, but you also talk to these other folks. I would challenge you on that, where when you're at a company like Google Cloud, increasingly everyone in the community and the ecosystem is in one way or another indistinguishable from being your customer.
Starting point is 00:26:32 It all starts to converge at some point. All the major cloud providers have that luxury, to be perfectly honest. What do you see in the ecosystem that people are struggling with as you talk to them? And again, any one person is going to have a problem or a bone to pick with some particular service or implementation. And okay, great.
Starting point is 00:26:52 What I'm always interested in is what is the broad sweep of things? Because when I hear someone complaining that a given service from a given cloud provider is terrible, okay, great. Everyone has an opinion. When I start to hear that four or five, six times, it's okay, there's something something afoot here and now i'm curious as to what it is what what patterns are you seeing emerge these days yeah i think more and more patterns along the lines of how can you make it automated how can you make anything automated right like from machine learning's perspective um how do i not need ml skills to build an ml model like how can we get there faster right
Starting point is 00:27:28 um same for like in the infrastructure side the serverless aspect um how how how can you make it easy for me so i can just build an application and just deploy it so it becomes your problem to run it and not mine oh that you are preaching to the choir on that. I feel like all of these services that talk about, this is how you build and train a machine learning model, yada, yada. For an awful lot of the use cases out there, it's exposing implementation details about which I could not possibly care less. It's the, I want an API that I throw something at, like be it a picture.
Starting point is 00:28:03 And then I want to get a response of, yes, it's a hot dog or that's disgusting or whatever it is that it decides that it wants to say. Great, because that's the business outcome I'm after. And I do not care what wizardry happens on the backend. I don't care if it's people who are underpaid and working extremely quickly by hand to do it. As long as from a business perspective,
Starting point is 00:28:23 it hits a certain level of performance, reliability, et cetera. And price, of course. Yeah. That is not to say I'm in favor of exploiting people. Let's be clear here. Cause I'm pretty sure most of these are not actually humans on the backend, but okay. I just want, that is the outcome that I think people are after.
Starting point is 00:28:38 And so much of the conversation around how to build and train models and all misses the point because there are companies out there that need that. Absolutely there are, but there are a lot more that need the outcome, not the focus on this. And let's face it, an awful lot of businesses that would benefit from this don't have the budget to hire the team of incredibly expensive people it takes to effectively leverage these things. Because I have an awful lot of observations about people in the machine learning space.
Starting point is 00:29:06 One of them is absolutely not that, wow, I bet those people are inexpensive for me to hire. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think the future of the whole cloud space, like when it started, we started with how can I run my server not in my basement, but somewhere else, right? Now we are at a different stage where we have different sets of problems and requirements for businesses, right?
Starting point is 00:29:33 And that's where I see it growing. It's like, how can I make this automated fast? Not my problem. How can I make it not my problem is like the biggest, I think, theme that we are seeing, whether it's infrastructure, data science, data analytics, in all of the spaces. I get a lot of interesting feedback for my comparative takes on the various cloud providers. And one thing that I've said for a while about Google Cloud has been that its developer experience is unparalleled compared to basically anything else on the market. It makes things just work.
Starting point is 00:30:11 And that's important because a bad developer experience has the unfortunate expression, at least for me, of, oh, this isn't working. This isn't working the way I want it to. I must be dumb. No, it's a bad user experience for you. What I am seeing emerge as well from Google Cloud is a incredible emphasis, and I do think they're aligned here, on storytelling and doing so effectively.
Starting point is 00:30:33 You're there communicating visually. Forrest is there basically trying to be the me of Google Cloud, which is what I assume he's doing. He would argue everything about that, and he'd be right to do it, but that's what I'm calling it. Cause this is my show.
Starting point is 00:30:46 He can come on and argue with me himself if he takes issue with it. But I love the emphasis on storytelling as and unifying solutions and the rest, as opposed to throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks to it. I think there's more intention being put into an awful lot of not just what you're building,
Starting point is 00:31:04 but how you're talking about it. Now it's integrated with the other things that you're building. That's no small thing. That is so hard, especially when you know the cloud space, like hundreds of products. They all have their unique requirement to solve a problem, but nobody cares, right? Like as a consumer, I shouldn't have to care that there are 120 some products or whatever. It doesn't matter to me. To me as a consumer, a customer, all that matters is whether I can solve my business problem with set of your tools, right?
Starting point is 00:31:40 So that's exactly why we have this team that I work in, that I'm a part of, which has an entire focus on storytelling. We do YouTube videos with storytelling. We do art like this. I've also dabbled into comics a little bit. And we continue to go back to the drawing board with how else we can tell these these stories um i know i mentioned this to forest i'm working on a song as well which i have never done before and i think i'm gonna butcher it i kind of have it ready for like six months but never released it right because i'm just too scared to do that. But anyway. Ship and then turn the internet off for a week and it'll be gone regardless by the time you come back. Problem solved. Until the reporters start calling and then you have problems. I might have to just do that and be like, you know what, word, keep saying whatever you want
Starting point is 00:32:36 to say. I'm not here. But anyway, going back to that point of storytelling, I think we have weaved it into the process and it's going really well. And now we are investing more in R&D and doing more of how we can tell stories in different ways. I have to say, I'm a big fan of the way that you're approaching this. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, and arguably, as I argue they should, get a copy of your book because it is glorious, where's the best place to find you? Thank you. Okay. So LinkedIn and Twitter are my platforms that I check every single day. So you can message me, connect with me.
Starting point is 00:33:19 I am available as my handle is P. Vergadia. I don't know if they have... This is all going in the show notes. You need not worry. Okay, perfect. So yeah, I don't have to spell it because my last name is hard. So you'll find it in the show notes.
Starting point is 00:33:36 But yeah, you can connect with me there and you will find at the top of both of my profiles the link to order the book. So you can do it there. Excellent. And I've already done so and I am just waiting for it to arrive. So it's going to be an exciting read,
Starting point is 00:33:52 if nothing else. One of these days, I may have to actually live tweet a reading thereof. We'll see how that plays out. That would be amazing. Be careful what you wish for. Some of the times the snark
Starting point is 00:34:01 could be a little too cutting. We have to be cautious of that. I'm always scared of your tweets. Like, do I want to read this or not? If nothing else, it at least tries to be funny. So there is that. Yes, yes, for sure. I really do.
Starting point is 00:34:15 I'm excited. I'm excited for when you get a chance to read it and just tweet whatever you feel like from all the bits and pieces that I've brought together. So I would love to get your take. Oh, you will one way or another. That's one of those non-optional things. It's one of the fun parts of dealing with me.
Starting point is 00:34:33 It's all crap. That shit posters back again, like the kid outside of your yard, just across the street, staring at your house and pointing and it's, Oh dear, here we go. I'm excited either way. He's got a platypus with him this time.
Starting point is 00:34:48 What's going on? It happens. We deal with what we have to. Yeah. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It was amazing.
Starting point is 00:34:57 You are a celebrity and I wanted to be, you know, part of your show for a long time. So I'm glad we were able to make it work. You are welcome back anytime. I will. An absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks again. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:35:09 Priyanka Vargadia, staff developer, but you call a developer advocate, at Google Cloud. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review
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