Screaming in the Cloud - The Power of Humor in Tech with Chloe Condon

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

About Chloe CondonChloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she was an advocate for their open-source & hosted error monitoring too...l, and created the award winning "Sentry Scouts" program. Her unique demos and projects with Microsoft Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart "astrology", and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, is likely one of the only engineers you'll meet who has played an ogre princess, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage (a true "triple threat"), and is passionate about bringing folks with non-traditional backgrounds into tech.LinksTwitter: @ChloeCondonLinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloecondon/Personal site: https://dev.to/chloecondonCompany site: https://azure.microsoft.com

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, cloud economist 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. And this episode is sponsored by Influx Data. This is Screaming in the Cloud. available for sale and has paying customers. To check out what they're doing, both with their SaaS offering as well as their on-premise offerings that you can use yourself because they're open source, visit influxdata.com. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Chloe Condon, a Bay Area-based cloud advocate for
Starting point is 00:01:07 Microsoft. Welcome to the show, Chloe. Thank you for having me. This is such a long time in the making. I'm so excited. It has been a while. Originally, I started trying to get you on the show way back when you were at Sentry, where you were doing a bunch of open source work with their hosted error monitoring tool. You were doing the Sentry Scouts program, which I always thought was just cheesy enough to be interesting. And then you sort of went past that, went to Microsoft.
Starting point is 00:01:33 You started doing a bunch of unique demos and interesting projects with Microsoft Azure that are just phenomenal. You have a fake boyfriend alert, which is awesome, because when he came over for dinner, he was totally convincing. I would never have guessed he was fake. Oh, he's so convincing. That smug look, and we brought my skeleton son over as well. It
Starting point is 00:01:53 was a family affair. It was a blast, across the board for everyone. People have known you from all kinds of interesting places. You've been featured in Vice, the New York Times, Smash Mouth's Twitter account somehow. What's the story there? That's one I haven't seen in a bio before. Oh my goodness. Well, it's so funny because a lot of the demos and examples that I use at Microsoft aren't really the traditional, not your dad's Microsoft, as maybe one would say. My background, of course, is in theater performance. So my brain works a little bit differently than other people. And I also have ADHD. So the left side of my brain is very creative. So when I think of these ways and examples and demos for using Azure,
Starting point is 00:02:39 my mind always goes to these weird places. but I can't take credit for this amazing smash mouth scenario because I did a workshop of my fake boyfriend workshop, which is Azure Functions workshop that integrates with Twilio. And essentially, it was built for those awkward situations at conferences or parties or events where you want to leave early, but you need that like fake call to come in to save you from the conversation you maybe want to leave. And I was giving this workshop in New York at the New York Reactor. And one of the women in the group decided to repurpose it. I usually have a little MP3 of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up that plays automatically. Again, can't take credit for that. That's a Twilio Docs Easter egg that I'm absolutely obsessed with. But this woman, Kalila, she added Smash Mouth's All Star to it. So it's just a never ending mp3 of, hey, now you're an all star and you press this button and you get a text that says, somebody once told me.
Starting point is 00:03:46 So I love to see people, especially with these open-sourced workshops and projects, people kind of taking it and running with it and making it a fake daughter call or a fake, oh, Beyonce's calling me. It's always fun to see what people repurpose with it. I will admit in years past, I've had an emergency panic button like that myself at conferences. Not that I had to use them very often, but every once in a while when someone, you know, follows you into the bathroom because they want to hang out with you, but don't have anything to say, it gets a little on the strange side and it's, okay, now I'm actively uncomfortable. Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it is a lifesaver.
Starting point is 00:04:22 And it's one of those things where with the nature of our roles and and specifically with developer advocacy a lot of our job is being not only just like a kind of spokesperson and voice for the company and and to give advice but to also um be a nice human being all around and i'm an ambivert which for those who don't know is an introverted extrovert, and I kind of cap out my social interaction after a couple hours. And I'm too nice. So if someone says like, oh, I must be bothering you, I'll be like, oh my gosh, you're not bothering me when they are 100% bothering me. So I have to kind of socially check in with myself.
Starting point is 00:05:01 My boyfriend has a higher tolerance for human interaction than I do. So I always kind of strategically go, okay, 30 minutes from now is when he's going to want to leave. So I'm going to start bugging him now. So it's very mathematical. There's a whole algorithm to my social interaction. So this Azure Functions app solved a lot of problems for me at conferences and even just house parties, really. It's a way out of awkward situations without making people feel bad. If you don't have a way to extricate yourself from a situation like that without stepping on people's toes, so to speak, people don't really want to have you around anymore. I don't want to say that there's a requirement to be a public figure. Even framing it like that sounds ridiculous and self-aggrandizing.
Starting point is 00:05:47 But when people know who you are more than you know who they are, it changes the dynamic in a way that I'm not sure people can necessarily understand if they haven't done that in some form or another. Your background in drama is another great example. You used to do a lot of interesting things on stages of a different kind. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I did many a musical in my day. Actually, we just moved apartments and I stumbled upon, I've never had a child, but a photo
Starting point is 00:06:15 of me looking very pregnant in Jerry Springer, the opera as a pregnant teenager. So I had a lot of very kooky credits on my resume. For some reason, I feel like there's a few of us in this space who tend to go down that particular path. I can't speak for anyone else, but my personal reasoning behind bringing humor into things as much as I do is without that, I've got to say the entire world of cloud computing is kind of dry if it's a just the facts story if it's a just the facts style of retelling instead i much rather would see folks getting the audience engaged because you need people engaged or they're just going to stare at their phone and miss the whole point of what you came there to tell them oh my gosh gosh, absolutely. And I think that Smash Mouth repurposing of that demo was such a great example. When else is Smash Mouth going to retweet an Azure project? Never, really, right? Smash Mouth probably doesn't even still know what Azure is. But that was
Starting point is 00:07:21 sort of the brilliance of what Kalila had done with this repurposing of the app is like, make it a pop culture, funny, you know, often named and referenced thing and make Azure relevant, which I thought was just so cool. And such this like weird hybrid, you know, I've done some hacking, hardware hacking, unrelated to work on things like Furbies and tapping into that like, humor, nostalgia, there's really something there. I see a lot of people doing this like April Vogue and Code on Twitter. People who really notice like, oh, there's something about this like throwback thing. Clippy is a really great example that gets people interested and engaged. Or even, you know, you and I make a lot of puns on Twitter I mean we're probably two of the biggest offenders I'm sure you're about to say a pun and you're
Starting point is 00:08:10 developing one as I'm speaking right now but I truly do you know my background is in musical theater I told my boyfriend when I first started my journey into learning how to program and going to a boot camp that if I bring anything to this, I'm going into it for the puns I told them, because I just kept thinking of all these, you know, awful, you know, the more you know, things like that in my early, early days of programming. And it's gotten worse. My puns have gotten better and worse in a lot of ways. Well, that's the trick is it's very easy to come at this world from a perspective of intense cynicism. And increasingly, I've been actively trying
Starting point is 00:08:52 to lift people up more than I tear them down. My rule has always been that I make fun of large, successful companies. So for better or worse, congratulations, Azure, you win. You're now in that club. I own twitterforpets.com, on the other hand, because making fun of a real small startup is not going to win friends, influence people,
Starting point is 00:09:10 or have the impact I want the joke to carry. And I think that's such a, you know, I think back on being a performer and doing musicals, and if you look at a picture of me, I'm this quirky, quirky, large-eyed, you know, blonde, five-foot-two girl, which is every girl who does musical theater, spoiler alert. Also, quick PSA, if you're a man looking to have a musical theater career, Broadway is calling, they're looking for you. It's the exact opposite in theater and tech. It's all women, no men. And coming into tech was quite
Starting point is 00:09:46 a culture shock. But this is all to say that I would always get typecast as the ingenue because I had these big doe eyes and long hair. But I really, really loved playing the quirky sidekick. Like I played Penny in Hairspray once and it was just so much fun. I got to do 25th annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which is literally just like a long form improv musical that's about adults playing children in the spelling bee, need I say more. But I noticed towards the end of my acting career that that's what I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed kind of the working of the crowd and finding the humor in things and being able to find that in tech has been so fascinating. I think, first of all, I'm a very weird anomaly to most people in tech. I don't look like the
Starting point is 00:10:32 traditional engineer, although I do own one Patagonia jacket. And I do own several pairs of Allbirds. And I did drink Soylent exclusively for a couple weeks, but we'll just like forget that ever happened. But I'm very much this quirky, pink-loving, I'm wearing an extra-large Target shirt that's a little girl's shirt from Target right now. I don't look like a traditional engineer. But I think a really, really big part of my aesthetic is kind of showing this other side of tech, this humorous side of tech. And RIP, I'm going to pour one out from my favorite tweet I've ever tweeted that I accidentally deleted, me giving a thumbs up in a women's bathroom, just wearing this pink shirt, had this crazy look on my face. And I was like, hey, women, where are you? The bathroom lines don't exist. Come and join tech.
Starting point is 00:11:21 And I think what made that tweet go so viral was people were like, oh my god, we've like never seen this before. And this is so funny that it's true. And I think back of like, you know, looking at my pin tweet right now, and like my highest performing tweets, they're always some sort of pun. Like I think I had one for a while that was like, Google in the sheets, Excel in the streets. And like my pin tweet right now is I like my coffee, like I like my browser tabs an excessive amount to the point where it causes me mild anxiety. And as much as I would like to think that's humor, that's just that's just the truth for me. But I think people Danny Donovan gives
Starting point is 00:11:54 a great or gave a great keynote about this at anxiety tech, which people really started to respond to her illustrations and visualizations of ADHD because it's sort of this collective consciousness of like, oh my God, that happens to me too. And we see people like Cassidy Williams doing this on, oh my gosh, she's hilarious. She's amazing and on my shortlist of people I'd love to meet someday. Oh my goodness. I didn't know I was in the presence of greatness when Sarah Chips took Cassidy Williams and I out to dinner. And then I discovered if you haven't watched this woman's videos on TikTok or Twitter, she is one of the funniest people in tech. But that just goes to show, I mean, I'm looking at her Twitter right now and she's got 54.4k likes on her very funny video about when your code works on the first try.
Starting point is 00:12:42 Like there's really something to be said for that like ironic humor that we all face every single day as engineers. Oh, my stars, yes. I frequently said that multi-cloud is a stupid best practice and I stand by that. However, if your customers are in multiple clouds and you're a platform, you probably want to be where your customers are
Starting point is 00:13:05 unless you enjoy turning down money. An example of that is Influxdata. Influxdata are the manufacturers of InfluxDB, a time-series database that you'll use if you need a time-series database. Check them out at influxdb.com. I think that people who come into this space from alternative backgrounds, for better or worse, tend to bring a unique perspective that occasionally lends itself to interesting storytelling. I mean, my primary skill is wearing a suit, although if I'm being perfectly honest, most days it wears me instead. That, for some reason, lends itself to a particular way of presenting myself on stage that was early on in my speaking career grabbed attention in a way that I wasn't at all expecting. And it's fascinating seeing other folks like you, for example, that remind me, oh wait, I'm not the only person out there who doesn't lead with, this is my code editor and here's some code I wrote,
Starting point is 00:14:04 and wow, that was a fast 45 minutes. Why is everyone sleeping? I mean, power to people who can make a talk like that engaging. I never could. Yeah. And I think that's so much speaks to, you know, there's so much talk these days about like soft skills are important and like, you know, it's important that you're, you're able to command a room and things like that. Obviously I have this very bizarre leg up, like, especially when I was entering the industry, you know, I had to kind of position myself as like, look, I'm, I'm more, I'm a more junior engineer, but you're not going to find an
Starting point is 00:14:35 engineer who's been doing public speaking for 20 plus years of their life. Like I've been on stage since I was four, essentially. So I think that's a really interesting place to come from, to be up leveling your tech skills, but having those like kind of person skills, because, you know, they ask you an interview question, as a junior engineer with a theater degree, have you ever dealt with any difficult people? And it's like, have you have you met an actor before? Right? Well, I managed to keep a straight face in response to that question so yeah that should do it and that's like why i'm such a huge advocate for you know these transfer role skills um you know i have this background in theater there's so many stage managers oh my gosh
Starting point is 00:15:16 stage managers could be some of the best pms if you've if you've never done a show before a stage manager essentially is doing the job of multiple product managers, like balancing all the schedules and the scripts and making sure everything goes well. So I'm a huge advocate for, you know, I'm working on a project right now that's a wine bot with a former sommelier who is now going to a boot camp. And I've met botanists and principals and bringing those perspectives into the industry. It's just so
Starting point is 00:15:45 valuable. Like not only does it create better products and, but it often goes hand in hand with diversity because spoiler alert, most, you know, I, I come from a, I'm a white, to give you a picture, paint you another picture yet again. I'm a, I'm a white woman from Sacramento, California, you know, middle-class family. I had computers around, but I never saw anybody who looked like me or acted like me doing anything with computers. There would be nothing to push me that way. So I think it's not only important to show people like, hey, here's what engineers can look like, and here's what engineering can look like, but finding all these little niche paths that it seems that both you and
Starting point is 00:16:25 I have found for ourselves and Cassidy has found for herself as well of almost this like, it's like a tech entertainer, but it's in no way acting. It's being a personality, but DevRel is such a weird, it's such a weird field, right? Because we we're ourselves but we're also representing a product and we also want it to be realistic and and genuine and i think that's why i lean more towards these more humorous quirky funny examples because if i took it too seriously i i don't think i could do it i am right there with you i mean i take a look through my news feed right now apparently the day that we're recording this uh the first day of Microsoft Ignite. And there have been a bunch of announcements out of there. And some of them are fascinating.
Starting point is 00:17:12 And others are just a little out there. For example, Microsoft pre-announced this morning Azure Quantum, which is apparently a quantum cloud computing service that is going to be rolling out in the coming months. Now, there's a lot of deep math in something like that that I'm sure someone smarter than I am could talk about. But my immediate knee-jerk response to something like that is, great, how can I make fun of it? Because if I'm making fun of it, well, at least we're having a conversation about it. And generally speaking, I tend to put Microsoft into that bucket of companies that are large enough that if I make fun of them, they're probably going to be able to withstand my slings and arrows so i got to know then what where did your mind go with quantum was it some sort of like avengers villain or something it feels like it's one of those uh new names for uh technology of some sort
Starting point is 00:18:01 maybe it's a new kind of cpu maybe it winds up being a throwback to Quantum Leap, which was a great show. And we could do a whole skit based upon nothing other than that, only instead of jumping randomly from time to time to time trying to get back home, we're crashing into various meeting rooms trying to figure out where the hell we're supposed to be
Starting point is 00:18:19 to have a conversation because nothing is labeled sensibly in this entire building. That sounds like a Hulu, Hulu show maybe. Yeah. Yeah, it really does. Or taking a meeting at any one of a number of companies I'm not allowed to name. And other times it's, for example, sure, I can talk about some of the upcoming stuff that Microsoft might be doing, for example, but it's way more engaging if I start building
Starting point is 00:18:42 protest signs and marching downtown outside of the Microsoft reactor, urging Microsoft to turn it off before it melts down and kills us all. I know. What is in there? There's all that like... And it's glowing at weird times and strange noises coming out of it. And it's not just Microsoft. I think that it is unconscionable that AWS has launched the AWS Global Accelerator.
Starting point is 00:19:04 It is doing terrible things for climate change. And anyone who knows what any of these things are looks at me as if I've blown several IQ points out the back of my head the last time I sneezed. But that's not, it's not out of based out of not having anything else to say. It's the getting people to do a double take and suddenly engage. You meet people where they are. Because, I'm sorry, press releases inherently are so watered down that even the people writing them by the time they go out just don't care anymore. And I think, like, such a great example of that is, well, there's been all this talk lately that Microsoft has really changed, especially in the last couple years. I think such a great example of this, which I just have a lot of pride in because this
Starting point is 00:19:47 is just like a silly thing that I love, but this sort of like resurgence of Clippy, which kind of in a weird way started from me making very silly business cards. But there's a whole, definitely Google it, type in or Bing it, I should say, I'm a Microsoft employee. Go to bing.com and type in unauthorized autobiography of Clippy. It's about an hour long video by two folks at Andreessen Horowitz. And it was all inspired by the business cards that I made, but specifically around, you know, Clippy was viewed as such a failure back then. And to give everyone context, you know, I just turned 30 as such a failure back then. And to give everyone context, you know, I just turned 30. I don't come from a computer science background. I have a theater
Starting point is 00:20:30 degree. So as a 30-year-old, newer to the industry, I had no concept that Clippy was a failure. In fact, I thought Clippy was a very, very cute, nostalgic thing, which I'm coming to find out is a pretty common sentiment among people my age. We were not in the software engineering field at the time that this was viewed as a... That was such a strange thing for me when I started tweeting. People were like, oh, this guy's back? I know, he was great. He was taken before his time. Microsoft took him out behind the shed and Google Reader'd him. Exactly. And I love Clippy and I view it even to this day. I mean, obviously, as I sit here at my desk, I have, you know, a Clippy coin purse and a Clippy, you know, refoldable straw. And I just, I love that little guy. And it's been really interesting to learn
Starting point is 00:21:17 about the history of Microsoft while working at Microsoft, because there's a lot of little nuances that like, I didn't know I had to watch the developers, developers at developers video, because why would I have watched it before this time in my life, I had no awareness of it. So it's a weird kind of catch up that I have to do not only from a technical standpoint, but also from a pop culture standpoint of understanding who the heck these people are that get referenced on Twitter often. And like, you know, especially when I started in the industry, I worked at a Docker CICD company called Codefresh. And I'm like, what the heck's a Kubernetes? Like, okay, how do you spell that? If you're going to answer that
Starting point is 00:21:54 one, please let me know. Cause I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Same, same, same. Maybe I need that children's book. Maybe that'll, that'll help me a little bit. I'm right there with you. I mean, I spent this morning, for example, talking with my new best friend on Twitter, Microsoft Excel. I made a reference a couple of days ago and someone mentioned, oh, don't joke. Spreadsheet Twitter is small, but passionate. I'm like, yes, but you shouldn't date from it. Never hook up where you V look up.
Starting point is 00:22:19 And Microsoft Excel chimed in on the conversation and we're best friends now. We're going to hang out soon. I love it. And also, you know, I can't, and mind you, I don't know who runs these accounts personally since Microsoft's really big, but I want to say it was the, either the Windows dev account or one of those verified, you know, major Microsoft accounts on Halloween said something like have a spooky, you know, Halloween on the web and it had all these spider
Starting point is 00:22:45 emojis and i'm like in what like 10 years ago in what world would we see like microsoft an official microsoft account tweeting like the windys account you know what i mean look at and you can see what that was like today just by looking at any large banks twitter account or investment firm where they have no personality of which they are aware. And I'm certain if whoever was controlling that account expressed one, they would be immediately fired. Yeah, that's what people tended to think of. It's the old school marketing voice, for lack of a better term. Now it's engaging with people who care. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As long as you don't wind up getting dragged by a social media mob, it's generally okay.
Starting point is 00:23:32 Yeah, yeah. It's very, it's an interesting time to be on Twitter as a brand and specifically as a tech company, I feel, because there's sort of this, and it's totally what we were talking about earlier about this idea of incorporating humor and having it be successful, which is a whole other science, right? Like, what is funny to a particular demographic? When you look at the demographics of the people who follow me on Twitter, it's mostly tech people. And my tech jokes do not land on Facebook. I'm not really on Facebook anymore. But all my Facebook, Instagram followers are people from my theater life. And, you know, I tell a Rajak stroke in there, obviously it lands very
Starting point is 00:24:05 flat, but it's been really interesting to kind of find the different humors of these different sides of things and to really channel that, to really make that the thing that helps sell the product or make the product more interesting, because it's exactly what you said. You go to these, you tag a brand and you're like, Norwegian Airlines FU, my plane was delayed, and you get the auto responder. It's gonna be very, very different than a quip back at you, especially with someone like you, Corey,
Starting point is 00:24:34 who can respond really well and they're gonna have a hard time. Well, nowadays, I mean, again, everyone, I think I go back two years now and I had fewer than 1500 Twitter followers and it took me seven years to get there. And some of my early tweets since deleted were pretty much me yelling at various companies about perceived customer service failures, which everyone can enjoy. I was, I was the worst kind of Twitter user. Wait, I take that back. There are several
Starting point is 00:24:57 worst kinds of Twitter user, but I was one of the unpleasant to listen to types of Twitter user, not the actual horrifying type of Twitter user. This was early on. Yeah. And a funny story. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but Ty, my boyfriend Ty is an Android dev.
Starting point is 00:25:13 And when we first started dating, he was working at Twitter. He was an Android dev at Twitter. And I, in theater, actresses for the most part, at least in musical theater in the Bay area, we mainly used Facebook and Instagram for social media.
Starting point is 00:25:26 So I was like, Twitter's weird. Who uses Twitter? And flash forward to today in time, my boyfriend's like, can you please get off Twitter? Like, can we have a conversation face to face? And I'm like, I got to just draft this joke real quick. And so it's been interesting to not only kind of learn how to, there's a whole learning process of knowing how to interact with people. I'm 30 and trying to learn TikTok right now. Shout out to Tierney and Julie and Emily
Starting point is 00:25:51 for trying to get this old lady to learn a new platform. But yeah, there's a whole subculture to every, LinkedIn is a, well, it's its own platform in itself to engage. Meanwhile, I come from an era where our social network of choice was communicating with one another via BGP route announcements, which is, that's an inside joke for some folks. So what was the face mask you used? That must have been part of it.
Starting point is 00:26:21 It was a eucalyptus. Yeah, it's a whole skin regimen treatment. I'll have to must have been part of it. It was a eucalyptus. Yeah, it's a whole skin regimen treatment. I'll have to do a blog post about it. I do have to thank you as well. One of the nice things about knowing people such as yourself who have a background in theater are that whenever there's a, there are periodically certain referrals I can benefit from.
Starting point is 00:26:44 And the one that stuck most notably in my mind was the person you sent me to to get my headshots done. Yes, oh my gosh, he's my neighbor now. Yes, Ben Krantz. Oh yeah. And we'll throw a link to that in the show notes as well. And so when he suddenly wonders where all these ridiculous people are coming from,
Starting point is 00:26:59 don't tell him, just show up and get headshots done. Since I started doing theater professionally in the Bay Area, and a funny story, there's a woman named Lauren who works at Microsoft. And when I was working at Century, we had a call together and we were the first two people on the call. And you know, when you have a Teams meeting or a Skype call, if you're not doing video chat, it just shows your image, which is usually your headshot. And we were waiting for the other people to join. And I said, I'm so sorry, I have such a random question for you. Are you an actress?
Starting point is 00:27:26 And she said, how did you know? I'm an opera singer. I have such a radar for headshots and photos from theater performers and actors, because it's so different. There's this sort of like, it's not a smize, but it's like, I'm acting. So I'm so glad.
Starting point is 00:27:44 You're the perfect person to go get a headshot from Ben, Corey. And it worked out super well for the first three quarters of the shoot. And then I'm like, yeah, let's do one for fun. And I do the happy with my mouth open face. And Ben is a professional, professional enough not to ask what is wrong with you.
Starting point is 00:28:01 He just smiled, took the picture and it worked out super well. Yeah, he's great. And also Easter egg egg about Ben he's also a really amazing performer I saw him in drowsy chaperone once I used to only know him as a photographer and he was a producer when we did Jerry Springer the opera and then I saw him on stage and he blew my mind with his voice another another multi-talented individual working in several fields yeah Yeah, he was a consummate professional. It's Ben Krantz, K-R-A-N-T-Z.com. We'll throw that into the show notes and see if
Starting point is 00:28:31 we can get him a few extra gigs for people wanting to look amazing on Twitter profile pictures, on conference speaking circuits, or even on their dating profile. So I've done a couple of ridiculous music video style things recently where I'll write song parody lyrics, have other people perform them. Sometimes I'll perform them and then my staff laughs and won't let that get into the light of day.
Starting point is 00:28:58 But one of these days we should collaborate on something. I think that there's a certain affinity for interesting music, making fun of things in tech, and more or less just, I think both of us were born without that part of our brain that experiences shame. So there's no problem with either one of us going out there and being actively ridiculous. Oh my gosh, yes. There's so many cool people who are doing specifically music parodied stuff.
Starting point is 00:29:25 My coworker, Cassie and I, for a while, we really wanted to do this Twitch stream where we would essentially put up a Microsoft Learn Lab and then kind of work with our audience to come up with punny songs and lyrics and things like that. But the other day I was programming with my friend Kimberly and she's newer to programming. And I told her, oh, for the blog post, just use a GitHub gist. And she's like, oh, what's that? And I was like, oh, here, just use this gist. And I recently, while out to, let's give you an insight to how my brain works. While out to dinner with my boyfriend was eating lobster bisque and was singing this
Starting point is 00:30:01 bisque by Faith Hill, like this bisk, this bisk. So obviously Kimberly and I were like, oh wow, we have to do a parody of this gist. So coming to the Billboard charts soon, maybe a collab with Kimberly Corey. We needed, it was the CCKs, CPK. We'll think of a better band name, but there's just so much.
Starting point is 00:30:25 We certainly can. Cassie and I came up with If I Could Deploy instead of If I Were a Boy from Beyonce. There's just so much there. And I'm saying it out loud on this podcast so you guys can't steal my ideas. But yeah, WaffleJS always has an open call for performers. So I think we got a good end there, Corey.
Starting point is 00:30:43 I really think there's another opportunity around the if I could turn back time only about how to use Git properly. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, that's so good. In a full drag share look, absolutely. So if people want to learn more about the exciting life that you lead,
Starting point is 00:31:01 what you're up to next, and of course, find out the latest on your album before it drops, where can they up to next, and of course, find out the latest on your album before it drops. Where can they find you? Yes, of course. Well, you can definitely follow me on Twitter, just my name at Chloe Condon. I also have a website. If you go to
Starting point is 00:31:16 chloecondon.com, by the time this is live, I'll have a cute little website that links to all my videos and upcoming talks and some of the fun projects that I'm working on lately. And if you want to check out how to get started with Azure very simply and easily, you can go to aka.ms slash screaming with Chloe.
Starting point is 00:31:37 Excellent. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and of course, for tolerating my ridiculous sense of humor. Well, thank you. And you know, I'll probably be sending you a Twitter DM to speak with me and of course for tolerating my ridiculous sense of humor well thank you and uh you know i'll probably be be sending you a twitter dm running a pun by you soon as per usual yes that that doesn't tend to differentiate itself we see we have so many of those back channel puns is this funny to anyone besides me don't care posting it yolo chloe condon cloud advocate
Starting point is 00:32:03 at microsoft azure i'm cloud economist core Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave it a five-star review on iTunes. If you've hated this podcast, please leave it a five-star review on iTunes. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at ScreamingInTheCloud.com or wherever Fine Snark is sold. This has been a humble pod production stay humble

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