EES2024 THE TECH HUSTLE-Blueprints for Success:Manifesting Your Career in an Ever-Changing Landscape

All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Tech Hustle Blueprints for Success hosted by our one and only EES MC, Mr. Bobby Doris.

Super excited to have you all join us today. I’m going to introduce Bobby in just a second, but before we do that, couple quick reminders. One, please utilize the chat to have conversations and share your thoughts during the session, but please keep all messages relevant to the topic of the session.

Note that the presenters and speakers can see the chat. Our team will also be monitoring the chat and questions may be answered live during the session, but we’ll also do Q&A at the end. So, post your questions, upload questions that you want to see answered.

Following the session, we just ask that you complete a brief feedback survey because your feedback is very important to us. And with those reminders out of the way, I would like to introduce our speaker. So, Bobby D is a seasoned engineer turned professional speaker with 20 plus years of experience in technology and engineering specializing in the practices of site reliability engineering with an emphasis on hyperscale distributed infrastructure.

Bobby D is known for his outgoingness and historical knowledge of Twitter’s tech and DNI journey where he worked for nine years and became one of only a few black engineers to achieve the title of staff engineer. As Bobby D’s journey continues, he looks forward for opportunities to contribute to his community hashtag the tech hustle by mentoring, coaching, and teaching the next generation about tech and the value of our diverse perspective. So without further ado, please show some love for Bobby D in the chat and I will turn things over to him.

Show me some love. Oh, can I get him a round of applause, Dana? Thank you so much for that introduction.

I hope y’all notice that my setup is a little different than all the other presenters that you have today. First of all, I’m in podcast mode. So, I got my switchboard here.

I got the camera set up. I got my, you know, laptop here. And I see all y’all in there.

So, I definitely want to say what’s up. Throw where you’re from and what city you’re representing inside the chat so we can definitely definitely keep and connect. But we have a really great conversation tonight and like I said, it’s going to be a little different because I don’t really have no slides.

So, you’re gonna see a lot of me and a lot of speaking and a lot of talking. But I’m going to really be giving y’all the blueprint to success by manifesting your career in an everchanging landscape. First of all, my name is Bobby Doris, but my friends call me Bobby D.

So, when you see me in these streets, make sure you holl at me for sure because I travel the country. I speak on stages all over the place talking about, you know, leveling up in tech, my journey in tech, and definitely some of the topics we’re going to be covering today because I have a blueprint for you all that’s truly going to be an insightful step that I’ve took multiple times to secure job opportunities, especially for landscapes that we’re in right now. Because I don’t know about y’all, but sometimes I feel like I’m on a roller coaster.

This thing’s going up and down. Last year, everybody’s getting a job. This year it’s tough to even get a you know a phone call back.

But I’m going to give you some skills and more specifically help you tailor a plan that gives you an idea how you can be successful in this field of engineering. But before we get started, one of the things that I always like to do is first of all spend some time to talk a little bit about my journey. So, I don’t really have a traditional path to working at, you know, these tech companies that I feel like are kind of like the top of our industry, at least during this era.

And we’ll talk more about Twitter and my time there, but my story actually begins way back in the 80s because I was born in 1982, actually October 17th, 1982. So, my birthday’s coming up. So, I’m hoping y’all give me some birthday wishes out there.

I’m about to be I’m gonna say it out loud, 42 years old. Which I can’t believe, especially with all these gray hairs. Sometimes people see me and say, "Hey, they can’t think that I’m this old, but they don’t know what these knees feel like when you turn 40." But you, you all, most of you don’t really have to worry about it much because you’re getting started in your career.

But being somebody in the 80s, one thing that I really enjoyed, and here goes a little twist for y’all in terms of us having a good time here at this, I don’t know what I’m going to call it. Maybe a side podcast episode here at, Emerging Engineering Summit or Emerging Engineer Summit 2024. But one thing that I always like to do, and hopefully I don’t get dinged with this for YouTube when they actually, you know, play this, but one thing we’re going to play tonight is we’re going to be playing music all throughout the night.

Especially when I’m talking about errors, we’re talking about the 80s. If you don’t know what hit this is, I hope you know who Michael Jackson is. Which by far is one of the greatest entertainers of all time.

And this song right here came out during my era and really just impacted my life because I have a really cool story to talk about. This song called Billy Jean. So being an 80s baby, I grew up in South Florida and always enjoyed music and loved, entertaining, you know, dancing and thinking that I was the man.

But one of the cool things that also happened is is when this song came out, the title was called Billy Jean, but my mom’s name is Fina Jean. So for at least a whole year straight, in my mind, I thought Michael Jackson was talking about me being his son. So much so that I remember talking to my pops one time and be like, "Yo, dad, do you know Michael Jackson?" Because when I listen to this song, he’s talking about my mommy and I want to know how how this all works out.

But whenever I think of the 80s and during that era, I really do think about the value around music and definitely during that time how Michael Jackson impacted my life. I know that doesn’t have anything specifically to do with tech, but just trying to calibrate us from where I came from the 80s to where we’re right now in 2024. You can imagine that’s a clip of time though.

But one of the cool things during the era that I grew up in is also I grew up in the dotcom bubble. And more or less the invention of the internet, the invention of computers, mobile devices, all these technologies that were using happened right in front of my eyes, especially being a child of the 80s. And one of the things that I always enjoyed when I was younger is I always used to like breaking my toys so I can figure out how things work because I was an engineer even at that age about the 90s and 2000 for sure.

I was definitely in my mind already an engineer because I could take a part of let’s say a cassette player, put it back together or a VHS system and basically, you know, set it back up andor configure and connect these things together in terms of computers before the internet was even invented. It’s something that I grew up in terms of the time and era of my time especially you know growing up in the 80s 90s and 2000 but my story definitely has a very unique beginning because I’m also if you didn’t know a first generation Haitian-American big shout outs to all my out there. I know y’all out there so definitely show some love in the chat.

But the thing about being someone from another country especially being a first generation and in my case I was actually the first one in both of my families born here is that when they say you start from the bottom you really do start from the bottom. And as you all will find out my ability to manifest these opportunities really you know started off with the idea of what we could be in terms of my family but also what I could be in terms of what my father always instilled in me. Dream big, dream farther.

If you think that’s it, dream even farther. And it’s definitely something that I hope I inspire you all to do as we’re going through this journey. But that’s a little bit about, you know, the beginning of my time, 80s baby, a first generation, but let’s talk about any college degree or college attendance.

Like I only really went to vocational school for two years, so no college degree. And I really use certifications as a way to level up. So, if you’re on this journey right now and you are really, you know, unaware of how capable you are without a college degree, take a look at your boy because I don’t even know what I would do if I had got all those student loans.

I couldn’t pay them back, but I only had to take out a few dollars out just for two years and that’s it and level up. But the reason why I’m bringing this up in terms of the beginning of the story is that I want to make sure that you you all know foundationally like y’all hear a lot of my accolades and things that I’ve achieved in my life or places I’ve worked. But some and a lot of people don’t really know the struggle and the challenges I had to come up with, you know, coming up in a, you know, a first generation immigrant household to, you know, not having a college degree but still being able to get it.

This is why I tell my mentees all the time, if I can do it, you can 100% do it and you can do even more. But we’re going to, you know, move on in the conversation and really just talk about my early portion of my tech career. So, after graduating technical school, getting a few certifications, I mostly focused on systems administration.

I know a lot of you all are studying computer science, data science, machine learning, getting ready for AI, but for me, I started on the infrastructure side of the house. And sometimes I feel like y’all don’t even give infrastructure some love because I don’t really hear anybody interested in learning systems engineering. All y’all want to do is, you know, write code and then do, you know, leak code algorithms type stuff.

And I’m like, yo, but there’s so many more lanes and niches of engineering that are out there. And I do want to inspire you all to broaden your scope. Because I became a systems engineer and then I eventually adopted another skill being software engineering.

But I do want you all to know that there are other lanes because becoming a systems administrator which is like the first level into that system engineering role. I had to get certified on an operating system called Microsoft. I think we had not I think we had a a great keynote speaker Donna Sakard this morning introduce and be a keynote speaker to this event.

And she works for Microsoft but Microsoft was one of the first companies that I learned the operating system at a very high level more or less looking for job opportunities. But the thing that happened during that time especially around 2000 and 2002 I’m about to show my age again. I actually graduated high school and class of 2000 new millennials we out here.

Some of y’all might have been born then. So sometimes that just takes me back but in general I grew graduated high school in 2000 and went to technical school for two years. So I got in the industry around 2020 2002 or 2002 I don’t even know if you can say 2002 but whatever 2002 and during that time a lot of organizations vocational schools almost like boot camps are now obsessively pushing people into the systems administration skill and it’s almost feeling like the same climate that we’re experiencing right now because if you think about the dotcom bubble that’s when you know opportunities in terms of layoffs companies shutting down and I would actually, you know, say that it was a little bit more challenging than the time that we’re living right now.

Because companies were wiped out in terms of operational wise, right? It’s like, hey, that company used to exist. It’s gone tomorrow.

Not just lay off a percentage of their staff, but totally gone. And the thing that I really learned during that time and this is the note that I wrote here is is that u maintaining the high technical skills that industry people or industry in terms of companies are looking for is your success is your way to be successful in the field itself. What do I mean by that?

So when I graduated technical school in 2002, I got a few certifications around Microsoft as an operating system. I landed my very first job at the help desk. And at the time I thought I was going to be working as a systems administrator looking towards an engineering role but I had to start a little bit lower in the stack and it’s because the climate that I was in and more or less started at the help desk.

This was 2003 and then within one year I got laid off. It was by far one of the most challenging things that I went through in my career, at least at the initial part. But after I’ve been in the game for so long, I actually was grateful that I had that experience early.

Because one thing that I always remind my mentees, especially when we’re going through climates like this, is to note you are literally a line item on a spreadsheet, unfortunately. And sometimes you misunderstand what companies will commit to you, especially when they have to make cuts. You can imagine during that time I was making the most money in my household.

I was feeling like I was going to take on some more bills. I was about to get a new car. I was thinking about, hey, I want to go buy a house.

And then all of a sudden, gone. And for me, it was one of those impactful experiences in my life because it changed the trajectory in terms of the things that I focused on. And I’m going to give you some more insights around that because what I found out was is that there was an overabundance of individuals that learned my skill.

And the skill that I learned was Windows administration. There were dime a dozen in the industry and everybody was applying for the same job similar to what’s going on right now. And what I had to do is shift my focus and upskilling and developing skills on technologies and things that nobody else wanted to work on.

So when it came to about 2003 2004, I actually had you know the universe line the stars up really well. Is a great opportunity to work for a small startup. Which gave me a chance to travel domestically and internationally for four years which whenever I think back to it I was well how was I probably 2021 22 23 so from my 20s to from 20 to 23 24 I worked on cruise ships.

Basically what I used to do is I used to service the computer systems on cruise ships but more specifically I started to develop a skill that nobody else wanted to learn. And and just as a sidebar I wish during that time that I had something called IG or I had something called Twitter or Facebook during that time. Because there are so many places I’ve been in this planet that at that time Polaroid was the only way that I was able to capture it.

But man, my my IG feed would be fire right now andor I would have, you know, thousands of followers because I’ve been, you know, posting since then. But I’ve been to some crazy places like just to name off a few all over Asia. Sorry about that.

I have my 6:30 walking alarm come up. Don’t worry about it. When you get 40, you’re going to have to add things like that to your calendar so you don’t forget.

But sidebar, another sidebar. But anyways, traveling the world, I’ve visit places like all over Asia. I’ve been to Japan.

I’ve been to Singapore. I’ve been to, let’s say, in the Pacific. I’ve been to Hawaii, but I’ve also been to Tahiti.

I’ve been to Australia. I’ve been to New Zealand. Let’s say in the Europe, I’ve been to Spain and Barcelona.

I’ve been to France and Italy. Have been all over this planet and these places and I tell my kids this all the time. Some of them I might not even get to go again like Tahiti I don’t know if I’m going to sit for another 16 hour flight to get there or even Singapore.

Singapore was another long flight almost 18 hours to get there. But in general, I really enjoy that time because one thing that I learned by transitioning into that role, that opened up right after my, layoff was I needed to develop skills that were different than what I was learning in school, but more focused on what the industry needed. And the reason why I say this is that this is the first nugget for the blueprint is developing the right skills requires you to research what companies are looking for.

And we’re going to be talking about the blueprint more specifically, but just keep this in mind that developing the skills that companies are looking for, that’s how you get your next opportunity. Not what you just think what the industry is looking for, but looking at exactly what the companies are looking for gives you an opportunity to narrow that focus. So, while I was working there at this small mom and pop startup, I learned a newer operating system called Linux, more specifically becoming a Unix administrator.

Now, why did I learn this skill? Number one, companies were hiring and they were hiring at the top level in terms of salary. Number two, nobody wanted to learn the terminal.

So, if you’ve ever logged into Bash or ZSH and or execute commands through your VS Code, that terminal became my best friend, right? I did all of my administration and learned to administer computers through that one terminal. Being able to SSH into a computer, understanding, you know, the file system structure, understanding services like DNS, understanding, you know, LDAP and Active Directory and like really getting down to the core functionality of some of these technologies because companies were looking for these skills and one of those was, do you know how to work on a terminal?

So, what did your boy do? Became an expert. I actually have a course that I’ve written talking about, you know, developing skills around Bash because I don’t know if you knew this, but Bash is not just a terminal, it’s also a programming languages and actually a very powerful scripting language if you didn’t know.

And I do want to encourage you to always sharpen your skills around different programming languages and skill sets. But learning this specific skill, becoming a Unix administrator by utilizing that terminal opened up massive doors for me. And the thing that I want to make sure I reemphasize in terms of getting your blueprint ready is ensuring that you’re developing skills that companies are looking for because that’s what driven me to learn that as a skill set and really develop a high level of proficiency.

Now the thing that I always like to emphasize especially as you’re going on this journey and I’m looking at my notes here to make sure I stay in line because you can see your boy likes to talk and I can just keep going. But one of the quotes that I wrote especially about ma skills mastery and and chasing the bag is I find a lot of my mentees and cohorts really not focusing on the right object. I think a lot of expectations on what the amount of salary you were going to get or the roles at companies that you’re you’re positioning yourself for really puts a veil in front of you in terms of what you should be focusing on.

And what you should be focusing on is skills development. Developing your skills so much that you want to chase the knowledge, not the bag because the bags will follow once you get the knowledge. And the key thing about this is that if you think about my journey and we’re only at the beginning.

I unfortunately got laid off. I’m looking for work. What job should I get?

Start going to job sites. Oh, you need to develop that skill and that skill which we’ll talk more about as we go through it. And I developed that knowledge that eventually the bags they just come they I don’t even know how they get to the house.

Sometimes I even forget. Look, I’m over here having a conversation with you and I forgot that I have my switchboard here. So hopefully I can add some more ad libs in there.

But anyways, developing that skill is definitely important and one of those areas that I spent an extremely amount of time is perfecting that skill around Unix administration because my journey took me from working at that small mom and pop to transitioning to work at the South Florida Water Management District. But let me tell you how I manifested because this is one of the first examples. So, while I was working at traveling the world, you know, I got married.

And my wife was like, "Hey, if if if you you’re going there, I’m going there, too." And I’m like, "All right." And we started, you know, about to have a family. We had my daughter. So, I was like, "All right, I got to cut this traveling down a little bit more and more specifically transition into another role." So, what I did was, and this is the manifesting part, is I started to research online for what roles that were available with the skill sets that I was developing.

And I stumbled upon a state local government down here in South Florida called the South Florida Water Management District. I’m not going to go too in too much details about what they do, but just think of the Lake Cook Chobee. They’re the ones that manage the water flows from the lake and definitely during hurricanes to ensure that everybody doesn’t flood.

But one of the skill sets that they were looking was systems administrator that’s proficient at Unix but building high performance compute clusters. And what I found out by that job description is is that it wasn’t the only place that was looking for that experience of building high performance compute clusters, especially at the level of engineering I was attempting to get into, is that it helped me manifest the career position that I wanted, which was at the South Florida Water Management District. Because what I did was is I took that job description, I put it on my wall, and every day I would look at it and I would see that there’s skills that I’m missing.

I don’t know the operating system and understand kernel parameters that I need to add and increase performance for latency challenges. I see on there that it says that I need to learn a configuration management tool called Puppet. I actually don’t even know what a configuration management tool is.

All right, let me highlight that. So much so that that became my blueprint for developing skills. Look at that.

I’m already giving you away the whole worksheet, the whole the whole setup already in in just one small little point of conversation. But I’m going to tell you how this has happened multiple times because once I did that, that job position came to me. And what I mean by that is I did have to go chase it.

I did have to go write what are they called? Cover letters. I did have to reach out to recruiters.

I used to have to pick up the phone and call companies be like, "Hey, I’m calling about this position. Can I speak to the hiring manager?" That like that’s how much hustle I had to be or had to commit to. But the key thing here is is that I positioned myself to apply for roles that I was developing the skills that they were looking and we’ll talk more about it.

But let me tell you a little bit about the South Florida Water Management District. So while working at the district which is our shorthand calling it call it the district. I was able to really develop some real world experiences because while I was traveling you know touching these stars in the world and going to some of these awesome places that I probably never not get to again.

It still was limited in terms of the technology that I was exposed to because it was only one application one you know network connection or one setup that I was really impacting and I wanted to broaden my knowledge to be able to manage more computing resources at a very hyper scale. So going to the district and getting that opportunity and really just manifesting the skill sets is that I started to research and develop these skills before I applied. And then when I got there, oh my gosh, I was a rock star.

I’m one of the first engineers here in South Florida that designed one of the first compute clusters that does statistical modeling on hurricane flows. I helped develop a sunshine cluster that allowed us to expand computing resources not just from one district to the next because I developed that skill. But the cool thing about the district is I also was able to get mentors and I actually call them by technical mentors.

There were two older fellas that were old school Unix guys and I mean they one had a ponytail stretched his hair back and the other one his glasses were about this thick and he’ll still laugh at it now because I always used to make fun of him with about it because I was just such a young cat off the corner that you know was just a little different. Very friendly, very outgoing. You know, this energy that I show right now.

I used to do this all the time and it’s not nothing new for people to really, you know, gravitate to me. And what happened was is that these two Unix administrators really brought me under their wings and really developed my skills to the next level because they helped me manifest the next role that I wanted because I told them how I got the job at the district and how I was like working towards developing this skill or that skill. And the thing that they really just gave me some insights about is like, hey, if you are looking to take this to the next level, you should be looking over there on the west coast in Silicon Valley for companies like Google and Amazon and, you know, shooting for that in terms of where I was at my journey.

Because one of my mentors gave me this lesson. He told me one time, he was like, "Hey, if you’re ever in an environment and you become the smartest person, then you need to move. You need to go somewhere else." And the cool thing about what happened working at the district or at the South Florida Water Management District is that at the beginning I became the one I was the one that asked a lot of questions and then eventually during my time there everyone started to ask me questions.

Even my mentors were asking me how I were doing things. At that point it was time for me to be out. So my second attempt to manifesting the role that I wanted, right?

This is where I remember that lesson that I learned from the first time moving from a small mom mom and pop startup into, you know, state local government is I needed to start to do some research and find out what skill sets companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon were looking for. And what did I do again? I went to their job sites, google.com or jobs.google.com, and I put in my keyword.

My keyword is Linux. Put in Linux and all of these job positions start to pop up. Not only entry-level jobs, mid-level jobs, but I was looking at senior staff level jobs because I want to see what technologies they’re calling out.

So, I see a senior level Linux systems administrator managing data center scale. Oh, perfect. I want that job.

Let me go look at the job description. You need to have this skill set. You need to have that skill set.

You need to know about hypers scale. You need to know about fault tolerant. You need to know about replication.

And I’m like, man, I don’t know about these. So, what did I do? I printed out that job description.

I put it on my wall and I start highlighting the things again. Oh, this skill I need to develop. This skill I need to be mindful of.

And I spent the next at least two and a half years, seriously, developing skills around the things that were posted on this job description. And what happened was is that the district got to a point where it almost had some layoffs. There was a new governor that came into office.

And whenever a new governor just like a new president people get cut there is new position that come up and or structural things changes in terms of the organization and there was hints of being laid off and you remember I got burnt the first time. I was not going to let this happen because I got a wife and two kids at this time. So I’m like, yo, I got to make sure we straight.

And what happened was is that I felt in terms of development wise that I could cross off a lot of those job roles or those skill sets that were on that list for the job at Google. And I thought I was going to go work at Google. I’m like applying at Google, sending my resume, calling the recruiter, using all my skill sets, nothing.

I’m like, man, I guess I’m I’m I’m not the one they’re looking for. So then I brought in my scope. I started to apply for at that time actually this is before Facebook and MySpace.

No, no, this is probably MySpace time because MySpace was a place I applied for. Amazon was just starting off with EC2 and their you know web infrastructure over there. So I applied for them.

I also tried applied for some fintech companies. But in general, I start to ply out there and then what happened is they start to come back and holl at me and I’m like, "Oh my gosh, I guess my resume is good." because I’m putting the skills that I have at the top of my resume and my education is all the way at the bottom because I only got a vocational school, right? Technical skills, work experience all the way at the top.

And I was starting to get a lot of bites, a lot of bites. But I’m trying to go to the West Coast. I’m trying to go to Silicon Valley.

I want one of them big companies to holl at me. And the thing that happened in terms of my manifestation and building this blueprint because I was able to check those technologies off in 2013, I got a phone call. I got a phone call from Twitter’s recruiting team.

First of all, I didn’t even know it was Twitter. I was like, "Y’all must be playing because I don’t even think Twitter works at this scale. Twitter was still kind of new on these streets.

It wasn’t like a major social media platform that is now." but definitely something that was noteworthy because hey, it would get me out to the bay. So I went through the interview process and let me tell you the cool thing about this blueprint and this process of manifesting the role that I wanted is that literally during the interview out of five questions that they asked me because it was a few rounds four of them were highlighted on my my job listing at Google. Hypers scale distributed system building and booting Linux operating systems pixie booting and understanding a technology called Hadoop.

Now I don’t know if y’all know what Hadoop is. It’s a map reduce shared file system HDFS and I purposely learned this because of that job description and when I went to go interview at Twitter they were blown out of their mind how indepth of knowledge that I developed without actually touching the technology. I even went and got certified as a Hadoop engineer or Hadoop administrator just so that if I do talk to one of these companies I got some credibility and I promise you at that moment I knew that my skill set and the blueprint that I followed before around manifesting the role and ultimately making sure that I’m developing the skills that the industry is looking for was a guaranteed win because before I even left that interview which is the funniest thing they flew me out to San Francisco you know this is my first time on the west coast in the Bay and I’m like oh my gosh I can’t believe this.

And they tell me, they send me a letter that says, or they send me an email that says, hey, don’t wear a suit. You don’t need to bring a briefcase or a foldable for your resume. Don’t even bring your resume.

Just pull up and show up. And I’m like, yo, I I’ve never experienced this before. And I go there, people are wearing shorts, sandals.

One guy is wearing a kilt and tank top. They’re interviewing me. And I’m like, yo, what’s going on at this place?

But the thing that was really cool was the level of engineering that they were asking me about and that they were questioning me about, and I was right there with them, right? And then when they find out skill-wise that I’m right there and then school-wise, I only did two-year technical school, it didn’t matter. It did not matter because the skills that I developed were the things that they were looking for in the industry at that specific time.

So much so that when I left on that Friday, you know, it was like a 4-hour interview. And y’all y’all kind of got it lucky nowadays because and I’m not trying to throw no shade, but I’m going to make a comment real quick. I know that there’s a lot of you mentees be like, "Yo, I got three rounds of interview." And I’m like, "Oh, so they’re flying you out on site." and like, "No, they’re all on Zoom." I was like, "All on Zoom?

Then what are you worried about?" For me, I had to go into the office and sit in a room with two engineers grilling me for two hours straight and then another set of two engineers and another set of two engineers just to prove myself. So I do want to let y’all know that, hey, there’s no shade. Just know that the the times have changed.

And back in the days, you would really have to be showcasing yourself on the whiteboard, not just talking andor lead coding up. But we’re going to have to get on the whiteboard and design something. I can’t wait until those type of interviews get back.

Because that’s where we really find some really cool engineers outside of this lead coding thing. But that’s a whole another subject. But anyways, after I wrapped up this, you know, whole day worth of interview, my underarms are sweating from my elbow to my waistline.

Like I’m done. I couldn’t even believe I got through it. The recruiter calls and he was like, "Hey, can you start on Monday?" And I was like, "Start on Monday?" "Oh, what do you mean start on Monday?

I got a family in Florida. We going to have to move them out." And second of all, I don’t even accept the first offer. So y’all gonna have to come to the table because your boy is about to make it by this time, I’ve been in the game for almost 10 years, developing my skills, getting ready for this perfect opportunity to really position myself and my family to move out to the bay, but more specifically manifesting the career that I wanted by making sure I’m developing the skills that the industry is looking for.

I don’t know if y’all noticed that. That’s kind of like my tagline for this whole conversation because I mentioned it a few times and definitely want to make sure I emphasize how valuable it is for you to develop the skills. So what happened after that, you know, getting the call from Twitter, working at Twitter since 2013 to about 2023, 2022, 2023, you know, they kept me on payroll a little bit afterwards.

It’s another hustle that I could put you up on. But the key thing that I want to just emphasize during my time there is is that while I was there, what do you think I was doing? I was upskilling and developing the skills that I needed.

Because at that level of engineering, it wasn’t just, hey, you’re a high performing Unix administrator, subject matter expert, building data centers from the ground up. I know how everything inside of a computer works. I can connect it to the internet.

I can install containerization. I can run applications on it. I can monitor it.

I can do all of that’s a check. There was still something that I needed to develop. Need to develop software engineering skills.

So when I got to Twitter, the cool thing is is that opportunities were opening up internally. Plus, I was always keeping my eyes on the streets to see what other companies are looking for. And there was the skill around site reliability engineering that really started to become very well known in our industry.

Now, if you’re not familiar with site reliability engineer, it’s more or less someone that has more than one skill set, but their main goal is to ensure the reliability of the system from the customer’s perspective. I always like to describe us as the diplomats for customers. And the reason why I say that is is that our role is to ensure a certain level of reliability.

And we have enough pool or you can call it power in the in our organization to say hey we can’t do that because we’re going to affect our customers andor if the site goes down our responsibility is to bring the site back up because it’s affecting our customers. But the thing about the skill that I started to build out my new blueprint and also developing skills around it is that there was a line item that said software engineering is a principle right systems engineering but software engineering also. And then by that time I was only you know writing most of my code with bash which is a programming language but more scripting and I needed to take it to the next level.

So I started to develop those skill sets around software engineering while working at Twitter. And I became a very proficient Pythoner because Python’s my favorite programming language. It’s very phonic a lot of libraries and you can do just about anything with there are some setbacks.

It’s not a compiled programming language. It’s single process. It’s single threaded and definitely can be really bloated in terms of managing so many dependencies that sometimes you lose track of what what is what.

But besides that, it is one of those programming language that I do want to encourage you if you’re not solid or locked in on a specific programming language. Learn Python. Even our keynote speaker today, Donna Sakar, mentioned that Python would be one of the programming languages that she would focus if she started all over again.

But what I’m really getting to is is that I’m implementing or I had implemented this manifestation of creating my next role by figuring out what site reliability engineer skills I need to develop. The top of that list is becoming a system or software engineer, but also developing system design principles and practices, especially at a hypers scale distributed infrastructure. And hopefully that word doesn’t throw y’all too much off, but just think of the scale that we were at Twitter.

And the reason why I say that this became my new blueprint because that was the new job that I wanted while I was working at Twitter. I started off in the systems engineering side of the table, managing data centers, managing system deployment, managing clusters. And I wanted to move into the site reliability lane, but I had to go develop those skills.

It took me some time. It took me at least about a year and a half. But the thing that I did is I automated myself out of a job which is by far one of my favorite mantras of all time because if you think about what as engineer was connecting pieces together in terms of executionable task to be able to automate myself so I didn’t have to execute any task but I could do it programmatically and that’s what Python gave me was a way to programmatically automate a lot of my task and also check a box off on my manifest estation blueprint of what skills I want to develop.

So that when I had an opportunity to interview internally at Twitter. So if you do branch into other teams, you still have to interview for that team is I was able to showcase a lot of code that I written because we had an internal GitHub which I want to encourage you all to make sure you’re sharing your code wherever you are in your journey, especially publicly on GitHub so engineers like me can check it out. But more specifically internally at Twitter, they were watching and watching me develop my my skills.

So much so that when the position came open, the door was wide open. And guess what? A new role means a new salary means new stock options means Yeah.

I mean, it was great as an opportunity working at Twitter and iterating through the engineering infrastructure or engineering, you know, ladder to be able to work as a staff level site reliability engineer. And it all foundationally started off with me ensuring that I’m always developing the skills that the industry was looking at on my piece of paper that I put on my wall and I stick up there. Now we are getting close to the tail end of our conversation.

I feel like I’ve been talking for like forever, but it looks like it’s only about 40 minutes. So, we’re going to keep going here. But the the thing that I want to get to in terms of just ensuring that we drive home this idea about creating this blueprint to be able to manifest this is I already have a new sheet of paper on my wall.

And what I’m moving closer to every day for the past two to three years is developing the skills to really bring my level of proficiency in a lane that you might not even know. Especially if you didn’t know. I’m one of the technical career coaches here at CodePath and big shout outs to the career center.

Thank y’all so much for giving me a a platform, an opportunity, but more specifically a chance to develop a skill that I’ve put on my wall here. So, my next blueprint that I have there is developing coaching, teaching, and mentoring skills by you, you know, developing this with the community that I want to support the most. CodePath is one of my first stops on the menu.

I I still haven’t checked it off yet because I still feel like I can still continue to contribute. But my goals are eventually to develop a community that really just foundationally relies on the same concept. We’re always developing the skills that the industry needs.

And that we’re always there to support each other because one of the things that you may have briefly heard me mention is is that I was able to make these leaps and bounds by having mentors in my life, especially technical mentors, that I would follow along. And and let me just give you a sidebar real quick. So what is a technical mentor to me?

So a technical mentor is somebody that I really admire their work. The way and style that they write code, the way that and style that they administer computers and systems so much so that I follow along. I didn’t even ask the two fellas, you know, when I worked at the district, could they be my mentor.

I just started to follow along what they were doing. If they had a ticket or if they had a project they were worked on, I was subscribed. I seen all the emails.

I seen all the bug reports. I seen how they fixed it. I went back and you know what?

Our our keynote speaker said this today. She said, "Yo, you should go back to the last bug that was reported and see if you can debug that same bug or reproduce it and see if you could understand it." I was doing that so that I can understand what my mentors were doing and that’s how they technically were my technical mentors in my development. So, if I can as a cyborg encourage you, especially if you do find people in this industry that you admire and yo, your boy’s always out on GitHub.

Y’all, you just didn’t know that I was out there yet. So, I hopefully find some new technical mentees that comes and follow along because I got some projects that I’m working on and I’ll talk a little bit more about it as we get into the end. But more or less, finding the right technical mentors can really be an avenue for you to level up even faster than you can imagine because you’re not making the same mistakes and you’re actually learning by from experts.

That’s why open source, as much as we’ve been screaming about it, is so important to your development. And I and you just don’t know how fast you can learn if you allow your guard go down a little bit in terms of being, you know, and I won’t say scared, I will say more hesitant and more reserved about learning and developing, you know, in open space. But I guarantee you’ll level up.

Now, back to the the topic here in terms of like what’s next. Because I have this paper on the wall that I remind myself every time I look at it on the skills development. We talked about the development here at CodePath with you know coaching, mentoring and really just hone in in that skill.

But also a new one that’s on my board and I hope you all are very very involved with this technology which is called AI in some capacity. And y’all might be sick of hearing about AI. But let me tell y’all something.

I grew up in the 80s. We were playing some Michael Jackson earlier. I have not seen an iteration of a technology and what I mean by iteration like how quickly it gets better as what AI is and the adoption of AI is at the pace that when the internet first got involved or first was invented what I mean by that is when I first learned about the internet I was like oh my god everybody should have this everybody in the world should have access to this I don’t know why no Like why don’t you have internet at your house so I can send you an email rather than me putting a mail or a letter in the mailbox and waiting for them to deliver it at your house.

Like why aren’t everybody you it’s the same feeling that I’m getting right now in terms of AI is like I don’t know why everyone is not using it but within a shorter period of time than it took for the internet to get to where it is now. And I would say clocking it probably like I would say about 10 years from 2000 to 2010. That’s when the internet was a wrap.

Everybody had access to it. Everybody, you know, had at least 2G on their cell phone and you’re walking around and you didn’t even need a phone number anymore. You just needed a device that’s connected to cellular network.

Like that’s about 2010. That’s about 10 years for AI. I I would say it’s it’s it’s most likely three to five years and it’s a wrap.

So I do want to encourage you all and that’s why I have it on my board in terms of developing AI skills. And also, man, I’m giving Donna Sakar some shout outs all day. She even said that there’s a new role out there called AI engineer.

I hope y’all caught that because I wrote a note down and it’s actually on my board right there in terms of AI engineering, but more specifically around prompt engineering, vector databases and things like that because these skills will be one of the ways that you’re able to maintain your role in the field of engineering and technologies. And I’ll say that again. If you don’t, I’ll rephrase it in a different way.

You will lose your opportunity. You won’t be writing code the way that we’re writing code right now. You’re going to have to iterate and I don’t want you to get left behind.

So, if I could encourage you in terms of developing your blueprint and crafting your manifestation for the next level of what you want to work towards and what you want to develop, I would say go to these companies websites. Look at these roles called AI engineers, machine learning engineers, ML ops, it’s another one, machine learning operation. It’s almost like DevOps but specifically for machine learning.

Go and check out these roles and these opportunities, these skill sets. Go learn PyTorch, go learn TensorFlow. Go go contribute to those open source projects.

And and I mean it’s endless in terms of the opportunities that we have specifically with AI, but don’t get left behind because it’s is moving faster than we are keeping up with. And definitely want to encourage you to use that blueprint that we talked about in terms of being able to manifest your next step. We’re definitely coming to the close end of our conversation here, but I do have a few call to actions for you.

So, first of all, thank you so much for listening to my story. I really do enjoy having these conversations because sometimes I think unless I talk about the behind the scenes and what happened in my journey, most people won’t realize how far they are in their journey, but also how I can help inspire you to keep pushing and keep going. Because we started off way in the 80s, first generation, no college degree.

To 2013, Twitter was knocking on my door to come work for them. Paid for everything and them bags. They just kept following and they still following now.

I’ll tell you, well, I’ll say whatever. When whenever I talk about Elon Musk, I’ll be like, "Yo, one of the richest men in the world wrote me a check when he wrote a check for Twitter." That’s how much I’ve gotten to where the bag just flows and I don’t even really even know about it because I was able to securely create a knowledge pipeline that helped me develop and the bags just kept following. The next steps and the next levels that I got, especially on my blueprint that I have out there, you can only imagine what those are going to look like.

I’m I’m thinking dynasty and legacy after this. But definitely want to encourage you to set your mind up for success in the same lane. Now, in terms of call to action, I know y’all see this shirt that I’m rocking.

Can I see it right here? Let me see. The tech hustle.

So let me tell you a little bit about the tech hustle and definitely want to give you all an opportunity to get more connected with follow along. So, the tech hustle is a podcast newsletter tech community. We are called the tech hustle and our main focus is developing the next generation of engineers by building communities.

And what our communities are going to work on are building products and those same products are going to be companies and billion-dollar companies that we’re going to create. I’m manifesting because this is on another sheet of paper over there. How we going to get there?

But what I’m really getting to is is by joining these community, you get access to engineers like myself that number one look like me and you, move and talk like me and you, but have had a journey that we want to see me and you be successful in this long term. I have some personal legends that I’m always working on and one of those is to teach the next generation how to store time. It might go over your head what I just said, but I’m telling you, we are really close and I really want to build these technologies, these products, and my community because my community is going to be what’s going to continue to develop.

And once we have products, then we create multi-billion dollar companies. And y’all just don’t know in terms of my level of engineering because one of the things that I didn’t mention to you in terms of my role at Twitter is that I was the team lead that managed all of the compute infrastructure. Now what do I mean by compute?

That’s AWS, GCP, whoever and what team at AWS or Amazon that manages all of AWS. That’s the same role that I was in when I was at Twitter. Whatever that same team that manages all of GCP, I mean all of it.

That’s the same type of role that I was in at Twitter. So, what we’re building our communities are all of these same products that I helped develop and create over my 10 years at Twitter because we’re going to be building billion-dollar companies and AI is going to be foundational. Now, how do you get access to me or how do you get some more information?

Because I have this product that we’re working on in the opensource space called Muppy. MU PP py is you’re going to have to get subscribed to my newsletter. Our newsletter publishes on a monthly basis.

I’m going to drop a link here in the chat for y’all to get some more information. But more or less this month’s publication is coming out at the end of the week. So, when we get to the end of EES, I have a newsletter that we’re going to be publishing and included in that newsletter is going to be a worksheet talking about the blueprint that we talked about today and how you can manifest your future.

So, if you are looking to reach out, are looking to connect, I want to encourage you to pull up, come through, check out the newsletter, and actually I’m getting the link ready right now, and I’m going to drop it in there. Oh, somebody already dropped in there. The techhustle.com.

I really do appreciate you. But if you want to connect, share your contacts, look at some more information about me, access any of my socials, or if you scroll down, you can see our website, you can see our newsletter, our YouTube, and all of that. We are on these streets really trying to take this generation to the next level, and I’m hoping and only really praying that y’all can pull up and hang out with me for a little bit.

Because I have so much more that I want to teach and develop, and I got all these sheets of paper on my wall that I’m manifesting. So, thank y’all so much for your time. And yeah, I’m think we’re going to be looking forward to some questions here.

So, Dana, definitely feel free to come back up on stage. Hopefully I didn’t speak too much. Because I definitely got a few answers for some of these questions out here.

It looks like this lighting right here sweating so much. So, definitely any questions that we have, feel free to drop the All right. All right.

Thank you, Bobby. Gems everywhere. I don’t know if you can see in the chat.

Everyone is hyping you up. You Dana. Oh.

Can you hear me now? Oh, it’s me. You hear me?

Go ahead. I’m so sorry. No, you’re good.

I was just saying everyone is showing you love in the chat. Let’s go to the top voted question which says, "Do you have any advice for entry-level engineers who love building software but can’t do leak code interviews very well?" Yeah, that’s that’s a really great question. This is why I don’t like leak code.

Because there’s going to be a lot of engineers that are going to be left behind because of this concept of if I can solve this Rubik’s cube, that means I can get a job. And technically, it’s not a representation of what your role would be. So, don’t feel like you’re not capable of fulfilling that role just because le code is one of those unfortunately roadblocks for a lot of us.

I mean, I don’t even like le code like that and it doesn’t really represent what I worked on for my whole career. My advice to you is utilizing resources and I’m might sound like a broken record saying this on GitHub open source and more specifically a collective codebase. You want to work in an environment where you’re developing but also showcasing it publicly to the world.

If you all did not hear our keynote speech today, go and listen to Dana Sakar talk about open source talk about AI and the encouragement that she has around where we’re going and how she would have done it all over again if she had a chance to. Another sidebar and definitely just to let you know her journey, she’s been at the keyboard more than 20 plus years. So she has that same type of level experience that I have.

And one of the key takeaways that I took away from that keynote is that if she was able to do it again, she would have definitely contributed to more open source projects. Maybe in a more isolated environment, my own feature, my own branch, but creating products and creating services or writing code that really fulfills that need, which is your passion. So that would be my words of encouragement.

But unfortunately with this hustle, I still want to encourage you to lead code up, right? Is continue to sharpen those skill sets. And now I’m going to put on my CodePath coaching hat.

There is a career kit that has some really good road maps for you to develop your Le co skills. Definitely check us out at the career center. Check out the career kit.

I guarantee you’re going to level up. So, we’ll put in that little plug for them. Awesome.

Thank you for that, Bobby. Next question is from Manuel and he says, "What do you recommend for new grads to develop a blueprint like yours? Whiteboard, paper, printed design, etc." Yeah.

So, if I was in your position as a new grad, what I would be doing, and I send my mentees on this adventure all the time, is I would want you to go to three to four companies that you dream that you want to work at. It’s Google, it’s Bloomberg, it’s JP Morgan Chase, it’s it’s Capital One, it’s some of the sponsors even here at this event. Go to their job posting site, look for keyword that resonates with you.

Don’t only look at entry level positions or new grad position. Look at the senior level positions because those are going to call out the technologies that you need to develop. Now I would start to aggregate these together.

Maybe even put two or three resumes or job descriptions on my wall. And then what I would do is I would read through that job description. I would highlight every word that does not I have I or so excuse me highlight every word that I do not have a a good proficiency on that I could talk about that I can really dive deeper into and I really need to skills gap that skill set and then that becomes your blueprint.

Those becomes the things that you start to build projects on. You start to have a better understanding with and definitely feel free to pull up to the tech hustle and let us know what you’re working on and we might be able to pair you up with other peers in your in the group and or in our community that are looking for those same development skills. So that would be my blueprint and yeah, subscribe to the newsletter because I’m going to put this all in there for you even more details.

Awesome. I love the idea of building like a physical representation of what your goals and your blueprint are. Roger that.

Roger that. And one thing other that I want to mention, Dana, is that that was a daily reminder for me. Like every day I walked into my office and I seen that sheet of paper, I was like, "Oh, yep." Every day physically that needed to be there so that my mind could always be focused and on that frequency because I’m trying to level up.

Amazing advice. All right. Next top voted question is from John and he says, "What are some of the skills from your experience and perspective that companies want or are going to want?" Yeah, I think all right, I’m going to be blunt with you all.

This is like a public service announcement. There’s nothing wrong with learning to be a software engineer, but I don’t think the software engineering skill set itself will be at the top of the list as much as it is right now. I think that engineers that have an understanding of how infrastructure works, how to connect computers together and how to build reliable systems andor how to automate tasks that requires an individual interaction, especially in the engineering lane.

Those jobs and those roles will definitely be moving up in the stack. I think roles around DevOps engineering I think roles around site reliability engineering I even think cloud engineering as a role right now as high as it is sooner or later you’re going to see GCP and AWS released their own AI agents or a AI yeah we’ll call them AI agents that’s going to take care of all of that for us and technically I’ve created one that just about does it too so I’m definitely going to be seeing cloud engineering come down in the stack also understanding how these computing resources work or how to design systems. I know that there’s an interview cycle that happens with a lot of engineers that they get nervous for, which is system design.

Those skill sets, oh my gosh, they’re going to be some of the top skills that you’re going to have to develop to really be relevant in this industry that we’re in. And then anything AI in terms of managing infrastructure around AI, we talked about ML ops, so that’s machine learning operations. We talked about another one that I I definitely want to shout out is edge computing.

This is basically if you think about where a lot of computing resources right now are inside the data centers and they want to move them as close as they are can to the consumers themselves. So they actually have to create edge computing resources. That’s going to be a very very you know lucrative opportunity.

And then also to mention data center engineering like inside that building inside of data center engineering. Oh my gosh. We’re going to need some really bright minds to help design the the more you know power efficient cooling efficient hardware and resources deploying and managing it.

I think those roles are going to become more common than software engineering. No shade to you as a software engineer keep pushing but I want to encourage you develop a second skill if you have some time frame for it because AI is catching up. No, no, no front.

All right. I think we may have time for one more quick question. So, this will be the last one.

And this question is from Latana and she says, "How do you manifest for less technical roles like product or project management or business analysis?" Yeah, I think for those roles, one of the cool things about open-source that I think a lot of people are unaware of is that they’re actually products that we’re developing. You have engineers that are writing code and you have somebody writing product requirements, user stories. How are we going to use this application?

How are we going to iterate on it? Or how are we going to implement this new feature? Or hey, there’s a customer asking for this feature to be enabled.

How do I influence the direction of an open source project? That means we need product managers also contributing to open source. So even when you think about open source, don’t think that it’s only software engineers that are involved in this cycle.

There are weekly meetings for some products out there. There are roadmap strategy meetings on how we’re going to implement new features or what direction we’re going to go in. All of those influences do not come from the software engineering arm.

They come from more of the product and actually user experiences that help influence. So if I can encourage you and also letting you know especially if you are thinking about product andor data is like finding the opportunity to contribute to a community that works in open source space and then filling the void that that community need which may be product management or understanding how to utilize data data and I’ll just mention something on data on the sideline. So data is going to be one of the most valuable assets we have in our time going forward.

So whoever has the ability to manage, manipulate, and or more specifically design ways that management can understand the data they have are going to be some killer skills to have because if you can take a SQL database, a Reddus instance, a MongoDB, and they all have different data, but you’re able to aggregate them together and create a nice user interface that shows me what we’re looking at in terms of data. That’s a great opportunity right there. And that’s really something I want to encourage you all to do those type of you know engineering in the open source space.

If you haven’t heard Tableau is a great product. If you haven’t heard Python you can build charts with them. Is starting to combine these skill sets together and I guarantee you’ll find opportunities open up doors for so definitely thank you so much for that question though.

All right. Thank you so much Bobby. Please show love to Bobby in the chat and thank you for leading an incredible session.

Don’t forget to take the session’s feedback survey that’s pinned at the top of the chat and I will let Mr. Bobby D close us out. Yeah. So, definitely first of all, I want to say thank you so much Dana.

Thank you so much Career Center. Thank you so much CodePath for giving me this opportunity to shine my light just a little bit. This is something that I’ve been encouraged to do even more, which is talking about my journey out loud and teaching you all as we go.

I’ve had years worth two decades worth of experience and we’re only scratching the surface in terms of what we can really talk about at that really high tech level. So I do want to encourage you all to follow along because I’m building a community. Why not be a part of it, right?

Especially from the beginning ground up. The last thing that I want to tell you all is keep pushing. If you are here, I heard Michael Ellis, the CEO said something today.

He said, "If you took just one CodePath course, your 80% chance of increase 80% chance of getting an opportunity." That’s just by taking one course. And all I can encourage you to do is keep pushing, keep working towards use the blueprint to manifest where you want by printing out jobs and developing the skills that the industry is looking for. Told you I was going to mention it again, but ultimately continue to pursue your passion and continue to shine light on.

So, the last thing that I’ll say is since I’m been also the host of the event, it sounds like there might be another video that’s going to come in afterwards to introduce this networking opportunity. I’m going to definitely be hanging out there. But I definitely want to encourage you all to use this opportunity to network, connect with your peers, connect with companies.

And with that said, holl at your boy. It’s Bobby D. See if I play some music.

We will now be transitioning into the open network session. Let me give you some information here. It says that you can access the networking lounge to build connections.

Now remember network it will be your network going forward. Remember that Jim or you can visit the company’s booth to learn more about the organizations joining us here at the summit. And don’t forget to drop your resume when you go visit them too.

Thank you so much. We’ll see you in a little bit.