November 28, 2023 • 45 mins
Let's set off on an awe-inspiring journey with our guest, Cecilia Martinez, who, armed with self-awareness and an appetite for growth, has carved out a successful career in software development. Starting from her high school days, designing layouts for myspace pages, Cecilia's trajectory includes journalism, web development, and a self-discovery of her place in tech communities. Her story of growth and transformation, nurtured by her battles with ADHD, the trials and triumphs of a software development boot camp, and her blossoming career as a community lead at Replay, is nothing short of inspiring.
What role can tech communities play in launching and shaping your career? Listen as Cecilia shares her experience exploring various local tech groups and the profound impact they had on her career. We examine the role of multi-channel outreach in creating diverse and representative communities and discuss how these communities can act as springboards for newcomers to the industry. Cecilia's narrative underlines the importance of aligning work with passion, the power of self-awareness, and the necessity to take calculated risks.
From being a people pleaser to learning to push back when necessary, Cecilia shares the invaluable lessons she's picked up navigating her career paths. We discuss the decision-making processes involved in considering the next career move, the advantages of early-stage startups, and how she's grown to identify the most valuable work to do with her time. Cecilia also shares insights from her deep involvement with open source development tools and the influence these experiences have had on her career. Join us as she takes us through her journey of discovery and growth in the tech space.
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Episode Transcript
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Cecelia Martinez (00:00):
you have to be self aware, and that requires
work.
You have to do some analysisabout yourself and figure out
what it is that will work foryou.
As I mentioned, I later on wasdiagnosed with ADHD, so I
realizing, oh, that juice that Ineed is what helps to motivate
me.
I tend to work well in thingsthat are deadline driven, like
journalism or like writing atalk for a conference, and I
(00:21):
like to learn new things, and soI need new developer tools and
integrations and things to workon.
So I've been able to identifythe things that work well for me
.
But I would say, do the work andkind of being reflective on
yourself and finding what areyour priorities, what is not
just a role, not just a title,not just a stack, but at the
(00:42):
base, a more base level, what isit that you get joy out of?
What is it that you feel thatyou could do for the next 20, 30
, 40, 50 years?
And go from there and figureout a plan to make that happen,
because I guess that everyperson is going to be different.
But you need to look in, lookinward first.
Tim Bourguignon (00:59):
Hello and welcome to Devopers Journey, the
podcast bringing you the makingof stories of successful
software developers to help youon your upcoming journey.
I'm a host, tim Borghigno.
On this episode, I receiveCecilia Martinez.
Cecilia is dedicated tocreating better, more inclusive
developer experiences foreveryone.
(01:20):
As such, she is the developeradvocate for AppFlow at Ionic.
Her previous companies includeCypress and Replay, with areas
of expertise including webdevelopment, testing, developer
tools and open source software.
She is a lead volunteer forWomen who Code Frontend, a
chapter lead for Out in TechAtlanta and a GitHub star.
(01:42):
So yeah, welcome DevTrain.
Cecelia Martinez (01:45):
Thank you, hello, hello.
Tim Bourguignon (01:47):
But before we come to your story, I want to
thank the terrific listeners whosupport the show.
Every month you are keeping theDevTrain lights up.
If you would like to join thisfine crew and help me spend more
time on finding phenomenalguests than editing audio tracks
, please go to our website,devjourneyinfo, and click on the
(02:09):
support me on Patreon button.
Even the smallest contributionsare giant steps toward a
sustainable Dev journey Journey.
Thank you, and now back totoday's guest.
So, cecilia, as you know, theshow exists to help the
listeners understand what yourstory looked like and imagine
(02:30):
how to shape their own future.
So, as is usual on the show,let's go back to your beginnings
.
Where would you place the startof your Dev journey?
Cecelia Martinez (02:37):
So the start of my Dev journey starts where
not a lot of good stories start,but in this case it is a good
beginning with live journal.
I'm not sure how many peopleremember live journal, but for
me, in high school I spent a lotof time on live journal and
that's where I learned HTML andCSS for the first time.
I created custom live journallayouts and graphics and got
(03:02):
involved with some band streetteams and was kind of helping
them make websites and thingslike that Very simple, like
custom my space pages and customlive journal layouts, and
that's where I first started theexperience first felt the
experience of being up all nightworking on something and then
looking up and realizing that itwas 3 am and I was supposed to
(03:23):
be up for school the next dayand that really that sensation
of just getting sucked intosomething always pulled me back
throughout the years, eventhough I didn't do development
professionally for a very longtime.
So it started with live journalstarted with some drama.
You know, live journal there'salways a little bit of drama and
(03:44):
I, yeah, kind of went fromthere.
The next time that I toucheddevelopment in a more formal
sense was in college.
So I actually studiedjournalism or public
communications in myundergraduate degree and at that
time making websites wasconsidered part of marketing,
(04:05):
was considered part of publicrelations, and so I learned
Dreamweaver.
I learned again like HTML CSS.
They told us we could usewhatever technology we wanted to
make a website, and I choseFlash, which took a lot of time
and now is the dead technology.
But and I ended up using thoseskills on our college newspaper
(04:29):
website.
So we I was the editor of ourcollege newspaper and we had a
hosted platform where we justkind of pushed everything to a
remote site and everything wasmanaged for us.
And I moved us to a self-hostedWordPress instance while I was
there at college so that wecould have more control over the
layout.
There wasn't any ads on it.
(04:49):
We could control our own ads.
And that was my firstexperience with dealing with
things like setting up adatabase and digging into the
PHP files and trying to changejust one little thing and hoping
that nothing broke and draggingyou know FTP files over for the
new release coming out onSunday nights.
And so again it was.
(05:11):
It was that same feeling ofstaying up and not realizing how
much time had passed andwanting to get everything
perfect and make it look greatbecause I knew that it would
eventually be seen by a lot ofpeople and used by a lot of
people and found that verymotivating.
But, as you can probably guess,with a degree in journalism and
being an editor of my collegenewspaper, my first career was
(05:33):
actually in journalism.
So I was a newspaper reporterright out of college.
I worked at a small I wouldn'tsay small, it was a local
newspaper, an upstate New York,in Troy, new York, and I covered
local news, local politics, andI covered some state politics
as well.
So I went to city councilmeetings, zoning board meetings,
(05:53):
you know, interviewed citycouncil people and small town
politics is the funniest thingbecause there's rivalries,
there's history, there's, youknow, this neighborhood versus
that neighborhood, and I reallyfell in love with talking to
people and learning theirstories and, you know, didn't do
tech for a while.
You know I was.
I was what we would they calledthe digital journalists back
(06:16):
then because I also knew how toupdate our website and so I
would write for print.
I would also do pagination forprint as well, you know, and
would watch it run on theprinting press.
But we'd also update ourwebsite and I recorded videos.
I was the first person to livetweet city council meetings.
This is, you know, back in 2008, 2009 time period and so.
(06:40):
But so tech has always kind oftouched my career, but it never
was something that I diddirectly.
And along the way, I would makewebsites for friends, for
musicians that I knew, for, likeyou know, nonprofits or
different kind of groups, butalways that you know HTML, css,
wordpress, kind of static sites.
After journalism, I actuallytransitioned to financial
(07:02):
services and got I'm a licensedbroker, I have my insurance
license, I'm a licensedfinancial planner.
I did that for for for some youknow, almost five years working
at banks and large brokeragefirms and had left kind of tech
behind me at that point and wasreally focused in on financial
services and felt that this wasgoing to be the career for me.
(07:25):
Yeah, and so I got to.
I always felt that I didn'thave that sensation of staying
up till 3am looking at, you know, spreadsheets or you know Roth,
ira, you know distributions.
I didn't get that same joltthat you get of solving a
problem or having that aha orlike, oh, it's finally perfect.
(07:45):
And I got to the point where Iwas in my career where I was
ready to prepare to startgetting my CFP.
I had gotten my MBA, I hadgotten a couple of like all my
licenses, and CFP is kind of amulti-year commitment.
After that you're pretty much afinancial certified financial
planner.
Is what CFP means, sorry.
Tim Bourguignon (08:05):
Yeah, so certified financial planner, and
once you do that that's prettymuch your career.
Cecelia Martinez (08:11):
Like you know, you have clients and you want
to be with them for a long time.
You want to have a relationshipwith them that lasts for a very
long time.
And I started to get cold feet.
I was.
I was like I don't know if Ican do this for the next 20, 30,
40 years, because I just didn'tfeel that jolt of excitement.
I also didn't feel the samesense of you know, kind of
altruism that I felt withjournalism.
(08:31):
You know, I it's nice to beable to help people and I
definitely do feel like I triedto help people as much as
possible, but at the end of theday, it is a money driven
industry when you're infinancial services.
And so that's when I started tothink about okay, you know, if
you are going to have a careerfor 20, 30, 40, 50 years, like,
what do you want to spend yourtime doing?
(08:51):
And my mind kept going back tothose nights.
You know staying up till 3amfiguring something out, getting
stuck on something.
You know wanting to throw mycomputer against the wall, and
at that time it was a heavy, bigcomputer like these weren't
laptops, right, they were thebig PC towers.
And so until you finally got it, and then it all seems worth it
(09:13):
, and so I, yeah, so I decidedto kind of look back into web
development or, you know, beinga webmaster or websites or
whatever it was called at thattime, but at this point we had
fast forwarded to 2018.
So 10 years later from when Ifirst, when I made that
WordPress site in college, right, and so web apps had come a
(09:35):
long way.
They, I mean, they could do alot.
It was much more complex thanit was.
It's not just HTML, css, maybeWordPress like a little bit of
JavaScript, it's.
They do very, very complex,full stack things.
And so I did some.
I started doing some research,started teaching myself
JavaScript.
This is all.
I was still kind of working infinancial services, but I
realized that I was going toneed more of a formal kind of
(10:00):
education a little bit, and so Ilooked into options for that
and I found a boot camp.
Tim Bourguignon (10:06):
So I yeah before we get there.
Had you made up your mindalready?
Yeah, Now I'm going to switch,or was it still?
Let's, let's put back a feetand a foot in there and see what
happens.
Yeah, so I, I had I had made upmy mind, because I just again,
I kept coming back to like thecold feet and I don't want to do
this.
Cecelia Martinez (10:21):
And so when I decided to do my boot camp, I
actually went all in.
I quit my job, I quit my job, Iquit my job, I quit my job, I
quit my job, I quit my job, Iquit my job.
It was a three month full timeboot camp and I had basically
enough, you know, savings to getme through that, and at the end
of it I needed a job, andwhether that job was development
(10:43):
, whether it was working at abank or whether it was waitressy
like I needed to have somethingso I could pay my rent and so
but I felt like I needed thattoo.
It's so, I think it's so easyfor people to keep doing
something that they are, they dowell, they're successful at it,
and everyone says, oh, this isa great job, this is a great
career, you do well at it.
(11:04):
And it's really hard, I think,to shake yourself out of that
flow, of that kind of momentum,if, if something doesn't force
you to do that.
And so I could definitely seemyself getting caught up in that
and being like well, you know,everyone says this is the right
thing, you know it's a goodcareer for me, like, why not?
(11:25):
But I just couldn't get rid ofthat nagging feeling, and I
think, in order to let thatnagging feeling win and not just
bother me for the next severaldecades, I needed to do
something drastic, and so thatwas what made the best sense for
me.
I don't think I don'tnecessarily know if I would
recommend it.
Honestly, it was probably someof the most stressful time of my
(11:47):
life.
There was a lot of time where Iwas like I can't do this, I've
made a huge mistake.
This is way too much.
But it was really thecommunities that I had
surrounded myself with thathelped me get through that time
and ended up making itworthwhile.
Tim Bourguignon (12:02):
And I'm nodding heavily while you say all this.
Yeah, so how did?
You find this bootcamp.
Cecelia Martinez (12:09):
Yeah, so I had moved to Atlanta.
I moved to Atlanta in late 2017.
I was working at an insurancecompany and I just started.
I started teaching myselfJavaScript, decided I needed to
kind of something more formaland I actually saw an ad for the
Georgia Tech bootcamp and thiswas kind of still in the earlier
days.
Of bootcamps, there was a fewthat were out there.
I saw that it was a full stackengineering program and that
(12:34):
they had it was in person, whichI liked as well, and it was on
campus and you could do it fulltime.
But I wanted to do my vettingbecause it was going to be an
investment, it was going to bedrastic.
So I had started going to womenwho code Atlanta meetups.
So women who code as a globalorganization, they have chapters
all over and the Atlantachapter is very robust and they
(12:56):
had in person meetups and so Istarted going to those as I was
teaching myself JavaScript,going to some code jams, you
know doing things like that andI reached out to some of the
women in the chapter and say,hey, do one of you know about
this bootcamp, Like, what's beenyour experience?
And they were so helpful.
So Valerie Ragus, who I knowreally well now, at this point
(13:16):
she actually hopped on a callwith me and was like, hey, yeah,
stranger, I'll, I'll, I'll setsome time aside from my family
and talk to you about this andgave me her experience, told me,
hey, learn, get before you getstarted, because they're not
going to teach you that.
You know, make sure that youlearn this, start your job
search early.
And every like I said thatcommunity really helped me the
(13:37):
entire time because I would nothave been able to get through it
without that support and peopletelling and them telling me yes
, you can do this.
It's going to be very hard,you're going to need to commit
to it, but if you make itthrough the other end and it
will be worth it.
And there was one saying that Ikind of latched on too early,
and I still say all the time,but it's the only way to truly
fail is to give up.
(13:57):
So as long as you don't give up, you haven't failed yet.
You can keep moving forward,and that's how I was.
My first interaction with, with, with a local kind of tech
community, was with women whocode, and that is where I
started to really see the impactof what it could, what it could
make for individuals, but alsofor the community at large.
Tim Bourguignon (14:19):
Hmm, how did you discover that this tech
industry has such a concept ofcommunities and that you can
find local groups everywherethat talk about all this?
I mean, if you're a lawyer, Idoubt there are communities of
lawyers meeting sometime in abar discussing something.
How did you find this out?
Cecelia Martinez (14:41):
Yeah, so I I'm an extroverted person, I love
making new friends and when Imoved to Atlanta I needed to do
that.
Here I didn't know anybody.
I moved here for my parentslived here at the time, but I
didn't know anybody else and Iactually just went on meetupcom
and was looking for anythingrelated to anything Like I went
to some like women's groups whojust like got together to do
(15:02):
crafting.
I found a like a woman, like alady geeks meetup group who
would do like D&D meetups and goto comfort, like go to barcades
and things like that, and Inoticed that there was also tech
meetups and I was like huh,okay, cool, like that's been
something I'm interested in, andso really it was just my desire
for any any kind of, so eventhe social community that led me
(15:26):
to realize that there was techcommunities out there that did
exist, and so thankfully, Ithink it was just me being
lonely and being bored andwanting to kind of find people
in a new city and fortunatelythey were out there and and
we're very welcoming, and fromthere I've gotten involved with
so many other communitiesbecause of that first experience
and seeing how impactful it canbe.
Tim Bourguignon (15:47):
I'm so jealous.
It took me, I think, sevenyears into my career to realize
this.
I was working for a giantcompany back then and we had our
communities inside the company.
I mean finding, finding peoplelike my new people and talk
together, but I didn't realizethere was a community out there.
And and then came meetupcom,and then I realized as well that
(16:09):
there were a lot more.
But it took a while.
It really took a while, and Ican't imagine what it would
bring to a person just startingto really be be engulfed in this
community and really support itfrom right and left, and having
people of the same level and abit a bit higher, a bit a bit
farther, farther down the lineand not say higher, and having
(16:31):
people to look at or to look to,and so that must be fantastic.
Cecelia Martinez (16:35):
So yeah, and as I've gotten more involved in
communities on the other side,as an organizer and, as you know
, like leading chapters.
It's that stuck with me andyour story I think sex with me
as well and the importance ofgetting the word out, because a
lot of times people come to anevent and they're like, oh, is
this your first event?
And they're like, yeah, I hadno idea this existed.
(16:56):
You know, I would have loved tohave been coming to these the
entire time, and that justmotivates me more to say, okay,
we need to get the word out, weneed to tell people know that
the support is there, theseevents are here and you can find
it because, especially withremote work now, a lot of people
are really hungry for acommunity and for that sense of
(17:17):
camaraderie and collaborationthat they're not getting from
their day to day work, and sothat's a.
It just kind of reminds me,like you can never push, put the
word out too much.
There's always going to, you'realways going to find somebody
new.
Tim Bourguignon (17:30):
Yeah, you need to find the right words.
I was co-organizing aconference a few years back and
we gave out tickets to studentsto the local university and say,
hey, whoever wants to come, weget something.
Our five students coming and Iwas.
I was appalled by that and saywhy?
And I think it's just wellputting out a flyer, it doesn't
(17:50):
ring a bell, doesn't connect.
You have to get there, you haveto start talking to people.
And as soon as I startedtalking to students, they opened
their eyes wide and say, ofcourse I'm coming, but we had to
bridge that gap first and wenever managed to do this with
just information blasting.
It didn't work.
Cecelia Martinez (18:08):
Yeah, you have to find developers where they
are right, and that's somethingwhere and you have to understand
too is like, not everydeveloper or every student or
every person is going to consumeinformation in the same way.
And by identifying all thedifferent potential paths where
people could find out aboutthings and discover things, and
catering to all of thosedifferent potentials, like
(18:29):
that's really as I, for me, Ifind things a certain way.
I will go out and I will searchfor that information.
Not everybody will.
Even even when you think aboutthings like teaching concepts,
right, like I, I like to readdocumentation.
I like to do things hands on.
I have a harder time watchingvideos, but a lot of people do
love watching videos.
So if I only ever did whatworks for me, I'm missing out on
(18:52):
connecting with all of thepeople who do things a different
way.
So it requires a lot of puttingyourself in other people's
shoes and thinking and askingthem like, how do you find
things?
Like you did to me like, howdid you find out about this?
Like, how did you learn aboutit?
And identifying all those pathsand those threads that you can
pull at.
Tim Bourguignon (19:11):
I'm dropping a few years ahead now, but that
must be exactly challenging foryour job right now being a
developer advocate and having toreally construct multi-channel
outreach to really try to gathera representative community.
Cecelia Martinez (19:27):
Yeah, absolutely it's.
And it's interesting whenyou're working with an existing
community and looking to growthat community and then when
you're starting a community fromscratch and there's two very,
very different motions.
And it's, I feel, likethroughout my career, because
I've been very fortunate to beat three open source developer
(19:48):
tools with Cyprus, replay andnow Ionic, the but they're very
different types of communities.
They have some commonalitieswith open source and with being
developers, but they are at verydifferent stages at the at the
times that I was at thosecompanies, and so I've been able
to see how it's not always acopy paste, it's not always a
(20:09):
take this you know playbook andapply it here.
Community is its own entity, ithas its own personality, it has
its own way of doing things.
Just like how, whenever you'retalking to an individual
developer, you can't just hitthem with the same talking
points, that you have to askquestions.
And I always approach everyconversation with an individual
(20:31):
developer and sometimes I'lltalk to people and they say, oh,
like, tell me, like, sell me onIonic, and I'll be like well,
what are you working on?
Like, what do you do?
I can't.
I need to know you first, andyou have to do the same thing
with communities.
You have to say okay, why areyou here?
What type of support are youlooking for?
Are you looking to connect?
Are you looking to learn?
Do you need help?
(20:51):
Because you know you don't havethe support that you need.
And so I think you have to kindof treat a community like it's
its own person, with its ownpersonality, and approach it
that way, and so it's beenreally fun to see the different
iterations of that.
Tim Bourguignon (21:06):
For sure, Probably we should, we should
get there, but let's, let'sstart right.
You were in the, in thebootcamp, having on one side the
time of your life, on the otherside the biggest regrets, and
wondering if you took the rightdecision.
What ensued in this was threemonths that led to probably a
job.
Cecelia Martinez (21:27):
Yeah, so I mean I, it really was high
stress.
Like I said, I don't know ifI'd recommend it for everybody.
I think it's what worked for me.
Later on in my life I wasdiagnosed with ADHD and a lot of
things that I look back makessense.
That sense of having a deadline, having that intensity, that
that really kind of motivated meto get through it.
(21:49):
But I was very fortunate, likeI said, this was, you know, 2019
, it was still in person.
I started my job search a littleearly and I did have some
things going for me that notevery bootcamp student does, in
that I did have an undergraduatedegree, I did have an MBA and I
had previous experience kind ofworking with websites, at least
(22:09):
to some extent.
So I understood those conceptsof deployment and getting things
out to users and thinking aboutkind of a user experience and
so.
But I did have two offers whenI graduated my bootcamp after
three months and a lot of that,honestly, both of them were from
referrals and from people thatI knew ended up finding through
my network, and so, again, thecommunity kind of saved the day,
(22:33):
I think, in a way, because Idefinitely did the apply, apply,
apply to all the junior devpositions that you can find, but
, ultimately, the firstdeveloper position that I ended
up taking was a with somebodywho had seen my job search tweet
on LinkedIn I mean on Twitterand then reached out on LinkedIn
, sent me a message hey, we'relooking for somebody, and it was
(22:56):
a junior software developerposition at a really unique
opportunity, and that is where Istarted my development career
working.
The best part was, though, as Ihad just learned react in my
bootcamp and this was a dotnetangular shop.
I was like, okay, I justlearned JavaScript, got to learn
C sharp now, just learn react,got to learn angular now, and
(23:20):
then they're also working withreact native, so there was like
a little bit of overlap there,but react is not react native,
so so, yeah.
So I was like, okay, let's,let's keep the challenges
rolling, let's do this, and thatwas.
That was a great.
I was a great experience.
It definitely, though, helpedme get a better sense of what
(23:40):
type of work I wanted to do longterm.
Again, I was still tech is avery broad space.
I think a lot of people come inthinking, okay, I have to be an
engineer, or this is like I'mgoing to learn, I'm going to do
front end.
This is what I'm and they havea very kind of narrow view of
what it means to be in atechnical role and that I had.
I had the same conception to.
(24:00):
I was like I did a full stackengineering bootcamp.
By God, I'm going to be a fullstack engineer and, you know, I
think going through that initialrole helped me to kind of
formulate and see, oh wow, likewhat's that team doing, what's
this team doing?
Well, what are the like?
Why did we do it this way, whydid we do it that way?
And being able to ask a lot ofquestions and learn a lot about
(24:23):
what real world softwaredevelopment looks like helped me
to kind of start to see theearly shape of what might what
my career would eventually be.
Because I was, you know, at thepoint where I was.
I got up to speed, probablyabout, you know, within the
first like two to three months,where I was actually at that
point just like doing tickets,doing tickets, like doing doing
(24:45):
some node scripts to helpautomate some of our API
interactions.
I had gotten comfortable withthe database, was kind of
allowed to do more things, pushsome stuff and so.
But I about like eight monthsand I'm realizing, oh, I'm just
kind of like doing tickets anddoing tickets, and doing tickets
and you know, I didn't, Ididn't have that 3am, you know,
(25:07):
feeling anymore it wasn't thesame, and so that is when I kind
of started to again expand myhorizons a little bit more about
, well, where do I fit into techand how can I use these skills
in a way where I can combine alot like some of the things that
I'm doing outside of my careerin terms of, like the
communities I'm involved in andstill, and get that, get that
(25:31):
feeling, you know, get thatfeeling back right and so, yeah,
but where you tempted at somepoint to bring your financial
expertise into the mix andcombine this to.
Yeah, so I was.
Initially I was.
I was thinking about, like,fintech companies, you know,
fintech startups, anythingrelated to banking or investment
(25:53):
or insurance, and butultimately, like, especially in
Atlanta, there's actually areally big fintech scene here
but ultimately I think I wouldhave probably still run into
that same kind of like altruismfeeling, lack of thereof,
because, if anything, I wantedto work on financial literacy
and financial education, whichisn't exactly a.
(26:14):
You know, like a VC hot button,like topic of you know teaching
people how to you know how tobudget and how to like manage
their money, but but actuallyteaching everybody and not just
people who only have high networth.
And so I, yeah, so I ended upkind of leaning away from that
and when I started at Cyprus, Isaw the magic of what it can be
(26:38):
like to work on developer toolsbecause you are a part of every
single thing that the developersthat use your tools are
building and it feels it feelslike a cheat code because it's a
like a force multiplier.
If I can help somebody, like ifI help to make this tool better,
(26:58):
than every single thing that isbuilt with that tool becomes
better.
And we would get so excited,like we found out that I think
the NASA website was usingCyprus to test their website and
we're like, oh, like we'rehelping NASA.
This is so cool and like youknow everything from nonprofits,
from like cutting edge, likemedical applications, everything
(27:19):
you get to feel like you're apart of that in a way.
And that's where I was like,okay, this is, this is the juice
, this is like I'm getting thefeelings now of this is pretty
cool to be able to have thatmassive impact across, like
literally, like you know,millions of projects right and
(27:41):
yeah, and that's so.
That's when I started at Cyprusand really fell in love with
developer tools and also withopen source.
Tim Bourguignon (27:48):
So what happened that led you to leaving
Cyprus at some point?
It sounds like a love story.
Cecelia Martinez (27:53):
Yeah, it was, and I honestly I still love the
Cyprus community.
I am they're having their firstor, like you know, I still talk
to a lot of them and like theirevents, that they have coming
up and I have a lot of friendsthere.
But I Cyprus was definitely aproving ground for me and it was
a learning arena, like Ilearned probably, I feel like
five years, five to 10 yearsworth of things and that to in
(28:16):
like the just over two yearsthat I was there Because of the
stage that we were at.
I was the first hire on oursuccess team, so I was working
directly with all of our Cyprususers.
We didn't have a community teamat that point so I was handling
a lot of that function outfunction as well, in addition to
speaking about Cyprus atconferences and events, and so I
(28:37):
was doing a lot of differentthings and it forced me out of
my comfort zone.
I remember where I had aconversation with my, with one
of the co-founders, and we wereintegrating our team with a
brand new tool and it was goingto be a big.
We had to all of our customerdata.
It was like kind of like a CRMadjacent type tool required a
lot of database configurationwith our business database, and
(28:59):
he was like I want you to leadthat project.
And I was like, oh, I'm notsure if I'm the best person to
do that.
I don't have that expertise.
And he said, well, who wouldyou recommend do it instead?
And I realized, oh yeah, likethere's no one else, like
there's no one to pass this to,I just have to figure it out and
make it work.
And so that really got me inthe mindset of, okay, yeah, like
(29:21):
we just have to run with things.
I have to be superuncomfortable, I'm going to have
to learn new things that Ihaven't done before and and hope
that it works out.
And if it doesn't work out,then trust that I can fix it.
And and even when working onthings that are customer
impacting and working directlywith customers and answering
their questions, and so that wasreally a massive period of
(29:43):
growth for me at Cyprus, becauseI was given so much trust and I
was given so much agency whereI didn't feel like a junior
developer.
I didn't feel like somebodyearly in my career.
I felt like somebody who waspart of the team and really
helped pushing everythingforward, and they wanted my
opinion and they wanted even ifit was bad, they wanted to know
(30:05):
what I thought, and that was newfor me and so it really shaped
me into really like being muchmore confident to try new things
, to do things I'm uncomfortablewith, to be, you know, to be
the rain in the parade sometimesand say, hey, like, have we
thought about how this is goingto impact this?
Or, you know, I don't know ifthis is going to work.
(30:25):
Do we think about that?
And I think, if anything, thatis, those are the some of the
traits that I think took me fromkind of more of like a junior
to somebody who is more of aleader and being able to make
those high impact decisions.
But I know you asked about why Ileft.
Tim Bourguignon (30:44):
So great that along the way.
So that was good, you took thatthe way.
Cecelia Martinez (30:49):
Yeah.
So, as I mentioned, I started atCyprus on the success team and
I was very customer facing, butwe didn't have a community team,
we didn't have a dev route team, and so when opportunities
arose of, hey, we'd likesomebody to talk about Cyprus or
do a workshop on Cyprus, Iwould be the person to who could
do that, especially once wekind of got more like the team,
(31:10):
got a little bit bigger and Ihad been there for a while and I
was one of the most even aftera year and a half you're like
the more senior person as it'sgrowing from 20 people up to
over 100.
And so I actually ended updeveloping an entire 20 hour
workshop series that I would usefor our enterprise customers
and I did various workshops outin the community and I really at
(31:33):
the same time, in tandem, hadbeen working with external
communities more like women whocode and like out and out and
tech, and I could feel that poolof really wanting to do
something that was morecommunity focused, unless maybe
like customer facing and but theway that Cyprus was at the time
, it just there wasn't, theopportunity wasn't there, and so
(31:56):
I ended up looking for thatelsewhere and, you know, found a
different other companies thatI could work at, but I've always
still like love the Cypruscommunity, continued to do some
Cyprus talks and workshops andanswer questions around that,
because it was.
It was a place where I met somany amazing people and so many
and they're solving really coolproblems.
I think they.
(32:16):
I think they still are so, butthat's where I ended up, how I
ended up at replay as acommunity lead.
Tim Bourguignon (32:23):
So how did you find another tool in open source
to get your, your, your, your,your vibes on to that sounds
like the planets aligning.
Cecelia Martinez (32:37):
I don't know, I'm so lucky, I don't know if I
somebody like, if I didsomething like maybe I found a
rabbit's foot along the way orsomething like that but you know
, I've, I I've been embedded orI shouldn't say embedded, but
involved in really active andengaged is maybe a better word
with a lot of different opensource tools.
So a lot of what I would do tois talk about how Cyprus can
integrate with other open sourcetools, with the communities
(32:58):
that I've worked with, kind ofcontributing to different
communities, and so the opensource dev tools community is
not small, but it's also not toobig, and so typically, I'm
always on the lookout for newthings and things that catch my
eye, and I actually found replayof just you know, through
social media.
Somebody had kind of mentionedit on Twitter.
(33:19):
I looked into it and I was like, oh, this is like pretty
interesting, like, oh, cool,it's open source.
Oh, wow, like another kind ofcool, unique problem, and I like
to joke that I really loveworking on things that, like
developers hate like the hardestthing.
So testing everyone hates end toend testing, debugging like
people like you know, pull theirhair over debugging and
(33:40):
deploying mobile applications toapp stores, which is again like
the most tedious process.
I don't know if I've ever beenthrough and so it's.
I could kind of see that.
Okay, cool, this is a real painpoint and maybe a pain point is
the better word versus likethings that devs hate, but it
was a real pain point and it wasopen source and the product
team was really cool and thenice thing about the work that I
(34:03):
had done up to that point withmy open source work and then
also with the community workthat I had done, is that it
wasn't really an interviewprocess.
It was more of a hey, let's chat.
Hey, like okay, yeah, we'veseen your conference talks, yep,
we know your work with Cyprus,like, we're familiar with all of
that.
I've never had to do atechnical like algorithm test or
anything like that, becauseeverything that I do is pretty,
(34:26):
is open source and it's publicand everything I do is out there
, and so I ended up being Icould just kind of a chat and
then I ended up making the leap.
It was very tough decision butI ended up making the leap to
replay with that, which at thetime was a very early stage
startup, like earlier thanCyprus was for me, so that came
with it's with.
(34:46):
Yeah, it was a very uniqueexperience.
Tim Bourguignon (34:51):
I feel there is some stuff to impact behind the
word unique.
Cecelia Martinez (34:55):
Yeah, I mean.
So I'm a very transparentperson, like anybody that I
talked to.
Like replay for me ended upbeing too early.
I am.
I joined Cyprus when it had,you know, we were about 25
people and it was like there wasalready a very robust community
at that point.
It was more about expansion ofthe community and finding new
(35:19):
audiences versus starting fromscratch.
Replays was very early and Ijust found that with the way the
types of skills that I broughtto the table was the words
necessarily the skill set thatthey actually needed at the end
of the day, but you don't knowthat, right, when you're early
in, right, you know you don'tnecessarily know that in the
early stage startup because youhave to be able to pivot so
(35:40):
frequently.
And so I have a lot of love forthe team like I actually have
met, seen many of them in personat different events because,
again, open source DevTools notbig, not small.
So and there I left, I said Iknow part of me is going to like
kick myself, because I knowyou're going to do great things,
and they really have.
They've come out with somereally cool new tools in the
(36:02):
testing space and I'm reallyexcited to see what they
continue to do there.
But for for one of the thingsthat I could do well, I didn't
feel like I could do thosethings well for them at that
time, and so, and again, theseare all things that you learn
along the way and you have to becomfortable with that and
that's something that again,early in my career, I was very
(36:23):
much a people pleaser, like yesperson.
I struggled a lot with feelinglike I didn't belong there,
which meant I would do anythingand everything to keep from
being you know, quote unquotediscovered and kicked out.
I felt that, oh, they're goingto figure out that I'm not smart
enough, not technical enough,not whatever enough, and so I
(36:43):
need to say yes to everything.
I need to learn this, I need tolearn everything, and I ended
up doing a lot, a lot of work indifferent areas.
That maybe wasn't the mostproductive work I did still did
do productive work as well but Iprobably could have gotten away
with doing maybe like 80% ofthe work and it's would have
been the highest impact workright.
(37:04):
And so I think, as I've gonethrough my career, I've been
able to identify not just alwayssaying yes right off the bat,
but asking questions,challenging a little bit,
pushing back, kind of figuringout, okay, is this really the
highest impact work that I couldbe doing with my time?
And that happened actually atCyprus.
(37:26):
There was something where I,because of something that had
that happened, I needed tomanually update like rows and
rows and rows and rows of somedata, and I was like, all right,
I'll just, you know, I'll juststay up late and I'll just knock
this out.
And we realized is like, okay,the solution is not Cecilia
stays up late and knocks us out.
The solution is how do we dothis in a more automated way?
(37:47):
How do we make sure thisdoesn't happen again?
And I think I learned that iffires keep happening I tend to
like to follow the chaos I'llthrow myself on the grenade, but
if fires keep happening, theanswer is not buy more fire
extinguishers, the answer is getthe gasoline out of the
building.
And so the nice thing was isthat by the time that I was at
(38:10):
replay and I do feel like I dida lot of really good, impactful
work there I was able to rewriteour documentation.
I did a lot of product work, Italked to a ton of developers
about their debuggingexperiences and I did quite a
few conference talks.
But the nice thing is, at thatpoint I had learned hey, am I
doing like I'm working a lot?
I'm doing a lot of things, butis this the most value for what
(38:32):
the company needs right now, yesor no?
And it ended up being that theanswer was no, and you know they
could, like it would make itwould make more sense to to not
to not like continue down thatpath.
And so I learned a ton, though,about like it's like, wow, I've
, like I said, I've been sofortunate to have been at series
a stage, then very early stage,like seed stage, and then now
(38:56):
at Ionic, which you know hadbeen post a and has been
acquired.
And so, seeing the communitydevelopment, seeing the business
strategies again what you wouldthink are similar, three open
source developer tools beingincredibly different.
But those skills that I learnedalong the way, that were not
technical, that were not techrelated, but were related to
(39:18):
being able to see high impactproblems, make decisions and
feel comfortable pushing upagainst that is, I think, what
had the most impact on my career.
Tim Bourguignon (39:27):
I love how, how the path go right and left at
some point.
Come back.
I mean you haven't reallytalked about journalism in.
I haven't mentioned journalismin your late career, but it's
there, and you mentioned a bitin financial education.
That would be there as well.
And now the community work thatyou're doing.
I'm sure there's tons ofwriting, tons of of summarizing,
(39:51):
tons of asking questions, allkind of skillset that you
learned back then, and I'm surethe financial pieces are there
as well.
When you talked, you didn'tmention that which, when you
talked about kind ofunderstanding the systems and
the modules and how things arepieced together, I kind of see
the financial person looking ata very complex systems and
(40:13):
seeing where the pieces fit etc.
So it's all coming together, Ithink, really nicely.
Cecelia Martinez (40:19):
It really does .
And so I think, for journalism,obviously, being able to
communicate, being able to talkto all kinds of people because I
would talk to senators and Iwould talk to, you know, the guy
who on the corner like you know, hey, what happened with this
robbery?
Kind of you know, we've beenable to navigate all those
different types of conversations.
Obviously, writing is a big one, but then from financial
services, I think what actuallyhas helped me a lot is being
(40:42):
able to take complex conceptsand break them down.
There's a lot of times thatyou're working, so I'm trying to
explain, you know, a verycomplex investment vehicle to
somebody who's about to retireand, you know, has.
It was like a teacher, like hasnot worked at all in finance,
and so at the end of the day, Ifeel like, really, I, I love
(41:03):
being an educator, I love beinga communicator, and that just
all happens to take place in atechnical field.
I'm talking to developersinstead of, you know, retirees,
and I'm teaching aboutdevelopment tools.
But it's all engaging withindividuals is engaging with
those communities and being ableto leverage that communications
(41:24):
and educational skills.
Tim Bourguignon (41:26):
Makes perfect sense.
I guess that's the best placeto stop this.
I usually ask for an advice andI'm short of an advice, right?
I'm wondering maybe if, ifsomebody was facing the same
challenge that you had, feelingwhere I'm not at my place right
now.
(41:46):
I don't feel I belong where I'm.
How did you put it?
You didn't find your juice, orto find your, your right, I'm
sure how you put it.
But anyhow, your answer to thatwas I quit my job, I enroll in
the boot camp, let's go.
Is this the advice you wouldgive?
Is there another advice youwould give to the person in this
(42:08):
, in this situation?
Cecelia Martinez (42:10):
Yeah, I think the important thing is to you
have to be self aware, and thatrequires work.
You have to do some analysisabout yourself and figure out
what it is that will work foryou.
As I mentioned, I later on wasdiagnosed with ADHD, so I
realizing, oh, that juice that Ineed is what helps to motivate
me.
I tend to work well in thingsthat are deadline driven, like
(42:30):
journalism or like writing atalk for a conference, and I
like to learn new things, and soI need new developer tools and
integrations and things to workon.
So I've been able to identifythe things that work well for me
.
But I would say, do the work andkind of being reflective on
yourself and finding what areyour priorities, what is like
not just a role, not just atitle, not just a stack, but at
(42:54):
the, at the base, a more baselevel, like what is it that you
get joy out of?
What is it that you feel thatyou could do for the next 20, 30
, 40, 50 years?
And and go from there andfigure out a plan to make that
happen, because I guess thatevery person is going to be
different.
But you need to look in, lookinward first.
Tim Bourguignon (43:14):
Why is move?
Thank you for that.
Cecelia Martinez (43:17):
Maybe don't.
Maybe don't quit your job.
Just yeah, please don't takeaway also.
So you told me to quit my job,so that's there, you can link
back to your person just say heyhey fantastic.
Tim Bourguignon (43:31):
Where would be the best place to continue the
discussion with you?
Cecelia Martinez (43:34):
Yeah, so I'm at Cecilia creates, I'm on
GitHub, I'm on Twitter.
That's also my threads username, if you're into that.
I haven't used it much yet, butbut, yeah, cecilia creates is.
You can find me pretty much onany platform there.
And yeah, and also you know,and any of the various
communities, women who code outin tech and then also in their,
(43:54):
you know, ionic Discord as well.
Tim Bourguignon (43:57):
Anything else you want to plug in?
Cecelia Martinez (44:00):
I'll be at testjs summit in early December
in Berlin.
It's one of my favoriteconferences because it is about
testing, but it's also a focuson the JavaScript stack, so a
lot about web testing.
It's a really great community.
It's the first time that we'rehaving the event in person.
I'm on the program committee aswell.
So, I'm extra biased, but Ithink we put together a really
(44:20):
great event.
Tim Bourguignon (44:21):
So and I link to all of that, including testjs
summit in the show.
Thank you so much, celia.
It's been really fun listeningto it.
Cecelia Martinez (44:30):
Sorry, yeah, thanks so much for having me.
It's been great.
Tim Bourguignon (44:34):
And this has been another episode of the
first journey with each othernext week.
Bye, bye.
Thanks a lot for tuning in.
I hope you have enjoyed thisweek's episode.
If you like the show, pleaseshare, rate and review.
It helps more listenersdiscover those stories.
You can find the links to allthe platforms the show appears
(44:55):
on on our website devjourneyinfoslash subscribe.
Creating the show every weektakes a lot of time, energy and,
of course, money.
Would you please help mecontinue bringing out those
inspiring stories every week bypledging a small monthly
donation.
You'll find our Patreon link atdevjourneyinfo slash donate.
(45:19):
And finally, don't hesitate toreach out and tell me how this
week's story is shaping yourfuture.
You can find me on Twitter andat teamathabinfo at
devjourneyinfo.
Talk to you soon.
you have to be self aware, and that requires
work.
You have to do some analysisabout yourself and figure out
what it is that will work foryou.
As I mentioned, I later on wasdiagnosed with ADHD, so I
realizing, oh, that juice that Ineed is what helps to motivate
me.
I tend to work well in thingsthat are deadline driven, like
journalism or like writing atalk for a conference, and I
(00:21):
like to learn new things, and soI need new developer tools and
integrations and things to workon.
So I've been able to identifythe things that work well for me
.
But I would say, do the work andkind of being reflective on
yourself and finding what areyour priorities, what is not
just a role, not just a title,not just a stack, but at the
(00:42):
base, a more base level, what isit that you get joy out of?
What is it that you feel thatyou could do for the next 20, 30
, 40, 50 years?
And go from there and figureout a plan to make that happen,
because I guess that everyperson is going to be different.
But you need to look in, lookinward first.
Tim Bourguignon (00:59):
Hello and welcome to Devopers Journey, the
podcast bringing you the makingof stories of successful
software developers to help youon your upcoming journey.
I'm a host, tim Borghigno.
On this episode, I receiveCecilia Martinez.
Cecilia is dedicated tocreating better, more inclusive
developer experiences foreveryone.
(01:20):
As such, she is the developeradvocate for AppFlow at Ionic.
Her previous companies includeCypress and Replay, with areas
of expertise including webdevelopment, testing, developer
tools and open source software.
She is a lead volunteer forWomen who Code Frontend, a
chapter lead for Out in TechAtlanta and a GitHub star.
(01:42):
So yeah, welcome DevTrain.
Cecelia Martinez (01:45):
Thank you, hello, hello.
Tim Bourguignon (01:47):
But before we come to your story, I want to
thank the terrific listeners whosupport the show.
Every month you are keeping theDevTrain lights up.
If you would like to join thisfine crew and help me spend more
time on finding phenomenalguests than editing audio tracks
, please go to our website,devjourneyinfo, and click on the
(02:09):
support me on Patreon button.
Even the smallest contributionsare giant steps toward a
sustainable Dev journey Journey.
Thank you, and now back totoday's guest.
So, cecilia, as you know, theshow exists to help the
listeners understand what yourstory looked like and imagine
(02:30):
how to shape their own future.
So, as is usual on the show,let's go back to your beginnings
.
Where would you place the startof your Dev journey?
Cecelia Martinez (02:37):
So the start of my Dev journey starts where
not a lot of good stories start,but in this case it is a good
beginning with live journal.
I'm not sure how many peopleremember live journal, but for
me, in high school I spent a lotof time on live journal and
that's where I learned HTML andCSS for the first time.
I created custom live journallayouts and graphics and got
(03:02):
involved with some band streetteams and was kind of helping
them make websites and thingslike that Very simple, like
custom my space pages and customlive journal layouts, and
that's where I first started theexperience first felt the
experience of being up all nightworking on something and then
looking up and realizing that itwas 3 am and I was supposed to
(03:23):
be up for school the next dayand that really that sensation
of just getting sucked intosomething always pulled me back
throughout the years, eventhough I didn't do development
professionally for a very longtime.
So it started with live journalstarted with some drama.
You know, live journal there'salways a little bit of drama and
(03:44):
I, yeah, kind of went fromthere.
The next time that I toucheddevelopment in a more formal
sense was in college.
So I actually studiedjournalism or public
communications in myundergraduate degree and at that
time making websites wasconsidered part of marketing,
(04:05):
was considered part of publicrelations, and so I learned
Dreamweaver.
I learned again like HTML CSS.
They told us we could usewhatever technology we wanted to
make a website, and I choseFlash, which took a lot of time
and now is the dead technology.
But and I ended up using thoseskills on our college newspaper
(04:29):
website.
So we I was the editor of ourcollege newspaper and we had a
hosted platform where we justkind of pushed everything to a
remote site and everything wasmanaged for us.
And I moved us to a self-hostedWordPress instance while I was
there at college so that wecould have more control over the
layout.
There wasn't any ads on it.
(04:49):
We could control our own ads.
And that was my firstexperience with dealing with
things like setting up adatabase and digging into the
PHP files and trying to changejust one little thing and hoping
that nothing broke and draggingyou know FTP files over for the
new release coming out onSunday nights.
And so again it was.
(05:11):
It was that same feeling ofstaying up and not realizing how
much time had passed andwanting to get everything
perfect and make it look greatbecause I knew that it would
eventually be seen by a lot ofpeople and used by a lot of
people and found that verymotivating.
But, as you can probably guess,with a degree in journalism and
being an editor of my collegenewspaper, my first career was
(05:33):
actually in journalism.
So I was a newspaper reporterright out of college.
I worked at a small I wouldn'tsay small, it was a local
newspaper, an upstate New York,in Troy, new York, and I covered
local news, local politics, andI covered some state politics
as well.
So I went to city councilmeetings, zoning board meetings,
(05:53):
you know, interviewed citycouncil people and small town
politics is the funniest thingbecause there's rivalries,
there's history, there's, youknow, this neighborhood versus
that neighborhood, and I reallyfell in love with talking to
people and learning theirstories and, you know, didn't do
tech for a while.
You know I was.
I was what we would they calledthe digital journalists back
(06:16):
then because I also knew how toupdate our website and so I
would write for print.
I would also do pagination forprint as well, you know, and
would watch it run on theprinting press.
But we'd also update ourwebsite and I recorded videos.
I was the first person to livetweet city council meetings.
This is, you know, back in 2008, 2009 time period and so.
(06:40):
But so tech has always kind oftouched my career, but it never
was something that I diddirectly.
And along the way, I would makewebsites for friends, for
musicians that I knew, for, likeyou know, nonprofits or
different kind of groups, butalways that you know HTML, css,
wordpress, kind of static sites.
After journalism, I actuallytransitioned to financial
(07:02):
services and got I'm a licensedbroker, I have my insurance
license, I'm a licensedfinancial planner.
I did that for for for some youknow, almost five years working
at banks and large brokeragefirms and had left kind of tech
behind me at that point and wasreally focused in on financial
services and felt that this wasgoing to be the career for me.
(07:25):
Yeah, and so I got to.
I always felt that I didn'thave that sensation of staying
up till 3am looking at, you know, spreadsheets or you know Roth,
ira, you know distributions.
I didn't get that same joltthat you get of solving a
problem or having that aha orlike, oh, it's finally perfect.
(07:45):
And I got to the point where Iwas in my career where I was
ready to prepare to startgetting my CFP.
I had gotten my MBA, I hadgotten a couple of like all my
licenses, and CFP is kind of amulti-year commitment.
After that you're pretty much afinancial certified financial
planner.
Is what CFP means, sorry.
Tim Bourguignon (08:05):
Yeah, so certified financial planner, and
once you do that that's prettymuch your career.
Cecelia Martinez (08:11):
Like you know, you have clients and you want
to be with them for a long time.
You want to have a relationshipwith them that lasts for a very
long time.
And I started to get cold feet.
I was.
I was like I don't know if Ican do this for the next 20, 30,
40 years, because I just didn'tfeel that jolt of excitement.
I also didn't feel the samesense of you know, kind of
altruism that I felt withjournalism.
(08:31):
You know, I it's nice to beable to help people and I
definitely do feel like I triedto help people as much as
possible, but at the end of theday, it is a money driven
industry when you're infinancial services.
And so that's when I started tothink about okay, you know, if
you are going to have a careerfor 20, 30, 40, 50 years, like,
what do you want to spend yourtime doing?
(08:51):
And my mind kept going back tothose nights.
You know staying up till 3amfiguring something out, getting
stuck on something.
You know wanting to throw mycomputer against the wall, and
at that time it was a heavy, bigcomputer like these weren't
laptops, right, they were thebig PC towers.
And so until you finally got it, and then it all seems worth it
(09:13):
, and so I, yeah, so I decidedto kind of look back into web
development or, you know, beinga webmaster or websites or
whatever it was called at thattime, but at this point we had
fast forwarded to 2018.
So 10 years later from when Ifirst, when I made that
WordPress site in college, right, and so web apps had come a
(09:35):
long way.
They, I mean, they could do alot.
It was much more complex thanit was.
It's not just HTML, css, maybeWordPress like a little bit of
JavaScript, it's.
They do very, very complex,full stack things.
And so I did some.
I started doing some research,started teaching myself
JavaScript.
This is all.
I was still kind of working infinancial services, but I
realized that I was going toneed more of a formal kind of
(10:00):
education a little bit, and so Ilooked into options for that
and I found a boot camp.
Tim Bourguignon (10:06):
So I yeah before we get there.
Had you made up your mindalready?
Yeah, Now I'm going to switch,or was it still?
Let's, let's put back a feetand a foot in there and see what
happens.
Yeah, so I, I had I had made upmy mind, because I just again,
I kept coming back to like thecold feet and I don't want to do
this.
Cecelia Martinez (10:21):
And so when I decided to do my boot camp, I
actually went all in.
I quit my job, I quit my job, Iquit my job, I quit my job, I
quit my job, I quit my job, Iquit my job.
It was a three month full timeboot camp and I had basically
enough, you know, savings to getme through that, and at the end
of it I needed a job, andwhether that job was development
(10:43):
, whether it was working at abank or whether it was waitressy
like I needed to have somethingso I could pay my rent and so
but I felt like I needed thattoo.
It's so, I think it's so easyfor people to keep doing
something that they are, they dowell, they're successful at it,
and everyone says, oh, this isa great job, this is a great
career, you do well at it.
(11:04):
And it's really hard, I think,to shake yourself out of that
flow, of that kind of momentum,if, if something doesn't force
you to do that.
And so I could definitely seemyself getting caught up in that
and being like well, you know,everyone says this is the right
thing, you know it's a goodcareer for me, like, why not?
(11:25):
But I just couldn't get rid ofthat nagging feeling, and I
think, in order to let thatnagging feeling win and not just
bother me for the next severaldecades, I needed to do
something drastic, and so thatwas what made the best sense for
me.
I don't think I don'tnecessarily know if I would
recommend it.
Honestly, it was probably someof the most stressful time of my
(11:47):
life.
There was a lot of time where Iwas like I can't do this, I've
made a huge mistake.
This is way too much.
But it was really thecommunities that I had
surrounded myself with thathelped me get through that time
and ended up making itworthwhile.
Tim Bourguignon (12:02):
And I'm nodding heavily while you say all this.
Yeah, so how did?
You find this bootcamp.
Cecelia Martinez (12:09):
Yeah, so I had moved to Atlanta.
I moved to Atlanta in late 2017.
I was working at an insurancecompany and I just started.
I started teaching myselfJavaScript, decided I needed to
kind of something more formaland I actually saw an ad for the
Georgia Tech bootcamp and thiswas kind of still in the earlier
days.
Of bootcamps, there was a fewthat were out there.
I saw that it was a full stackengineering program and that
(12:34):
they had it was in person, whichI liked as well, and it was on
campus and you could do it fulltime.
But I wanted to do my vettingbecause it was going to be an
investment, it was going to bedrastic.
So I had started going to womenwho code Atlanta meetups.
So women who code as a globalorganization, they have chapters
all over and the Atlantachapter is very robust and they
(12:56):
had in person meetups and so Istarted going to those as I was
teaching myself JavaScript,going to some code jams, you
know doing things like that andI reached out to some of the
women in the chapter and say,hey, do one of you know about
this bootcamp, Like, what's beenyour experience?
And they were so helpful.
So Valerie Ragus, who I knowreally well now, at this point
(13:16):
she actually hopped on a callwith me and was like, hey, yeah,
stranger, I'll, I'll, I'll setsome time aside from my family
and talk to you about this andgave me her experience, told me,
hey, learn, get before you getstarted, because they're not
going to teach you that.
You know, make sure that youlearn this, start your job
search early.
And every like I said thatcommunity really helped me the
(13:37):
entire time because I would nothave been able to get through it
without that support and peopletelling and them telling me yes
, you can do this.
It's going to be very hard,you're going to need to commit
to it, but if you make itthrough the other end and it
will be worth it.
And there was one saying that Ikind of latched on too early,
and I still say all the time,but it's the only way to truly
fail is to give up.
(13:57):
So as long as you don't give up, you haven't failed yet.
You can keep moving forward,and that's how I was.
My first interaction with, with, with a local kind of tech
community, was with women whocode, and that is where I
started to really see the impactof what it could, what it could
make for individuals, but alsofor the community at large.
Tim Bourguignon (14:19):
Hmm, how did you discover that this tech
industry has such a concept ofcommunities and that you can
find local groups everywherethat talk about all this?
I mean, if you're a lawyer, Idoubt there are communities of
lawyers meeting sometime in abar discussing something.
How did you find this out?
Cecelia Martinez (14:41):
Yeah, so I I'm an extroverted person, I love
making new friends and when Imoved to Atlanta I needed to do
that.
Here I didn't know anybody.
I moved here for my parentslived here at the time, but I
didn't know anybody else and Iactually just went on meetupcom
and was looking for anythingrelated to anything Like I went
to some like women's groups whojust like got together to do
(15:02):
crafting.
I found a like a woman, like alady geeks meetup group who
would do like D&D meetups and goto comfort, like go to barcades
and things like that, and Inoticed that there was also tech
meetups and I was like huh,okay, cool, like that's been
something I'm interested in, andso really it was just my desire
for any any kind of, so eventhe social community that led me
(15:26):
to realize that there was techcommunities out there that did
exist, and so thankfully, Ithink it was just me being
lonely and being bored andwanting to kind of find people
in a new city and fortunatelythey were out there and and
we're very welcoming, and fromthere I've gotten involved with
so many other communitiesbecause of that first experience
and seeing how impactful it canbe.
Tim Bourguignon (15:47):
I'm so jealous.
It took me, I think, sevenyears into my career to realize
this.
I was working for a giantcompany back then and we had our
communities inside the company.
I mean finding, finding peoplelike my new people and talk
together, but I didn't realizethere was a community out there.
And and then came meetupcom,and then I realized as well that
(16:09):
there were a lot more.
But it took a while.
It really took a while, and Ican't imagine what it would
bring to a person just startingto really be be engulfed in this
community and really support itfrom right and left, and having
people of the same level and abit a bit higher, a bit a bit
farther, farther down the lineand not say higher, and having
(16:31):
people to look at or to look to,and so that must be fantastic.
Cecelia Martinez (16:35):
So yeah, and as I've gotten more involved in
communities on the other side,as an organizer and, as you know
, like leading chapters.
It's that stuck with me andyour story I think sex with me
as well and the importance ofgetting the word out, because a
lot of times people come to anevent and they're like, oh, is
this your first event?
And they're like, yeah, I hadno idea this existed.
(16:56):
You know, I would have loved tohave been coming to these the
entire time, and that justmotivates me more to say, okay,
we need to get the word out, weneed to tell people know that
the support is there, theseevents are here and you can find
it because, especially withremote work now, a lot of people
are really hungry for acommunity and for that sense of
(17:17):
camaraderie and collaborationthat they're not getting from
their day to day work, and sothat's a.
It just kind of reminds me,like you can never push, put the
word out too much.
There's always going to, you'realways going to find somebody
new.
Tim Bourguignon (17:30):
Yeah, you need to find the right words.
I was co-organizing aconference a few years back and
we gave out tickets to studentsto the local university and say,
hey, whoever wants to come, weget something.
Our five students coming and Iwas.
I was appalled by that and saywhy?
And I think it's just wellputting out a flyer, it doesn't
(17:50):
ring a bell, doesn't connect.
You have to get there, you haveto start talking to people.
And as soon as I startedtalking to students, they opened
their eyes wide and say, ofcourse I'm coming, but we had to
bridge that gap first and wenever managed to do this with
just information blasting.
It didn't work.
Cecelia Martinez (18:08):
Yeah, you have to find developers where they
are right, and that's somethingwhere and you have to understand
too is like, not everydeveloper or every student or
every person is going to consumeinformation in the same way.
And by identifying all thedifferent potential paths where
people could find out aboutthings and discover things, and
catering to all of thosedifferent potentials, like
(18:29):
that's really as I, for me, Ifind things a certain way.
I will go out and I will searchfor that information.
Not everybody will.
Even even when you think aboutthings like teaching concepts,
right, like I, I like to readdocumentation.
I like to do things hands on.
I have a harder time watchingvideos, but a lot of people do
love watching videos.
So if I only ever did whatworks for me, I'm missing out on
(18:52):
connecting with all of thepeople who do things a different
way.
So it requires a lot of puttingyourself in other people's
shoes and thinking and askingthem like, how do you find
things?
Like you did to me like, howdid you find out about this?
Like, how did you learn aboutit?
And identifying all those pathsand those threads that you can
pull at.
Tim Bourguignon (19:11):
I'm dropping a few years ahead now, but that
must be exactly challenging foryour job right now being a
developer advocate and having toreally construct multi-channel
outreach to really try to gathera representative community.
Cecelia Martinez (19:27):
Yeah, absolutely it's.
And it's interesting whenyou're working with an existing
community and looking to growthat community and then when
you're starting a community fromscratch and there's two very,
very different motions.
And it's, I feel, likethroughout my career, because
I've been very fortunate to beat three open source developer
(19:48):
tools with Cyprus, replay andnow Ionic, the but they're very
different types of communities.
They have some commonalitieswith open source and with being
developers, but they are at verydifferent stages at the at the
times that I was at thosecompanies, and so I've been able
to see how it's not always acopy paste, it's not always a
(20:09):
take this you know playbook andapply it here.
Community is its own entity, ithas its own personality, it has
its own way of doing things.
Just like how, whenever you'retalking to an individual
developer, you can't just hitthem with the same talking
points, that you have to askquestions.
And I always approach everyconversation with an individual
(20:31):
developer and sometimes I'lltalk to people and they say, oh,
like, tell me, like, sell me onIonic, and I'll be like well,
what are you working on?
Like, what do you do?
I can't.
I need to know you first, andyou have to do the same thing
with communities.
You have to say okay, why areyou here?
What type of support are youlooking for?
Are you looking to connect?
Are you looking to learn?
Do you need help?
(20:51):
Because you know you don't havethe support that you need.
And so I think you have to kindof treat a community like it's
its own person, with its ownpersonality, and approach it
that way, and so it's beenreally fun to see the different
iterations of that.
Tim Bourguignon (21:06):
For sure, Probably we should, we should
get there, but let's, let'sstart right.
You were in the, in thebootcamp, having on one side the
time of your life, on the otherside the biggest regrets, and
wondering if you took the rightdecision.
What ensued in this was threemonths that led to probably a
job.
Cecelia Martinez (21:27):
Yeah, so I mean I, it really was high
stress.
Like I said, I don't know ifI'd recommend it for everybody.
I think it's what worked for me.
Later on in my life I wasdiagnosed with ADHD and a lot of
things that I look back makessense.
That sense of having a deadline, having that intensity, that
that really kind of motivated meto get through it.
(21:49):
But I was very fortunate, likeI said, this was, you know, 2019
, it was still in person.
I started my job search a littleearly and I did have some
things going for me that notevery bootcamp student does, in
that I did have an undergraduatedegree, I did have an MBA and I
had previous experience kind ofworking with websites, at least
(22:09):
to some extent.
So I understood those conceptsof deployment and getting things
out to users and thinking aboutkind of a user experience and
so.
But I did have two offers whenI graduated my bootcamp after
three months and a lot of that,honestly, both of them were from
referrals and from people thatI knew ended up finding through
my network, and so, again, thecommunity kind of saved the day,
(22:33):
I think, in a way, because Idefinitely did the apply, apply,
apply to all the junior devpositions that you can find, but
, ultimately, the firstdeveloper position that I ended
up taking was a with somebodywho had seen my job search tweet
on LinkedIn I mean on Twitterand then reached out on LinkedIn
, sent me a message hey, we'relooking for somebody, and it was
(22:56):
a junior software developerposition at a really unique
opportunity, and that is where Istarted my development career
working.
The best part was, though, as Ihad just learned react in my
bootcamp and this was a dotnetangular shop.
I was like, okay, I justlearned JavaScript, got to learn
C sharp now, just learn react,got to learn angular now, and
(23:20):
then they're also working withreact native, so there was like
a little bit of overlap there,but react is not react native,
so so, yeah.
So I was like, okay, let's,let's keep the challenges
rolling, let's do this, and thatwas.
That was a great.
I was a great experience.
It definitely, though, helpedme get a better sense of what
(23:40):
type of work I wanted to do longterm.
Again, I was still tech is avery broad space.
I think a lot of people come inthinking, okay, I have to be an
engineer, or this is like I'mgoing to learn, I'm going to do
front end.
This is what I'm and they havea very kind of narrow view of
what it means to be in atechnical role and that I had.
I had the same conception to.
(24:00):
I was like I did a full stackengineering bootcamp.
By God, I'm going to be a fullstack engineer and, you know, I
think going through that initialrole helped me to kind of
formulate and see, oh wow, likewhat's that team doing, what's
this team doing?
Well, what are the like?
Why did we do it this way, whydid we do it that way?
And being able to ask a lot ofquestions and learn a lot about
(24:23):
what real world softwaredevelopment looks like helped me
to kind of start to see theearly shape of what might what
my career would eventually be.
Because I was, you know, at thepoint where I was.
I got up to speed, probablyabout, you know, within the
first like two to three months,where I was actually at that
point just like doing tickets,doing tickets, like doing doing
(24:45):
some node scripts to helpautomate some of our API
interactions.
I had gotten comfortable withthe database, was kind of
allowed to do more things, pushsome stuff and so.
But I about like eight monthsand I'm realizing, oh, I'm just
kind of like doing tickets anddoing tickets, and doing tickets
and you know, I didn't, Ididn't have that 3am, you know,
(25:07):
feeling anymore it wasn't thesame, and so that is when I kind
of started to again expand myhorizons a little bit more about
, well, where do I fit into techand how can I use these skills
in a way where I can combine alot like some of the things that
I'm doing outside of my careerin terms of, like the
communities I'm involved in andstill, and get that, get that
(25:31):
feeling, you know, get thatfeeling back right and so, yeah,
but where you tempted at somepoint to bring your financial
expertise into the mix andcombine this to.
Yeah, so I was.
Initially I was.
I was thinking about, like,fintech companies, you know,
fintech startups, anythingrelated to banking or investment
(25:53):
or insurance, and butultimately, like, especially in
Atlanta, there's actually areally big fintech scene here
but ultimately I think I wouldhave probably still run into
that same kind of like altruismfeeling, lack of thereof,
because, if anything, I wantedto work on financial literacy
and financial education, whichisn't exactly a.
(26:14):
You know, like a VC hot button,like topic of you know teaching
people how to you know how tobudget and how to like manage
their money, but but actuallyteaching everybody and not just
people who only have high networth.
And so I, yeah, so I ended upkind of leaning away from that
and when I started at Cyprus, Isaw the magic of what it can be
(26:38):
like to work on developer toolsbecause you are a part of every
single thing that the developersthat use your tools are
building and it feels it feelslike a cheat code because it's a
like a force multiplier.
If I can help somebody, like ifI help to make this tool better,
(26:58):
than every single thing that isbuilt with that tool becomes
better.
And we would get so excited,like we found out that I think
the NASA website was usingCyprus to test their website and
we're like, oh, like we'rehelping NASA.
This is so cool and like youknow everything from nonprofits,
from like cutting edge, likemedical applications, everything
(27:19):
you get to feel like you're apart of that in a way.
And that's where I was like,okay, this is, this is the juice
, this is like I'm getting thefeelings now of this is pretty
cool to be able to have thatmassive impact across, like
literally, like you know,millions of projects right and
(27:41):
yeah, and that's so.
That's when I started at Cyprusand really fell in love with
developer tools and also withopen source.
Tim Bourguignon (27:48):
So what happened that led you to leaving
Cyprus at some point?
It sounds like a love story.
Cecelia Martinez (27:53):
Yeah, it was, and I honestly I still love the
Cyprus community.
I am they're having their firstor, like you know, I still talk
to a lot of them and like theirevents, that they have coming
up and I have a lot of friendsthere.
But I Cyprus was definitely aproving ground for me and it was
a learning arena, like Ilearned probably, I feel like
five years, five to 10 yearsworth of things and that to in
(28:16):
like the just over two yearsthat I was there Because of the
stage that we were at.
I was the first hire on oursuccess team, so I was working
directly with all of our Cyprususers.
We didn't have a community teamat that point so I was handling
a lot of that function outfunction as well, in addition to
speaking about Cyprus atconferences and events, and so I
(28:37):
was doing a lot of differentthings and it forced me out of
my comfort zone.
I remember where I had aconversation with my, with one
of the co-founders, and we wereintegrating our team with a
brand new tool and it was goingto be a big.
We had to all of our customerdata.
It was like kind of like a CRMadjacent type tool required a
lot of database configurationwith our business database, and
(28:59):
he was like I want you to leadthat project.
And I was like, oh, I'm notsure if I'm the best person to
do that.
I don't have that expertise.
And he said, well, who wouldyou recommend do it instead?
And I realized, oh yeah, likethere's no one else, like
there's no one to pass this to,I just have to figure it out and
make it work.
And so that really got me inthe mindset of, okay, yeah, like
(29:21):
we just have to run with things.
I have to be superuncomfortable, I'm going to have
to learn new things that Ihaven't done before and and hope
that it works out.
And if it doesn't work out,then trust that I can fix it.
And and even when working onthings that are customer
impacting and working directlywith customers and answering
their questions, and so that wasreally a massive period of
(29:43):
growth for me at Cyprus, becauseI was given so much trust and I
was given so much agency whereI didn't feel like a junior
developer.
I didn't feel like somebodyearly in my career.
I felt like somebody who waspart of the team and really
helped pushing everythingforward, and they wanted my
opinion and they wanted even ifit was bad, they wanted to know
(30:05):
what I thought, and that was newfor me and so it really shaped
me into really like being muchmore confident to try new things
, to do things I'm uncomfortablewith, to be, you know, to be
the rain in the parade sometimesand say, hey, like, have we
thought about how this is goingto impact this?
Or, you know, I don't know ifthis is going to work.
(30:25):
Do we think about that?
And I think, if anything, thatis, those are the some of the
traits that I think took me fromkind of more of like a junior
to somebody who is more of aleader and being able to make
those high impact decisions.
But I know you asked about why Ileft.
Tim Bourguignon (30:44):
So great that along the way.
So that was good, you took thatthe way.
Cecelia Martinez (30:49):
Yeah.
So, as I mentioned, I started atCyprus on the success team and
I was very customer facing, butwe didn't have a community team,
we didn't have a dev route team, and so when opportunities
arose of, hey, we'd likesomebody to talk about Cyprus or
do a workshop on Cyprus, Iwould be the person to who could
do that, especially once wekind of got more like the team,
(31:10):
got a little bit bigger and Ihad been there for a while and I
was one of the most even aftera year and a half you're like
the more senior person as it'sgrowing from 20 people up to
over 100.
And so I actually ended updeveloping an entire 20 hour
workshop series that I would usefor our enterprise customers
and I did various workshops outin the community and I really at
(31:33):
the same time, in tandem, hadbeen working with external
communities more like women whocode and like out and out and
tech, and I could feel that poolof really wanting to do
something that was morecommunity focused, unless maybe
like customer facing and but theway that Cyprus was at the time
, it just there wasn't, theopportunity wasn't there, and so
(31:56):
I ended up looking for thatelsewhere and, you know, found a
different other companies thatI could work at, but I've always
still like love the Cypruscommunity, continued to do some
Cyprus talks and workshops andanswer questions around that,
because it was.
It was a place where I met somany amazing people and so many
and they're solving really coolproblems.
I think they.
(32:16):
I think they still are so, butthat's where I ended up, how I
ended up at replay as acommunity lead.
Tim Bourguignon (32:23):
So how did you find another tool in open source
to get your, your, your, your,your vibes on to that sounds
like the planets aligning.
Cecelia Martinez (32:37):
I don't know, I'm so lucky, I don't know if I
somebody like, if I didsomething like maybe I found a
rabbit's foot along the way orsomething like that but you know
, I've, I I've been embedded orI shouldn't say embedded, but
involved in really active andengaged is maybe a better word
with a lot of different opensource tools.
So a lot of what I would do tois talk about how Cyprus can
integrate with other open sourcetools, with the communities
(32:58):
that I've worked with, kind ofcontributing to different
communities, and so the opensource dev tools community is
not small, but it's also not toobig, and so typically, I'm
always on the lookout for newthings and things that catch my
eye, and I actually found replayof just you know, through
social media.
Somebody had kind of mentionedit on Twitter.
(33:19):
I looked into it and I was like, oh, this is like pretty
interesting, like, oh, cool,it's open source.
Oh, wow, like another kind ofcool, unique problem, and I like
to joke that I really loveworking on things that, like
developers hate like the hardestthing.
So testing everyone hates end toend testing, debugging like
people like you know, pull theirhair over debugging and
(33:40):
deploying mobile applications toapp stores, which is again like
the most tedious process.
I don't know if I've ever beenthrough and so it's.
I could kind of see that.
Okay, cool, this is a real painpoint and maybe a pain point is
the better word versus likethings that devs hate, but it
was a real pain point and it wasopen source and the product
team was really cool and thenice thing about the work that I
(34:03):
had done up to that point withmy open source work and then
also with the community workthat I had done, is that it
wasn't really an interviewprocess.
It was more of a hey, let's chat.
Hey, like okay, yeah, we'veseen your conference talks, yep,
we know your work with Cyprus,like, we're familiar with all of
that.
I've never had to do atechnical like algorithm test or
anything like that, becauseeverything that I do is pretty,
(34:26):
is open source and it's publicand everything I do is out there
, and so I ended up being Icould just kind of a chat and
then I ended up making the leap.
It was very tough decision butI ended up making the leap to
replay with that, which at thetime was a very early stage
startup, like earlier thanCyprus was for me, so that came
with it's with.
(34:46):
Yeah, it was a very uniqueexperience.
Tim Bourguignon (34:51):
I feel there is some stuff to impact behind the
word unique.
Cecelia Martinez (34:55):
Yeah, I mean.
So I'm a very transparentperson, like anybody that I
talked to.
Like replay for me ended upbeing too early.
I am.
I joined Cyprus when it had,you know, we were about 25
people and it was like there wasalready a very robust community
at that point.
It was more about expansion ofthe community and finding new
(35:19):
audiences versus starting fromscratch.
Replays was very early and Ijust found that with the way the
types of skills that I broughtto the table was the words
necessarily the skill set thatthey actually needed at the end
of the day, but you don't knowthat, right, when you're early
in, right, you know you don'tnecessarily know that in the
early stage startup because youhave to be able to pivot so
(35:40):
frequently.
And so I have a lot of love forthe team like I actually have
met, seen many of them in personat different events because,
again, open source DevTools notbig, not small.
So and there I left, I said Iknow part of me is going to like
kick myself, because I knowyou're going to do great things,
and they really have.
They've come out with somereally cool new tools in the
(36:02):
testing space and I'm reallyexcited to see what they
continue to do there.
But for for one of the thingsthat I could do well, I didn't
feel like I could do thosethings well for them at that
time, and so, and again, theseare all things that you learn
along the way and you have to becomfortable with that and
that's something that again,early in my career, I was very
(36:23):
much a people pleaser, like yesperson.
I struggled a lot with feelinglike I didn't belong there,
which meant I would do anythingand everything to keep from
being you know, quote unquotediscovered and kicked out.
I felt that, oh, they're goingto figure out that I'm not smart
enough, not technical enough,not whatever enough, and so I
(36:43):
need to say yes to everything.
I need to learn this, I need tolearn everything, and I ended
up doing a lot, a lot of work indifferent areas.
That maybe wasn't the mostproductive work I did still did
do productive work as well but Iprobably could have gotten away
with doing maybe like 80% ofthe work and it's would have
been the highest impact workright.
(37:04):
And so I think, as I've gonethrough my career, I've been
able to identify not just alwayssaying yes right off the bat,
but asking questions,challenging a little bit,
pushing back, kind of figuringout, okay, is this really the
highest impact work that I couldbe doing with my time?
And that happened actually atCyprus.
(37:26):
There was something where I,because of something that had
that happened, I needed tomanually update like rows and
rows and rows and rows of somedata, and I was like, all right,
I'll just, you know, I'll juststay up late and I'll just knock
this out.
And we realized is like, okay,the solution is not Cecilia
stays up late and knocks us out.
The solution is how do we dothis in a more automated way?
(37:47):
How do we make sure thisdoesn't happen again?
And I think I learned that iffires keep happening I tend to
like to follow the chaos I'llthrow myself on the grenade, but
if fires keep happening, theanswer is not buy more fire
extinguishers, the answer is getthe gasoline out of the
building.
And so the nice thing was isthat by the time that I was at
(38:10):
replay and I do feel like I dida lot of really good, impactful
work there I was able to rewriteour documentation.
I did a lot of product work, Italked to a ton of developers
about their debuggingexperiences and I did quite a
few conference talks.
But the nice thing is, at thatpoint I had learned hey, am I
doing like I'm working a lot?
I'm doing a lot of things, butis this the most value for what
(38:32):
the company needs right now, yesor no?
And it ended up being that theanswer was no, and you know they
could, like it would make itwould make more sense to to not
to not like continue down thatpath.
And so I learned a ton, though,about like it's like, wow, I've
, like I said, I've been sofortunate to have been at series
a stage, then very early stage,like seed stage, and then now
(38:56):
at Ionic, which you know hadbeen post a and has been
acquired.
And so, seeing the communitydevelopment, seeing the business
strategies again what you wouldthink are similar, three open
source developer tools beingincredibly different.
But those skills that I learnedalong the way, that were not
technical, that were not techrelated, but were related to
(39:18):
being able to see high impactproblems, make decisions and
feel comfortable pushing upagainst that is, I think, what
had the most impact on my career.
Tim Bourguignon (39:27):
I love how, how the path go right and left at
some point.
Come back.
I mean you haven't reallytalked about journalism in.
I haven't mentioned journalismin your late career, but it's
there, and you mentioned a bitin financial education.
That would be there as well.
And now the community work thatyou're doing.
I'm sure there's tons ofwriting, tons of of summarizing,
(39:51):
tons of asking questions, allkind of skillset that you
learned back then, and I'm surethe financial pieces are there
as well.
When you talked, you didn'tmention that which, when you
talked about kind ofunderstanding the systems and
the modules and how things arepieced together, I kind of see
the financial person looking ata very complex systems and
(40:13):
seeing where the pieces fit etc.
So it's all coming together, Ithink, really nicely.
Cecelia Martinez (40:19):
It really does .
And so I think, for journalism,obviously, being able to
communicate, being able to talkto all kinds of people because I
would talk to senators and Iwould talk to, you know, the guy
who on the corner like you know, hey, what happened with this
robbery?
Kind of you know, we've beenable to navigate all those
different types of conversations.
Obviously, writing is a big one, but then from financial
services, I think what actuallyhas helped me a lot is being
(40:42):
able to take complex conceptsand break them down.
There's a lot of times thatyou're working, so I'm trying to
explain, you know, a verycomplex investment vehicle to
somebody who's about to retireand, you know, has.
It was like a teacher, like hasnot worked at all in finance,
and so at the end of the day, Ifeel like, really, I, I love
(41:03):
being an educator, I love beinga communicator, and that just
all happens to take place in atechnical field.
I'm talking to developersinstead of, you know, retirees,
and I'm teaching aboutdevelopment tools.
But it's all engaging withindividuals is engaging with
those communities and being ableto leverage that communications
(41:24):
and educational skills.
Tim Bourguignon (41:26):
Makes perfect sense.
I guess that's the best placeto stop this.
I usually ask for an advice andI'm short of an advice, right?
I'm wondering maybe if, ifsomebody was facing the same
challenge that you had, feelingwhere I'm not at my place right
now.
(41:46):
I don't feel I belong where I'm.
How did you put it?
You didn't find your juice, orto find your, your right, I'm
sure how you put it.
But anyhow, your answer to thatwas I quit my job, I enroll in
the boot camp, let's go.
Is this the advice you wouldgive?
Is there another advice youwould give to the person in this
(42:08):
, in this situation?
Cecelia Martinez (42:10):
Yeah, I think the important thing is to you
have to be self aware, and thatrequires work.
You have to do some analysisabout yourself and figure out
what it is that will work foryou.
As I mentioned, I later on wasdiagnosed with ADHD, so I
realizing, oh, that juice that Ineed is what helps to motivate
me.
I tend to work well in thingsthat are deadline driven, like
(42:30):
journalism or like writing atalk for a conference, and I
like to learn new things, and soI need new developer tools and
integrations and things to workon.
So I've been able to identifythe things that work well for me
.
But I would say, do the work andkind of being reflective on
yourself and finding what areyour priorities, what is like
not just a role, not just atitle, not just a stack, but at
(42:54):
the, at the base, a more baselevel, like what is it that you
get joy out of?
What is it that you feel thatyou could do for the next 20, 30
, 40, 50 years?
And and go from there andfigure out a plan to make that
happen, because I guess thatevery person is going to be
different.
But you need to look in, lookinward first.
Tim Bourguignon (43:14):
Why is move?
Thank you for that.
Cecelia Martinez (43:17):
Maybe don't.
Maybe don't quit your job.
Just yeah, please don't takeaway also.
So you told me to quit my job,so that's there, you can link
back to your person just say heyhey fantastic.
Tim Bourguignon (43:31):
Where would be the best place to continue the
discussion with you?
Cecelia Martinez (43:34):
Yeah, so I'm at Cecilia creates, I'm on
GitHub, I'm on Twitter.
That's also my threads username, if you're into that.
I haven't used it much yet, butbut, yeah, cecilia creates is.
You can find me pretty much onany platform there.
And yeah, and also you know,and any of the various
communities, women who code outin tech and then also in their,
(43:54):
you know, ionic Discord as well.
Tim Bourguignon (43:57):
Anything else you want to plug in?
Cecelia Martinez (44:00):
I'll be at testjs summit in early December
in Berlin.
It's one of my favoriteconferences because it is about
testing, but it's also a focuson the JavaScript stack, so a
lot about web testing.
It's a really great community.
It's the first time that we'rehaving the event in person.
I'm on the program committee aswell.
So, I'm extra biased, but Ithink we put together a really
(44:20):
great event.
Tim Bourguignon (44:21):
So and I link to all of that, including testjs
summit in the show.
Thank you so much, celia.
It's been really fun listeningto it.
Cecelia Martinez (44:30):
Sorry, yeah, thanks so much for having me.
It's been great.
Tim Bourguignon (44:34):
And this has been another episode of the
first journey with each othernext week.
Bye, bye.
Thanks a lot for tuning in.
I hope you have enjoyed thisweek's episode.
If you like the show, pleaseshare, rate and review.
It helps more listenersdiscover those stories.
You can find the links to allthe platforms the show appears
(44:55):
on on our website devjourneyinfoslash subscribe.
Creating the show every weektakes a lot of time, energy and,
of course, money.
Would you please help mecontinue bringing out those
inspiring stories every week bypledging a small monthly
donation.
You'll find our Patreon link atdevjourneyinfo slash donate.
(45:19):
And finally, don't hesitate toreach out and tell me how this
week's story is shaping yourfuture.
You can find me on Twitter andat teamathabinfo at
devjourneyinfo.
Talk to you soon.
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