Welcome Sid!

Transcript

Mandi Walls: Welcome to Page It to The Limit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to run software in production successfully. We cover leading practices used in the software industry to improve the system reliability and the lives of the people supporting those systems. I’m your host, Mandi Walls. Find me at LNXCHK on Twitter.

Hi folks. Welcome back to Page For The Limit. This week I’ve got a new guest with me who’s on our team. Yay. You may have noticed one of our prior DevRel folks. Tiago has left us for a IDP startup, we wish him the best of luck. We have some new folks joining the team. One of them is with me here today. Sid, welcome to the show. Welcome to PagerDuty. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Sid Verma: Yeah, super excited to be here. Like you said, my name’s Sid Verma. I’m joining you guys from Notion I was leading PMing, the API and also the whole developer relations developer advocacy motion there. I’m really excited to be here. I love the value prop that PagerDuty has. I mean, it’s always like it’s built into the product and I think it’s very obvious how valuable PagerDuty is, especially in today’s world where we see more outages more than anything. We saw the CrowdStrike not too long ago, but yeah, happy to be here.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. Sweet. So what kinds of things do you kind enjoy doing as far as DevRel goes? Where can folks maybe expect to see more of you as you get your feet under you here at PagerDuty?

Sid Verma: Yeah, so I think DevRel at every company is unique and while I’d love to be able to answer that question definitively, I think at the moment I would love to be more engaged in forums and more in-person events. I think that just has a really nice way of getting to know me in person. I think it’s a lot easier just to talk to people and have those little side conversations rather than go over Slack or email. So yeah, I would say for now look forward to seeing me in person and then I will probably ramp up more of my engagement on Twitter or X as time goes on.

Mandi Walls: Cool. And where are you based? So if folks have an event that they can invite you to or want to host a meetup or anything like that, where can they reach out to you?

Sid Verma: Yeah, so I’m based out of San Francisco Bay Area. That being said, I am very susceptible to travel and being told to travel. So if you have somewhere nice that you want to take me, please be my guest. Invite me anywhere. I am happy to travel the world and talk about technology. That’s kind of the dream.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. So yeah, we know some folks out there trying to rejuvenate some meetups and some other stuff in the Bay Area, so hoping to get in with some of those folks over the next couple of months and the next year as things continue to come back from the pandemic. So that’s awesome. How long have you been part of a DevRel sort of function? Where did you come into this from?

Sid Verma: Yeah, so I’ve kind of always been circling it and unknown to me, I was gravitating towards the world already, but I started this kind of off over at Twilio where I was a solution engineer and we were contributing to our documentation, but we were also kind of baked into the role was this idea of helping customers out, but also not strictly from a sales point of view, but just helping them out from a here’s, “we bought Twilio, here’s kind of where we’re stuck. Can you help unstuck us?” And so that’s where the semblance of developer advocacy kind of came in, where Twilio is an API based tool and we’re evangelizing the API. We’re having these, not these meetups, but these customer events where people can come up to and ask questions. So that’s where it got started in the world developer advocacy and just meeting up with people and interacting with them and their APIs.

Sid Verma: And then as I came to Notion, that’s when the role got a little bit more solidified where baked into with any startup, I think having these strict titles is tough, but baked into the role was this idea that we need to evangelize our API. And we have a lot of people that are passionate to use Notion but maybe don’t know the best practices behind it. They don’t know all of what it can do and they’re kind of using it as a point solution. And for me it was really important to show people the power of what the API can do, what the technology can do overall and what they can build with it. And I think that’s where it got really exciting for me was you see a lot of people really invested into the core product and then you introduce them to this set of functionality that seems technical on the surface, deeply technical at the surface, and for some almost unapproachable technical at the surface.

Sid Verma: And then they leapfrog from there and they start learning what more the API can do and these deeply technical things. And then you have these integration developers that come out of it and suddenly you start a community of people that want to build on top of this amazing product. And that’s always been really fun for me. And I think taking that to PagerDuty is kind of the next limit, right? It’s doing that, but at an enterprise scale where you can do a lot of fun things with PagerDuty myself at home, I’m trying to start this project where if anytime my PC crashes when I’m away, if I’m running a large backup, then I want to be able to alert my phone and I could set up a number of services to do this. I could go through Twilio, SMS, I could go through a whole bunch of stuff, but it’s already baked into product and I just kind of love doing these hacky solutions that I can start trying out at home and then learning the most I can about the a i. That’s how I got started with Twilio. That’s how I got started with Notion and that’s how I fully intend on getting started with PagerDuty as well.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. Yeah, well you have to share that with the community. Then as you finish that up, we love to have these weird little solutions that folks have put out. If you missed it, we did one earlier in the year with a user who had been managing his washer and dryer, but not a modern generation washer and dryer, like older equipment that he had to add the smart part of the smart appliance to. So that was fascinating. He had all kinds of things that he had rigged up to figure out how to know when the washer was done and how to know when the dryer was done based on electricity usage and movement and crazy things. So yeah, there’s so many possibilities with the PagerDuty for anything that you want to know about in real time to hook that in and get alerts from. So

Sid Verma: Yeah.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. This has been great. So where can folks find you first? Where are you living at on social media these days?

Sid Verma: Oh man. So I made the classic mistake of creating all of my social accounts based to the company I’m working at. My personal Twitter is probably not the best, it’s just mostly me complaining about long lines at fast food restaurants.

Mandi Walls: That’s life.

Sid Verma: Yeah, I mean, I would say for now probably on most community Slacks is the easiest. Email me, it’s S Verma, it’s sverma@pagerduty.com. Otherwise I will probably come back on another episode and once I get my socials up and running and post ‘em out. But those two channels should get you pretty far.

Mandi Walls: Awesome. I’d love to see it. Okay, so what fast food restaurants are you going to that are full of lines? Is it just like In-N-Out Burger, or what are you dealing with here?

Sid Verma: And Chick-fil-A are the biggest defenders for me.

Mandi Walls: Chick-fil-A’s Insane Everywhere. Absolutely insane. Oh my gosh.

Sid Verma: But on the rare occurrence I’ve had a long line at Taco Bell. It hits different, it makes me so angry.

Mandi Walls: Yeah. When do you go into a Taco Bell when there’s ever much of a line? Almost never. I only eat Taco Bell a couple times a year, but yeah.

Sid Verma: Oh, I probably eat Taco Bell a couple times a month.

Mandi Walls: Oh my gosh. Oh dude. Well, yeah, I mean that’s always fun stuff too, to know what folks do in their downtime and it helps us connect and relate to everybody in the community because everybody out there is having the same struggles if you’re in the US with Chick-fil-A as well, because their traffic is crazy everywhere they go. And I’ve heard they’re now going to be opening potentially in the UK so all of our listeners there can participate in this traffic mayhem that follows a Chick-fil-A everywhere. So yeah, two lanes of Drive-through is never enough for a Chick-fil-A.

Sid Verma: Yeah, I mean I assume that in the UK at least because public transit is so much better than it is here, that people will be in store more often than the drive through life

Mandi Walls: It could possibly be. Right? Yeah, they need to hook it up to the trams in Manchester or something like that.

Sid Verma: That’d be nice.

Mandi Walls: Sweet. It’s been great, dude. So looking forward to having some more episodes coming out. We have some guests in the pipeline for folks that will hopefully have some things out by the end of October, early in November. We’re looking forward to a bunch of events coming up. So you’ll find PagerDuty at KubeCon in Salt Lake City in early November, and we will have a huge presence this year at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas. We’re always there, but we are going big this year. So if you are at any of those events and you want to stop by the booth, say hello. We love to talk to people. Some of us might be there. I think I’m going to re:Invent. I’m not sure who’s staffing KubeCon yet, but yeah, we want to hear from you. Anything that you want to learn that we haven’t covered yet or anything that we should cover. Again, we’d love to hear from folks as to what you’re looking for and what you’re hoping to listen to. So you can always reach out to us. We’re community-team@pagerduty.com and Sid is sverma and I’m mWalls@pagerduty.com. So yeah, we’re excited to have sit on board. We’ll have another DevRel joining us in Lisbon in a couple of weeks and we’ll have him on as well. And then we’ll have a full team almost and it’ll be really exciting. We’ll be everywhere.

Sid Verma: Yeah. And let me also shout out our DevOps Vancouver meetup. If you are in the Vancouver area, October 29th from about five to 8:00 PM I’ll be talking about full service ownership of just how to build better software teams and how to build better software overall. So if you’re interested in learning about that or just chatting with me about pretty much anything, I will be there for three hours and probably a couple more hours after that just chatting with people. So please come up there. We’ll have a great time. It’s hosted by DevOps Vancouver. It’s a public group on Meetup and yeah, looking forward to seeing you all out there and also more episodes on the way.

Mandi Walls: Yeah, perfect. Will dude, thanks again. Welcome and everybody out there Sid a big shout out and welcome him to our community and we’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode. So in the meantime, I’ll wish everybody an uneventful day.

Sid Verma: Thanks Mandi.

Mandi Walls: That does it for another installment of Pager to the Limit. We’d like to thank our sponsor, PagerDuty for making podcast possible. Remember to subscribe to this podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can find our show notes at pageittothelimit.com, and you can reach us on Twitter at PageIt2TheLimit using the number two. Thank you so much for joining us, and remember, uneventful days are beautiful days.