#281 Cecelia Martinez was a journalist and finance expert missing a jolt of excitation
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Highlights
Our latest podcast episode takes a deep dive into the captivating career journey of Cecelia Martinez. As a high school student, Cecelia began her tech journey by designing layouts for MySpace pages. Today, she has built a successful career in software development and serves as a developer advocate at Ionic. Her story is a testament to the transformative power of self-awareness, the necessity of calculated risks, and the profound influence of tech communities on career trajectories.
Cecelia's career transition from journalism and web development to software development highlights the importance of aligning work with passion. As she navigated her career path, she discovered that the most fulfilling work combines personal interests with professional skills. This realization led her to software development, a field that she had dabbled in during her high school and college years. Her return to tech was facilitated by a software development boot camp, which provided a rigorous and comprehensive introduction to the industry.
Interestingly, Cecelia's journey in tech is also marked by her engagement with various tech communities. She found these communities to be crucial in shaping her career, acting as a source of inspiration, guidance, and support. Through her interactions with diverse groups of tech enthusiasts, she was able to explore different areas of the industry, gain valuable insights, and build a strong professional network. These experiences underpin the importance of tech communities as a resource for newcomers to the industry.
The podcast also explores Cecelia's experience as a community lead at Replay. In this role, she leveraged her technical skills and community experience to create a more inclusive and representative tech community. Her work underscores the potential of multi-channel outreach in fostering diverse tech communities and promoting the industry to a wider audience.
Cecelia's career story is also characterized by her deep involvement with open source development tools. She discusses the benefits of these tools and their impact on her work. As an advocate for open source, Cecelia underscores the importance of these resources in democratizing software development and encouraging innovation in the tech space.
The podcast ends with a discussion on the lessons Cecelia has learned throughout her career. From learning to assert herself and resist the urge to people-please, to understanding the importance of self-awareness in career decisions, Cecelia's insights are invaluable for anyone navigating their career in tech.
Overall, Cecelia's career journey underscores the transformative power of self-awareness and the role of tech communities in shaping career paths. It serves as a reminder that fulfilling work lies at the intersection of passion and skill, and that continuous learning and risk-taking are integral to career growth in the tech industry.
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Transcript
⚠ The following transcript was automatically generated. ❤ Help us out, Submit a pull-request to correct potential mistakes
Cecelia Martinez: 0:00
you have to be self aware, and that requires work. You have to do some analysis about yourself and figure out what it is that will work for you. As I mentioned, I later on was diagnosed with ADHD, so I realizing, oh, that juice that I need is what helps to motivate me. I tend to work well in things that are deadline driven, like journalism or like writing a talk for a conference, and I like to learn new things, and so I need new developer tools and integrations and things to work on. So I've been able to identify the things that work well for me. But I would say, do the work and kind of being reflective on yourself and finding what are your priorities, what is not just a role, not just a title, not just a stack, but at the base, a more base level, what is it that you get joy out of? What is it that you feel that you could do for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years? And go from there and figure out a plan to make that happen, because I guess that every person is going to be different. But you need to look in, look inward first.
Tim Bourguignon:
0:59
Hello and welcome to Devopers Journey, the podcast bringing you the making of stories of successful software developers to help you on your upcoming journey. I'm a host, tim Borghigno. On this episode, I receive Cecilia Martinez. Cecilia is dedicated to creating better, more inclusive developer experiences for everyone. As such, she is the developer advocate for AppFlow at Ionic. Her previous companies include Cypress and Replay, with areas of expertise including web development, testing, developer tools and open source software. She is a lead volunteer for Women who Code Frontend, a chapter lead for Out in Tech Atlanta and a GitHub star. So yeah, welcome DevTrain.
Cecelia Martinez:
1:45
Thank you, hello, hello.
Tim Bourguignon:
1:47
But before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific listeners who support the show. Every month you are keeping the DevTrain lights up. If you would like to join this fine crew and help me spend more time on finding phenomenal guests than editing audio tracks, please go to our website, devjourneyinfo, and click on the support me on Patreon button. Even the smallest contributions are giant steps toward a sustainable Dev journey Journey. Thank you, and now back to today's guest. So, cecilia, as you know, the show exists to help the listeners understand what your story looked like and imagine 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 start of your Dev journey?
Cecelia Martinez:
2:37
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 people remember live journal, but for me, in high school I spent a lot of time on live journal and that's where I learned HTML and CSS for the first time. I created custom live journal layouts and graphics and got involved with some band street teams and was kind of helping them make websites and things like that Very simple, like custom my space pages and custom live journal layouts, and that's where I first started the experience first felt the experience of being up all night working on something and then looking up and realizing that it was 3 am and I was supposed to be up for school the next day and that really that sensation of just getting sucked into something always pulled me back throughout the years, even though I didn't do development professionally for a very long time. So it started with live journal started with some drama. You know, live journal there's always a little bit of drama and I, yeah, kind of went from there. The next time that I touched development in a more formal sense was in college. So I actually studied journalism or public communications in my undergraduate degree and at that time making websites was considered part of marketing, was considered part of public relations, and so I learned Dreamweaver. I learned again like HTML CSS. They told us we could use whatever technology we wanted to make a website, and I chose Flash, which took a lot of time and now is the dead technology. But and I ended up using those skills on our college newspaper website. So we I was the editor of our college newspaper and we had a hosted platform where we just kind of pushed everything to a remote site and everything was managed for us. And I moved us to a self-hosted WordPress instance while I was there at college so that we could have more control over the layout. There wasn't any ads on it. We could control our own ads. And that was my first experience with dealing with things like setting up a database and digging into the PHP files and trying to change just one little thing and hoping that nothing broke and dragging you know FTP files over for the new release coming out on Sunday nights. And so again it was. It was that same feeling of staying up and not realizing how much time had passed and wanting to get everything perfect and make it look great because I knew that it would eventually be seen by a lot of people and used by a lot of people and found that very motivating. But, as you can probably guess, with a degree in journalism and being an editor of my college newspaper, my first career was actually in journalism. So I was a newspaper reporter right out of college. I worked at a small I wouldn't say small, it was a local newspaper, an upstate New York, in Troy, new York, and I covered local news, local politics, and I covered some state politics as well. So I went to city council meetings, zoning board meetings, you know, interviewed city council people and small town politics is the funniest thing because there's rivalries, there's history, there's, you know, this neighborhood versus that neighborhood, and I really fell in love with talking to people and learning their stories and, you know, didn't do tech for a while. You know I was. I was what we would they called the digital journalists back then because I also knew how to update our website and so I would write for print. I would also do pagination for print as well, you know, and would watch it run on the printing press. But we'd also update our website and I recorded videos. I was the first person to live tweet city council meetings. This is, you know, back in 2008, 2009 time period and so. But so tech has always kind of touched my career, but it never was something that I did directly. And along the way, I would make websites for friends, for musicians that I knew, for, like you know, nonprofits or different kind of groups, but always that you know HTML, css, wordpress, kind of static sites. After journalism, I actually transitioned to financial services and got I'm a licensed broker, I have my insurance license, I'm a licensed financial planner. I did that for for for some you know, almost five years working at banks and large brokerage firms and had left kind of tech behind me at that point and was really focused in on financial services and felt that this was going to be the career for me. Yeah, and so I got to. I always felt that I didn't have 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 jolt that you get of solving a problem or having that aha or like, oh, it's finally perfect. And I got to the point where I was in my career where I was ready to prepare to start getting my CFP. I had gotten my MBA, I had gotten a couple of like all my licenses, and CFP is kind of a multi-year commitment. After that you're pretty much a financial certified financial planner. Is what CFP means, sorry.
Tim Bourguignon:
8:05
Yeah, so certified financial planner, and once you do that that's pretty much your career.
Cecelia Martinez:
8:11
Like you know, you have clients and you want to be with them for a long time. You want to have a relationship with 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 I can do this for the next 20, 30, 40 years, because I just didn't feel that jolt of excitement. I also didn't feel the same sense of you know, kind of altruism that I felt with journalism. You know, I it's nice to be able to help people and I definitely do feel like I tried to help people as much as possible, but at the end of the day, it is a money driven industry when you're in financial services. And so that's when I started to think about okay, you know, if you are going to have a career for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, like, what do you want to spend your time doing? And my mind kept going back to those nights. You know staying up till 3am figuring something out, getting stuck on something. You know wanting to throw my computer against the wall, and at that time it was a heavy, big computer like these weren't laptops, right, they were the big PC towers. And so until you finally got it, and then it all seems worth it, and so I, yeah, so I decided to kind of look back into web development or, you know, being a webmaster or websites or whatever it was called at that time, but at this point we had fast forwarded to 2018. So 10 years later from when I first, when I made that WordPress site in college, right, and so web apps had come a long way. They, I mean, they could do a lot. It was much more complex than it was. It's not just HTML, css, maybe WordPress 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 in financial services, but I realized that I was going to need more of a formal kind of education a little bit, and so I looked 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 mind already? Yeah, Now I'm going to switch, or was it still? Let's, let's put back a feet and a foot in there and see what happens. Yeah, so I, I had I had made up my mind, because I just again, I kept coming back to like the cold 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, I quit my job, I quit my job, I quit my job, I quit my job, I quit my job. It was a three month full time boot camp and I had basically enough, you know, savings to get me through that, and at the end of it I needed a job, and whether that job was development, whether it was working at a bank or whether it was waitressy like I needed to have something so I could pay my rent and so but I felt like I needed that too. It's so, I think it's so easy for people to keep doing something that they are, they do well, they're successful at it, and everyone says, oh, this is a great job, this is a great career, you do well at it. 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 see myself getting caught up in that and being like well, you know, everyone says this is the right thing, you know it's a good career for me, like, why not? But I just couldn't get rid of that nagging feeling, and I think, in order to let that nagging feeling win and not just bother me for the next several decades, I needed to do something drastic, and so that was what made the best sense for me. I don't think I don't necessarily know if I would recommend it. Honestly, it was probably some of the most stressful time of my life. There was a lot of time where I was like I can't do this, I've made a huge mistake. This is way too much. But it was really the communities that I had surrounded myself with that helped me get through that time and ended up making it worthwhile.
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 insurance company and I just started. I started teaching myself JavaScript, decided I needed to kind of something more formal and I actually saw an ad for the Georgia Tech bootcamp and this was kind of still in the earlier days. Of bootcamps, there was a few that were out there. I saw that it was a full stack engineering program and that they had it was in person, which I liked as well, and it was on campus and you could do it full time. But I wanted to do my vetting because it was going to be an investment, it was going to be drastic. So I had started going to women who code Atlanta meetups. So women who code as a global organization, they have chapters all over and the Atlanta chapter is very robust and they had in person meetups and so I started going to those as I was teaching myself JavaScript, going to some code jams, you know doing things like that and I reached out to some of the women in the chapter and say, hey, do one of you know about this bootcamp, Like, what's been your experience? And they were so helpful. So Valerie Ragus, who I know really well now, at this point she actually hopped on a call with me and was like, hey, yeah, stranger, I'll, I'll, I'll set some time aside from my family and talk to you about this and gave me her experience, told me, hey, learn, get before you get started, because they're not going to teach you that. You know, make sure that you learn this, start your job search early. And every like I said that community really helped me the entire time because I would not have been able to get through it without that support and people telling 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 it through the other end and it will be worth it. And there was one saying that I kind 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. 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 who code, and that is where I started to really see the impact of what it could, what it could make for individuals, but also for the community at large.
Tim Bourguignon:
14:19
Hmm, how did you discover that this tech industry has such a concept of communities and that you can find local groups everywhere that talk about all this? I mean, if you're a lawyer, I doubt there are communities of lawyers meeting sometime in a bar discussing something. How did you find this out?
Cecelia Martinez:
15:48
Yeah, so I I'm an extroverted person, I love making new friends and when I moved to Atlanta I needed to do that. Here I didn't know anybody. I moved here for my parents lived here at the time, but I didn't know anybody else and I actually just went on meetupcom and was looking for anything related to anything Like I went to some like women's groups who just like got together to do crafting. I found a like a woman, like a lady geeks meetup group who would do like D&D meetups and go to comfort, like go to barcades and things like that, and I noticed that there was also tech meetups and I was like huh, okay, cool, like that's been something I'm interested in, and so really it was just my desire for any any kind of, so even the social community that led me to realize that there was tech communities out there that did exist, and so thankfully, I think it was just me being lonely and being bored and wanting to kind of find people in a new city and fortunately they were out there and and we're very welcoming, and from there I've gotten involved with so many other communities because of that first experience and seeing how impactful it can be.
Tim Bourguignon:
16:55
I'm so jealous. It took me, I think, seven years into my career to realize this. I was working for a giant company back then and we had our communities inside the company. I mean finding, finding people like my new people and talk together, but I didn't realize there was a community out there. And and then came meetupcom, and then I realized as well that there were a lot more. But it took a while. It really took a while, and I can't imagine what it would bring to a person just starting to really be be engulfed in this community and really support it from right and left, and having people of the same level and a bit a bit higher, a bit a bit farther, farther down the line and not say higher, and having people to look at or to look to, and so that must be fantastic.
Cecelia Martinez:
17:43
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 and your story I think sex with me as well and the importance of getting the word out, because a lot of times people come to an event and they're like, oh, is this your first event? And they're like, yeah, I had no idea this existed. You know, I would have loved to have been coming to these the entire time, and that just motivates me more to say, okay, we need to get the word out, we need to tell people know that the support is there, these events are here and you can find it because, especially with remote work now, a lot of people are really hungry for a community and for that sense of camaraderie and collaboration that they're not getting from their day to day work, and so that'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're always going to find somebody new.
Tim Bourguignon:
18:37
Yeah, you need to find the right words. I was co-organizing a conference a few years back and we gave out tickets to students to the local university and say, hey, whoever wants to come, we get something. Our five students coming and I was. I was appalled by that and say why? And I think it's just well putting out a flyer, it doesn't ring a bell, doesn't connect. You have to get there, you have to start talking to people. And as soon as I started talking to students, they opened their eyes wide and say, of course I'm coming, but we had to bridge that gap first and we never managed to do this with just information blasting. It didn't work.
Cecelia Martinez:
19:15
Yeah, you have to find developers where they are right, and that's something where and you have to understand too is like, not every developer or every student or every person is going to consume information in the same way. And by identifying all the different potential paths where people could find out about things and discover things, and catering to all of those different potentials, like that's really as I, for me, I find things a certain way. I will go out and I will search for that information. Not everybody will. Even even when you think about things like teaching concepts, right, like I, I like to read documentation. I like to do things hands on. I have a harder time watching videos, but a lot of people do love watching videos. So if I only ever did what works for me, I'm missing out on connecting with all of the people who do things a different way. So it requires a lot of putting yourself in other people's shoes and thinking and asking them like, how do you find things? Like you did to me like, how did you find out about this? Like, how did you learn about it? And identifying all those paths and those threads that you can pull at.
Tim Bourguignon:
20:18
I'm dropping a few years ahead now, but that must be exactly challenging for your job right now being a developer advocate and having to really construct multi-channel outreach to really try to gather a representative community.
Cecelia Martinez:
20:35
Yeah, absolutely it's. And it's interesting when you're working with an existing community and looking to grow that community and then when you're starting a community from scratch and there's two very, very different motions. And it's, I feel, like throughout my career, because I've been very fortunate to be at three open source developer tools with Cyprus, replay and now Ionic, the but they're very different types of communities. They have some commonalities with open source and with being developers, but they are at very different stages at the at the times that I was at those companies, and so I've been able to see how it's not always a copy paste, it's not always a take this you know playbook and apply it here. Community is its own entity, it has its own personality, it has its own way of doing things. Just like how, whenever you're talking to an individual developer, you can't just hit them with the same talking points, that you have to ask questions. And I always approach every conversation with an individual developer and sometimes I'll talk to people and they say, oh, like, tell me, like, sell me on Ionic, 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, and you have to do the same thing with communities. You have to say okay, why are you here? What type of support are you looking for? Are you looking to connect? Are you looking to learn? Do you need help? Because you know you don't have the support that you need. And so I think you have to kind of treat a community like it's its own person, with its own personality, and approach it that way, and so it's been really fun to see the different iterations of that.
Tim Bourguignon:
22:14
For sure, Probably we should, we should get there, but let's, let's start right. You were in the, in the bootcamp, having on one side the time of your life, on the other side the biggest regrets, and wondering if you took the right decision. What ensued in this was three months that led to probably a job.
Cecelia Martinez:
22:35
Yeah, so I mean I, it really was high stress. Like I said, I don't know if I'd recommend it for everybody. I think it's what worked for me. Later on in my life I was diagnosed with ADHD and a lot of things that I look back makes sense. That sense of having a deadline, having that intensity, that that really kind of motivated me to get through it. But I was very fortunate, like I said, this was, you know, 2019, it was still in person. I started my job search a little early and I did have some things going for me that not every bootcamp student does, in that I did have an undergraduate degree, I did have an MBA and I had previous experience kind of working with websites, at least to some extent. So I understood those concepts of deployment and getting things out to users and thinking about kind of a user experience and so. But I did have two offers when I graduated my bootcamp after three months and a lot of that, honestly, both of them were from referrals and from people that I knew ended up finding through my network, and so, again, the community kind of saved the day, I think, in a way, because I definitely did the apply, apply, apply to all the junior dev positions that you can find, but, ultimately, the first developer position that I ended up taking was a with somebody who had seen my job search tweet on LinkedIn I mean on Twitter and then reached out on LinkedIn, sent me a message hey, we're looking for somebody, and it was a junior software developer position at a really unique opportunity, and that is where I started my development career working. The best part was, though, as I had just learned react in my bootcamp and this was a dotnet angular shop. I was like, okay, I just learned JavaScript, got to learn C sharp now, just learn react, got to learn angular now, and then they're also working with react 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 that was. That was a great. I was a great experience. It definitely, though, helped me get a better sense of what type of work I wanted to do long term. Again, I was still tech is a very broad space. I think a lot of people come in thinking, okay, I have to be an engineer, or this is like I'm going to learn, I'm going to do front end. This is what I'm and they have a very kind of narrow view of what it means to be in a technical role and that I had. I had the same conception to. I was like I did a full stack engineering bootcamp. By God, I'm going to be a full stack engineer and, you know, I think going through that initial role helped me to kind of formulate and see, oh wow, like what's that team doing, what's this team doing? Well, what are the like? Why did we do it this way, why did we do it that way? And being able to ask a lot of questions and learn a lot about what real world software development looks like helped me to kind of start to see the early shape of what might what my career would eventually be. Because I was, you know, at the point where I was. I got up to speed, probably about, 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 some node scripts to help automate some of our API interactions. I had gotten comfortable with the database, was kind of allowed to do more things, push some stuff and so. But I about like eight months and I'm realizing, oh, I'm just kind of like doing tickets and doing tickets, and doing tickets and you know, I didn't, I didn't have that 3am, you know, feeling anymore it wasn't the same, and so that is when I kind of started to again expand my horizons a little bit more about, well, where do I fit into tech and how can I use these skills in a way where I can combine a lot like some of the things that I'm doing outside of my career in terms of, like the communities I'm involved in and still, and get that, get that feeling, you know, get that feeling back right and so, yeah, but where you tempted at some point to bring your financial expertise into the mix and combine this to. Yeah, so I was. Initially I was. I was thinking about, like, fintech companies, you know, fintech startups, anything related to banking or investment or insurance, and but ultimately, like, especially in Atlanta, there's actually a really big fintech scene here but ultimately I think I would have probably still run into that same kind of like altruism feeling, lack of thereof, because, if anything, I wanted to work on financial literacy and financial education, which isn't exactly a. You know, like a VC hot button, like topic of you know teaching people how to you know how to budget and how to like manage their money, but but actually teaching everybody and not just people who only have high net worth. And so I, yeah, so I ended up kind of leaning away from that and when I started at Cyprus, I saw the magic of what it can be like to work on developer tools because you are a part of every single thing that the developers that use your tools are building and it feels it feels like a cheat code because it's a like a force multiplier. If I can help somebody, like if I help to make this tool better, than every single thing that is built with that tool becomes better. And we would get so excited, like we found out that I think the NASA website was using Cyprus to test their website and we're like, oh, like we're helping NASA. This is so cool and like you know everything from nonprofits, from like cutting edge, like medical applications, everything you get to feel like you're a part 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 the feelings now of this is pretty cool to be able to have that massive impact across, like literally, like you know, millions of projects right and yeah, and that's so. That's when I started at Cyprus and really fell in love with developer tools and also with open source.
Tim Bourguignon:
28:55
So what happened that led you to leaving Cyprus at some point? It sounds like a love story.
Cecelia Martinez:
29:00
Yeah, it was, and I honestly I still love the Cyprus community. I am they're having their first or, like you know, I still talk to a lot of them and like their events, that they have coming up and I have a lot of friends there. But I Cyprus was definitely a proving ground for me and it was a learning arena, like I learned probably, I feel like five years, five to 10 years worth of things and that to in like the just over two years that I was there Because of the stage that we were at. I was the first hire on our success team, so I was working directly with all of our Cyprus users. We didn't have a community team at that point so I was handling a lot of that function out function as well, in addition to speaking about Cyprus at conferences and events, and so I was doing a lot of different things and it forced me out of my comfort zone. I remember where I had a conversation with my, with one of the co-founders, and we were integrating our team with a brand new tool and it was going to be a big. We had to all of our customer data. It was like kind of like a CRM adjacent type tool required a lot of database configuration with our business database, and he was like I want you to lead that project. And I was like, oh, I'm not sure if I'm the best person to do that. I don't have that expertise. And he said, well, who would you recommend do it instead? And I realized, oh yeah, like there'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 in the mindset of, okay, yeah, like we just have to run with things. I have to be super uncomfortable, I'm going to have to learn new things that I haven'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 on things that are customer impacting and working directly with customers and answering their questions, and so that was really a massive period of growth for me at Cyprus, because I was given so much trust and I was given so much agency where I didn't feel like a junior developer. I didn't feel like somebody early in my career. I felt like somebody who was part of the team and really helped pushing everything forward, and they wanted my opinion and they wanted even if it was bad, they wanted to know what I thought, and that was new for me and so it really shaped me into really like being much more confident to try new things, to do things I'm uncomfortable with, to be, you know, to be the rain in the parade sometimes and say, hey, like, have we thought about how this is going to impact this? Or, you know, I don't know if this is going to work. Do we think about that? And I think, if anything, that is, those are the some of the traits that I think took me from kind of more of like a junior to somebody who is more of a leader and being able to make those high impact decisions. But I know you asked about why I left.
Tim Bourguignon:
31:51
So great that along the way. So that was good, you took that the way.
Cecelia Martinez:
31:56
Yeah. So, as I mentioned, I started at Cyprus on the success team and I was very customer facing, but we didn't have a community team, we didn't have a dev route team, and so when opportunities arose of, hey, we'd like somebody to talk about Cyprus or do a workshop on Cyprus, I would be the person to who could do that, especially once we kind of got more like the team, got a little bit bigger and I had been there for a while and I was one of the most even after a year and a half you're like the more senior person as it's growing from 20 people up to over 100. And so I actually ended up developing an entire 20 hour workshop series that I would use for our enterprise customers and I did various workshops out in the community and I really at the same time, in tandem, had been working with external communities more like women who code and like out and out and tech, and I could feel that pool of really wanting to do something that was more community focused, unless maybe like customer facing and but the way that Cyprus was at the time, it just there wasn't, the opportunity wasn't there, and so I ended up looking for that elsewhere and, you know, found a different other companies that I could work at, but I've always still like love the Cyprus community, continued to do some Cyprus talks and workshops and answer questions around that, because it was. It was a place where I met so many amazing people and so many and they're solving really cool problems. I think they. I think they still are so, but that's where I ended up, how I ended up at replay as a community lead.
Tim Bourguignon:
33:30
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:
33:44
I don't know, I'm so lucky, I don't know if I somebody like, if I did something like maybe I found a rabbit's foot along the way or something like that but you know, I've, I I've been embedded or I shouldn't say embedded, but involved in really active and engaged is maybe a better word with a lot of different open source tools. So a lot of what I would do to is talk about how Cyprus can integrate with other open source tools, with the communities that I've worked with, kind of contributing to different communities, and so the open source dev tools community is not small, but it's also not too big, and so typically, I'm always on the lookout for new things and things that catch my eye, and I actually found replay of just you know, through social media. Somebody had kind of mentioned it on Twitter. 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 of cool, unique problem, and I like to joke that I really love working on things that, like developers hate like the hardest thing. So testing everyone hates end to end testing, debugging like people like you know, pull their hair over debugging and deploying mobile applications to app stores, which is again like the most tedious process. I don't know if I've ever been through and so it's. I could kind of see that. Okay, cool, this is a real pain point and maybe a pain point is the better word versus like things that devs hate, but it was a real pain point and it was open source and the product team was really cool and the nice thing about the work that I had done up to that point with my open source work and then also with the community work that I had done, is that it wasn't really an interview process. It was more of a hey, let's chat. Hey, like okay, yeah, we've seen your conference talks, yep, we know your work with Cyprus, like, we're familiar with all of that. I've never had to do a technical like algorithm test or anything like that, because everything that I do is pretty, is open source and it's public and everything I do is out there, and so I ended up being I could just kind of a chat and then I ended up making the leap. It was very tough decision but I ended up making the leap to replay with that, which at the time was a very early stage startup, like earlier than Cyprus was for me, so that came with it's with. Yeah, it was a very unique experience.
Tim Bourguignon:
35:58
I feel there is some stuff to impact behind the word unique.
Cecelia Martinez:
36:02
Yeah, I mean. So I'm a very transparent person, like anybody that I talked to. Like replay for me ended up being too early. I am. I joined Cyprus when it had, you know, we were about 25 people and it was like there was already a very robust community at that point. It was more about expansion of the community and finding new audiences versus starting from scratch. Replays was very early and I just found that with the way the types of skills that I brought to the table was the words necessarily the skill set that they actually needed at the end of the day, but you don't know that, right, when you're early in, right, you know you don't necessarily know that in the early stage startup because you have to be able to pivot so frequently. And so I have a lot of love for the team like I actually have met, seen many of them in person at different events because, again, open source DevTools not big, not small. So and there I left, I said I know part of me is going to like kick myself, because I know you're going to do great things, and they really have. They've come out with some really cool new tools in the testing space and I'm really excited to see what they continue to do there. But for for one of the things that I could do well, I didn't feel like I could do those things well for them at that time, and so, and again, these are all things that you learn along the way and you have to be comfortable with that and that's something that again, early in my career, I was very much a people pleaser, like yes person. I struggled a lot with feeling like I didn't belong there, which meant I would do anything and everything to keep from being you know, quote unquote discovered and kicked out. I felt that, oh, they're going to figure out that I'm not smart enough, not technical enough, not whatever enough, and so I need to say yes to everything. I need to learn this, I need to learn everything, and I ended up doing a lot, a lot of work in different areas. That maybe wasn't the most productive work I did still did do productive work as well but I probably could have gotten away with doing maybe like 80% of the work and it's would have been the highest impact work right. And so I think, as I've gone through my career, I've been able to identify not just always saying yes right off the bat, but asking questions, challenging a little bit, pushing back, kind of figuring out, okay, is this really the highest impact work that I could be doing with my time? And that happened actually at Cyprus. There was something where I, because of something that had that happened, I needed to manually update like rows and rows and rows and rows of some data, and I was like, all right, I'll just, you know, I'll just stay 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 do this in a more automated way? How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? And I think I learned that if fires keep happening I tend to like to follow the chaos I'll throw myself on the grenade, but if fires keep happening, the answer is not buy more fire extinguishers, the answer is get the gasoline out of the building. And so the nice thing was is that by the time that I was at replay and I do feel like I did a lot of really good, impactful work there I was able to rewrite our documentation. I did a lot of product work, I talked to a ton of developers about their debugging experiences and I did quite a few conference talks. But the nice thing is, at that point I had learned hey, am I doing like I'm working a lot? I'm doing a lot of things, but is this the most value for what the company needs right now, yes or no? And it ended up being that the answer was no, and you know they could, like it would make it would make more sense to to not to not like continue down that path. And so I learned a ton, though, about like it's like, wow, I've, like I said, I've been so fortunate to have been at series a stage, then very early stage, like seed stage, and then now at Ionic, which you know had been post a and has been acquired. And so, seeing the community development, seeing the business strategies again what you would think are similar, three open source developer tools being incredibly different. But those skills that I learned along the way, that were not technical, that were not tech related, but were related to being able to see high impact problems, make decisions and feel comfortable pushing up against that is, I think, what had the most impact on my career.
Tim Bourguignon:
40:35
I love how, how the path go right and left at some point. Come back. I mean you haven't really talked about journalism in. I haven't mentioned journalism in your late career, but it's there, and you mentioned a bit in financial education. That would be there as well. And now the community work that you're doing. I'm sure there's tons of writing, tons of of summarizing, tons of asking questions, all kind of skillset that you learned back then, and I'm sure the financial pieces are there as well. When you talked, you didn't mention that which, when you talked about kind of understanding the systems and the modules and how things are pieced together, I kind of see the financial person looking at a very complex systems and seeing where the pieces fit etc. So it's all coming together, I think, really nicely.
Cecelia Martinez:
41:26
It really does. And so I think, for journalism, obviously, being able to communicate, being able to talk to all kinds of people because I would talk to senators and I would 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 been able to navigate all those different types of conversations. Obviously, writing is a big one, but then from financial services, I think what actually has helped me a lot is being able to take complex concepts and break them down. There's a lot of times that you're working, so I'm trying to explain, you know, a very complex investment vehicle to somebody who's about to retire and, you know, has. It was like a teacher, like has not worked at all in finance, and so at the end of the day, I feel like, really, I, I love being an educator, I love being a communicator, and that just all happens to take place in a technical field. I'm talking to developers instead of, you know, retirees, and I'm teaching about development tools. But it's all engaging with individuals is engaging with those communities and being able to leverage that communications and educational skills.
Tim Bourguignon:
42:34
Makes perfect sense. I guess that's the best place to stop this. I usually ask for an advice and I'm short of an advice, right? I'm wondering maybe if, if somebody was facing the same challenge that you had, feeling where I'm not at my place right now. I don't feel I belong where I'm. How did you put it? You didn't find your juice, or to find your, your right, I'm sure how you put it. But anyhow, your answer to that was I quit my job, I enroll in the boot camp, let's go. Is this the advice you would give? Is there another advice you would give to the person in this, in this situation?
Cecelia Martinez:
43:17
Yeah, I think the important thing is to you have to be self aware, and that requires work. You have to do some analysis about yourself and figure out what it is that will work for you. As I mentioned, I later on was diagnosed with ADHD, so I realizing, oh, that juice that I need is what helps to motivate me. I tend to work well in things that are deadline driven, like journalism or like writing a talk for a conference, and I like to learn new things, and so I need new developer tools and integrations and things to work on. So I've been able to identify the things that work well for me. But I would say, do the work and kind of being reflective on yourself and finding what are your priorities, what is like not just a role, not just a title, not just a stack, but at the, at the base, a more base level, like what is it that you get joy out of? What is it that you feel that you could do for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years? And and go from there and figure out a plan to make that happen, because I guess that every person is going to be different. But you need to look in, look inward first.
Tim Bourguignon:
44:22
Why is move? Thank you for that.
Cecelia Martinez:
44:24
Maybe don't. Maybe don't quit your job. Just yeah, please don't take away also. So you told me to quit my job, so that's there, you can link back to your person just say hey hey fantastic.
Tim Bourguignon:
44:39
Where would be the best place to continue the discussion with you?
Cecelia Martinez:
44:42
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, but but, yeah, cecilia creates is. You can find me pretty much on any platform there. And yeah, and also you know, and any of the various communities, women who code out in tech and then also in their, you know, ionic Discord as well.
Tim Bourguignon:
45:04
Anything else you want to plug in?
Cecelia Martinez:
45:07
I'll be at testjs summit in early December in Berlin. It's one of my favorite conferences because it is about testing, but it's also a focus on the JavaScript stack, so a lot about web testing. It's a really great community. It's the first time that we're having the event in person. I'm on the program committee as well. So, I'm extra biased, but I think we put together a really great event.
Tim Bourguignon:
45:28
So and I link to all of that, including testjs summit in the show. Thank you so much, celia. It's been really fun listening to it.
Cecelia Martinez:
45:37
Sorry, yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been great.
Tim Bourguignon:
45:41
And this has been another episode of the first journey with each other next week. Bye, bye. Thanks a lot for tuning in. I hope you have enjoyed this week's episode. If you like the show, please share, rate and review. It helps more listeners discover those stories. You can find the links to all the platforms the show appears on on our website devjourneyinfo slash subscribe. Creating the show every week takes a lot of time, energy and, of course, money. Would you please help me continue bringing out those inspiring stories every week by pledging a small monthly donation. You'll find our Patreon link at devjourneyinfo slash donate. And finally, don't hesitate to reach out and tell me how this week's story is shaping your future. You can find me on Twitter and at teamathabinfo at devjourneyinfo. Talk to you soon.