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A Bridge to Community: CNCF Ambassador and Technical Translator with Julia Furst Morgado (2/2)

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How should we use our influence as technologists? For Julia Furst Morgado, it’s not about increasing followers on social media or hitting some kind of metric. It’s a focus on educating and helping others…being a bridge into a technical community for someone else.

This week in episode 312 you’ll hear more about Julia’s role as a global technologist for Veeam. We discuss the realities of traveling heavily for work and attending events while continuing to learn and build community. We’ll explore Julia’s involvement in the open-source community as a CNCF Ambassador and how she overcame impostor syndrome as a public speaker. Part of being an ambassador and a bridge to technical communities is also acting as a technical translator, making complex topics easier to understand. Listen closely to hear the full story.

Original Recording Date: 12-19-2024

Julia Furst Morgado is a global technologist at Veeam. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Julia, you can find it here.

Topics – Public Speaking and Acting as a Bridge, CNCF and Open Source, Finding Balance and Focusing on Helping Others, Work Travel and Community Building, Global Technologist and Translator, Parting Thoughts

2:28 – Public Speaking and Acting as a Bridge

  • Did Julia know there would be a large component of her work in the role at Veeam that was public speaking?
    • Julia did not realize this would be a big part of her role at Veeam. She was excited to be offered the job even before finishing the boot camp but had also heard one’s first job in tech can be hard when you are changing careers / coming from a non-technical background.
    • While Julia had a strong professional network already, she knew the role would be an exciting challenge.
    • “I said ‘yes, count me in.’ And I love what I do. I love what I do. My team is amazing. I couldn’t dream to do something different. It was perfect. I couldn’t have asked for something different.” – Julia Furst Morgado
  • How did Julia prepare to give public presentations?
    • Julia tells us she used to be more introverted but learned to get out of her shell and not fear judgement from others. It was the same with public speaking.
    • She tells us being prepared helps us be confident to deliver a public presentation.
    • “The problem for me was impostor syndrome. The problem wasn’t getting on stage and presenting and not stumbling or…forgetting the slides. For me it was impostor syndrome because I never worked in production. Even to this day I never worked in production…. And I’m up there talking to engineers, senior engineers, even CTOs, CISOs…. Who am I to be up there without experience? That’s what really bothered me for a long period, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.” – Julia Furst Morgado, on impostor syndrome
    • Julia says it took some self-talk to shift her mindset going into these presentations. She told herself it was ok to be up there speaking. She may not know everything about a topic but can still present confidently on the topic. If someone asks a question Julia does not know how to answer, she can find the right resource to get the person’s question answered.
    • “But I’m just that bridge. I’m a very good bridge from the technical to the external audience…so communities at conferences and events.” – Julia Furst Morgado
    • John highlights the feeling that people expect a presenter to be an authority. He calls what Julia has done being a gateway to other resources like product management or solution architects. To do this, you have to be honest with yourself about what you know and what you don’t and at the same time be willing to direct someone to the right person to get an answer.
      • “I can tell you about this technology, but if you want to go deeper, I can tell you who you can talk to.” – Julia Furst Morgado
      • Julia isn’t ashamed of saying she may not be the right person to answer specific questions that pop up during a session.
    • Julia considers herself a generalist and tells us she doesn’t want to be “just technical.” Her desire is to bring business value into the technical discussion to become a gateway to CTOs and other C-level executives.

7:09 – CNCF and Open Source

  • A lot of what Julia does is organizing events. Julia organizes both the Kubernetes Community Day (or the KCD) and the AWS Community Day in New York. She also organizes the CNCF meetup in New York.
  • Julia is involved in the CNCF community and AWS community. She is a CNCF Ambassador, and an AWS Container Hero.
  • Julia also mentions being an ambassador for Google’s Women TechMaker Program, an ambassador for GirlCode, and also an ambassador for Civo. All of these achievements came over a span of 2 years.
  • Many people want to know how Julia achieved so much without having the previous technical background. She is trying to show people they don’t have to be only technical and that they can add value with other skills. Becoming a CNCF Ambassador doesn’t require someone to be a senior staff engineer, for example.
  • What is a CNCF Ambassador expected to do and be?
    • A CNCF Ambassador is a spokesperson for the CNCF and may give talks about some of the open-source projects (a presentation at a conference, a YouTube video, etc.). Julia says it’s like being a subject matter expert on the CNCF. People can come to her and other ambassadors if they have questions about open-source projects.
    • There are certain perks to being a CNCF Ambassador like discounts on certifications, a discount and special room / lounge at KubeCon, etc.
    • An AWS Hero is similar to a CNCF Ambassador. They are experts and thought leaders who create content and try to build community around a specific topic.
    • The CNCF Ambassador program requires people to apply for it. This would be similar to the Veeam Vanguard program. John describes it as being recognized for creating a portfolio of work that you need to keep working on to stay in the program.
    • The AWS Hero is not something you can apply for but rather something you must be nominated for by others. Julia says you can apply for the AWS Community Builder program, for example, but being a “Hero” is a higher status because you cannot apply for it.
  • Where can people begin if they want to get involved in open source in some way?
    • If you’re not sure, you could reach out to Julia or another ambassador for guidance. She says the answer of where to start depends on a few things.
    • Think about how you would want to contribute to open source and how much technical experience you have.
      • What type of technology are you using? Passion for a technology you’re using can be channeled via contributions to an open-source project.
      • Contributing to code may not be something you have the techncial experience to do yet. Try contributing to documentation or translation / localization.
      • Other ways to contribute could include triage or fixing bugs.
    • After thinking about how you would like to contribute and the technology you want to target, you can filter the list of potential projects. Take a look at their documentation. The majority of projects have documentation that tells you how to get started as a contributor.
      • If there is no documentation on how to contribute, reach out to the project maintainers.
      • Often times open-source projects will have their own community within Slack or Discord.
    • Don’t be afraid to express your interest in contributing. Julia tells us all these projects need contributors.
      • “If you’re curious, and you know a project, go for it.” – Julia Furst Morgado, on contributing to open-source projects
    • Julia also has a blog about contributing to open source that can help if you don’t know where to start. She also has posts about how to get started in cloud or just in tech and continues to act as that bridge.

13:22 – Finding Balance and Focusing on Helping Others

  • How does Julia keep herself from getting overwhelmed or taking on too much?
    • Julia isn’t sure she has a good answer to this one. It’s been 2 years, and she has been putting in tremendous effort at a fast pace.
    • Julia is scared of burning out and tries to slow down when possible.
    • At the time of this recording, Julia already has a number of events booked for 2025, including being invited to do keynote speaking engagements and to be on other podcasts.
    • “It’s just really hard because I’m trying to surf that wave, you know? …I can say no, but I don’t want to. I love what I’m doing, and the opportunities are coming my way. So, it’s really hard, that balance…work-life balance.” – Julia Furst Morgado
    • Right now, Julia says things are going well. She is trying to learn how to say no. Will it help?
    • Instead of answering 10 messages about how people can get into tech, Julia wrote a blog post and will send people the link.
    • Maybe in a year or more we can talk to Julia again and see if she has a different answer.
    • What about community interactions and balancing participation in several of them?
      • Julia has friends who are learning serverless technologies and want her to do the same.
      • She tells the story of giving a talk at AWS re:Invent about running containers on AWS. Julia is now working to learn Lambda and serverless.
      • Sometimes Julia wonders if she should keep going or if she is going too deep in an area.
      • “I’m still learning. I don’t know if what I am doing is right, and I tend to try to do a lot, put a lot of my plate, and want to learn everything.” – Julia Furst Morgado
      • Julia also mentions she has ADHD and has lists of many things to learn.
    • John highlights the difficult balance between following everything you are interested in, developing a passion, and burning yourself out trying to do too much.
    • Nick says there are many positive indicators about what Julia has shared. She’s still excited about what she is doing. She is learning the things which are interesting. None of this feels like a chore from the way she described them.
    • Part of Julia’s job is traveling to attend events, and that might be for half of each month. She loves meeting new people and talking about different technologies but also works to prepare demos or write blog posts. The majority of what Julia has to do from a responsibility standpoint is fun, so she has no complaints.
  • John mentions one of the things he noticed about Julia’s social media profile before we conducted this interview was the way she posts on social media at conferences. She often goes to different vendor booths at the conference and interview people.
    • At the last KubeCon, Julia did an interview with people from every booth for an open source project within the project pavilion. Conference attendees can take a tour of the project pavilion (led by a CNCF Ambassador) to learn about the different projects.
    • Many people cannot afford to attend KubeCon, and Julia wanted to record with each project maintainer to educate more people and encourage participation.
    • Julia would like to do more of these interviews at other conferences perhaps related to challenges people are facing or some other topic. Short videos are quite popular right now. It’s a good style, and she will need to select a good topic for the discussions.
  • Julia isn’t concerned about followers or the metrics on views of a social media post. She is focused on educating and helping other people, and maybe this focus is the reason she has not burned out.
    • Many people are only focused on gaining more followers, and they keep posting only for this purpose.
    • Julia knows people are getting something out of her content. They write messages to her with their appreciation.
    • Julia keeps a brag folder (much like Ramzi Marjaba’s mention of a brag file in Episode 308) with screenshots of the feedback people have sent to her on the usefulness of her content. The feedback fuels her to keep going.
  • It seems like Julia has found a community in which she feels like she belongs in the technology industry. Even though she was not exposed to strong communities in law or marketing, was she exposed to community during other times in her life?
    • Julia says no.
    • There are probably marketing meetups, but it’s unlikely they will share a repository to work on a project together as people in tech might.
    • The tech community is very different.
    • John mentions The Cathedral and the Bazaar paper by Eric Raymond about the structure of open-source software (the bazaar) and how it contrasted with the previous methods of developing software (represented by the cathedral).
    • On the surface it may seem like the makeup of the bazaar is many people with competing interests, but the uniqueness comes from the openness and sharing.
    • Law and marketing may not have anything akin to the open-source community because open source is more idea driven than profit or goal driven.
    • Maybe other professions or even multiple professions can organize communities around ideas in a similar manner. But on the surface, the legal and marketing professions don’t seem to have anything like what you see from an open-source community.

22:41 – Work Travel and Community Building

  • How does Julia manage this aspect of the job? Traveling for work is not as glamorous as people might think.
    • Julia does not fly first class. She has layovers and wait times at airports.
    • Arriving early somewhere requires her to wait to check in.
    • Julia is grateful to have the opportunity to travel and doesn’t focus on the hardships of that travel. Other people working in developer relations may complain about the need to travel, for example.
  • John mentioned the goal of teaching the people following behind you as a mitigating factor against the travel required for a job.
    • Many people think a role in tech marketing or developer relations is glamorous because you become “nerd famous.”
    • John says people might aspire to obtain the “nerd famous” part of this not understanding some of the things that can get you there – the drive to teach, the drive to educate, the desire to give back to a community (all part of investing in other people’s success).
    • “I totally agree with you. It’s about helping others, lifting others up because by lifting others up they are going to come with better ideas and then they’re going to share them with you…. If you’re selfish and you just focus on you, you can definitely build something. But if you share your ideas with others, they are gonna definitely improve that with you. I’m all for uplifting others, helping others, and not just keeping to myself. That’s why I think I’m so good at building communities and engaging with communities.” – Julia Furst Morgado
    • Julia’s intention is also to have interesting conversations and to help fix problems. It’s not about showing up and taking selfies with people.
    • The fame part that may come in this type of role from the type of exposure you get is not the fulfilling part.
    • Julia has people who follow her, see her in person, and may want to take a selfie with her. John mentions likely these are the people who are getting value from the content Julia has created and shared.
    • People can see that Julia is genuine and authentic. She feels like this is the reason people come to ask her for help. When people ask for help, Julia helps them. Other people can tell when you’re doing something just for the numbers to gain influence.
    • “I’m just another human like you. I write that on my blog posts. I struggled as well. If you want to reach out, I’ve been in your shoes.” – Julia Furst Morgado

27:26 – Global Technologist and Translator

  • Julia’s role is truly global in scope.
  • Remember Julia speaks 4 languages fluently (including English).
    • Julia’s mother’s family is French, and she studied in a French school in high school in Brazil. She also spoke French at home.
    • Julia speaks Portuguese because she was born in Brazil and Spanish after living in Spain for over a year.
    • Julia lives in New York but attends events all over North America and Canada. She also supports Latina America (the LATAM region) in her role.
    • Julia’s family now resides in Portugal. She visits them frequently and helps with the local AWS User Group when in town.
    • One of Julia’s proudest achievements is giving a presentation in Monaco in French.
    • Julia has not yet delivered a presentation in the APJ region, but maybe she can do it in 2025.
  • Does the desire to bring more business value into presentations align well with being a part of a product strategy team?
    • As part of the product strategy team, Julia and her colleagues talk frequently about product roadmaps, receive feedback on the functionalities they should add to the products in the near term and longer term, and discuss the business value of the solution.
    • Julia and her colleagues attend meetings with customers as thought leaders. In those discussions, someone like Julia would speak to the business value of Veeam’s solutions (i.e. value of backup, using deduplication and compression, having a disaster recovery plan, etc.).
    • Technical people may not be thinking about the big picture, but Julia and her colleagues bring a perspective on the big picture to customer meetings.
  • Do most members of the community not really know how to communicate with product teams in an effective way?
    • “Technical people, they know how to talk technical things. You have to translate it so product managers can understand and so other teams can understand as well…. Technical people…they don’t even realize that what they write, the way they speak, is too technical for other people…. I think some of my value is translating that into less technical terms.” – Julia Furst Morgado
    • Julia knows people who write very technical content. She shares the story of finding a blog post and not being able to follow some of it because it was too technical. Julia wrote a version of the same blog post breaking down the steps into more detail.
    • Communicating something in less technical terms is about explaining it in a way so that you meet the audience where they are. We can do this for customers, product managers, a beginner in a community trying to learn something new, etc. This is part of the reason Julia calls herself a bridge.
  • Does Julia have a blog post on CNCF projects and the order in which she might recommend people learn and understand them?
    • No, but Julia says it’s a great idea and is something she can work on in the future.
    • Julia loves feedback and ideas from her audience. John provides more context on what led him to ask the above question. Someone had asked John about Falco and Knative, and these projects probably are not where someone should start when thinking about cloud native.
      • Julia’s guidance is to start learning containers, maybe Docker, and then work up to Kubernetes. Tools like Falco and Knative are built on top of Kubernetes.
      • Getting to Kubernetes might make someone think twice about choosing to continue on this path because it is conceptually difficult.

33:21 – Parting Thoughts

  • The best way to follow up with Julia on this conversation is on LinkedIn. But if you connect with Julia on LinkedIn, be sure to send her a message and not just a random connection request.
    • Julia learned this from her boot camp. When you add someone on LinkedIn, you should send a message. It helps you remember where you met that person.
    • Julia is also on Twitter, Blue Sky, and others, but LinkedIn is the best way. You can find Julia’s blog here.
  • And if people are hesitant to jump in and join a community, what advice would Julia give them?
    • “Start with one person. Try to find one person that is in that community…. Got to them and say…‘I want to join. I’m new. What can I do? I’m a little overwhelmed.’ Be honest. Don’t be afraid of being vulnerable…. Try to find one person, and that person will probably help you, guide you, or put you in touch with the right person to get involved in a community.” – Julia Furst Morgado
    • Julia recently re-read a book by Brené Brown on vulnerability, and being new to a community requires a little vulnerability.
    • Find that bridge into a new community!

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