Episode #25: Using Serverless to Transform Careers and Communities with Farrah Campbell and Danielle Heberling

About Farrah Campbell:After 10 years of working in healthcare management, a serendipitous 20-minute car ride with Kara Swisher inspired Farrah to make the jump into technology. She has worked at multiple startups in many different capacities, eventually working her way to being the Ecosystems Director for Stackery in Portland, Oregon. As the Stackery Ecosystems Director, Farrah has managed the Stackery relationship with AWS including Stackery as an Advanced Technology Partner, achieving the AWS DevOps Competency, a launch partner for Lambda Layers. Farrah has cultivated the serverless community as an organizer of Portland Serverless Days, the Portland Serverless Meetup, along with numerous serverless workshops and the Portland tech community events from Techfest to bringing multiple luminaries to Portland. She's also an AWS Serverless Hero.Twitter: @FarrahC32Email: [email protected] Danielle Heberling:Danielle Heberling is a software engineer with a background that includes being a musician and teaching at a K-8 public school. She’s passionate about building things that make the world a better place, whether that be through social change or a good laugh. When she’s not coding, you can often find her reaching back to her teaching roots by mentoring folks from underrepresented groups that would like to make a career switch into tech.Twitter: @deeheberEmail: [email protected]:Translator GitHub Repo: https://github.com/stackery/language-translatorTranslator App: www.serverlessing.ioStackery Blog: https://www.stackery.io/blog/re:Invent Session: https://www.portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/search.ww?searchPhrase=DVC16Transcript:Jeremy: Hi everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Farrah Campbell and Danielle Heberling. Hi Farrah and Danielle, thanks for joining me.Farrah: Hey Jeremy, thanks for having me.Danielle: Thanks for having me.Jeremy: So you both work at Stackery and we can talk a little bit more about what Stackery does in a bit, but I want to start with you Farrah because you are the ecosystems director there and I think it's a really interesting role. Can you tell us what that's all about?Farrah: Sure. Well, essentially the way I look at it is my job is to connect with people across AWS and other technical partners along with the serverless ecosystem so that we can increase serverless adoption.Jeremy: Awesome. And Danielle, you are a software engineer at Stackery, and I'm curious what that role looks like when you are building serverless applications to help people build serverless applications.Danielle: Yeah, it's pretty meta actually. Well, at Stackery we're a small startup. There's only six software engineers total. So I guess you could say we're all technically full stack, so I just jump in anywhere in the stack where I'm needed. And sometimes do customer support too.Jeremy: Very cool. So I saw the two of you give a talk at Serverlessconf, New York, called Leveling Up Serverless. And you talk about this app that you built and we will get into that in a minute, but what I really loved about your talk was the story behind it. And as you both explained, you have very different backgrounds. Neither of you started in tech, but somehow you sort of serendipitously came across serverless, started participating in the serverless community. And that's what inspired you and enabled you in a way to actually build this application. And I think your story is inspiring, especially to people who are getting into tech or thinking about getting into tech. So I'd love to just talk about your experiences today and we can go through that. So Farrah, let's start with you. How did you get into tech?Farrah: Well, my intro to tech wasn't like many people's, I hear. In fact, it wasn't until after high school that I really actually explored the internet. My mom had met a new man that she married who owned a computer company called MicroAge and he started a new startup in the back of that where he had multiple engineers working.And I talked him into letting me work for them to research the horizontal and vertical markets. Multiple years later being a single mom needing to pay the bills, I found a job in health insurance but always really still had that love for working with developers and would always find ways to try to work with the engineering and IT departments, which was awesome because when I moved to Portland there was all these tech companies and there's this very vibrant growing community.And I wanted so badly to be a part of it, but it took me... Well, I applied for jobs for about a year without any... I didn't get any interviews scheduled, and then started working or volunteering at a conference where I was able to meet a number of people. One who introduced me to a small startup in Portland where I was able to start working for four hours a week and then quickly turned that into a full-time office management position.And then multiple startups along the way ended up leading me to Stackery. The cool thing about it though is with each one of those startup jobs, I was always trying to really understand the tech and trying to find ways to work and be a part of the engineering teams. They even set up a way for me to update documentation so I would actually have contributions to our source control. And it's been pretty cool to be able to do something more with that at Stackery.Jeremy: Awesome. So Danielle, I think you and I probably had a very similar start. I went to college with the intent of being a music teacher actually, and instead I ended up switching into technology. But you started with music and you kind of went from there.Danielle: Yeah, definitely. So I grew up in a small town and in order to keep out of trouble, I just became very active in music throughout middle school, high school, took piano lessons starting in kindergarten even. I just really loved creating and sharing music, and it got to the point where I had to pick a college major to go to college and I really had no idea what I wanted to do.So I kind of looked at what I enjoyed doing activity wise and gravitated towards music. And I really like helping people out, teaching people. So I decided to go for music education. So I was a music teacher in a public school system for a few years and it took me to a different state, a completely different mindset in that area. I definitely enjoyed my time there, but longterm teaching just wasn't for me.So I went back in a whirlwind of not knowing what I wanted to do for a career, but I did need to pay my bills. So I just put out a lot of job applications and ended up getting hired in tech support. I really love tech support because every day was a completely new challenge. A customer would write in with a question about how to use the product and it would be like something that I never even thought someone would want to use the product for.So it really kind of gave me a great lesson in empa...