Grab your Teddy Ruxpin and buckle up for the latest episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This week, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Chloe Condon, a Senior Developer Advocate. Chloe has had a very different entry into the world of software. This actress turned engineer holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. Chloe is currently a Senior Developer Advocate at Google. Her previous experience includes Microsoft, Sentry, and Codefresh. In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Chloe to discuss her golden rule for coding, how acting elevated her developer career, and taxidermied Beanie Babies (yes, you read that right).
Grab your Teddy Ruxpin and buckle up for the latest episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This week, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Chloe Condon, a Senior Developer Advocate. Chloe has had a very different entry into the world of software. This actress turned engineer holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. Chloe is currently a Senior Developer Advocate at Google. Her previous experience includes Microsoft, Sentry, and Codefresh.
In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Chloe to discuss her golden rule for coding, how acting elevated her developer career, and taxidermied Beanie Babies (yes, you read that right).
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:59): Chloe’s path to developer advocacy
(13:23): Rapid Fire Questions
(15:39): The oldest tech that Chloe owns
(22:27): Random Segment Generator
(27:00): RIP hampsterdance.com
(30:51): What Chloe is excited about in software
(32:51): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I've been doing this now almost seven years and I still feel imposter syndrome every single ding dang day. You're never going to feel comfortable. You're going to have moments where you're like, ‘I think I do know what I'm doing,’ and then you're going to discover you actually do not know anything.” – Chloe Condon
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy William...: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Dev Morning Show at Night. My name is Cassidy Williams, and I am here with my lovely co-host Zach. Hey Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey Cassidy. What are you up to this weekend?
Cassidy William...: Nothing. I should do something with my life. I know I'm going to get boba, because what else is there? I should do something else though, right?
Zach Plata: That sounds amazing.
Cassidy William...: But anyway, speaking of doing things. Chloe, we have Chloe Condon on the show. Hey.
Chloe Condon: Hello,
Cassidy William...: Chloe is a dev ro engineer. She's awesome, and she's not at a new company yet. You're floating around, doing your own cool stuff now.
Chloe Condon: Yeah. The plot doth thicken. I've been calling it my little sabbatical where I've just been reflecting on what is next and what do I want to do? And I feel very lucky to be able to do that. But yeah, just been reading and writing a lot. Writing a book, which is really hard and reading a lot of books, which is something I've wanted to do more of because I'm on a screen all the time.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people in tech are people who read a lot of books in school and then college and tech and stuff happened. And then we ran out of time and motivation, I guess, to read. So that's awesome.
Zach Plata: The Dev Morning Show at Night is a sponsored podcast. Someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by Launch Darkly, and Launched Darkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want, fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money, Launched Darkly.
Cassidy William...: Chloe, could you talk about your experience as a dev experience or dev relations, whatever the title is, we all do the same job here. Tell us about your experience with it because you've had a very fun career, I think just from seeing on the outside, but not everybody knows what that is.
Chloe Condon: Yeah. So I come to the world of developer relations from a non-traditional background. I didn't really know anything about engineering until maybe nine, eight years ago now. I measure it on when did I meet my boyfriend? But it's really interesting. I had worked in tech in so many different roles. I was a recruiter. I was an office manager. I was a virtual assistant at virtual.com. I worked in retail in college, but all of my jobs, I stumbled into tech because I think one of my first jobs out of college was a Yelp account executive. And this was Yelp pre IPO. I had no idea what an account executive was. I just knew that I used Yelp. Not a lot of people knew what Yelp was, and I was checking in all the time. So I had an active account on there, and it turned out that I got this sales role, which I had never worked in sales, but they were like, You're great. Just read a script."
I'm terrible at sales. I cannot do them. But what I discovered from that role is there was free deli meat in the fridge, a pool table and sparkling water. And I came from the performing arts where I was an actress, and I did musicals and television and film. And there was never free food. You were lucky if you got a free t-shirt. And I was like, "What is tech? You guys just have a pool. Why hasn't anybody playing foosball?" These perks that we all take for granted in this industry.
I did a show, one of the last shows that I did before I started doing engineering work, I did because I wanted the jacket they gave to all the cast members. I just thought it looked cool. And the only way you could do it now, I'm throwing away all these tote bags and stuff from conferences.
But long story short, by chance, I saw this talk at Google. I was working for this company called NewCo. This is another one of my many, many jobs between children's birthday party entertainer, I did it all. Worked at summer camps. But once I had been in tech, I was an executive assistant to John Patel who ran this really cool company. I think he's the co-founder of Wired Magazine and has run many amazing successful companies over the years. So I was working for this very high up CEO, and he ran this company called NewCo, where instead of going to a conference where you go to Chicago, or you go to New York or San Francisco and it's at Moscone Center or whatever, this was a company that brought the conferences to the cities, which I think is so cool. And I don't understand why we don't do this more.
Probably because it's really hard to coordinate and John's company did a great job at this, but essentially you'd go to Silicon Valley and then you'd see a talk at Google and Facebook and startups. And you'd get literally inside the companies, which is a really cool concept. And I went to the Google talk because I was like, oh my God, I've never been to the Google campus. It must be so cool. Because I had seen all the pictures online. Of course, the talk was in the most boring building on campus. I did see one of the cool bikes though. That was exciting. But the talk happened to be about getting young women, specifically middle school, high school aged girls, interested in software engineering by adding Nickelodeon and Disney Channel characters working with NASA to create girls in STEM stuff. A.
Nd I went home and I told my boyfriend, "My ship has sailed. I Googled Girls Who Code, it's for little girls. I wish this stuff was around when I was younger." And it literally just took my boyfriend saying, "You can still learn this. Why don't you just start a course?" But I didn't know what engineering was. I knew engineers were these dudes in hoodies that rolled in with big headphones, who rolled in at 11:00 AM when I was an office manager. But I had no idea. I thought engineers were hammer and nail, putting computers together and stuff.
So yeah, I've had this very twisty, turny career to get to... That eventually led to me getting ads for boot camps, and I attended a boot camp. And on my final day, we were presenting all our stuff, all the other girls in my cohort were like, 'Why aren't you nervous? Public speaking is so hard." And I was like, "Are you kidding me? This is the best, easiest part. Building the technology is hard. Talking about it is the easiest thing." And that was a real moment for me where I was like, is this a job? Is the part of your job, to my boyfriend, where you give talks and talk about the community, is that a job? And he was like, "Actually, yes."
So I feel very lucky to have a partner who's in the industry and has been able to push me in these right directions. But yeah, I think that's eventually what led me to Developer Evangelist and developer advocate roles. And now my job is to help communicate, be a liaison between engineering and marketing is how I explain my role, because engineers think they know how to do marketing, marketers think they know how to talk to engineers. So I feel like our job very much is a translator. And also how many times have you asked an engineer to write a blog post or do a video for you? They don't have time to write in the code.
So I feel like I found this very interesting spot with this philosophy of I've seen really bad musical theater. I was a musical theater actress for 25 plus years of my life, and I think there's something to be said. I'm seeing all these talks and videos and stuff, and I was like, "What a snooze. I've seen bad musicals that are better than this." And I really wanted to come into the community with this philosophy that engineers are people too. And they like to have fun, and they like to be entertained, which is why I love Cassidy's content. Because I was like someone else doing weird, quirky music stuff, because that's my life, and Cassidy's one of the very few people that I know that I send musical theater memes to in the tech community.
So yeah. Cassidy and I were supposed to co-host a musical themed tech conference, and it was my literal dream, but COVID took that from us.
Cassidy William...: It was going to be beautiful. Ugh man.
Chloe Condon: I pictured us doing it's a good, isn't it great? Just doing Chicago to end it out. We had such lofty plans.
Zach Plata: I would love to see this happen.
Cassidy William...: Bring it back. Yeah. Yeah. It was going to be amazing, but alas.
Chloe Condon: In person events are back.
Cassidy William...: Slowly but surely, they're coming.
Chloe Condon: I saw Countess Luann from the Real Housewives perform cabaret last weekend.
Cassidy William...: My sister saw her too.
Chloe Condon: It was incredible.
Cassidy William...: Amazing, amazing.
Chloe Condon: The power of live performance, everyone.
Cassidy William...: Well, and I love that you had a serendipitous journey to get into tech and stuff, but also it's a testament to how a lot of people get into tech. And I think that there's often a lot of imposter syndrome that comes with not having a traditional tech background. A lot of people think like, oh, because I don't have a computer science degree, I don't know if I'll get to this level. But I think by having a different background and a background of just I'm interested in this, and so I'm going to figure out how to do it, and the fact that you did, I feel like that's the best approach because you approach problems in a very unique way that someone with a more traditional background might not do.
Chloe Condon: One of my favorite developer advocates is someone that I mentored, shout out to me and Brandon Minick. Brandon Minick was a coworker of mine at Microsoft, and he had this friend who during the pandemic was on a Zoom call, and they were all talking about their jobs and stuff. And it was the same conversation that I'd had with my boyfriend where it's like, well, you can take some classes. You don't have to do a bootcamp even, you can be self-taught. PJ Mets, incredible human being, he was a high school teacher in Florida working at the high school that he went to ironically enough and learned to code, taught himself during the pandemic. I had to go to a bootcamp. I needed the discipline and people keeping me in line, but he now works as a developer advocate, and I think one of the reasons he's a really great developer advocate is he was a high school teacher.
He had to keep the attention of high school students, which is next level compared to developers, maybe arguably harder. And I think that really speaks to... I love people like Danielle Baskins, I love people who are doing just weird tech stuff, and it's not trolling. I think a lot of people look at people like myself or Cassidy and are like, "They're being silly. They're just little jokesters." But I do have to say that people remember memory hooks. Anything that's funny or entertaining or musical or silly or interesting.
I used to do children's theater. You have to keep these people's attention when you're at a conference or an online event or whatever it may be, or watching video content for a tutorial for an API. I am so good at Twilio's API because their documentation has a Rick roll in it. It's hilarious. It's gamified. It makes such a difference of what tools you want to use when the people really speak your language.
Zach Plata: That's so true. And I feel like there's a lot of let's get started with this technology, and it's very cookie cutter, step one, two, three, but it's really the fun ones that have its own academy course or educational, fun, gamified aspect to it that really stand out and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to remember them." Like Twilio or otherwise. And yeah, I love that.
Chloe Condon: I always feel like when I think of companies that I really love and appreciate their brand, I think of what they do for April Fool's or holiday stuff, because it's a really interesting time for them to get quirky and weird. I think that should be year round, personally. I would love to see everybody-
Cassidy William...: Agreed.
Chloe Condon: Century, I think when I worked there, one of the reasons I wanted to work there was I think on their website, can we curse on this podcast? It was like your bleeps broken, let us help you fix it. It was bleeped out. But I was like, oh, this is how an engineer talks. These people are funny. And that told me as a developer advocate, oh, this brand is going to let me have a lot of fun, which we ended up doing a camp theme to meet up and doing all this silly stuff. So I'm all for the silliness. And I think some of the best content that I've seen out there is the silliest content.
Cassidy William...: Well, and I specifically remember when you worked at Century because you made such a great trailer for the Century Scouts group.
Chloe Condon: Oh my gosh. Thank you.
Cassidy William...: And the fact that you had patches and all this stuff, I showed that trailer to my mom. It was so good.
Chloe Condon: Oh my gosh, I'm so flattered
Cassidy William...: I mean it. To the point where when I told her I was interviewing you on the podcast, she said, "Oh, that's that theater girl who did the camping stuff."
Chloe Condon: Oh my God.
Cassidy William...: It sticks out in people's brains. And I think it's really, really important to be able to do that because even though I have never used Century ever, I know that they had a Century Scouts program, which means they're probably fun. And I'll probably look them up at some point because you made fun content for them.
Okay. We're going to move on to the next section.
Chloe Condon: Sure, sure.
Cassidy William...: Rapid fire.
So Zach and I are going to ask you a bunch of questions quickly, and we'll just go fast, see what you have to say. I'm excited for it. Are you ready?
Chloe Condon: Yes.
Cassidy William...: Okay. We all have a domain name or 10 that we're squatting on. What are some of yours?
Chloe Condon: Ooh, I started an app and didn't finish it called Where Art Though .IO, I think. And it was for a stage management app that I was building between jobs when I was trying to build a project. So I think I still have that.
Cassidy William...: I like it.
Zach Plata: What is the most recent thing you over optimized?
Chloe Condon: Over optimized? Ooh, can it be a physical thing?
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Zach Plata: Sure.
Cassidy William...: Absolutely.
Chloe Condon: Getting ready to go out the door, because I'm the person who needs... I need my wallet. I need my sunglasses. I need SPF. I need socks. And I recently confined it all to one space. So my out the door routine is quick.
Cassidy William...: That's actually amazing having socks by the door.
Chloe Condon: It's changed my life girl. Oh my gosh.
Cassidy William...: Okay, anyway. What's your golden rule for coding?
Chloe Condon: Work. Then you're like, "Okay, why is this working?" I feel at least that's how I code where I'm like this shouldn't be working. Why is this working? But yeah, just get it working. Once I see it working, then I know okay, I'm close.
Cassidy William...: Optimize from there. Fixing.
Zach Plata: Great starting place. All right. What is your favorite it depends question?
Chloe Condon: How do you measure dev rel success?
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Chloe Condon: I'm interviewing now. So I get that question a lot and let me tell you, I got a great answer. But yeah, I feel like that's the question of the hour for people who work in our type of role.
Cassidy William...: Right. It's constant. Everyone wants to know how to measure it perfectly. But the thing is it's abstract. Sometimes things that you do won't actually pay off for six months, but then it pays off in a huge way. And it's just depends.
What is the oldest piece of tech that you own?
Chloe Condon: Okay. I have props. I'm so excited for this. So this was my first choice, but then I'm going to show you the oldest one. So I have my original, I don't know what iPod this is. Because it's got this silicon case on it.
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh.
Zach Plata: Wow.
Chloe Condon: I know, right? This should be in a museum. This is a 20 gigabyte iPod. Yeah. I don't know what generation, but I still have it. The charge doesn't hold well, but the first thing I ever downloaded on iTunes was Goofy Movie soundtrack. So very-
Cassidy William...: Excellent.
Zach Plata: Classic.
Chloe Condon: But my oldest piece of technology is my Teddy Rexman with both tapes if you can believe.
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh.
Chloe Condon: It's not super operational. His mouth doesn't move, but it'll play the tapes. So I'm thinking of making a taxidermy out of this. Because I'm like, what do I do? How do I honor it? And I make Beanie Baby taxidermy, so I figure I'll just have a wall of all my old toys.
Cassidy William...: I would like to pause the rapid fire and please go into, what do you mean by you make Beanie Baby taxidermy?
Chloe Condon: I thought I brought it to show because I figured this would be a question. Should I grab it to show? I can just explain also.
Cassidy William...: I think you should probably grab something to show. It's very important.
Chloe Condon: Okay. So as I mentioned before, I've had a hard time parting with all my toys, and I kept them all in pristine condition, and it's been such a joy to take them apart. Like Furbies and weird stuff like that. But I literally-
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh.
Chloe Condon: This is not my original Beanie Baby, unfortunately. This is from eBay, but I wanted to see what was inside of them. Because I hack Furbies. I do weird stuff in my free time with all these old toys, just make stuff and sell it on Etsy sometimes. But yeah, I have a moose. You have to keep the tag on it. Right?
Cassidy William...: Of course.
Chloe Condon: This is Baldy, I think. But my boyfriend's name is Ty, T-Y. So I also feel like it's a really great decor.
Cassidy William...: Does he just have dozens of them for every special occasion?
Chloe Condon: I have a lot of enamel pins that I bought in bulk that he wears, and he gets a lot of compliments when he orders coffee and stuff. But yeah, I love to just take these things apart and see how they work, because I didn't know about technology when I was younger, and it's been so fascinating to figure out how these, especially from the nineties, all of these digital toys worked.
Cassidy William...: Especially the Furby ones, they're haunting, but fascinating.
Chloe Condon: Or Diva Stars. I didn't have a Diva Star, but there were all these toys for girls like the Poochies. I guess those are for boys too, the little robots.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, the little robot dogs?
Chloe Condon: I thought they were magic. I loved robots when I was younger. So it's great to have actual robots now to play with.
Cassidy William...: That is awesome.
Zach Plata: Yes.
Chloe Condon: That was not rapid fire. There were many prompts.
Cassidy William...: That is okay.
Zach Plata: That's all right.
Cassidy William...: Guess we're getting back on the rapid train. That was amazing.
Zach Plata: All right. Next rapid question. Have you written a piece of cringy code? And if you have, could you explain a little further?
Chloe Condon: All of my code is pretty cringy. When I take a look back at my Hackbright project, so Hackbright was the boot camp that I attended. It's an all women's, software engineering boot camp. And I built this app that was very me. I basically, before Hoot Suite was a thing, I went to Japan and I was waking up at two or three in the morning to tweet out to my followers back in California.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Chloe Condon: Because I was so obsessed with social media at the time. And I used the Twitter API and the Facebook API to create this essentially, where you could type, and it used NLP and you could be like 4:00 PM, and it would do it. But I look at that code and I'm like, oh, this is simply duct taped together. And I remember when I was interviewing as a junior engineer with Disney Store on my resume and people were looking at my resume as a junior engineer and developer evangelists, what is she doing here? But yeah, it's tough to look at. I'm tempted to take it off of my GitHub, honestly, because it's on a wing and a prayer, it's still with us.
Cassidy William...: That's growth though. You should cringe at your code every six months or so. My mind. What is your favorite programming pun?
Chloe Condon: I recently tweeted something, because I've just done a bunch of interviews. There's a lot of questions about key stakeholders and I tweeted, this is all I can picture when I hear key stakeholders, and it was keys and stake, and people holding steak. So I think the jargon of business, any jargon business jargon puns in tech, I'm so here for, I did a bunch of OKR puns when I figured out what an OKR was.
Cassidy William...: Excellent. Yeah. I like doing those ones when it's related to a business thing and then you can just toss it in a meeting, just dropping a grenade in there and they're like, "Why?"
Chloe Condon: But will it scale?
Zach Plata: Yeah. Speaking of OKRs, I saw a hilarious, I think it was on Twitter or something like that, where a guy was texting his mom and was like, "Oh I'm just working on OKRs." And then the mom was like, "Okay, when are you getting a girlfriend?" Or something like that.
All right. Next rapid fire question. Last one, actually. What is your most used emoji?
Chloe Condon: Ooh, I feel like I used the grimacing emoji a lot, which haunted me to my core when I was an iPhone user back in the day, and my boyfriend is an Android user, and it looked completely different. I was like I feel like this has not been translating how I wanted it to, but with the state of the world, how it is, I just constantly feel like people are texting me and I'm responding like, "Ooh," which is what I think the grimacing emoji is.
Cassidy William...: That is a good one. And I didn't really think of it as a grimacing emoji for a long time. I just thought it was someone smiling, but not really smiling. Like eh.
Chloe Condon: That too. I feel like it's almost like an I love Lucy thing.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see it.
Now we are going to our random segment generator where something random will appear and we'll do whatever segment we're told. And so the first one is dev opposites. So outside of your day job, outside of tech things, what do you do?
Chloe Condon: I most recently, I noticed that the Google I Pixel and the Pixel chargers look like little gravestones, little tombstones, and I got some moss from Michael's and some little flowers and I used my Cricuit machine to make a little tombstone. So I'm constantly crafting and yeah, I don't do a lot of theater stuff anymore. I feel like I really get the theater bug just from doing a lot of stuff that I get to do in my life now. And I don't miss having to rehearse all the time.
So yeah, I feel like I've turned. I feel like I have so much free time now. I used to work nine to five, Monday through Friday, do rehearsals, performances on weekends, and I've just really enjoying making weird crafty things all the time.
Zach Plata: Love that.
Cassidy William...: That is great. Yeah, I did theater stuff in my youth. I think I have a DVD of Zach in high school from when he did the freshman play. We went to high school together.
Chloe Condon: Oh, love this. So I love a good high school VHS. It's such a time capsule.
Cassidy William...: It's so excellent.
Chloe Condon: What was it called? What was the name?
Cassidy William...: Yeah Zach, what was it called? I don't actually remember.
Zach Plata: I think it's like, Are You Smarter Than a Ninth Grader? So it was a playoff that one show that was popular at the time, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? And it was just a series of small skits flushed together.
Chloe Condon: Just little vignettes.
Zach Plata: Just little vignettes.
Cassidy William...: So good.
Chloe Condon: Yeah. My dream job right out of college, before I knew about tech, was with Kaiser Permanente, touring these middle schools and high schools. And I thought I'm a shoo in because I look like a teen and the show was called... You had a fruits and vegetables one and stuff like that, but it was Nightmare on Puberty Street, and you had to rap about puberty in the audition. And it was very that same, the energy of we're trying to relate to-
Cassidy William...: Oh my gosh.
Chloe Condon: Youths.
Cassidy William...: Nightmare on Puberty Street is one of the best things I've heard in a very long time.
Chloe Condon: Give it a Google. There are many videos. I sadly did not book it, but know many people who did it, and it was quite a treat. They gave you health insurance. It was the only acting job in the Bay Area where you'd get benefits, health insurance. So my business mind is like the only way I'm going to make money in this business is to get health insurance through Kaiser. But yeah.
Cassidy William...: With Nightmare on Puberty Street.
Zach Plata: There you go.
Chloe Condon: Why do you do? Oh, I'm in Nightmare on Puberty Street. Yeah. It was like the ideal situation, but I got the Yelp job instead. What could have been, right?
Cassidy William...: If only.
Zach Plata: All right. One more related to dev opposites is what is your go to karaoke song?
Chloe Condon: Ooh. Okay. I'm an eighties girl, eighties, nineties.
Cassidy William...: Keep going.
Chloe Condon: I was briefly in a cover band in college or sub for fast times, eighties. I think I've learned in my time with karaoke that you got to do one that gets the crowd pumped up. So I used to do ballads. I used to do Total Eclipse and How Do I Get You Alone? But I now am in my Celine Dion era. So I'm really into, I Drove All Night. Some Dolly Parton I think is always a good choice. You want to leave them partying, Party in The USA, also a bop depending on the crowd. I feel like I also have to feel the energy of the room. If I'm at a piano bar, I'm going to do a Maybe This Time from Cabaret thing. Yeah, it's all about the vibe.
Cassidy William...: Can we please go karaoking together? Because you have literally named every one of my favorite karaoke songs except for Like a Prayer, which is-
Chloe Condon: Oh yes, yes, yes.
Cassidy William...: Excellent.
Zach Plata: So fun.
All right. Moving on to the next segment in this random segment generator, it's 404 and heartbreak. So what is something that you has been taken off the internet or gives you a 404 page that you have once beloved?
Chloe Condon: I feel like I should be playing In The Arms of The Angels right now because I checked before this podcast, because I was like, do my eyes deceive me? I've been visiting this website since I got the internet, and it is perished. I thankfully hold the history of it if anybody needs it. HamsterDance.com, error, not found, has disappeared from our lives. Luckily, we have the hit single and CD that I bought from Sam's Club in the early two thousands.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Chloe Condon: But hamster dance is gone and for people don't know, it was just gifs of hamsters dancing to a sped up version of the intro to Robinhood from Disney, but it has broken my heart to the very core, and I miss it every day.
Cassidy William...: All right. Last random segment is launch lightly, an ode to our sponsors. What is your best advice for someone starting off in the software development tech world?
Chloe Condon: You are never going to feel like you know what you're doing. I've been doing this now almost seven years, and I still feel imposter syndrome every single ding dang day, just as much, if not more than when I was just a wee boot camp student. So I would say find a good mentor who can check you in those moments. I'm very lucky that I live with one of my mentors, but I think that, yeah, you're never going to feel comfortable. You're going to have glimpses. You're going to have moments where you're like, I think I do know what I'm doing.
Cassidy William...: Amazing.
Chloe Condon: And then you're going to discover you actually do not know anything.
Zach Plata: And that's when we grow. It's the best feeling.
So another question around this is if you could undo one thing in your career, what would it be?
Chloe Condon: I wish that in some moments in my career, that I had been more true to who I am as a person. I've had a lot of people throughout my career in positions of power, not understand me and get me. And I've now hit my mid thirties, I don't care. I do care what other people think about me. I work in an industry where it is my job to get people to care about what I'm talking about, but I'm not everybody's flavor. And I think I used to internalize that a lot. So if I could change anything, it would be in certain moments where I'm being asked to maybe do things that I don't feel are true to me and my brand and a person, to not do those.
Yeah. And usually those are just moments where I'm being asked to be too serious. Or if I'm having to speak to... For example, there was a time in my career where I got pushed into giving a talk that I had not written. It was very weird where someone else had written the talk, and I was giving it, and I didn't feel comfortable about it because A, it was written as if an expert had wrote it. And I simply was not an expert on the subject. And I tried, it felt like being an actress again, actually, where I was like even when I'm fielding these questions or being like, and this is really great and you should try it. I felt like I was cheating the audience out of genuine. I think you can tell when someone's genuinely passionate about something, and they're talking about it.
Cassidy William...: You can.
Chloe Condon: So yeah, I would say I would go back in those moments where I felt like this feels not markety, because I love marketing just more this doesn't feel like me. I wish I'd raised my hand a little bit more.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, for sure. What are you excited about now in this world of software?
Chloe Condon: To quote Little Red Riding Hood from Into The Woods, I'm excited and scared for AI. I love artificial intelligence. Like the first sci-fi I ever watched was AI with Haley Joel Osment, and it fascinated me because this whole idea of sentience in robots and how we will have to deal with that as a society. And I do genuinely believe that with the rapid rate at which society is growing with technology, that we will have to be having these discussions on governance with AI.
And yeah, I've just been reading a lot about that lately and I just love robots too. So I don't know if you guys are watching OB One, but the young Leia character, I think it's so important that she has this. Leia has always had an affinity for robots throughout the whole Star Wars franchise, but to see a little girl interested in robots, I feel like is so important. And I wish that someone had told me when I was younger, you know how you stare at the animatronics at Disneyland all the time and watch videos with them? That is a job and something you can work on.
So yeah, I'm terrified and excited for it. But robots, if you're listening, I love you. And I hope you will let me join your army.
Cassidy William...: That being said, it is time for the advice portion of this podcast, and the advice that I have is to bring your whole self to work, unto the workplace, to your personal brand, social media, whatever cliche phrase you want to say. When I say bring your whole self to work, I mean don't bring a shade of yourself where you slowly but surely reveal who you actually are to your coworkers or to the people who are around you. Because when you are yourself right away, it never feels like you're hiding, and you can start to do your best work. And you can really start to establish that work is work and who you are is separate from that.
It helps not only with your own personal identity, but also just in general. Let's just say you write some bad code, it won't be the end of the world, because you're not attaching yourself to that. And also work life balance wise, if people know that you like to review operas on the weekend, they're not going to make you work on the weekend, because they know you got to review your operas. Well, hopefully anyway.
Chloe, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was so fun chatting with all of you.
Chloe Condon: I love it. Let's do it again next week.
Cassidy William...: Yeah. Easy. It's done.
Zach Plata: Thank you so much, Chloe.
Cassidy William...: Chloe, where can people find you on the internet? Do you have any plugs for us that you'd like to share?
Chloe Condon: On Twitter, I'm most active on Twitter, just my name, Chloe Conden. And I'm also on Instagram. I think honestly, I think my best work is my Instagram story. So I'm going to shout out my Instagram stories. I'm at GITForked, get forked. So yeah, come and watch all the weird quirky stuff I'm making all the time.
Cassidy William...: Your Instagram stories are my favorite thing. I don't really use Instagram anymore, but I go on the app to see your stories because they're so funny.
Chloe Condon: Thank you. Someone recently DMed me and was like, "Your Instagram stories are the most chaotic corner of the internet." And I'm like, "Thank you." So yeah. Come see what Cassidy says she joins Instagram for.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, exactly. And could you tell us a bit more about your podcast too?
Chloe Condon: Oh yeah, of course. Definitely check out Salute Your Scores. It is a pod about all things nineties, sometimes early two thousands or late eighties like Teen Witch. But yeah, we talk about movies, TV shows. Cassidy came on and did our Parent Trap episode, and yeah, we have everything on there from Disney Channel original movies to me talking about all my McDonald's toys to PeeWee's holiday specials. So yeah, come and come listen if you want a dose of nostalgia.
Cassidy William...: And once again, because making podcast is expensive, this show is brought to you by Launch Darkly. Launched Darkly toggles peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day.,And that number continues to grow and you should use them. You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible, Launch Darkly.
Zach Plata: I'm Zach. I'm a dev ral at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter at Zach Plata.
Cassidy William...: And I'm Cassidy Williams. You can find me at Cassidoo, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. I do dev advocacy, dev relationship, dev experience, whatever it is for Remote and for OSS Capital. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. Bye.