Sarah Withee 0:15 Welcome back to The Rest of Us in Tech podcast. My name is Sarah Withee. And today I'm here with Mary Thengvall. Hi, Mary. Mary Thengvall 0:21 Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me. Sarah Withee 0:23 Thanks for coming on. So a little bit about Mary. She is a connector of people at heart both personally and professionally. She loves digging into the strategy of how to build and foster developer communities and has been doing so for over 10 years. In addition to her work, she's known as being "the one with the dog" thanks to her ever present medical alert service dog Ember, the author of the first book on developer relations, "The Business Value of Developer Relations" coming out later this fall from Apress. So I guess we should first talk about the book, what got you started writing a book about developer relations? Mary Thengvall 0:55 So like you said, I've been in developer relations been working with developer communities for a while. I've wanted to write and loved writing since I was a little kid. But to be honest, never really thought I would be the author of a business book. Wasn't exactly the type of writing that I was that I was enthralled by. But there were a few of us hanging out at SCALE (the Southern California Linux Expo conference) in 2017. And Julie Gunderson and Jason D, and Nathan Harvey, all kind of walk past me at separate times. And went "I'm so excited, this is going to be so much fun." And I finally stopped one of them long enough to say, "What are we talking about? What is going to be fun? I have no idea what you're referring to." And it turns out that our amazing editor, Louise from Apress, was there at the dinner and had been talking to some of them about like, "Hey, we need a book on technical communities. What do you think about writing it?" and they kind of volunteered me into this awesome group. Uh, the funny part of that story though is that they then along the way realized all three of them realized I don't really actually have time to do this book and have time to put the effort into this because it's a lot of effort and a lot of time, and they all had full time jobs. And I had permission from my company that I was working with at the time spark post to do some writing on the side. And so that really is what allowed me to take the time and and truly flush out all the information that went into the book. But I'm still incredibly grateful to those three for pulling me in and getting it kicked off that way. Sarah Withee 2:40 If some people watching and weren't quite sure what Developer Relations means, do you have a good summary of that? Mary Thengvall 2:47 Sure. So Developer Relations at its core, if you break it down real simple, is just how do we relate to developers? So how do we market to them? How do we talk to them? How do we get them involved in our communities? How do we have them become aware of the products that we have? And that looks completely different at every company, right? So some companies, it's going to be a lot of speaking engagements, a lot of talking to folks at conferences, some it's going to be reading sample code and working on the documentation and making the developer experience better. Some it's going to be internal content. So helping your engineers with the SDK, or the client libraries, the tooling, again, more documentation, and sometimes its external content as well. Right? So blog posts and tutorials and webinars, things like that. But at the end of the day, it's about relating to those developers who either are or could be your customers. Sarah Withee 3:49 So do you find this the same as like a typical marketing department or do you think there's like enough variance there that it really does have kind of a special world? Mary Thengvall 3:59 Yeah, so that's that's a hot topic of conversation and has been for a while now. I, for a while actually, and I've told enough people this by now I think it's probably safe to say it's public knowledge, for a while actively turned down any job that had to do with developer relations that reported in the marketing. And there are some companies who can do that really, really well. Twilio is one of them. And Twilio is known as like they are top of the line developer relations. Everyone wants to be Twilio. But the problem is your typical marketing department is judged on things like sales, qualified leads or marketing, qualified leads, demand generation and traditional demand generation and all of that is just how many people can we get into the funnel that we can then pass off to sales and contribute to that side of the company. Old-school marketing was relationship building, it was word of mouth, it was providing materials and content that would take off among the community, and you would get discovered because of this word of mouth communication. And so if you wind up at a company that has those two separate but equal parts of marketing, I think community fits really nicely in there. The biggest problem with Developer Relations and figuring what what department we're in is that there are so many different places we could fit. We could fit in marketing, we could fit in product, we could fit in engineering, we could fit in documentation and learning, we could fit on our own department all together, right? So figuring out the right placement and the right metrics to judge us on then is probably the most difficult part. Sarah Withee 5:43 That's a really good explanation. Mary Thengvall 5:45 Thank you. Sarah Withee 5:49 So where do you work currently, and what do you do there? Mary Thengvall 5:51 So I actually founded my own company back in late October, early November 2017. And I now do consulting for companies who kind of know about developer relations, but don't really know what it is or how to implement it in their own company. I live in San Francisco and so it's kind of this breeding ground for these companies who go, "We need a community manager, we need a developer advocate, we need Developer Relations!" And so they have a job description out there. But they don't really understand either what it takes to pull that off successfully, or how to actually support those people that they're bringing on. And so I'm working with those companies to figure out strategy to figure out where they can go to set up some of those processes so that they can then set their developer relations team up for success. Sarah Withee 6:41 Along those lines, what made you decide to go into running your own business as opposed to going to work for some other company? Mary Thengvall 6:47 So there's a couple things that led to that. One of them was just I've been in the industry for a while and I tend to pick up on patterns pretty well and I kept seeing good friends of mine. And really good community folks either get shuffled around in companies until they were just so tired and worn out from trying to learn all the new people's names and learn all the new processes that they quit, or the company never really realized their true potential and their full value and so let the entire community team go. Or they just got tired of having to do the work of marketing and product and engineering and trying to keep all these balls in the air and never really been able to keep up with it all. So that was part of it was I felt strongly that there needed to be someone who was kind of the advocate for the advocates, and who was providing resources for those of us who have been doing this and who are doing this full time so that there's groups that they can talk to, there's people that they can relate to, there's resources that they can take back to their management and go, "Look, we're not the only ones doing this. And this is the better way. And maybe if we try these things, here's some here's some other options rather than what we're doing." The other piece of that was that I have a strong desire to move the industry forward. Communities been around for a while, especially in open source communities. And developer relations, has a couple different start dates depending on if you go with you know who Guy Kawasaki first call himself a developer evangelist, or just the popularity in the last probably 8 to 10 years. But we've gotten to a point where everyone knows about us, but there's still not a lot of education around who we are, what we do, what value we provide. And so that's something that I've really struggled with is you know, not only do we need resources for those of us who are doing this on a day-to-day basis, we need resources for the business owners, or the product owners, for the CEOs and the CTOs and the CMOs, who are trying to figure out where this all fits. And so that's the biggest part of my goal is to provide the resources for the right people to be able to continue these conversations, but drive it forward, instead of stagnating where we are now. Sarah Withee 9:08 So I guess back to the book thought for a little bit: What was that process like? Mary Thengvall 9:14 Writing a book is easily one of the hardest things I've ever done. Um, couple different reasons. One is that there's no it's not a straightforward like, "Today, I will do X," right? Like, I could sit down to write chapter three and my brain could skip ahead to chapter eight. And that's fine. But I still have to write chapter three at some point. Or I could set the entire day aside to write and sit down to write and just didn't have the motivation or didn't have the inspiration to be able to write that day. So there was a lot of unknowns, there was a lot of, you know, I suddenly can write and it's 10 o'clock at night. All right, let me go make a pot of coffee and I'm staying up as late I can to get this done because I need to get this done. Sarah Withee 10:02 That sounds more like me. Mary Thengvall 10:03 And it was something that I really struggled with. Because you know, there's so many things out there about like, well, if you just sit down and write and you have your set time and you make it happen, and it'll work. And sometimes that was totally the case and other times not at all. Sarah Withee 10:22 So for the Slack, did you start that? Or are you just like heavily involved in it? Mary Thengvall 10:27 So DevRel Collective Slack started as the Evangelist Collective "We Are Developer Evangelist, and You Can Too!" Slack. Sarah Withee 10:37 I remember that long title! Mary Thengvall 10:38 Right? It was difficult to write out and I think we eventually just shorten it to WADE, or at least part of it to WADE, I guess. But, that was started, I don't actually remember the date, but probably five or six years ago. It's been a while now. And Dave Josephson, who is still one of the admins with me, came up to me at the very first Velocity in New York and said, "Hey, there's a handful of us that only see each other at these conferences, and we never have a chance to catch up at the conferences, because we're always working in the booth. What do you think about starting the slack team? And what do you think about coming on board because we'd like you to help us out?" And that has been a seriously awesome wild ride, like we it started out with just, you know, invite who you know, and everybody's welcome. And let's see what happens. And it is now close to 1000 people in there, I think. And we have a little more, we hold the reins a little tighter, just from making sure that people who are in there doing developer relations, community building, stuff like that, usually for their profession. So it's people who are either actively looking to join that or are actively doing it as a full time role. Partly because we started realizing that as a resource for people who weren't familiar with Developer Relations, it wasn't great. So we had a lot of people who, you know, stuck their name in the hat and said, I really want to know more. And then they join a Slack with a handful of, well, quite a few people who are tend to be very talkative tend to be very excited about the topics. And those people kind of get lost a little bit. So one of the things we're actually in the process of working on now is building out a part of the website that has resources section, so that if someone says, you know, "Hey, I'm interested to know more about Developer Relations, but I'm not actively doing it right now or not actively pursuing it right." Now we can go, "Awesome, here's a whole set of links and resources and information for you, that you can go look at and see if it's something that you really want to pursue. And if it is, then awesome. Come back. And we'll help you out and see what we can do." Sarah Withee 12:53 So I know the logo for the developer advocate slack is an avocado. Do you want to explain the origin of the avocado? Mary Thengvall 13:02 Sure! So about two and a half years ago now, when I was working at Spark Post, which was the last company that I was at, we had one of our project managers who when she got talking really fast couldn't say developer advocate. It would always come out as developer avocado. And so eventually, a lot of people throughout the company started calling us a developer avocado team. And we decided if that was going to be our name, we needed to figure out a good reason why that was going to stick and it couldn't just be a good slip of the tongue. So we came up with this whole, and we meaning myself and Adrian Howard, who was my developer advocate at the time. He's based in New York, he's with MongoDB now. And we came up with this whole idea of avocados with a good kind of fat. And so developer relations can tend to be a fatty HR department, and that it costs a lot of money to send people to conferences, and sponsorships, and all of those types of things. But when used in the right ways, and the right combinations with the right people and given enough time, it can be really healthy, both for the company as well as the community. And so we reflected on that for a while and came up with this whole list of other things as well that like, you know, avocado goes with everything so it fits really well for API companies, as well as SAS companies, as well as DevOps companies across the board, right? It takes a while to ripen but once it does, it's really, really good. But it's a long tail game, right? Like, it takes something like seven years for an avocado tree to bear fruit. So you're playing a long tail game, but it's really worth it in the end. What was one of the other ones? Avocados are highly priced. And DevRel teams tend to be again, a little more on the pricier side, a little more on the expensive side. But you get a variety of skills and a variety of knowledge and people who can really learn and stretch and grow with the company. Just like you can use avocados in a variety of ways too. So it's taken off since then, there's been a lot of folks who have who have talked about it and kind of added other things along the lines of, you know, where I also like of avocados, because of this thing over here. That's been fun. And it's actually on the cover of my book I did. I worked with an artist Erica Yala, who created avocado cartoon versions of each of the people who I did case studies with. And so there's a big group shot of us on the cover of the book. And it just makes me ridiculously happy every time I look at it. (laughs) Sarah Withee 15:48 I kind of want to see this now. But it won't really work for a podcast. Mary Thengvall 15:52 That's fair. Sarah Withee 15:53 So you're also getting ready to run one of your conferences. Mary Thengvall 15:58 Yes. Sarah Withee 15:59 Want to talk a little bit about that too? Mary Thengvall 16:00 Sure. So Redeploy is, it's this idea that my friend J. Paul Reed and I had started talking about probably almost 18 months ago at this point, that, you know, this concept of fail fast fail forward that's that's heavy in the DevOps space and that I had been hearing for years, being a community manager in the DevOps space is great. Except for when it hits a point of, okay, we're not taking care of organization, we're not taking care of the people at that organization. And suddenly we have this resilient tech that we're trying to build but because our people aren't resilient, and our teams aren't resilient, and they don't know how to fix that, then the tech really truly isn't as resilient as it should be either, because we don't have the people in the organization to back it up. And so there's an academic school of thought called resilience engineering that's this, this whole idea, you know, we have to view resilience from the holistic standpoint of not only tech but organizations and people as well. And we have to prepare for these outages and prepare for these problems. And so your resilience really isn't based on how well you recovered, but how prepared you are for those types of events. So it's not just reactive, it's being proactive about the way they are approaching it. Sarah Withee 17:22 And what kind of conference is that, like a single track or multi track? Is it more tech talks or... Mary Thengvall 17:27 It's single track. Yeah, so it single track. It's a good mixture of like, tech talks, and human-ops talks, and leadership, and how to how to work with your teams and things like that. We're not diving too heavily into any of the coding side of tech. So even if you're not technical, I would still say if there are topics that you're interested in, please join us. Because there's a very, it's very much about the concepts and not as much about, you know, "here's how you deploy a Docker container" kind of a deal. Which is all well and good, but it's not this conference. Sarah Withee 18:09 So one of the things in your bio you also mentioned is you have a medical service alert dog named Ember, who I have met and is absolutely adorable. Do want to talk about kind of the story of how Ember came to be your dog? Mary Thengvall 18:24 Sure. So Ember is awesome. And I swear, there are more people who know and recognize him than recognize me. I will often get called out as, "Oh, you're the one with the dog." And so it's kind of become, you know, a thing that I go by, because it makes sense. And people know who I am that way. But Ember is a service dog for me. I have type one diabetes, and I got him as a pet. I had no intention of him being a service dog, no intention of him traveling with me. In fact when I moved out on my own with him, I was actually a little worried about that because I was trying and on the road often and suddenly having to figure out, you know, "Hey, can so-and-so watch him? Can you housesit for me? How does how does that all work?" And when I did move out on my own, a couple months after he started barking and standing on my chest and marketing in my face in the middle of the night. And he would wake me up with such an adrenaline rush that I couldn't get back to sleep for probably 20 to 30 minutes. And by the time I was finally able to calm down enough to feel like I maybe could fall asleep again, I'd realized that my blood sugar was low and I was starting to feel the symptoms. And so after like the third time that that happened, I called my doctor up. And I was like, "Look, this is weird. I know, this is weird, but my dog is doing this thing." She was like, "Well, dogs do that. Like there are dogs who are trained to do that. And there are people who train their dogs to do that." And I had no idea that diabetic alert dogs were even something that was possible, let alone something that was fairly common. And so that's what been a fascinating adventure for me figuring out, you know, training him and working with him and reinforcing the things that he was doing automatically. But it's been it's been a cool experience traveling with him as well, seeing, you know, if I'm hanging out in the speaker lounge before I speak at a conference, and I'll have another speaker come up and go, "Hey, can I say hi to your dog, like I'm talking next and I really miss my dog and that might really help." And the amount of stories that I've heard back from people of, you know, the panic attack that he prevented, or the anxiety that that he was able to diminish and things like that, that were that have been pretty awesome. So it's incredibly helpful for me that he can sense my blood sugar as it's dropping. Because it means that I can grab a granola bar to my bag instead of having to actually like, stop what I'm doing and walk away and then come back 20 minutes later when I'm able to process what we're talking about again. But also, it's been cool to see how he connects with other people around us and the rest of the community. So he's got his own Twitter handle, you can follow him @ember_dog. Um, he is on the cover of the book, which I'm super stoked about along with with the rest of us. And yeah, he's, he's pretty awesome. Sarah Withee 21:15 I had never known about service dogs I could do that either until, actually, I met your dog. So that's definitely fun. And, you know, also as a diabetic myself and have had some of those hypoglycemic attacks. They're not fun. Mary Thengvall 21:29 No! Sarah Withee 21:31 So to detect them early is absolutely wonderful. Mary Thengvall 21:34 Yes. Sarah Withee 21:36 So I think this is the part where I would like to get into the really hard hitting questions. Are you ready? Mary Thengvall 21:41 Sure. Sarah Withee 21:41 What did you want to be when you grew up? Mary Thengvall 21:45 So I wanted to be a journalist. I had always known that I love to write. My parents like to say that I put out the first neighborhood newspaper in our area because I would like go sell copies of a weekly newsletter that was, you know, so and so got an A on their homework this week, and you know, highlighting the different kids in the neighborhood. Um, but I would also write poetry or fiction, all sorts of stuff that I have piled up in a box somewhere that I probably don't know if I ever want to look at ever again. But pursuing journalism was the practical side of that, um, until I hit about my junior year of college and all the newspapers started letting the writing stuff go because no one was buying print newspapers anymore. And so it turned into this like, okay, now what? How do I do this? Actually landed an internship at O'Reilly Media, which led to my working with their PR team and writing press releases and getting to know the community members, which funnel directly into doing community work with them, which was awesome. Sarah Withee 22:51 That kind of answers my question of how did you get into it? So thank you for answering that. Mary Thengvall 22:57 (laughs) No problem, happy to help. Sarah Withee 22:58 What kind of stuff did you want to write when you were little, aside from like, the weekly town newsletter? Mary Thengvall 23:04 So I went between a few things. Um, I dreamed about writing novels, and have since realized that, like, I'm great at writing feature articles and things like that. I'm not so great on the fiction side of things. But I had a teacher in second and third grade, who would give us, we had notebooks that we wrote in every day. And like beginning of class, you know, we have 15 minutes of writing, and we turn them in at the end of the week, and she read them over the weekend. And then turn them back to us with notes and comments and encouragement. And at the end of my third grade year, she left a sticky note in my yearbook that said, "Looking forward to seeing an autographed copy of your first book." And I still have that yearbook, it's up on my shelf. And I still have that post-it note. And I'm in the process of trying to track down her contact info so I can send her a book. Sarah Withee 23:56 Amazing. Mary Thengvall 23:58 It's pretty awesome. I'm excited. Sarah Withee 24:00 Maybe not the book she was expecting, but... Mary Thengvall 24:03 Exactly. Well, and I was joking around with people when I first said I was writing a book, because I wasn't specific in the topic that I was going to be covering. So I had so many people who are like, "That's amazing that you are finally writing a fiction book!" And I was like, "Yeah, nope, nope, nope, that's not gonna happen." Sarah Withee 24:20 "Developer Relations, the romance novel." Mary Thengvall 24:22 No. No! Sarah Withee 24:26 Bad idea, nobody do that, please. Mary Thengvall 24:30 (laughs) Sarah Withee 24:30 So along similar lines, is there any, like, good books or movies, TV shows, or anything that you've seen lately that you'd like to recommend to people? Mary Thengvall 24:39 I saw "Oceans 8," which was awesome. The Oceans movies are always ones that I tend to put on in the background if I need just some white noise and entertainment going on while I'm doing stuff around the house. That was a lot of fun. Um, what was the other one that I saw recently? Incredibles 2, which was wild because that's, it's been a long time. Since when? Sarah Withee 25:05 That has been a long time. Mary Thengvall 25:06 Right? Sarah Withee 25:07 Was it as good as 1? Mary Thengvall 25:08 Yes. Absolutely. Hands down. Sarah Withee 25:11 Better? Equal? Mary Thengvall 25:15 I'd say equal. 1 holds a pretty awesome place in my heart. So it's got to be equal. Sarah Withee 25:24 Nice. Talking about superheroes makes a good segue into: If you could have some sort of superpower, what superpower would you want to have? Mary Thengvall 25:34 Mmm... Um... That's a good question. Sarah Withee 25:40 And why? Mary Thengvall 25:41 And why, of course, of course. I'd like to be able to teleport because I'm not good at being patient but I want to see more places in the world. So traveling for 20 hours on a plane ride to go somewhere is not my idea of fun. I'd rather just be there right now. Which I don't know if that's teleportation as much as it is. Because teleportation is back in time as well. Right? Sarah Withee 26:10 I suppose it could be... Mary Thengvall 26:10 Just teleport to a different place. Sarah Withee 26:13 Timey wimey, wibbly wobbly... Mary Thengvall 26:17 Yes! Yes please. That'll work. I have a Doctor Who blanket on my couch. So you're in good company. Sarah Withee 26:25 Who's your favorite doctor? Mary Thengvall 26:27 I have to go with Matt Smith and Amy uh... not Amy Poehler... Amy Pond. Sarah Withee 26:34 Amy Poehler would probably make an entertaining companion. Mary Thengvall 26:38 Yes, definitely. But yeah, he was he was my first so that's gotta be my favorite with the fishes and custard. Sarah Withee 26:46 Nice. Mary Thengvall 26:47 Yeah. Yeah. Sarah Withee 26:48 If we were to go to a coffee shop, and you were to just geek out about anything like, like, just get you on a topic and you would not shut up for hours, what would you be geeking out about? Mary Thengvall 27:01 Good question too. Um, developer relations. That's, that's a gimme. Sarah Withee 27:10 Oh really? Maybe you should write a book about that. Mary Thengvall 27:12 Yeah, right? Someone should, that's for sure. (laughs) No, I just I genuinely love talking about people, about communities, about how to support people, about how to bring people together. And I mean, that's the reason why I have in my bio, that I'm a connector of people personally and professionally. Like that's what I love to do. I love telling stories. I love working with people to figure out what their story is. All of those types of things. And that's really what drew me to journalism in the first place. Because I love the feature writing side of it. So telling, figuring out what the cool story was, and putting those pieces together in a way that was interesting, exciting to other people. Sarah Withee 27:59 Is there anything you feel like you've learned from working on the book? Mary Thengvall 28:05 I think I've learned a lot about myself. (laughs) Sarah Withee 28:09 Interesting. Mary Thengvall 28:10 And I've learned that sometimes I just have a mental block. And if I can tell myself that I can do it, then I sit down and I actually can. But I also have a very, I am very capable of telling myself that something is too difficult. So I know when I got my edits back, not the copy edits, but like peer review edits, I really, really struggled with figuring out, you know, "This feels like it's a narrative, how do I just kind of like crack this chapter open and write a new paragraph and stick it in there somewhere that it doesn't really feel like it works?" And I struggled with that to a point where, you know, I talked to a couple other writer friends and had mentioned editing and how difficult that was, and they all commiserated with me on it. And so then that kind of became a mantra of sorts of like, editing is hard. This is the hardest part of the book so far. This is difficult. I just need to figure out a way past that. But it's hard. And once I could get myself past the, it's hard back to a like, you know what, if I don't like the comment, I don't have to use it. And if I can't figure out an easy way to do it, I don't have to. But I need to see, I need to just sit down and see what I can do with the comments that were left. And yes, it's going to be hard, but I can do it. It was a completely different mentality. And that's not to say that it got instantly easier. But I suddenly was able to move past that block of "this is too difficult. I can't do this that I've been stuck in for probably two weeks." Sarah Withee 29:49 Somebody wanting to get into the developer relations field, do you have any suggestions on what they might do or how they would go about it? Mary Thengvall 29:55 So if you are on the technical side of things, I would say help out with your marketing team. Talk to marketing, talk to product, talk to sales, figure out, talk to support too, but figure out what questions your community is asking and how you can support those teams. So you know, maybe marketing's looking for some technical content, maybe product is looking for some feedback from community members. And you can go hit up a couple meetups and chat with people this week. Maybe support needs some technical help or improvement on the documentation, right? So take take baby steps towards this role. Don't just jump in with both feet, I would say it's a lot, it's a lot of skills, it's a lot of commitment, it's a lot of different things that are being thrown at you. And one of the things that I've heard the most from, particularly from people who are technical, is that they have a really hard time jumping into a role that is so unpredictable and so not timeblocked. So you know, you might work on 20 different projects one day and get halfway through two of them. And that's it. And you have to be okay with sitting there and going "Alright, I made this, I made progress on all of these things. I didn't actually finish anything, but that's okay. And tomorrow is probably going to be the same. And I'm probably going to get as many interruptions and I keep moving forward. And I'll do what I can." But that's a difficult shift to make, I would say if you're in marketing or product, and you're not super technical, take some time to talk to the engineers, and you can probably figure out which ones are more willing to talk and which ones are less willing to talk. Going to the engineers who enjoy writing or enjoy speaking at conferences is probably a good place to start. But working with them on getting to know the products, getting to know the ins and outs of how it works, and not necessarily how do I write the code that makes this thing go, but understanding the technical components and what sets your product apart? And then using that to start conversations with community members. And you know, "hey, so what, what problem are you trying to solve? Oh, I think I think we can do something about that because we've got this piece over here." And starting to kind of have those more technical conversations and seeing if that's something that you're interested in. Because coming from both sides, you need to have either a technical background or an interest and an ability to pick up on those technical conversations. Like I'm not a developer, I don't have a developer background. I taught myself HTML back in like, eighth grade in the mid 90s just because I was tired of not being able to make the website the right color that I wanted it to be in Yahoo's plug and play interface, right? But like, that's the extent of my developer skills. But I can dig into a topic and go, "Okay, you know, Kubernetes is connected to these other technologies. And you might use Docker instead, if you're looking at this thing over here, but the open source components lends Kubernetes these attributes, and you know, here's three other things that you can do as well." So I can have those conversations that are more than just surface level elevator pitch of "This product is X thing, you want to buy it because of Y." But that's taken a lot of time and it's taken a lot of conversations and a lot of questions to the community of "Okay, you're interested in this. And you're also interested in that, does that thing fit into here as well?" And honestly, starting this conversations, more often than not, you figure out people are perfectly fine to talk to you and want to help out and want you to be able to put those pieces together. Because the more people who understand what they're doing, the better off they are. Sarah Withee 33:54 If you had any final thoughts for a podcast audience, what sort of advice or inspirational thing would you tell them? Mary Thengvall 34:01 Hmm... I'd say make sure you are putting yourself first. It's something that I'm passionate about. And it sounds really selfish at a glance. But ultimately, if we aren't taking care of ourselves, we can't take care of our communities, we can't take care of our code, we can't be expected to pull our own at work. Because we aren't healthy, and we aren't looking after us so that we can look after other things. So whether that means taking some time off, or just being good about getting enough rest and getting good food in our bodies, or whatever that looks like for you make sure that you're putting yourself first above your work, above your other relationships, above other things in your life. Because by doing that, we can then dedicate the time that we want to those other items as well. Sarah Withee 34:51 I've been working on both the blog post and the talk for mental health things. Mary Thengvall 34:55 Yeah, I'm really, really glad that more people are talking about it these days. But we definitely need more of it. Sarah Withee 35:03 And I guess to wrap up is somebody wanted to chat with you on social media or talk more about any of this, how would they get ahold of you? Mary Thengvall 35:11 So you can find me on Twitter. I am @mary_grace. You can find my website at marygrace.community because I'm not mean enough to make people spell my last name. So marygrace.community for my blog or for my contact info on there as well. I'm going to be at a handful of conferences coming up. And I know I met API City. I'll be at Redeploy, obviously, and then likely All Things Open and hopefully DevRelCon London. Sarah Withee 35:42 So I would like to thank Mary for being on the show today. Thank you so much. It was great to chat with you. Mary Thengvall 35:47 Yeah, really was. Always fun to talk. Appreciate it. Sarah Withee 35:51 And I've been Sarah Withee. I'm @geekygirlsarah on Twitter. And check out the podcast at Rest of Us in Tech on all the social media. Thanks, and have a great day. Transcribed by https://otter.ai