Jay Miller, staff developer advocate at Aiven and founder of Black Python Devs, joins Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, for this RedMonk Conversation. Jay discusses what his military service taught him about the importance of real-world problem-solving. He shares his thoughts on the connection between Python and AI, highlighting the importance of responsible AI usage and critical thinking. Jay talks about the state of developer relations and developer advocacy as a profession. He also talks about Black Python Devs, an organization extending the ecosystem of Python communities to black and colo(u)red communities around the world through initiatives such as supporting conference travel, providing mentorship, and promoting open source contributions.
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Transcript
Kate (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this Redmonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk, and today I am joined by Jay Miller, Staff Developer Advocate at Aiven and founder of Black Python Devs. He is also alumni of Microsoft and Elastic. Jay, thanks so much for joining me.
Jay Miller (00:29)
Hey, happy to be here.
Kate (00:31)
Awesome, so let’s start off with some work and educational background. Can you share some details about your military service, your history in tech, and your current role at Aiven?
Jay Miller (00:41)
Yeah, sure. By the way, it’s No worries. Trust me, usually the first thing I do when people are like, you work at, and I’m like, Aiven. They go, yeah, who is that? And it’s like, no, that’s not a person.
Kate (00:44)
Embarrassing. Thank you.
It does sound like “Ivan”. my God, how funny. Yeah, geez. Okay, well, I appreciate you correcting me. I will endeavor not to make that mistake again.
Jay Miller (01:06)
No worries. Yeah. I, I am a college dropout. like that’s, that’s like my education background. There is about six weeks of realizing that, I was not ready for college at 17. But at 18, a year removed, the military seemed like the right path to go. Not for any reason other than, you know, on the job training of, you know, I learned best by doing and. Took a test. They were like, here’s the book of jobs that you can pick. And I knew that I wanted to get into tech and I became a computer network specialist. I served in Okinawa for mostly for about three years. I was deployed to the South China Sea, got to travel a lot. So everyone, thank you so much for everyone says like, thank you for your service. And like, thank you for letting me serve. My passport is is also thankful.
But yeah, I got to tour all over Southeast Asia. And while there, we did a lot of like training foreign military. you know, South Korean Marine Corps, Filipino Marines, Thai Marine Corps, a lot of what we were doing is, and even our own local Marines, like Marines from the US, we would prepare and train, get trained on like how to get on this giant ship, float around the ocean for about three months.
go to a foreign country and then set up like a network out in the field using Satcom stuff and then teach the foreign Marine Corps how to do what we just did. And it was basically that rinse and repeat for about three years. So I spent a lot of time teaching people like, hey, here’s the five minute lesson on how to configure a Cisco switch or how to, you know, set up
You know, I can’t remember half of the acronyms, but how to set up a, you know, this router or to, to connect to like this firewall or connect to a satellite somewhere. a lot of it was, I just learned this two weeks ago and now I’m going to teach you how to do it. And I really think that down the road that played well into my career and to developer relations as a developer advocate. mostly because that’s what I do now is I learn a thing and then like, I immediately go on YouTube or I immediately go to a conference or.
to a colleague and it’s like, here, let me show you how you do this now. But before that, when I got out of the military, I was a sysadmin, I was a help desk technician for a while. I went into marketing. Basically, I learned Python so that I could automate myself out of a job and then proceeded to automate myself out of a job. But Elastic took a chance on me and they were like, hey, you seem to be kind of good at this. Do you wanna come be a developer advocate? And then from there…
Microsoft called me and said, Hey, we like what you’re doing at Elastic. Do you want to do more Python things? So became a Python advocate at Microsoft. then, Aiven kind of just did the same thing. so it’s been very much a rinse and repeat of, of people seeing something that I did liking it and going, Hey, why don’t you come here and do this with some added benefit? And you know, the, the transition from Microsoft to Aiven was great because it was one of the first times where
A large part of what I do is teaching and like empowering others to do the things that I’m doing, which is something that I wanted to do a little bit more just throughout my career, kind of get back to those military days of like, I just learned this thing. Let me teach you so that you can go and teach other people how to do this thing as well.
Kate (04:45)
my God, okay, I did not mean to subject you to this question, but I have been so interested in the issue of upskilling in tech, right? So there’s all these sort of badging programs and certifications and right, and.
the military has been doing this sort of like non-accredited education in house forever. And so I’m curious, you know, I’ve spoken with some folks in the Navy who explained how the dolphins work and it just seems like education and upskilling is such a big part of what happens in the military. do you think that there’s any lessons that the tech industry can learn from the military about how to upskill better? Because, the stereotypes of developers hating certifications is well known, I’m sure I don’t need to regale you with those. But like, did you like learn anything important in the military about how to teach and like what the most important parts of upskilling a group should look like?
Jay Miller (05:29)
Absolutely. And I will also say the only two certifications I’ve ever gotten were because I was in the military and they were like, our, our networking training was the A plus certification test basically. And then if we did well enough, you could apply to take your CCNA, or Cisco certified networking associate, that whole thing. And then when I, I went to a security detachment that I had to take a security plus, you know, accreditation. like since then I’ve been also very like anti Coursera like farm certification farming I feel like it dilutes the thing that I think the military did do really well, which was the first unit I got to there was a giant box of cables and Day one you’re cutting off the tips of all of those cat 5 cables at the time was cat 5 It’s probably like cat 6 or 7 or something now but and you’re retipping them and you don’t think about how important that is because you’re just like, why? Like this is is hazing. This is it’s not it’s in the middle of my second float where I wasn’t the one tipping the cables. We had a typhoon that was coming to hit Thailand. And our responsibility was you have less than 48 hours to get this network up. Otherwise, we don’t have communication across not just Thailand, but between our ship in Thailand, between our ship Thailand and our base in Okinawa, half of the base that we’re actually supporting, which is like local residents. And it’s like, that giant box of cables that I had to go cut all the tips off of, retip and test to verify they work has now saved us so much time because we had just that extra box of cables laying around. And it was one of those moments of like, I’m doing a thing and I don’t know the reason why and the military teaches you kind of not to ask questions. You kind of just do as you’re told. But it was this very real moment of like, you’re going to need this one day. And there were so many times where like, Hey, I need you to look at this switch configuration. You don’t need to know the individual values of them, but you need to know what it’s doing. You need to know that like, first you need to set this up and then you need to go and set this up and then you need to go to this. And it’s like, all of a sudden, one of the switches has too much dust in it because we’re in dusty environments and like it burns out. You pull out an empty switch and now you have to configure it by hand. And you’re like, wow. I’m so glad that I paid attention to that thing where I had to configure this thing from scratch. And I feel like right now, one of the things that our industry is doing that I, you know, even with Black Python Devs, I kind of vehemently like strike against it is let’s stop trying to teach people algorithms for junior developer jobs and let’s teach them how to triage GitHub issues or how to handle JIRA tickets and do the things that they’re actually going to do in that job because I’ve never had to make a decision on whether or not I was going to use one algorithm versus another. Nowadays, as a Python developer, it’s often like, I’m going to use an ORM. The ORM is going to make a lot of decisions for me as far as my data layer goes. And the language is optimized to do a lot of the things for the sake of both readability as well as performance. It’s going to make a lot of decisions than I would make on my own if I were trying to instrument this myself. But meanwhile, I have 800 or so people in this discord and they’re all asking what is the most valuable thing that I can learn that will help me in my career? And I’m like, how to put accurate labels on get issues and how to just write a good issue to begin with so that it’s easy to replicate. It’s easy to find that error and you know what to do when someone says, hey, can you rebase all this code, which I mess up all the time.
Kate (09:49)
Yeah, yeah. So to summarize, maybe, doing real world problem solving is absolutely more essential to preparing folks who want to re -skill into the tech industry than multiple choice questions, which a lot of certifications seem to be using. And the military gets that, that they’re already doing that, that they’re saying, hey, I love the idea of it seeming hazing, but in fact you were doing this grunt work that was almost like soup to nuts. They got you started on, here’s the basic part of networking that you need to understand, and that’s cables. And so they made you tear them apart and understand what they actually are. And it prepared for future disasters even. I figured that was just like a training exercise, but they were actually usable cables by the end of it. How long ago did you wrap up your service? This was a while ago?
Jay Miller (10:42)
Oh wow, yeah, it’s been 11 years now. Yeah, it doesn’t feel like it’s been 11 years, but I mean, of course, you then start getting like high school reunion, you know, messages and you’re like, dear, what’s happened? It absolutely.
Kate (10:45)
11 years, okay, okay.
Yes. Well, the pandemic didn’t help, I gotta say.
Let’s talk a little bit about your current role. I’m curious about your thoughts on the state of developer relations and developer advocacy right now as a profession. Yeah. So, you know, I think a lot of us are following on social media about the layoffs and that’s very sad. And then there’s a lot of like hand wringing from folks like think of like Shawn Wang’s post, Devrel’s Death as a Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon. I mean, talk about a great title.
So what’s your sense of the state of the field right now? Are you concerned? Do you think this is a like tempest in a teapot situation?
Jay Miller (11:33)
Oh dear. So I am vehemently against like, let me explain to you why my opinion is the best opinion in DevRel. And it’s like the same reason that like none of us can tell you what a developer advocate actually is because it varies depending on what company you’re at. I did read Shawn’s article and I read many of the rebuttal articles and then I…
sat in a room and cried a little bit about all the time that I had wasted. This reminds me a lot of like, I’m not old enough to remember when D &D brought on like the satanic panic, but I do remember when like all of my friends who were conference organizers just said we hate developer advocates because they’re taking all the talking spots and they’re converting them into marketing pitches for the company.
I think what ultimately needs to happen are everybody needs to just come to some very clear realities. Companies have to make money. Companies also need to support the communities of the people in which they’re making that money from. And developer advocates sit in a very pivotal spot in there. Now, as it would be at a disservice to myself if I said, are we being probably overpaid a little bit for that service? I think that there’s probably a realization that needs to happen there as well. I’m not gonna say that out loud, but I also think that there are a lot of advocates who are very much I get it. The company needs to make the money. Let me do everything in my power to drive the metrics that will keep the company happy to keep me from getting laid off. And then they get laid off and there’s nothing that they could have done that would have prevented that layoff. It’s just the reality of it. I think that there are several companies or several organizations, sorry, including my own Black Python Devs that would love for a company that said, you know what? We would love to tell you about our product and also write you a check for $10 ,000. Yes, absolutely, 100%. But what we have are neither of these groups coming to the table to say, what is a realistic medium? Like, okay, as an advocate, it benefits me and not really my company when I come onto like, a podcast like this. I mean, sure, I could talk about how, you know, multiple data platforms and stuff like that are great and how it helps you leverage AI tools and all those amazing things. That helps if a bunch of decision makers are listening to your podcast, which I hope they are. And then, hey, take that little snippet and go on LinkedIn and reach out to me and say, tell me more about that stuff and we’ll talk. But the reality is. A lot of people started looking into Aiven from my community when I started working there, not because of the feature set, it was because I was working there. So there is a level of influencer, know, some think it’s a dirty word, but there is a level of influencer that comes with the territory of being a developer advocate. You are now an influencer working on behalf of this company. And a part of that is maintaining your influence. And sometimes that means doing things that are not just let me preach about my company. But that also means that you can’t be afraid to talk about the products that your company offers and to talk about those services and be that person that is a subject matter expert in the realm of content when there are things that are worth talking about.
One of my, one of the big reasons that I like Aiven just as a company is that there are a lot of different data platforms that I have never played with. And now I have an excuse to play with them. I have open source contributions to the Valkey project purely because Valkey is a product that we support. I dove back into the OpenSearch Elasticsearch differences because I worked at Elastic when they changed their license, which they have recently.
Not unchanged, but changed yet again. So like there was a lot of things that have just transpired in the few years that that’s happened. And in the world of AI, we have these things where people want to pick a side. And my side is honestly just responsible, responsible and ethical. it’s not a matter of like, do we have to shove AI down people’s throats? No. But do we also have to like…
Never want to talk about AI because I do think that there are some great use cases, but we have to be not afraid to sit down and have these conversations. And I think as long as we do that, as long as we go, let’s be adults here, let’s have real conversations. Let’s find happy mediums. Let’s support the communities that invite us to these conferences, ask us to speak, invite us to podcasts and ask us to talk about these things.
as long as we’re continuing to support them and support their initiatives, be them financially, be them just in attendance, then it’s a lot easier to gain some good press around that next product release that we really want the people who are organizing those events to go back to their employers and tell their decision makers about.
So it has to be both. can’t just say DevRel is dead and we’re all sales marketing folks, but we also can’t say that we’re here 100 % for the community and the community only and the company is just paying our way to do that. We just have to be adults about it. And again, we’ll get past the satanic panic of DevRel is doomed forever or developer advocates are the devil and like get to a point where it’s like, okay, no, they’re pretty cool. Like we get it, they’re doing their job. And like also, hey community, know, like, I gotta say like the five minute thing, but also our company is ready to like sponsor your event in exchange for saying the five minute thing.
Kate (17:58)
All right, I love it. You’ve got your line in the sand, but it’s also like, hey, we have to negotiate a challenging situation, which is that we don’t wanna, ignore the community, but we also wanna make sure that it’s not just about the free tier, right? It’s about trying to support the company that you work for. Like it’s about having an authentic voice within the developer community. So yeah, I think that makes sense. And I love a good satanic panic analogy. If we can keep metaphors like that coming, I think this is fun. This is hitting me. I listen to a lot of Ghost lately. this is on brand for me. In any event, I am super excited to talk to you about Python now. So let’s pivot and let’s start with Python and AI, because Python is having a moment right now. Like you have been in it for a while. But now it’s all like, Python is the language to learn if you want to get your foot in the door in the generative AI community, right? So as someone in the trenches, how synonymous do you consider Python and AI to be? Like, is it overblown? What’s your sense there?
Jay Miller (19:04)
I definitely think that there’s a lot of connection, but I think that that connection is loosening up over time as other languages go, hey, we can do this too. I think you get kind of the award for being first out the gate. I I look at Lang Chain all the time. Lang Chain is one of my favorite tools when I do have to implement some large language model or chat type solution, because I don’t wanna pick a winner.
Like it would be dumb to pick a winner right now. Every like it changes every week. So having a tool like Lang Chain that is both written in Python and also in JavaScript. So you can kind of choose which one you want to go with. And then you see like semantic kernel and some other ones that are coming out in other languages as well. It, it is truly a time where I think because the demand is so high.
It was only a matter of time before other languages would be like, no, no, no, we support this fully too. You don’t have to go and learn Python. But I do think, you know, we talk about like Open AI and kind of their early mover advantage that they have. I think Python kind of has a similar one where if you just look for resources, the majority of the resources that exist are going to be written in Python because that’s what they’ve had to be for the last couple of years that we’ve been kind of in this movement.
Kate (20:22)
Well, it’s nice to be in that position, but you feel like it’s a position of convenience where it’s not gonna stay that way, yeah, I talked to lot of Java folks and we’ve discussed how in universities now, CS students are using or learning Python as opposed to Java at the same rate that they were 10, 20 years ago, right?
Jay Miller (20:27)
Yeah.
No comment on that one, because I think that that is the correct move to not figure out whether your public or private static should be voided or not, and instead just write the code.
Kate (20:52)
jeez.
All right, all right, we’ll leave our thoughts on Java for another episode. Okay, well, so, and so you run the Black Python Devs group. Are you talking a lot about AI in that setting?
Jay Miller (21:08)
It comes up every now and then. often, I mean, again, when I was at Microsoft, when it kind of became like, hey, we’re going all in on AI. And then I left Microsoft, which, you know, not to say anything about that decision, but I think that there was a very big push on like, how do we do things responsibly? Microsoft pushed out this like responsible AI initiative that I thought was, you know, great.
a little ambitious because I think a lot of companies are like, yeah, yeah. No, no, give us the thing that helps us make the money that we want that. But I try to emphasize when we talk about Black Python devs and people are like, I want to learn these AI tools. It’s like, OK, I think it’s great that you want to learn them. But more importantly, I need you to learn how to say no because there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. you don’t not necessarily want to be on the wrong side of history on it. I think a good example of this is Simon Willison, who has spoken several times about AI. He keynoted at PyCon US this year, kind of showcasing some of the amazing benefits and things that you could do with AI in Python, as well as some of the downfalls.
And one of the things that I’ve sat with Simon a couple of times and we’ve had like just a one on one discussion with this and in a lot of the things that he’s doing, it’s not out of AI is going to radically change the world and I want to be the first person on that boat, you know, of this new world that we have. It is AI is currently like giving a child a chainsaw.
Like there’s a lot of damage that could be done if if without proper supervision, you know, and not to ask him on his opinion, because I think that there’s some good there, but there’s also a lot of dangerous, unknown, like side effects of what we’re doing and how we’re utilizing AI. So a lot of his research, a lot of the things that he’s doing are in the efforts of like, okay, let’s expose these dangers so that we can try to be as safe as possible utilizing these tools. And I think that that’s great. And again, you won’t hear me say like, don’t use AI or to always use AI. I’m always going to ask what is the context in which you’re trying to utilize this tool. And don’t be afraid to say this is not a solution that I think we should throw a large language model at, or this is a solution that’s already been solved. There’s no reason. Like AI isn’t going to make it faster, it’s just going to make it less accurate, or it’s going to make it less known what the accuracy actually is. So I think we try in all things with Black Python Devs to…
especially for the folks who are brand new, who are getting into the industry, who are probably trying to learn something about AI to get that first Python job, we’re trying to teach them that there is power in saying no, and there is power in critically thinking about the solution before immediately wanting to reach, again, for the AI chainsaw.
Kate (24:25)
I’m always gonna think of it as the AI chainsaw from now on. mean, that’s it. That’s the vision I have. I’m… Yes!
Jay Miller (24:28)
A lot of buzzwords for throwing out here. The satanic panic of developer relations, the AI chainsaw like.
RedMonk (24:37)
This is it. This is the infinitely quotable episode of the MonkCast. I love this. Yeah, when Simon came on our show a while back, he was talking about prompt injection. And so yeah, his concerns about safety and privacy and like the dangers of AI, mean, they need to be taken a lot more seriously than they are. So I’m glad you’re sitting down with him and trying to talk through this.
I love that.
Jay Miller (24:59)
Funny enough, he’s actually one of the originators for some of the more popular Django projects. So he’s kind of a big deal of the Python space prior to his involvement in AI. I’ve always loved, he’s any, I feel like anytime I get asked to speak at an event and Simon’s there, he will find me during a lunch break and go, I have questions. And then we’ll proceed to talk about for like an hour. So shout out to Simon. I love Simon. Simon’s awesome.
Kate (25:26)
Yes. Absolutely shout out. he’s incredible. That’s a fantastic story.
I feel like we are sort of alluding to what it is that Black Python Devs does, but could you talk a little bit about what the purpose of the community is? What need does it fulfill? And yeah, what’s the history?
Jay Miller (25:50)
So I’ll start with the history. So Black Python Devs is officially almost two years old now or a year, officially a year, unofficially like a couple of years old, just in initiative, I guess. My first PyCon US was 2022. I wanted to go in 2020.
Apparently the world had other plans. So in 2022, I went to PyCon US and it was just like every other conference that I had gone to in the Python community where I was the only person that kind of looked like me except for maybe like the other person that kind of looked like me that we always talked to about like, is it that we’re the only two people that we always see at these events? So in that moment, we were like, okay, there needs to be like this concerted effort to like increase participation in the Python community. And a little bit about that. think a lot of people come to Python because it’s this very easy to read, easy to onboard to language that, mean, again, this is why I think that it should be taught in colleges. No stabs against, I love DevNexus. DevNexus is a great event, okay?
Kate (27:01)
Don’t drag Vincent [Mayers] and Pratik [Patel] into this.
Jay Miller (27:02)
Yeah, exactly. Please accept my talk. It’ll be fun. But the bigger side of that is that at the very top of the language, there are people who…not only care about the language itself, but care about the community that is making a lot of decisions for that language. And I think that that’s like a hard thing to like quantify when you’re like, have YouTubers that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers that people are flocking to to learn about Python, but then they’re not really contributing back to like the governance of the language itself or the like community or the local events ecosystem that’s there.
That community is very, very supportive and there has always been this position of like, we feel like there’s a gap in reaching black audiences, whether it be, regional issues in like just parts of the US or around the globe where we had incidents of like policies that were put in place that delayed funding of major events in Africa and ultimately, it all comes to a head because regardless of what the intention is, if the reality is, is that black people just don’t go to these events or go to these meetups or don’t feel welcome, then that that’s just what it is. So.
What we also noticed were that there were a lot of black leaders that were like working on like, Hey, if I’m going to show that I can, I’m in this area. was an organizer at San Diego Python. I’ve, you know, participated in Django cons for several years. I’ve been a, you know, a couple of py cons now. And it’s like, I see the same faces of, of black leaders. And I asked like, Hey, how are you doing? And they’re all just like, I’m exhausted. Like I I’ve doing this. have like this nonprofit over here doing this thing.
And like, we’re trying to get books from the US to Africa because shipping physical books is incredibly expensive and we don’t know how to, you know, gain partnership deals with major publishers and things like that. So they are working incredibly hard and often by themselves. So Black Python devs, our goal is extending the Python ecosystem and community ecosystem to Black and color communities across the globe.
And we use that phrasing intentionally because blackness is a construct. It is a thing that was like designated by people and often people will identify like it’s funny that the biggest question that we often get is like there will be someone that comes in and goes, I don’t know if I identify as black or not. And I’m like, just join. You’ll figure it out. Like we like, we’re not, we’re not asking you to like, you don’t have to like plant your stake in the ground here on this. want you to focus on the Python devs part, maybe a little less on the black part and we’ll, we’ll work on that.
But the hope is that by people being able to collect and the leaders specifically collect, then we’re able to concentrate a lot of those efforts and do things that stretch the amount of support that we’re getting across the black ecosystem, whether it be in the US or South America or in Africa. We’ve talked to people who would really like to see us connect with Aboriginal communities in Australia and do a lot of things that say like, hey, you don’t have to go to the US all the time. And if you do want to go to the US, we can help provide visa support and have a community of people that have done this before that can help you make that a reality.
But ultimately, it should be fine that every country has its own local Python conference or a Django girls meetup or just a local meetup where or a workshop even. in, in the year that we’ve been, well, I guess the six months that we’ve been operating as a nonprofit under the GNOME foundation, which they reached out to us, they were like, Hey, we like what you’re doing. Can we support? what we’ve seen is just growth.
We’ve seen, you know, obviously we’ve been able to directly support conferences in places like Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, but we’ve also been able to buy tickets for students. So like their first Python conference experience is hosted in their backyard at the local, you know, at a local university in which they go to that now they can also attend the event See the community growing in their local area get plugged in and get involved We’ve also helped with code schools getting like doing intro to python workshops in Zimbabwe We’ve had other events that we want to support and what we’ve really hoped to do is allow Culture. allow different cultures to kind of blend together and hopefully that’s gonna shine a little bit more I do want to I don’t know when this is coming out. It might come out around the same time that this is happening, but September 21st Yes, we are doing it’s like 20th 21st. I’ve got like two events happening around the same time We’re doing the Python leadership summit the way that our governance and our leadership structure works is I’m the executor and founder ultimately I can kind of make decisions and people will just kind of go, sure, why not? And I, that’s, that’s not great. So we have a leadership team that helps advise towards those decisions.
And ultimately I often just pass that power down to them to say, you make the decision, you have better knowledge on this or you have a better eye sight on this and that’s helped build new leaders. So now we have like a conference coordinator who does only conferences in Africa, who’s from Nigeria, who has gone to a lot of these events, who knows a lot of the people that a lot of the organizers. like, Hey, let’s talk to African communities about the things that they actually need. instead of just writing them a check, maybe we can solve a problem. Maybe we can also help them in their outreach or their support. But we also have a leadership council that works as kind of a large advisory board of about 25, you know, self -black identifying individuals who are also leaders in their local communities, their local Python communities that whenever, you know, Jay comes up with an idea of like, hey, we need to spend a thousand dollars on, I don’t know, brand new t -shirts, they can go, hey, a thousand dollars would really help this community with like their Zoom bill probably more than a t -shirt would. And I go, that’s a great idea, we should do that. So there is a lot of just advising happening of like, what does your community actually need? How do we give you the things that you need? And then ultimately just get out the way and let you do your thing.
Kate (33:56)
That is phenomenal. I had no idea of some of these initiatives. This is, you’re doing really excellent work here. And I can’t believe all of this has been happening in a year, you know, a little bit more. man.
Jay Miller (34:05)
Yeah, most of it’s happened in the last six months. We’ve gone like two years ago, there were like five of us. And it was just like, how do we get more black folks to a local meetup in like Houston, Texas or like, hey, maybe San Diego or New York. And now we have, I think as of yesterday, we have like slightly over 800 members from all over the world, mostly in Africa. We have a local meetup that’s happening in Ghana. We’re working on a couple of local meetups in the U S we’re partnering with existing meetups, hopefully in New York and some other places. And a lot of this is, is we don’t want to come in and we don’t want to be in charge of the thing.
We’ll do it if we need to, but it is a lot of listening and Funny enough, as much as we when we do mentorship calls and things like that, we talk about telling no. Sadly, a lot of it is kind of just saying no. We we launched an open source mentorship program last week, actually, and it’s going to run for the next two months. It’ll run until the end of Hack tober fest. And the biggest challenge with that is everyone’s like, hey, we need to set up an official mentor mentee program. It’s like, no, no. Hey, we need to set up a job board. Absolutely not.
There are lot of things that there are a lot of great folks out there doing these things already, Diversify Tech from a Veni Kunche‘s platform, Pariss Athena‘s or Pariss Chandler’s project, Black Tech Pipeline.
Like there are so many of these amazing projects that us just building a worse version of what they’re doing isn’t really going to help anyone. So instead let’s just work with them. Let’s work with some of our partners like Talk Python Training, like Python Morsels, like O’Reilly and say like, Hey, how do we, how do we get books to this meetup in Kenya? How do we make sure that the book club that we host that people don’t have to say, I really want to learn this new thing, but I can’t afford it’s either this or buy groceries. Like how do we just help with that? And again, the more and more the companies are hearing about us, the more that they’re saying like, how can we help? And that’s, that’s been really, really beneficial, but there’s always more and more that can be done.
Kate (36:23)
I mean, I’m just floored. This is so exciting. I think what really intimidates me about this is the global reach of your organization. it’s hard enough to be in Atlanta and try to get folks together. mean, this is one city and you’re not only talking about the US, but the entire world. kudos to you and your co -founders. That’s amazing.
Jay Miller (36:42)
That one. That one wasn’t my idea. I actually so I moved from San Diego to Atlanta, partially to be close to family. I’m originally from Knoxville, but also partially because it was like I wanted to go to a community where I could see myself in the room. And Atlanta is Atlanta and New York are kind of like the two biggest spots for that. DC as well. Shout out to those communities. But originally, the idea was like, hey, we know this place in Stockbridge that does like, it’s like an black owned community, a black owned co -op. have event space and we could do like this thing that is like a way to help teach people how to give talks at conferences and get involved with open source and kind of these things. And as we were talking about these plans, one of our co -founders, Felipe de Morais who lives in Brazil, who runs AfroPython in Brazil, which is kind of a similar initiative, was like, don’t leave us out of this. Like, let us get involved. And then, know, Ron Maravanyika, in Zimbabwe was like, yes, like the Zim community would love to do this too. And then we went to DjangoCon and they were like, I know a bunch of people in Kenya and Ghana that would love to do this. then of course, the Nigerian community was like, don’t forget about us either.
So like it was, it became this like very obvious thing of like, Okay, we’ve got to expand beyond what we’re doing. And again, my response to them was I’m always happy to do that as long as the needs of the individuals on the ground are being met. And it doesn’t feel like we’re just another American company trying to tell another country what they need to do. they true like, most people now just need jobs. And most people don’t realize that, you know, we’ve talked to so many people and they’re like, well, you can’t hire people in Zimbabwe. Actually, as of March of this year, you can now. So, and the way that we know that is we sit there and we read the sanction lists for updates. Cause we understand that companies are like, I’m worried about this. I want to help, but we can’t legally. And it’s like, well, actually now you can. And you wouldn’t know that because like you’re doing other things and it makes sense to do those other things.
So now we’re that organization that goes, actually, it is OK. Or, hey, I’m worried about someone in Kenya during the stop finance bill movement that happened earlier this year. And it’s like, OK, well, hey, our vice -executor lives in Nairobi. So like, hey, are you OK? Can you explain what’s going on so that I can explain that to people in the US with a little bit more education to the actual needs of what’s happening and how people can help?
But a lot of that is, I mean, again, There is zero expectation of these larger corporations who have just said, okay, well, we’re not allowed to do this, so we’re not going to do it, to ever revisit that until someone goes, well, actually you can now, like that’s possible. And actually you could support this community. And usually it’s not that expensive. We spent $500 to send 75 students to a conference in Nigeria.
Like, That’s a lot of good. Like that’s, that’s with $500 and a limited budget. Imagine a conference says, know what, we want to do the same thing, but we want to invest $10 ,000 because they can. Like you have radically changed a computer science department at that point. And you’ve also radically changed a conference. You’ve probably gotten some new organizers. You’ve probably gotten some new excitement and like vision in that community. And you have a bunch of really young, amazing, talented developers going, I see this community for what it is now. How do I get involved? How do I make it better? How do I make it bigger? How do I spread the word about it more? And again, for us, it was just $500. And imagine what it could be with more.
Kate (40:44)
so when I tend to think of like the meetup community, it tends to not do as much advocacy as you’re talking about doing here. So talk to me about the folks who are members. So you mentioned hundreds, I can’t remember the number, but it was like 500.
Jay Miller (40:58)
Like 800 roughly. Yeah.
Kate (40:59)
800, my God. So are these people that are like re -skilling into tech or are they folks who are already in the community but then you’re like helping them get contract work or just hired outright by companies maybe in the US? could you explain to me like who the members are?
Jay Miller (41:16)
So we have developers of all different ranges. I think we have one CTO that’s in the community, but we also have folks at different levels of their career, not just in Python. We have some JavaScript developers as well. I’m going to say we have a Java developer just to keep the Dev Nexus folks happy.
But there’s a large, wide, segment of the community. a lot of people, you know, when they give their introductions in the Discord, they basically say, this feels refreshing. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing that we offer is like a refreshing space where you can go in and not feel like you’re the only person in the room that kind of looks like you, which is great. We tend to say, well, we tend to vehemently say like we’re not a job platform because the reality is, is while we are trying to sway the opinion and let folks know that like, yeah, you can hire from these companies in Africa, not everyone there has like, the US has a really weird like fantasy around what Africa looks like. while yes, there are some of those images that are very true of like areas that don’t have, you know, very regular electricity and things like that.
Like, there are so many, like Africa is a very large place and there’s a lot of infrastructure. Yes, like there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s been set up. Like I know of several people who are like full -time Python developers that live in Africa and are capable of doing their job very well. So like a lot of it is, is kind of just explaining to a larger audience of like, okay, you don’t need to be worried about certain things like.
Kate (42:46)
It’s literally a continent.
Jay Miller (43:11)
They share a time zone with most of Europe. So like if you have European employees, could, they could operate at the same time without much issue. Like cultural things, sure. There are some very like large, like they’re, they’re like political cultures, sometimes very religious backed, which I mean, looks at our government and says like, I mean, there’s probably some overlap. So like there, there are some cultural things, but you improve those by hiring people in those cultures and learning and understanding. So I don’t think that there’s any barrier outside of, there are some regulatory things where you might have to have an office in that country in order to hire from that country.
But again, when you’re looking at expanding and you’re looking at expanding into India and you’re looking at expanding into the Philippines or Mexico or Taiwan and some of these other areas, like, look at Zimbabwe as well. Look at, you know, Cameroon, look at something, Botswana, like we just helped put on a data science, you know, conference, you know, we sponsored a data science conference in Botswana. And it’s like, cool. Like, awesome. People are, didn’t even know they did data science in Botswana. And it’s like, okay, well, that just sounds ignorant. But like, I don’t know what to tell people when it’s like there, there are the things that you’re doing here. They’re probably also doing there. and they’re doing it on a much tighter budget. And it’s just like, wow, they’re capable of doing a lot more with a lot less. So what if we gave them a lot more? Like what would happen if we did that? And not everyone is trying to move to the US, which is, it’s shocking to hear. He said very exaggeratedly, but it’s.
You caught me on a good day. I don’t know. I’m like spicy today. I don’t know. But it’s definitely this moment of like everyone that joins the community. Usually one of the things that we have to like first address is like if you’re trying to get a job at a U .S. company and they don’t have an office in your country, unless you’re willing to move, that’s probably like that’s probably the only way you get that job. But hey, let’s let’s not look at the FAANG companies.
Kate (45:08)
I love it.
Jay Miller (45:32)
And let’s look at logistics companies. Let’s look at healthcare companies. Let’s look at all these companies that probably operate in your country that could use another data scientist, that could use a data analyst, that could use a software engineer or a backend developer. And let’s talk about how we try to apply to those roles and how do we get into those jobs. My first job I was a help desk technician for a company that sells toilet paper and cleaning supplies. like it’s… It doesn’t have to be a glamorous job because it’s a job. like, you know, that’s kind of what we try to help people realize.
Kate (46:10)
Right, can’t overstate getting your foot in the door, which is really hard. you’re doing good work. I mean, it’s so necessary. So I have one last question, and then I know we need to wrap up, because we’re running a little long. Talk to me about this open source initiative. you have, you know, I would love to just like have a full episode with you talking about open source, because of your involvement with the Django Foundation and your experience with Elasticsearch. I mean, you even mentioned the fact that, they just adopted the AGPL, super interesting. I’m curious though, how is it that you, with the Black Python Devs group, are integrating open source into your initiatives? How are you interacting with open source communities?
Jay Miller (46:50)
So we have a phrase. We stole it from James Brown. It’s called, say it loud. And that means everything that we can say loudly, we do. We put an MIT license on it. We’ve learned from so many other communities that have licensed their policies, their procedures. And we operate from an open source contributor model. So when we talk about things that need to be added to the website, we file issues.
add commits, we go through PRs, we do everything as if this were your standard software engineering project. Whether it’s like, hey, there’s a typo on here. Like, okay, cool. Why don’t you contribute to the project by doing that and extending that invitation to individuals and doing a lot to, I say almost over, oversimplify the process to where sometimes it’s too simple. And I have issues on that where it’s like, it’s like, it works when I do this.
But when I try to do it locally, now there’s so much put in place that I can’t do it anymore. what I’ve kind of learned from, always wanted, when I got into Python programming, I was at San Diego Python. There are a lot of amazing people that come from that San Diego Python community. Carol Willing, Trey Hunner, Melanie Arbor. Folks that if there were a Hall of Fame, they would all be in it. And they were teaching this young, like veteran who just gotten out of the military, who didn’t know anything about Python, like how to build healthy community. And then maybe a little Python on the side. And ever since then, I was like, I want to contribute to this. And I’ve had a lot of really great mentors that were just like, your talents exceed beyond code and the contributions that you have that you can contribute to any project exceed beyond the code that you can write.
So I’ve kind of just taken that to heart and said, you know, let’s make as much as we can open source. Let’s teach people how to contribute to the open source ecosystem outside of ever writing a line of code. Honestly, our biggest success is our documentation team. And like they meet twice, they meet every other week. I don’t, I’m not invited in anymore. I’m invited in, but I told them, I’m like, you go ahead, you do the thing.
But then they come up and they ask questions. go, hey, you wrote this, this, this about this policy. Can you better explain that? And then I sit in a call with them and then all of a sudden there’s a commit and a PR and a read. And I go, that actually does make a lot more sense than whatever I was trying to say. like, thank you. And then approve the PR. And what we’ve seen are those folks have so much confidence now that now they start tackling code problems. And they’re like, hey, I know how to work on this issue. And I know how to go through the process. I think most people are capable of solving issues, it’s usually Git that gets in the way, not necessarily the actual programming language. And I am a big fan of the good first issues model that I learned from Brian Douglas and the OpenSauced community, which is if you tell yourself this will only take a couple of minutes, I can do this, then take twice as long to make a really good issue that someone can have a great onboarding experience onto your project.
so that they can tackle that really easy issue. Because you’ve now done the hardest part. You’ve gotten your code on their local machine. So now the next time that there’s an issue, they’re like, well, it’s already on here. I can just do another one. And I can do another one. I can try this harder one. I can write this test that’s missing. I can update this documentation. you know what? I’ve played with this code a lot. I have this idea for a feature that would really help it. And then now you’ve turned someone who just fixed a typo into a contributor. And I’ve seen that work. have contributors for projects that I’ve spearheaded that are started that way, just fixing small typos to now like overhauling documentation systems, adding tests, adding features. And we teach that in our Black Python Devs open source program. I am not the right person to talk about this. The person who is spearheading it, Afi, who she’s absolutely fantastic.
She partnered with a team that I believe came out of Shopify called Dagworks. And they have a couple of open source projects called Hamilton and Burr. I wonder where they got those from. But those are some really cool like AI infused data science projects. And we met at PyCon US and they were just like, we would love to help people get their first like Python contributions into open source. What do we do?
And at the same time, another initiative called Djangonauts had launched, you know, just before that. And they were doing this mentorship, like mentor mentee model of getting people integrated into contributing to the Django project. And we kind of tried to meet in the middle, the Djangonaut cohorts a little short. think it’s like a month long. they’re doing very technical things. So there is kind of an onboard of like, we need you to come in with a little bit of knowledge on how these things work.
We’re a little probably friendlier towards, you you’ve never written Python code. That’s okay. You can contribute to open source in many different ways. And what I’ve learned is by tinkering and applying to different projects, wherever they seem to fit, they learn what they want to do in the tech space. Everyone just picks software engineer because they think that’s the only job. I picked developer advocate because I saw a developer advocate give a talk about a thing that they were doing. And I go, I can do that. I have a podcast too. This sounds great. Like, what is this in tech? And they go, it’s called developer advocacy. I want to do that now. So exposing them to these different areas so that they can become QA engineers, so they can become data analysts, so they can become technical writers. Like, just giving them these opportunities to get very small wins could really spark and ignite their career in the future.
Kate (52:53)
We’ll have to get Afi on here to give the full account, but I hear so much good coming out of using open source as a practical means of reskilling into the tech field rather than again, just following YouTube tutorials or whatever, but because it gives you that real world experience and it does exactly what you kind of began by saying was important, which is learning about versioning and Git and like all these things that unless you’re working on a team, you just can’t get and that’s really what hiring managers that I speak to at least are looking for and here it is that they’re able to do some good. And using documentation as that way in where the barrier to entry is a little less high, it’s a little less intimidating, it not only makes sense, but also is, I don’t know, it’s an inspiring way of bringing folks into that community. And yeah, again, you know, doing good, having a community focus behind it. So thank you.
Jay Miller (53:47)
Absolutely. Well, we have we’ll have 40 40 people who have completed our program in October So any of those any of those hiring managers that are looking for those skills I have at least 40 people I can vouch for and we’ll have more our waitlist was I think we had a hundred and fifty people like sign up to apply to the program and like we capped it at 40 because that’s what we could handle so there’s a huge demand for this
Kate (53:56)
There you go.
I love it.
I am just floored. can’t tell you. I’m so glad that you are able to come on here and talk about this because yeah, it’s something that, well, for one, I just wasn’t familiar with, but also like it’s moving so fast. mean, Jay, you’re on a lot of podcasts and I haven’t heard you talk about this yet. So this is great. I hope you guys have a blog. I hope you’re shouting it from the rooftops because this is so important. And obviously whoever is getting the word out, you know, to get that many applicants is doing a great job because that’s not a small number and I’m sure the 40 folks who to join was was challenging because so many folks are interested.
Jay Miller (54:47)
Again, you’ll have to bring Afi on because I am glad that I did not have to make these decisions.
Kate (54:53)
Understood, understood. All right, so we are about out of time, but before we go, how can folks hear more from you, Jay? What sort of socials are you using these days? Are you talking at any conferences at the end of 2024 or into 2025? And yeah, just in general, what’s the best way for folks to follow the things that you’re the most interested in?
Jay Miller (55:14)
So I would say probably the best way is Mastodon. I’m @[email protected] check out the stuff that Black Python Devs is doing. Go to BlackPythonDevs.com. Donate. I always have to say donate. I’ve been warned. If you don’t ask for money, people won’t give you money. donate. You can donate there, one time recurring, any amount. And yeah. KJayMiller.com, if you like blogs, I don’t write a ton, but when I do, it’s usually full of spicy opinions like this. And I also do regularly stream on Twitch and YouTube, and it’s often anywhere from helping someone else learn a little bit of Python to just tinkering with something at work, because the best way to learn is to do something wrong in public so that someone will come in and tell you how wrong you are and correct you, and then you learn.
Kate (56:13)
I that wasn’t so true, my God. But here we are. All right, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, Jay. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
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