It's the last episode of 2025, and we're ending things off in style with guest Cortney Nickerson! Like many of our guests, Cortney didn't start out in tech. In fact, she grew up mostly techless. But in her first tech job, armed with curiosity and supported by coworkers who were willing to teach her, she fell in love with tech. Turns out she's pretty damn good at it, too! Learn about Cortney's tech journey, navigating motherhood and tech, coping with imposter syndrome, and her reflections on being selected as a Keynote Speaker for KubeCon China! Also learn Cortney's awesome takes on why she prefers tabs over spaces, and why QAs are the unsung heroes of tech.
Key takeaways:
About our guest:
Cortney is Head of Community at Nirmata. As a CNCF and Civo Ambassador, she helps co-organize the CNCF Bilbao Community, various Kubernetes Community Day events, and KubeJam. Additionally, she is a recognized voice in the cloud native space. Initially, a non-techie, she turned techie as employee 7 at a startup acquired by DataDog while writing content for the Data on Kubernetes Community. When not talking tech, you can find her talking DEl, sharing about her struggle with imposter syndrome, and trying to wrestle her kids to bed at a normal time.
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Show notes:
Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.
ADRIANA:
And geeking out with me today, I have Cortney Nickerson. Welcome, Cortney.
CORTNEY:
I thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
ADRIANA:
I'm excited to have you. It. You know, when when I was looking at guests to bring on for the next season, I'm like, how have I not had Courtney on yet?
CORTNEY:
Yes. Actually, I think you said to me you should be on my podcast. Again. That was what you said to me. We where were we? We were... we were at Rejekts. I think at the last KubeCon.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah, Rejekts, that’s right.
CORTNEY:
You should be on my podcast again. And I was like, I haven't been on it. And you're like, wait, what? Wait. How's this possible? And I was like, I don't know. But I've seen like every episode. I've, I feel like I've been on it, but I haven’t been.
ADRIANA:
And finally we made it happen. Yay!
CORTNEY:
Yes we did.
ADRIANA:
So. And where are you calling from today?
CORTNEY:
Today I'm calling from Farmington, New Mexico. I spend most of my life in, in Spain, just outside of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. But I am home visiting my, my parents in, in New Mexico today, so. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
We'll we're going to start with, lightning round questions or. Icebreaker, or, whatever. I, I used to call them lightning round, but sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're not. So... icbreaker.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Well, let the wind blow as it may.
CORTNEY:
At your own pace questions.
ADRIANA:
Yes, at your own pace questions. I like that okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?
CORTNEY:
Oh. Good question. Writing right handed. But batting in in softball. Left handed.
ADRIANA:
No way. That's so cool.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah.
ADRIANA:
Does it throw people off? Like when you're batting left handed because, I mean, there's so few, few left handed batters.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Actually, my my dad coached me in sports my whole life, and he's left handed. And so he used to stand in front of me to do things. I stand behind him and mimic what he was doing. And so in almost all of my sports I’m better left-handed. So basketball as well, I spent more time dribbling with my left hand, because I was mimicking my dad. Layups from left hand side, like shoot, jump shot left handed. Batting softball left handed because I was mimicking my dad. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That is so cool. Do you catch also like, like, I guess if you're left handed, catch with your right. So I bat left handed, but I pitched right handed. So catch with my left. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
But that was also because the first person who started teaching how to pitch, my dad was the catcher, and he didn't know anything about pitching, so he had somebody, work with me the first time. And they were right handed.
ADRIANA:
Ah!
CORTNEY:
So I'm one of those people that's like. Oh, well, that person does it this way, so I guess I do too. So depending on what you're showing me how to do, I might do it right handed or I do it left.
ADRIANA:
That's awesome. I it reminds me like, because I'm left handed, but I mouse right handed, and I couldn’t even fathom mousing, mousing left handed. My mom was left handed, But my dad is the computer guy, and he's the one who showed me a mouse for the first time, and he is right handed. So I think I just...
CORTNEY:
See? Same thing!
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Very cool.
ADRIANA:
It's so cool. I also find, like, you know, you mentioned them showing sports. Like you were shown left handed way. So you gravitated towards that. I remember at one point I took squash lessons and, and this was as an adult, and I had attempted racket sports. And so I use my left hand dominant. So it always throws people off whenever, like they try to show me sports stuff and they're and they're right-handed. Yeah. And then I'm the lefty. I'm like, can you show that for left handed people? And it always throws people off.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah for sure.
ADRIANA:
So yeah. Yeah. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?
CORTNEY:
Android 100%. I use a Mac for work, but Android for phone. Absolutely.
ADRIANA:
Okay, that falls into my next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?
CORTNEY:
I'm. I'm a MacBook user. But I think probably because I came from a non-technical background. And so it was like, oh, Mac. Mac is great for design and it's great for a bunch of other other things. And then I just kind of stuck with it.
ADRIANA:
That's great. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?
CORTNEY:
I love this question. Because the first time I was asked if I knew any programing language, my answer is, I know HTML. Because that was all I knew. Now that time has gone by, I've learned some other programing languages, but to this day, my my favorite language is always going to be HTML, because I did not realize how stupid I sounded when I answered that way. But also, it's like I I'm aging myself, but I had MySpace and that's why I know HTML. So like, it was my first language, and I'm proud of it.
ADRIANA:
That's great. That's great. My, my. First dabbling into HTML. I went I went wild, like, do you remember the blink tag in HTML? Yeah, I, I used that with reckless abandon. And, and I, like, threw a bunch of animated GIFs on the website.
CORTNEY:
Of course. Of course.
ADRIANA:
it was, it was the. Tackiest most useless like, but so glorious in so many ways.
CORTNEY:
Under underneath it all. Like, HTML isn't really a coding language, but I still love it.
ADRIANA:
It holds a special place in my heart. I, I dabbled in HTML back in the day. I found it... when it was paired with CSS, things looked pretty, but I hated the fact that it never looked the same in every browser. And then I just got really mad and frustrated. I'm like, yeah. Buh bye. I'm doing backend.
CORTNEY:
I only had access to the internet of the public library. It was like one dial-up modem we had like basically 30 minutes, because there is such a long line of people who wanted to get on, but like, I don't I don't even think I had time to recognize what they're like, the same anywhere else. It was just like, oh, cool, I've got a.
ADRIANA:
And back in the time of dial up modems, I don't even think we had like that many options with web browsers.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. No, there wasn't a lot. There was.
ADRIANA:
You remember...
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
the flashing “N”?
CORTNEY:
Yeah. And Yahoo
ADRIANA:
Ask Jeeves?
CORTNEY:
Oh I was just talking about Jeeves the other day. I was like, whatever happened to Ask Jeeves? We were just having that conversation the other day. I was like, know everybody, just ask Google or ChatGPT. But didn't anybody hear of Ask Jeeves? And half of the meeting was like, oh yeah, and the other half as a way too young. Way too young to be asking Jeeves anything. And I was like, okay.
ADRIANA:
That is so funny. I just remember, like, Ask Jeeves was the go to. And then all of a sudden, people started using Google, and I can't remember, like, in my brain when, you know, I switched to using Google. Like...
CORTNEY:
Yeah, me neither. Yeah, it did just happened. But Jeeves is like. And he was so cute. Like, their little logo guy was.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Just... like a little butler.
ADRIANA:
That's right!
CORTNEY:
Take care of all your stuff.
ADRIANA:
Brings back memories. That and... that and the dial up noise.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
I used to have that as a ringtone for when my dad called.
CORTNEY:
Oh.
ADRIANA:
But now my phone is always on silent, so I don't really get to enjoy my ringtones.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, my phone's always on silent also. We should bring ringtones back. At least the dial up. The dial up.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
(...) ringtone. The rest of them maybe not, but that one's like a nice, nice nostalgia to it.
ADRIANA:
It is is is. It probably like, hurts the ears of the young ones when they hear it and they're like, what is that noise?
CORTNEY:
What is that? Yeah. What is that? So okay. Next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?
CORTNEY:
Ops. For sure. Yeah. I think I've got a lot of reasons for it. But yeah. Ops.
ADRIANA:
Oh, do share, if you're up for it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, well. My first job in tech was actually doing cold calls to people about a DevSecOps tool. And so I spent a lot of time talking to devs specifically because the whole concept was a “shift left” security concept. And the number of times I just heard over and over, because everybody wants developers to do everything, right. And it was like a ehhhgh, and if I talked to somebody from the Ops space, most of the time, they were trying to push it off onto the security team. They were never trying to push it off on devs. They were always trying to push it off on the security team. But almost like they had this whole, oh, I already push a bunch of stuff off on devs, and I don't want to have to, like, get yelled at by them again. And I don't want to talk to them. And so it's just better like, security team, you need to talk to security team.
ADRIANA:
Oh.
CORTNEY:
And I was like, okay, but, specifically it was that it was I was constantly hearing Devs be like, oh, everything. Everything. Shift left shift left shift left. I do agree with them that so many things are shift left, but also it just happens to be the the where they're situated in the pipeline. Right. It's like, well, things need to get started in one specific way. And like, you're, you're the starting point. And so the I personally adore devs who have moved into the Ops space and, and being in the cloud native space, there's so many of them. Like, I used to be a dev and then I got. Some of them got stuck having to figure out how to package their own things. Other people just kind of took more of an interest into this whole space. And I, I just find those particular people that have moved into ops from dev, to be incredibly knowledgeable because they've done it all now. And and so friendly and so helpful and oftentimes most active in community spaces.
But also, if I had another option, I would inevitably pick the QA people. QA folks bridge the gap for everybody. I always and like they should be the platform team because, they have had to make everybody communicate with each other and they feel everybody's pain. They're like innately empathetic, and they're stuck in the middle all the time. Yeah. And, and they try to be helpful. And they never think that they know the answer, even though a lot of times they do, and they dabble in, in everything a little bit, but don't want to step on anybody's toes. And they really listen and, and so if I, if I had a third option, I would the QA. I think QA folks are highly underrated.
ADRIANA:
I love that that's such a great take! Yeah. I mean, I started my, career after university, doing QA.
CORTNEY:
Oh, see?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, and it was, you know, like, that's what was available at the company I joined. And it gave me it gave me some really good perspective. I had wanted to go straight into dev, but they got me into QA, and, I learned some things along the way. I have to say, I learned patience.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That was one thing. Yeah. Yeah, there is, there. I feel like QAs carry a lot.
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
A burden of sorts, right? Because, like, they're the ones being pressured at the end of the day, like, pass the test. Pass the test. Pass the.... It's like, no, no, no, it's not working.
CORTNEY:
Exactly.
ADRIANA:
What are you talking about?
CORTNEY:
No, um, pressure is a privilege, no matter where you are in life, I think. But also they carry out a lot of silent, silent weight, from everyone around them. And, and often times they are the doing the glue work, that works together and makes things possible for both sides. So they're, they're, they're actually my, my favorite.
ADRIANA:
Yay. Thanks for sharing that perspective. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?
CORTNEY:
YAML. Definitely YAML. Also, I, I was DevRel for a project called Monokle for a bit, and, and created the slogan, “We love YAML so you don't have to.”
ADRIANA:
That's so clever. I love that.
CORTNEY:
So by default it's it's got to be YAML because that was my slogan. I made stickers and everything. I was like, we love YAML so you don't have to. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Aw, that's great. Okay. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?
CORTNEY:
Tabs. Yeah. Tabs. But this is also PTSD from loads of years working in word docs, where spaces never come out the same, as everybody's space in their own machine. And then all of a sudden you use it and some like if somebody is using Windows and they send you that same word doc, but you're in a Mac, and all of a sudden everything's out of out of whack. And tabs just stay the same. So this is.
ADRIANA:
I'm there for consistency. I love consistency. Yeah. Yeah. It's frustrating when you, when you get, like, the different the different formatting based on the, based on the OS that you're running. It's like. Aggravating to say the least.
CORTNEY:
So aggravating, so aggravating. Or when you have something in a format that works and then you send it to somebody and they open it in like a Google drive, and all of a sudden you're like, what happened. That's not the font. That's not this. That's a space. Ugh. It’s aggravating.
ADRIANA:
Kay... two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?
CORTNEY:
I'm. I'm a text person, actually, I do, I do watch a lot of videos, but inevitably I will turn on the video and also read the transcript.
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
That's that's me. And so sometimes I'll get engrossed in the transcript that I, I totally stop watching the video.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. I, I, I much rather like transcript closed captioning like I love captions. Like if I forget to turn on the captions or like, someone at home forgets to turn on captions while we're watching TV, I'm like.
ADRIANA:
Turn on the captions.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
And all three of us at home are, like, addicted to having the captions on when we watch TV.
CORTNEY:
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm. I'm that person. I, I prefer, I prefer text, so I, I guess this is also aging me. I'm sure I'm. Five years younger or. Or less be like. Oh, no. Video. Are you kidding me? Who reads?
ADRIANA:
I do wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because my my daughter like, hates reading and I'm like, oh whatever, I don't care. Because like, the, the amount of cool shit she learns on YouTube is, incredible. Like she was just telling me all all this, like, stuff, like she follows, like, astronomers and cosmologists and like, she's learning about dinosaurs. I'm like, okay, I, I don't care that you don't read books because you're learning cool shit on YouTube.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, there's tons of stuff out there. But I am the person who's like, oh, that video looks cool. And then I'll open the transcript. And totally stop seeing. Anything that's going on in the video. And just like be engrossed in the transcript. But I think part of it is just I learn better that way if I, if I hear it, okay. But if I read it, it sticks with me longer.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. It’s like the visual that visual aspect of the words on the page. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm the same way. I, I find videos too distracting. I'm too ADHD for it. I start watching a video and then they'll say something and my mind wanders, and then I'm like. Shit. What did they say again? And then I'm finding myself rewinding.
CORTNEY:
I do that as well. I do that as well. Whereas if I'm reading it, then I, my mind goes off and then I come back to...
ADRIANA:
Yes, yeah, yeah. It’s easier to come back to it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Exactly. I... same same. Yes.
CORTNEY:
Also. This attributes to the massive number of just excessive browser tabs I have open. Or when I force myself to stop like once every six weeks and go look at them and like, what was I on this page for? Like, why in the world did I go on this rabbit hole of a tangent? And I have like four browsers in a row that, like, clearly are all there because I went from one to the next to the next down some rabbit hole.
CORTNEY:
But I can't fathom why I was there. It's like it's been six weeks since they opened this, and it was really important to me at that time. I can't remember why now. It's just it's astounding that I do that, but I learn more, I guess, reading and than watching.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I feel you and I can very much relate on the browser tabs. Like even when I start with like a fresh slate. Fresh browser, I'm like, okay, I'm going to be good. And the next thing I know I've got like 20 tabs open in the span of ten minutes. I'm like, what happened?
CORTNEY:
How does this happen. No. And and I had a whole bunch of browsers, like I go through these very odd anxiety where it's like, I know I need to close these tabs. I know they're pointless, and I know I haven't looked at them for weeks, but if I accidentally close the whole thing, it's just like overwhelming anxiety. Oh my God, I need to get it back. And then I have to stop myself and be like, Cortney, just let it go. You don't need to... like, you don't need to do the command to bring it back up. Like there's no reason for this. It's slowing everything down. But it will sit with me and then I won't restart my computer for a while because I'm like, just in case. Just in case it comes to me what was in a browser tab that I needed. It's a weird anxiety that I don't know why I have it, because I have yet to, like, not be able to find something again. But but but it's still there.
ADRIANA:
There's something comforting about keeping it. I also like, my computer even it screams at me like my work computer's like, you haven't rebooted in ten days. I'm like, mmm hmmm. I'm like, but all the stuff I have here is so important. And then it starts to slow down. I'm like, okay. Just start my computer again.
CORTNEY:
No, I do the inevitable do you want to reopen all of these tabs. Yes I do.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah.
CORTNEY:
But also there should be like a checkmark on that dialog box. It's like ALWAYS. Don't ask again. It's always going to be yes. So stop asking me.
ADRIANA:
Okay. Final question. What is your superpower?
CORTNEY:
Probably being willing to just say, “I have no idea” about stuff all the time. And ask for help. I, I don't think I saw it as being a superpower. I used to think that it was like me just being inevitably dumb. And now I've realized it's actually empowering for me because it's allowed me to adapt and change the thing in my life over and over. And be reborn, professionally and personally. Because I'm willing to say that, I don't know, but also it's liberating for for the other people who are around me. So they can say they don't know too. So that's that's probably it. Just being so blatant about I have no idea what you're talking to me about. Can can you explain it to me like I'm your grandma or your mom? Because I probably could be.
ADRIANA:
Honestly, like, I used to be so intimidated in meetings to say, like, I don't know, but now I'm just like, just for my benefit. Can you explain what that means? And as you said it, it gives other people permission to like, oh, thank God I didn't get that either. There's probably like a room full of people. Who have no idea what the fuck's going on. You just said you just ask the the question. Please explain to me. It's great. It's liberating. I think this is a good segue into, you know, our, our main, conversation. I always love to hear about, like, the journeys of, of my various guests, like how they got into tech. Sounds like you've had an interesting tech journey. I'd love to hear about it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah. I, I actually didn't realize how strange it was, or is until recently. I gave a talk at KubeCon in Hong Kong. And my my very dear friend Amit DSouza, like the day before the CFP closed for Hong Kong and Japan, is like, let's submit, something. We’re just, kind of. It was like, oh, okay, yeah, I should I, I'm doing DevRel. Like, I should, why haven't I done this yet? And we were just kind of having this snarky back and forth conversation about things and we submitted a talk, about Crossplane. It was like, Crossplane is the answer. What's the question? And the whole thing came up just kind of like a snarky conversation about what people around us are talking about. And we made up a talk submission, and it was supposed to be a workshop, and we submitted it, and then it got accepted. And after it got accepted, it was like a week and a half later, because when she sends you acceptance emails, it's like the same subject line, right? Congratulations. You've been accepted. And it's a big letters and that's it. And so I read this subject line and I screenshot and I sent it to him and we were like, oh yay. We’re going to Hong Kong. Yay! And it was just kind of like, oh. And then like a week later, I get a message from my friend Atul, who was like, congratulations, this is amazing. And I was like, oh yeah, I got accepted. Yeah. The schedule's out. Yeah, it's accepted. And he was... And then I thought to myself, I should start looking at flights. So I open up the email to like, look for more information. And it says keynote in the first paragraph. But it’s so far, down, that you don't actually see it on your phone, right. And you don't see it in the subject line. And it was like, wait, what?
ADRIANA:
That is amazing.
CORTNEY:
It was. Yeah. It was really amazing. It took weeks for it to sink in. It was it was terribly, overwhelming, to be honest. And my friend Amit was like we both, neither one of us had noticed, it was just like, oh, woohoo! And then when we realized it was, it was daunting to me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
It went very well. We had a lot of fun preparing it. It we were we submitted a workshop and ended up having to cut that down to 10 to 12 minutes. Which is... As an exercise I had never done before. Like, we've got 90 minutes of content that has to be put into 12 minutes.. That, that. That. I've done the exercise of, okay, we've got 15 minutes of content. Let's turn it into 30, never the other way around. So that was daunting, in of itself. But after we gave the talk, it took me weeks to actually post anything about it. And a huge part of that was just, in, in the hands small handful of years that I've been in tech, it's just been so fast and so extreme, and so much that I hadn't actually stopped to reflect on it. Yeah. At all. Because my first job in tech was, doing cold calls on the telephone for a Spanish startup. That was a startup. It was a web application security tool. It happened to be an agent that deployed everywhere. Now, in retrospect, I'm like, wow, I know a lot of stuff about agents and a lot of like and for the whole AI world and MCP world and understanding the difference between like this has served me incredibly well. But all of that came from making cold calls on the phone for a company that just needed an English speaker who could also speak to them in Spanish. And I happened to be an American living in the same town that they were in. And being curious. Right. So I'd get somebody on the phone and they'd finally not hang up on me and finally give me some sort of conversation. And then they'd say something that made no sense, and I’d go back to team, be like, okay, so they said this. I don't know what else to ask. That team was so incredibly generous. It was my first experience with techies, as well. The anything I asked if I asked them to teach it to me, they did. Anything. And everything. We ended up getting acquired by Datadog, which was also, I didn't know at the time that that is what everybody aspires to have happen in a tech startup is to then get acquired by some IPOed company. Because I had no experience with tech prior to that job. All of my life experience had been in totally different things.
ADRIANA:
What was your original education background?
CORTNEY:
Yeah, I studied philosophy, international relations, and world religion.
ADRIANA:
No way!
CORTNEY:
So I have three degrees. But, yeah, that that's what I studied. Had nothing to do with tech at all. I grew up in New Mexico. Ten minutes from my parents’ house, where I am right now, there isn't really even cell phone service. Once you get out on the Navajo reservation, there's just there's not a lot of of service. It’s gotten better. But, a lot of times, we’d drive across the reservation to go visit my grandparents in Utah. And, and yeah, you have to wait for the satellite to go over. If you, if you need to make a call. There's nothing. So it wasn't like I grew up in a place that had a lot of access to technology, either. Dial up internet was oftentimes at the library. That's where you could get it. And that was about it. And so I just didn't have access to it. And when I went to college, I didn't go with my own computer. I was using the ones that, in the study hall because I was an athlete. And so we had access to computers there. I remember they had Ethernet, and I had only ever seen and been around dial up, and it was like, whoa! What is that? But my, my experience with that also was very limited. It was like, I would use the computer when I needed to actually type a paper, and do schoolwork on it. Otherwise, all of research was Dewey Decimal System in the library, because that's what I knew. And that's what worked for me. And and I didn't have access to anything else. And nobody introduces you to it. It was just uh, people who knew were in the know. But they don't realize that not everybody else is in the know. And so and then I moved to Europe and again, no, no real access to it other than for emails and, and work, stuff.
So when I did my interview for this job, I had just had my son, and I was I had found a job that I really liked, but I had just had my son and I couldn't travel anywhere near as much with the newborn as what I had been doing. And I remember they asked me, how technical are you? And my answer sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I was being very sincere. It was like, well, if the electricity goes off of my house, I can probably like restart and like configure my printer on the second try, but I can google anything, right? Like I can figure it out. And turns out that was that was the answer that got me the job, because they were all devs who would Google, when they don't know what was going on, to find an answer. And and that was the right answer. And they were like, okay. You speak Spanish, speak English, and you can Google anything. We’ll hire you. Because they were in dire straits, obviously. But it was it was a massive change. Prior to that, I spent ten years running, international summer camps and language immersion summer camps with kids. We started off with 50 students and scaled out to, like, I don't know, 5000 kids and in six weeks doing abroad programs and summer camps and and half day programs and and random things. Nothing technical.
I worked for some marketing firms that were doing marketing for, for big, like big retail providers like Macy's or Mark and Spencer's or, Samsung. Just like, big retail and, and doing marketing campaigns for them. I was, the softball coach for the Spanish national team for a bit as well. So I had done nothing that was technically inclined, to the, to the world that I'm in now. And so after giving that talk in Hong Kong, it was just this moment of pause where it was like, do I actually belong? It all happened so fast. And and truly had to take a couple of weeks to just sit with myself and the insane imposter syndrome that happened of, “How am I even here?” And, How did this happen so fast? Do... all of the amazing people around me have helped me so much and explained so many things and are still so patient with me because I still don't. There's just so many gaps. I still just don't know. And it was very much this thought of, do I actually deserve to be there, and, and truly had to sit with myself for a bit and have this realization of, okay, so most people who are my age have been doing this for 20, 25 years. I don't fit into that group. There's a whole subset of people who've been doing this about as long as I have who are like, 20, 25 years younger than I am. I don't actually fit into that group either, but I've. I've worked insanely hard. And so I, I guess just on, on the basis of just constant working at it, there is merit to that. But I truly had to sit with myself for a couple of weeks to, to get to that point. And, and doing so was, taking a moment to be like, how did I even end up here? And so my, my journey into this space was
Not a typical journey into this space. I showed up through marketing and sales, doing cold calls on the sales side of things, moved into marketing, went back into sales and sales enablement, fell in love with the really techie stuff and just kept wanting to learn and and doing a lot of self-learning and, and community stuff. I learned about Kubernetes first, by writing the newsletter for the Data on Kubernetes community. My friend Bart, who lives nearby in, in Spain, is like the other American who survived long. It's not a lot of us who survived that long there. Being an immigrant from the US is is a totally different thing than being in the US with immigrants. Right. And I think, oftentimes a lot of my, a lot of Americans I know are like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to expat. And it's like, oh, no, no, you're an immigrant. Expat makes it sound really glamorous. But no, no, you're going to immigrate.
ADRIANA:
It's a different vibe.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. You can dress that up for social media all you want, but actually, give yourself a year and a half and you're suddenly going to be like, oh yeah, and I'm an immigrant. Realize what that is and how much work that is as well. And, and appreciate things in a different way, I think. But yeah, he was there and he kind of stumbled into the Data on Kubernetes community and was like, I, I also know nothing about tech and you studied religion. And so let's pray together that we can get through this. It was very much, and, and for some reason, I was like. Okay. Yeah. I had a newborn and I was, I was doing cold calls on the phone, and started writing this newsletter, and kept asking more questions about Kubernetes and got involved in the community. And then and then ended up in a DevRel role, that when they hired me also, I thought, why have these people hired me? I have no idea why. Like I told them, I don't know how to do any of this. Why have they hired me? And then three years later, almost three years later, made the move into community role, Nirmata, which is where I am now in the Kyverno project. So it's it's been a lot of just not knowing and being able to be like, I don't know this. Will somebody please help me. And and realizing almost everybody will. And I think that's the that's the astounding thing about this space that in my experience, because I do have, extensive more experience in other industries than in tech, it's still this point in my life, that that innate sense of. Absolutely. I'll teach you if you're willing to put in some work. Or I can see that you've been trying. Let me help you. That. That doesn't exist, at the same scale as it does here. And I think that's probably the first thing that I actually fell in love with it long before having any. Even the notion that I might like the technical side of things, it was just the human factor of, oh, well.
Look, look at this. Poor girl. She's really trying and she's trying to help us. And so, yeah, like, let's jump on a call and I'll give you time and time is the one thing that you you can't get back. Right. And people in this space are just incredibly generous with it. And so, yeah, now I'm, now I'm a techie for life. I hope.
ADRIANA:
I love that story. And, you know, you're you're so right about people's willingness to help out. I'm. Whenever I'm digging into something that I don't know super well and I reach out for help, I'm, you know, I still force myself to reach out for help, but I'm always scared. I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to think I'm an idiot. They're going to think I don't know what I'm talking about. And the patience. Like, more often than not, people are super patient. They'll send me resources, they'll do follow ups, and I'm so grateful. And I feel like Cloud Native especially, think because, and specifically like, Cloud Native open source, because of the nature of open source, there's so many contributors who are doing this. As you know, many do it as part of their jobs, but many not necessarily. Right. It's for funsies. They enjoy it. And I think that's reflected in their personality and willingness to help, right?
CORTNEY:
Yeah, it's it's incredible. Also, the refreshing thing about this space, is that there's so much to learn, like nobody is actually an expert on all of it. And when I first started, I did not realize that. I just didn't have context to realize it, either. The depth of everything. But the people who are the most expert, remind people of this all the time. Right. And, and they very much are like, oh that's a great question. Not for me. I'm an expert in this. Let me introduce you to this other person who is way more than that. And let's learn together. And there's always this undercurrent of oh, I know the basics, so let me tell you that. But let's see if we can find somebody else and learn together. I don't really know that much about that. Yeah. And that's that's phenomenal. I think that that sets those people apart. It probably is why they’re so amazing at what they do as well. But it's a, it's a constant. You come across people. I mean they're just really everybody knows who they are and and they know so much. But they consciously said, no, no, I know so much about this. But these other things I don't know about. Let's go learn about them together. And and that's that in itself is, is just really valuable. To to the community space at large, I think.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's what I love about tech is, like, the sky's the limit. I mean, even, you know, I, I'm one of those people has been in tech for 20 plus years. It's coming up it. Yeah. I've just hit 24, since I graduated school. I've been tech-ing for a while. But, like, the job I'm doing now is so wildly different from the job I started out with. Or even, like when you consider, AI was like, you know, not necessarily top of mind. You know, five years ago and now. And now there are people who had no expertise in the area and are gaining expertise in the area. Like it's such an opportunity for you to become an expert in a new area. I think as long as you're willing to learn along the way. And I think, you know, we're rewarded for for the desire to learn and keep up with tech.
CORTNEY:
Absolutely. That the AI space is, is mind blowing.
ADRIANA:
I know. I, I started dabbling. Like, I'm playing around with MCP servers. I'm like, there's so much I want to play around with. It's it's it breaks my brain in a, in a good way, in a good way.
CORTNEY:
In a good way. But also it's one of those things. It's like, I just don't have the time. I have this thing I need to do, and I really, really want to do a lot more of that. And where in the world do I find the time? The most lovely thing that has been said to me in a very long time. I was freaking out. I was like, I have so much to do. Where do these people find the time? And I said to my friend, Atul Sharma, who graciously gave me some of his time, and I and he, I’d seen him everywhere. Like the week leading up to our call. It was like, he was everywhere. He was. He was doing talks. He was on YouTube, he was on LinkedIn, he was everywhere. And I was like, thank you so much for your time, Atul, I'm really sorry. Like, I have to go because I don't have time. I mean, I have to go pick up my son. I have no idea where you find the time. And he starts laughing. He's so sweet. He starts laughing. He goes, oh, Cortney, I still live at home with my mom. You ARE a mom. That's why I have time. You need somebody to take care of you, and like basic things. Then you would have a lot more time to. I don't know where you find the time. I've seen you everywhere this week. Right? I hadn't said anything to him about. I've seen you everywhere. It was just like, I have no idea where you find the time to do all the things you've been doing. And that was his response. It was like, oh, I still live at home with my mom. Like she takes care of me when I when I'm not taking care of myself. I don't know where YOU find the time. And so every time I start thinking myself, oh my gosh, I don't have time for all these things, I remind myself , Atul says that I'm doing just fine. He sees me making time for a lot of things, and if he sees it then. Then it must be that way. I'm fine. Just stop pressuring yourself.
ADRIANA:
I love that, I love that, and I know I think it's such an important thing to touch upon because, like, I'm not going to lie. Like, this week, I was having a major bout of imposter syndrome, a major bout of, like, how is it that everyone else is doing, like, five kajillion things? And I'm like, I think I'm being productive, but it feels like everyone else of being like 20 times more productive than me. And also like, I don't want to burn out.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah.
ADRIANA:
You know?
CORTNEY:
I can't afford to burn out. I yeah, that's exactly it's it's just a lot. I, I do. I fall back on what Atul said to me. It was about six months ago. And I fall back on all the times, like, stop, stop. You're doing just fine. You’re doing just fine. Other people see you finding time. They think that you're being really productive. Stop comparing yourself. Comparison is like the end of happiness. Just stop. You're doing what you can as best you can. Like, take a breath. Just focus on what's going on and and if you don't find time, maybe you will next week. But I have that. Like, I dial myself back that way probably 3 or 4 times a day, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, but it's, it's so nice that you have like kind of that anchor to pull you back. I think it's really important to have like kind of an anchoring thought or an anchor anchoring mantra to like, I'm doing okay. Sometimes for me, it's like I cry to my husband. He works from home as well. So like, I'll, I'll come down to the basement where he works.
CORTNEY:
Therapy session.
ADRIANA:
Give me a hug. And that helps.
CORTNEY:
It helps so much. Yeah. It helps so much to have that. But also, Adriana, I think I think you don't see how other people see you.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
CORTNEY:
You're amazing. You you give back to the community. You're maintaining one of the fastest growing projects out there. You're constantly doing DevRel work and community work and all kinds of other things and giving time to people. And you have a podcast and and you find some time to go bouldering and just... right? Take a breath and.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I, I need a reminder too.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, absolutely. Because the truth is I, we're all, I think, incredibly hard on ourselves in general. But when other people tell me how they see me, most of the time I'm like, wow, I can't believe you see me that way. I have really like, I'm just a stepped up my social media game, right? Like, wow, I got everybody fooled here. But also. But also there's there is truth to it, right? It's like, well, I actually don't post anything that I haven't done and I don't always there's all the stuff that I have done because I don't think it's actually worth posting, which you just posted the other day about self-promotion. And it really hit home with me because there's so many times and I'm like, oh no, I won't post it. It's not really like, oh no, I won't post it. But yeah, when other people tell you how they see you, right? And I'm always like, oh, it's not quite that, but also it's not, not that. It's, it's somewhere in the middle.
And I try to hold on to those moments. They're, they're few and far between. But I do, try to hold on to them for me. They're, they're priceless for my for my mental health and to keep myself balanced because it's like, okay, like you're being incredibly hard on yourself. There are other people who see the effort that you make, and they appreciate what it is that you get done. And if this week it's less, it's less and next week will be more. But like be kind to yourself. So if you're ever like, I'm not being productive, you just give me a call and be like, Adriana.
ADRIANA:
I know, I know.
CORTNEY:
Let me remind you that last week you were doing this and this, this, this. I'm like, I see you, I. See your effort, like, Be a little bit nicer to yourself.
ADRIANA:
Good advice on this podcast. And you're right. I mean, even what you were saying, like people see you and a like I think we, we are extra hard on ourselves even like when we look in the mirror, you know, you. Even my daughter the other day...
CORTNEY:
Oh my goodness.
ADRIANA:
She said, I look horrible. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, what are you seeing that I don't see? And yet, you know, we tend to do that. I think women tend to be extra hard on themselves. I'm not saying men also aren't, but I do feel like women get to be tend to be extra hard on themselves when it comes to this.
CORTNEY:
I think in different ways. I think many men are definitely hard on themselves. But they're hard on themselves in very different ways than than women. And, and, they have different, different types of pressures on them. I think a lot of pressure that men feel that they, they put it on themselves. Whereas women, we feel a lot of pressure that we haven't always put on ourselves. It's just completely there and it's coming from external forces and you don't. At least in my case, I don't always know how to handle that, or it takes me a while to figure out that, oh, like, that's not actually my criteria. It's somebody else's. Why am I feeling like I need to live up to that? I think men a lot of times they just, they have a the ones who are very hard on themselves have a very high criteria. Right. And and so it's, it's a different the external internal factors I think are different than also women. We just compound it with our own internal, dialogues as well. Like your daughter at the age that she is, being like, I look terrible. Oh my gosh. Like I see photos of myself and I come home to visit my parents when I was like 16, 17. And I'm like, dang, I was cute. Like like if I had realized then. That I was that cute, I would have taken over the world. But like, I didn't. And now it's late. And now I'm just. I'm just this. And it's good.
ADRIANA:
You're taking over the world.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. There's a different, different ways in taking over the world.
ADRIANA:
That's right.
CORTNEY:
But it’s just perspective.
ADRIANA:
It's so true. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, because, you know, I, I want to, I love talking to other like, working moms in tech. I feel like we need to have more of these conversations. Certainly. Like when, when I had my daughter, like, coming back to work right after mat leave. Holy crap. I just felt like I sucked at everything. And, you know, in, in Canada, we get, like, a year of mat leave. I'd been away for a year, and. And so this extreme guilt of, like, I haven't been productive. What are they going to think of me? And then having to, like, leave early because. Well, daycare.
Or or leaving extra early because your kid has a fever and can't be at daycare. You know, and you and you, you mentioned that you have, a 21 year old and a 6 year old.
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
And and I can imagine how, interesting that must have been.
CORTNEY:
My home is bipolar. I've got a 21 year old who I'm trying to convince she's not 6, and a 6 year old that I'm trying to convince is not 21. They keep me very, very preoccupied. But, yeah, this is something I don't think we talk about enough. Parenting in general is difficult. And it has its own emotional things tied to it. And, and moms and dads both live that. But, women working in tech, especially if you do take time off, things move so quickly in the space. Right. And so if you actually take the time off to focus on yourself and your child and your family, and by the time you come back, the feeling of I suck at this is because so much has changed. It doesn't matter if you took six weeks or if you took a year. So much has changed. And there's this thought as I've advanced to this point and so why am I? Why am I all of a sudden behind again? And, and I think it's that I just feel like you have to catch up and if it's six weeks or a year, but you've got that whole thing to catch up to, to all of the people around you who didn't take any time off. They've just been living that learning curve because it's happening in real time for them. And, and figuring out how to manage that and at the same time manage the mom guilt of I'm leaving my child at childcare.
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah.
CORTNEY:
Right. The mom guilt of I just left my child and I'm trying to get back into this, this other thing, whether it's career because I love it or something else. But, like, I just left my child. There's a stigma to that, whether people want to admit it or not. There is. And, and there's an emotional feeling of that as well, whether you believe the stigma or not, it like you still feel the guilt of, okay, so I just left my child behind on top of it to come take my career back over. And now here I am, and I'm not up to date on anything. And so I suck as a mom and I suck at my career. It's like I suck at everything going on in my life. And also, it might have been six weeks, it might have been a year, but this body still is not mine.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Right. And so I suck at that too. There's there's people don't talk about that because it's not a fun thing to talk about. But at the same time, there's so much power in it for everyone who actually goes through that curve and and goes goes through that life experience and for the people around them as well. Right. Because in order to catch up, it requires a lot of support from other people, whether it's a spouse or a co-parent, partner, or in my case, my, my older daughter. I was like, can you please hold your brother? I just really need to finish this right. And she so lovingly did. And that was a growth in our relationship as well. But for my my colleagues, people who are around you, they also participate in that knowingly or unknowingly. They're they're a part of that. And they can make that so much better and, and nicer for people or so much worse as well. And so not having those conversations really takes away the possibility for people who are around women going through this to be able to be helpful and supportive. Because a lot of times you don't know what to do or how to be supportive because there aren't conversations around it.
ADRIANA:
It's so true. It's so true. Yeah. I mean, even even when you're pregnant, a lot of people don't know how to act around you. Like when I was pregnant, I swear to God, I got so mad because everyone's like, how are you feeling? I'm like, what? Like, I'm not an invalid. I'm not sick. I'm just growing a human. Like, I'm fine. Like, I'll tell you if I’m not okay.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
I was a grumpy pregnant woman. I'm sorry to say. I'm like, just treat me normal.
CORTNEY:
Well, that's another thing, though. Exactly what you're saying. I had this whole phase with my son that it was like I'm still me, right? Because all of a sudden, you start having a first name and you just be. In my case, I'm just Ethan's mom, so, like, a whole subset of the world...
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah.
CORTNEY:
That I actually knew prior to being Ethan's mom. I have now just become Ethan's mom. Oh, there's Ethan's mom, which I'm proud to be. Ethan's mom. It's not that, but also, it's like, well, but that's like a facet of who I am. Actually, I'm Cortney, and I'm still a whole human being who's got like, oh, a whole, like, life. And history long before I was Ethan's mom. And how does that suddenly get erased? Right. And and it and it's totally erased for some people. And that is really hard. It's it's really, really difficult to to just have a huge part of your being an existence just totally unrecognized because you have a cute kid. Right. And and not to take away from my super cute kid because he is, he's super cute, but also, I'm more than just his mom. And that that is very difficult, at least for me. It was it was very difficult to navigate, like, can you please just call me by my name or not say anything at all? Because I exist and and again, these are things that I think have been universally. Everybody is like, how are you? How are you feeling? Just like you were saying, right? Like, oh, look at you. How are you feeling? How how is everything going? And everybody tiptoes around. And then all of a sudden, just like that, it's like, oh, you don't really exist that much anymore. How’s the baby?
ADRIANA:
How’s the baby.
CORTNEY:
How’s the baby? How's the how's the child? How's the teenager? How's it? Which is great. And I and I love that people care. But also it's like, can you also ask me if I'm doing all right? Because like, also they're my my kids ability to be okay very much depends on whether I'm all right or not. So true. And so not having those conversations or just being able to say those things without worrying how they might trigger or affect other people takes away the possibility for others to to recognize that and and know that they probably should ask how you are and not just your not just your new baby or. Right, that they you still exist and you still want them to ask about you because I think a lot of people also think that you're so excited to be in a mom that that's what you want to talk about all the time.
And it's like, oh, look at you. That's because you're the dad. And so you get a break or oh, look at you, you're good. You're you're young. Your parents got tired of talking about you once in a while, too. And those things are fine. But not not having those conversations doesn't allow people to kind of have that that context. So.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think another one, that hit me, when I became a mom was like, get coming to terms with being a mom. Like, I could not for the longest time have that mom feeling. I'm like, I, I don't see myself as someone's mom. And to add insult to injury, for for my case, like I couldn't breastfeed my daughter, I had to rely on formula at an early age. And when my daughter was two months old, my grandma died in Brazil and I couldn't go to her funeral. And the minute I heard the news, my milk dried. Like I could just feel it go... So like, she was a formula fed baby. And first of all, like the shit I got from other moms for doing that.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
It's like it. It killed my self-esteem. And then I'm like, great. I can't even provide for my daughter. I am a terrible mom because I can't breastfeed her. And and so, like, that messes with you. The change in routine messes with you because you're like, I used to be able to do this, and now I am tethered to this human who depends on me for everything, and I have to wipe its ass.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. You know.
ADRIANA:
It's, it's very jarring. And, like, for me, I had postpartum depression as well, and I didn't even recognize that. It was my husband who was like, this doesn't look right. And, you know, saw it, sought help, sought support from some of our friends to, you know, help support me. And these are things that, like, when you're in the thick of it, you don't even notice.
CORTNEY:
So you're just trying to survive.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
CORTNEY:
I think one of the best things I ever read about motherhood, it was about the fact that in in war, they use lack of sleep as torture. Right. And so this is a very well-studied way to torture someone is to just not allow them to sleep or have quality sleep, or just let them barely fall asleep and. Wake them up.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That fucks with you.
CORTNEY:
That is the correlation of having a newborn, as a mother.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I and that's why I was laughing when you mentioned the lack of sleep thing because I'm like, oh my God, yes, I can complete. Yes.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That is that is a form of torture.
CORTNEY:
It is a form of torture. And people who are around you who are sleeping well, at first it's like, okay, well I'm fine, I'm just a little tired, but after a few months it's like truly my like I would wake up and it was like I'd look at my husband still laying there asleep and really just despise him because it was like, how can you not hear this child? Like, how are you not? And he truly didn't. Right. How? I still have no idea. But it was infuriating.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Infuriating that he just didn't wake up. Right. And and at first it was fine, but after a few months, it was just so unbearable that I left the room and we just moved into totally different rooms that I wouldn't have to see him not wake up because I wanted to strangle him every time, like, kick in to wake him up once the baby was asleep, just so that he would have some idea of what it was that I was living through. The the number of times that I just felt insanely inadequate. Because also, you're given a human being that you have no idea what they actually need.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
I would look at other women around me, and, and also, I was, my, my daughter, I adopted her, and she's two and a half, so I didn't do the newborn thing with her. I did that the two and three year old thing with her, which was...
ADRIANA:
Always fun.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. And also I was clearly much younger. And so it was just like oh wow wow okay. Wow. Oh look. I actually adopted a dinosaur. Wow. I like I don't know what's going on. But my son, my he he showed up ten days late, and so the time that my parents had allotted to be there with us was cut short because she showed up late, and he was born, and then he suddenly, they suddenly left. And here I was living in Spain. No extended family, no community around me, no nothing. Dealing with all of it, all by myself. And my husband would get up and he'd go to work, and he's very sweet and whatever, but he'd come home and I'd be like, please, like, please take the baby. Yeah, because I was breastfeeding. It was like. And then he'd try to give me a hug and to be like, don't touch me. But it was because I had somebody attached to me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another thing too, that I. Am. So you're like, don't.
CORTNEY:
So overstimulated. Like, I understand you just want to give me a hug, but like, please don't. Because like, oh my gosh. I'm just I just can't and it took everything I had to just get through that. And I'd see these other women I was supposed to go to, to a breastfeeding like a couple of weeks after I'd had my son. And I remember I got up and I did not feel like being up because I hadn't slept at all. But it was like, okay, I'm going to drag myself to this thing. And I got up and I got dressed, and then he puked on me. And so I changed, like, I changed my clothes. And then I got him totally dressed. And then he had one of those explosive, like, just shit shows up the back of his, like, onesie. And it was like, oh.
We’re already running late. I'm never going to make it. And I thought, I like, bathed the child and like, redressed him. We finally get out of the house, I show up, everybody. There's like a whole room of women who are just very serene and very motherly and, like, who had stereotypical way. And they're all seated in dresses and, like, breastfeeding their baby. And I show up, I'm like scattered. My hair is everywhere. I have no idea what I'm even wearing. I haven't showered for a week because, like, when am I going to like, I just couldn't. It was everything it took for me to just breathe and function. And here they all are. They're all put together like, calm. And and I showed up like 45 minutes late, so it was like 20 minutes left. And the whole 20 minutes I sat there, my son was crying, right. Everybody else's babies were calm and they're doing tummy time. They're like, all fine. And my my kid is crying. I'm like tattered mess. And the 20 minutes I was there, I was just truly counting down the time to be able to leave because I was holding back tears. I just was like, I should not be doing this. I was not made for this. Clearly, I am looking at a room of women. I was not built for this. This is not what I was built for. I got home and got through the door and had my son on a blanket and dragged him to crawling while I was crying into the living room so that if I like, fell asleep, my husband would think that we were just there because I was so overwhelmed with with everything.
And here, a year and a half later, taking my son to daycare and a mom at this breastfeeding class who had had twins. And I vividly remember her sitting there changing from one to the other, and she was just totally capable of two. And I had never felt so incapable in my life. And now she's a very good friend of mine, and her kids are very good friends of my son. But I remember I told her, wow, the first time I saw you, this is the situation. And and truly, I just felt so overwhelmed. And it was because she was asking me for help and she was apologizing for asking me for help. And she she was like, I'm really sorry. But like, my sisters are all out of town and so's my mom. Would you be able to? And I was like, of course, yeah, I really and she felt so bad about asking me for help. And I told her it was the first time I saw you like you were. You were serenely taking care of two kids like, oh my gosh, it's fine that you asked for help and so on. And she told me she's like, well, that was because I have three sisters and my mom. And so they were staying with me like, I don't know how anybody could do it otherwise. And it was, again, that whole concept and having context, right, to take a moment and be like, oh, and realize everybody who was actually in that room, I live in this town. I know them all now because the kids go to school with my kids. They all have a community of help because they didn't immigrate somewhere else where they don't have extended family and they don't have anyone to call.
And so if they were, if they were scattered and needed to sleep, they had somebody to hold their baby where they did. So I didn't have that. And, and having that context and people just don't talk about it enough. If, if I had heard anybody say, take a moment for yourself and stop comparing, because if you don't have the same type of community support or the same type of similar support, or that you're probably doing just fine, you're actually going through a torturous situation that they do in war, right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah.
CORTNEY:
The fact that you're holding yourselves together is pretty good. Like, just sit with the fact that you're getting through it. I, I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. Right. I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. So every time. And I, I'm very grateful that you bring this up often because I think it's it needs to be it's not a taboo and it needs to be talked about. And the more people talk about it, the more others start to recognize it. One, it does take a community, whether we like it or not. It takes a community. And so be part of that community in whatever way you can be. Yeah, even if it's just showing some amount of moral support at work, let you be part of that community, in whatever way you can be. And to for women who are going through it, knowing this might be awful for a while, but like other people have survived it.
And so it's okay for me to say it's really awful. And nobody's going to think worse of me because somebody else has gone through this and has openly said, it's really awful. Makes it okay. And and making that okay actually helps the mother be better because it takes the shame away from things. And and shame is such a powerful thing that is not good for anyone. Right. And, and I think parenting is so hard on its own anyway, being a mom, going through all of those different things and challenges a lot of shame comes with it because you don't really know what, like how you're going to react.
And also every kid is different. And so a different mom, right? You're different if you have more than one. Turns out you end up being a different mom and you're at a different phase in your life and at a different age and a different everything. And you don't know how one might affect you in comparison to another, so being open about that empowers other women who are going through it to be like, okay, it's it's okay that I think this is awful. Because turns out it is, but it will be short lived, like there is another phase coming. And so I'm just I'll get through it and I'll live and I'll be okay. So, thank you for always bringing things like this up and advocating for it, because it is it's really important. And for the dads and the men who are around working with us, they want to be helpful.
Like, I've yet to meet a man that doesn't think that their own mother is a superwoman. It's like their moms, their sisters, when you look at it. And I always say this, in the techie world, people get really into manga and and superhero things. This is this is true. It's not just a weird stigma. It's not everyone. Right? But that there is like a subset of us that like these things. But almost all of that is written by men. And inevitably the most powerful characters are women. Even the Lord of the Rings the, the powerful person who, like, takes away the ring is a woman. It was written by a man. And so I think oftentimes we lose sight of that as well.
Yeah, like there are a lot of men out there who are advocates and who want to be supportive, and they want to be helpful, but they don't know what to do. And so unless we have these conversations, the the can't be added to be helpful because they don't know.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And by like raising that awareness so that they know like what we're going through I mean yeah you go through it to a certain extent with your spouse. If you're if your spouse has had a child and you know, you're, you're, you're helping to raise, but, it's it's a different vibe to I think oftentimes when you're in your own little world, you think, oh, this only applies to me. Yeah. And then have other people talk about it. You're like, oh, that happens to others. Like, you know, when I was pregnant, I was I was so grateful to be pregnant because we wanted a child, but like, oh my God, I fucking hated being pregnant. And I think both can exist, you know?
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
I did not love how my body changed. I'm sorry. You know, I was used to running around and climbing, and then I couldn't.
CORTNEY:
No, I envy the women who were like, I love being pregnant. And for the longest time, I was like, I wish I did, but oh, my God, it's just that so uncomfortable. And I am so swollen and I am so sick, like. And I am so sick of thinking about every last little thing that I eat. And I really just miss caffeine.
ADRIANA:
I know, like, am I allowed to do this? I can't eat sushi. Oops. I ate goat cheese by accident. I'm fucked. Yeah, I, I.
CORTNEY:
Can, I just have a piece of sliced turkey because it's in the fridge and I don't have to cook it. Oh my God, turns out I can't. What is listeria anyway? I don't even know what it is, but I'm so afraid of getting it.
ADRIANA:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, all these things you have to worry about. But, you know, unless you're in it, you don't know. So to be able to talk about that, and have these conversations openly and, you know, make it a safe space for other, you know, moms, moms to be, to have, you know, to know, like, yeah, we got you. We've been through it. It'll be okay.
CORTNEY:
It'll be okay.
ADRIANA:
You can bitch about it, too. It's okay. Willing to hear all sides of the story, right. There will be. There will be women. And I'm so grateful for them. The ones who are, like, just by nature, super motherly and and caring and totally fine with setting themselves aside and being so-and-so's mom. Those women exist, and they should have a platform in which. But also turns out, at least in my experience, they're not the majority. They're part of.
CORTNEY:
There's not really a majority. Everyone's experiences is different, and unique, but there are certain things that, that tie us all together, like the lack of sleep and the overwhelming rage at your husband for not waking up and like. Like, those things are real. And they happened to to all of us at the end of the day. And so, making spaces to, to talk about that is, is helpful for everyone. And I don't care how uncomfortable it might make some people, at the end of the day, they're uncomfortable because they're struggling to hear things that they didn't know, and probably feel bad that they weren't able to provide more support. Right? Yes. And so it's important for them to be uncomfortable so that the next time they, they aren't uncomfortable with the situation.
ADRIANA:
Exactly. We got to normalize this at the end of the day.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Awesome. Well thank you. Well we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, do you have any parting words of wisdom?
CORTNEY:
I don't consider myself to be very wise. I think my my parting words of wisdom, I it's it's a it's a quote that I personally really like by Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. Don't stop there. If you're having a bad day, like, just keep going, keep going. The sun will come up. Tomorrow is a new opportunity. Go running to it with your arms open for for something better. That's a new day. Start over. But yeah, if you're going through hell, keep going. Don't don't stop there. Just just keep chugging through. And. And tomorrow's tomorrow will be a better day. That's that's it. That's that's how I try to get through my weeks.
ADRIANA:
That's great. I love that. That's such a great quote. Thank you so much for sharing. And, thank you so much, Cortney, for geeking out with me today. Don’t forget to subscribe, nd be sure to check the show notes and additional resources to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...
CORTNEY:
Geek out, peace out.
ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.
Geeking Out will be taking a short break for the holidays, but expect all new episodes starting in early January 2026. Peace out and geek out.
ADRIANA:
Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.
ADRIANA:
And geeking out with me today, I have Cortney Nickerson. Welcome, Cortney.
CORTNEY:
I thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
ADRIANA:
I'm excited to have you. It. You know, when when I was looking at guests to bring on for the next season, I'm like, how have I not had Courtney on yet?
CORTNEY:
Yes. Actually, I think you said to me you should be on my podcast. Again. That was what you said to me. We where were we? We were... we were at Rejekts. I think at the last KubeCon.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah, Rejekts, that’s right.
CORTNEY:
You should be on my podcast again. And I was like, I haven't been on it. And you're like, wait, what? Wait. How's this possible? And I was like, I don't know. But I've seen like every episode. I've, I feel like I've been on it, but I haven’t been.
ADRIANA:
And finally we made it happen. Yay!
CORTNEY:
Yes we did.
ADRIANA:
So. And where are you calling from today?
CORTNEY:
Today I'm calling from Farmington, New Mexico. I spend most of my life in, in Spain, just outside of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. But I am home visiting my, my parents in, in New Mexico today, so. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
We'll we're going to start with, lightning round questions or. Icebreaker, or, whatever. I, I used to call them lightning round, but sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're not. So... icbreaker.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Well, let the wind blow as it may.
CORTNEY:
At your own pace questions.
ADRIANA:
Yes, at your own pace questions. I like that okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?
CORTNEY:
Oh. Good question. Writing right handed. But batting in in softball. Left handed.
ADRIANA:
No way. That's so cool.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah.
ADRIANA:
Does it throw people off? Like when you're batting left handed because, I mean, there's so few, few left handed batters.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Actually, my my dad coached me in sports my whole life, and he's left handed. And so he used to stand in front of me to do things. I stand behind him and mimic what he was doing. And so in almost all of my sports I’m better left-handed. So basketball as well, I spent more time dribbling with my left hand, because I was mimicking my dad. Layups from left hand side, like shoot, jump shot left handed. Batting softball left handed because I was mimicking my dad. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That is so cool. Do you catch also like, like, I guess if you're left handed, catch with your right. So I bat left handed, but I pitched right handed. So catch with my left. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
But that was also because the first person who started teaching how to pitch, my dad was the catcher, and he didn't know anything about pitching, so he had somebody, work with me the first time. And they were right handed.
ADRIANA:
Ah!
CORTNEY:
So I'm one of those people that's like. Oh, well, that person does it this way, so I guess I do too. So depending on what you're showing me how to do, I might do it right handed or I do it left.
ADRIANA:
That's awesome. I it reminds me like, because I'm left handed, but I mouse right handed, and I couldn’t even fathom mousing, mousing left handed. My mom was left handed, But my dad is the computer guy, and he's the one who showed me a mouse for the first time, and he is right handed. So I think I just...
CORTNEY:
See? Same thing!
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Very cool.
ADRIANA:
It's so cool. I also find, like, you know, you mentioned them showing sports. Like you were shown left handed way. So you gravitated towards that. I remember at one point I took squash lessons and, and this was as an adult, and I had attempted racket sports. And so I use my left hand dominant. So it always throws people off whenever, like they try to show me sports stuff and they're and they're right-handed. Yeah. And then I'm the lefty. I'm like, can you show that for left handed people? And it always throws people off.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah for sure.
ADRIANA:
So yeah. Yeah. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?
CORTNEY:
Android 100%. I use a Mac for work, but Android for phone. Absolutely.
ADRIANA:
Okay, that falls into my next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?
CORTNEY:
I'm. I'm a MacBook user. But I think probably because I came from a non-technical background. And so it was like, oh, Mac. Mac is great for design and it's great for a bunch of other other things. And then I just kind of stuck with it.
ADRIANA:
That's great. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?
CORTNEY:
I love this question. Because the first time I was asked if I knew any programing language, my answer is, I know HTML. Because that was all I knew. Now that time has gone by, I've learned some other programing languages, but to this day, my my favorite language is always going to be HTML, because I did not realize how stupid I sounded when I answered that way. But also, it's like I I'm aging myself, but I had MySpace and that's why I know HTML. So like, it was my first language, and I'm proud of it.
ADRIANA:
That's great. That's great. My, my. First dabbling into HTML. I went I went wild, like, do you remember the blink tag in HTML? Yeah, I, I used that with reckless abandon. And, and I, like, threw a bunch of animated GIFs on the website.
CORTNEY:
Of course. Of course.
ADRIANA:
it was, it was the. Tackiest most useless like, but so glorious in so many ways.
CORTNEY:
Under underneath it all. Like, HTML isn't really a coding language, but I still love it.
ADRIANA:
It holds a special place in my heart. I, I dabbled in HTML back in the day. I found it... when it was paired with CSS, things looked pretty, but I hated the fact that it never looked the same in every browser. And then I just got really mad and frustrated. I'm like, yeah. Buh bye. I'm doing backend.
CORTNEY:
I only had access to the internet of the public library. It was like one dial-up modem we had like basically 30 minutes, because there is such a long line of people who wanted to get on, but like, I don't I don't even think I had time to recognize what they're like, the same anywhere else. It was just like, oh, cool, I've got a.
ADRIANA:
And back in the time of dial up modems, I don't even think we had like that many options with web browsers.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. No, there wasn't a lot. There was.
ADRIANA:
You remember...
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
the flashing “N”?
CORTNEY:
Yeah. And Yahoo
ADRIANA:
Ask Jeeves?
CORTNEY:
Oh I was just talking about Jeeves the other day. I was like, whatever happened to Ask Jeeves? We were just having that conversation the other day. I was like, know everybody, just ask Google or ChatGPT. But didn't anybody hear of Ask Jeeves? And half of the meeting was like, oh yeah, and the other half as a way too young. Way too young to be asking Jeeves anything. And I was like, okay.
ADRIANA:
That is so funny. I just remember, like, Ask Jeeves was the go to. And then all of a sudden, people started using Google, and I can't remember, like, in my brain when, you know, I switched to using Google. Like...
CORTNEY:
Yeah, me neither. Yeah, it did just happened. But Jeeves is like. And he was so cute. Like, their little logo guy was.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Just... like a little butler.
ADRIANA:
That's right!
CORTNEY:
Take care of all your stuff.
ADRIANA:
Brings back memories. That and... that and the dial up noise.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
I used to have that as a ringtone for when my dad called.
CORTNEY:
Oh.
ADRIANA:
But now my phone is always on silent, so I don't really get to enjoy my ringtones.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, my phone's always on silent also. We should bring ringtones back. At least the dial up. The dial up.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
(...) ringtone. The rest of them maybe not, but that one's like a nice, nice nostalgia to it.
ADRIANA:
It is is is. It probably like, hurts the ears of the young ones when they hear it and they're like, what is that noise?
CORTNEY:
What is that? Yeah. What is that? So okay. Next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?
CORTNEY:
Ops. For sure. Yeah. I think I've got a lot of reasons for it. But yeah. Ops.
ADRIANA:
Oh, do share, if you're up for it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, well. My first job in tech was actually doing cold calls to people about a DevSecOps tool. And so I spent a lot of time talking to devs specifically because the whole concept was a “shift left” security concept. And the number of times I just heard over and over, because everybody wants developers to do everything, right. And it was like a ehhhgh, and if I talked to somebody from the Ops space, most of the time, they were trying to push it off onto the security team. They were never trying to push it off on devs. They were always trying to push it off on the security team. But almost like they had this whole, oh, I already push a bunch of stuff off on devs, and I don't want to have to, like, get yelled at by them again. And I don't want to talk to them. And so it's just better like, security team, you need to talk to security team.
ADRIANA:
Oh.
CORTNEY:
And I was like, okay, but, specifically it was that it was I was constantly hearing Devs be like, oh, everything. Everything. Shift left shift left shift left. I do agree with them that so many things are shift left, but also it just happens to be the the where they're situated in the pipeline. Right. It's like, well, things need to get started in one specific way. And like, you're, you're the starting point. And so the I personally adore devs who have moved into the Ops space and, and being in the cloud native space, there's so many of them. Like, I used to be a dev and then I got. Some of them got stuck having to figure out how to package their own things. Other people just kind of took more of an interest into this whole space. And I, I just find those particular people that have moved into ops from dev, to be incredibly knowledgeable because they've done it all now. And and so friendly and so helpful and oftentimes most active in community spaces.
But also, if I had another option, I would inevitably pick the QA people. QA folks bridge the gap for everybody. I always and like they should be the platform team because, they have had to make everybody communicate with each other and they feel everybody's pain. They're like innately empathetic, and they're stuck in the middle all the time. Yeah. And, and they try to be helpful. And they never think that they know the answer, even though a lot of times they do, and they dabble in, in everything a little bit, but don't want to step on anybody's toes. And they really listen and, and so if I, if I had a third option, I would the QA. I think QA folks are highly underrated.
ADRIANA:
I love that that's such a great take! Yeah. I mean, I started my, career after university, doing QA.
CORTNEY:
Oh, see?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, and it was, you know, like, that's what was available at the company I joined. And it gave me it gave me some really good perspective. I had wanted to go straight into dev, but they got me into QA, and, I learned some things along the way. I have to say, I learned patience.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That was one thing. Yeah. Yeah, there is, there. I feel like QAs carry a lot.
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
A burden of sorts, right? Because, like, they're the ones being pressured at the end of the day, like, pass the test. Pass the test. Pass the.... It's like, no, no, no, it's not working.
CORTNEY:
Exactly.
ADRIANA:
What are you talking about?
CORTNEY:
No, um, pressure is a privilege, no matter where you are in life, I think. But also they carry out a lot of silent, silent weight, from everyone around them. And, and often times they are the doing the glue work, that works together and makes things possible for both sides. So they're, they're, they're actually my, my favorite.
ADRIANA:
Yay. Thanks for sharing that perspective. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?
CORTNEY:
YAML. Definitely YAML. Also, I, I was DevRel for a project called Monokle for a bit, and, and created the slogan, “We love YAML so you don't have to.”
ADRIANA:
That's so clever. I love that.
CORTNEY:
So by default it's it's got to be YAML because that was my slogan. I made stickers and everything. I was like, we love YAML so you don't have to. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Aw, that's great. Okay. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?
CORTNEY:
Tabs. Yeah. Tabs. But this is also PTSD from loads of years working in word docs, where spaces never come out the same, as everybody's space in their own machine. And then all of a sudden you use it and some like if somebody is using Windows and they send you that same word doc, but you're in a Mac, and all of a sudden everything's out of out of whack. And tabs just stay the same. So this is.
ADRIANA:
I'm there for consistency. I love consistency. Yeah. Yeah. It's frustrating when you, when you get, like, the different the different formatting based on the, based on the OS that you're running. It's like. Aggravating to say the least.
CORTNEY:
So aggravating, so aggravating. Or when you have something in a format that works and then you send it to somebody and they open it in like a Google drive, and all of a sudden you're like, what happened. That's not the font. That's not this. That's a space. Ugh. It’s aggravating.
ADRIANA:
Kay... two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?
CORTNEY:
I'm. I'm a text person, actually, I do, I do watch a lot of videos, but inevitably I will turn on the video and also read the transcript.
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
That's that's me. And so sometimes I'll get engrossed in the transcript that I, I totally stop watching the video.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. I, I, I much rather like transcript closed captioning like I love captions. Like if I forget to turn on the captions or like, someone at home forgets to turn on captions while we're watching TV, I'm like.
ADRIANA:
Turn on the captions.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
And all three of us at home are, like, addicted to having the captions on when we watch TV.
CORTNEY:
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm. I'm that person. I, I prefer, I prefer text, so I, I guess this is also aging me. I'm sure I'm. Five years younger or. Or less be like. Oh, no. Video. Are you kidding me? Who reads?
ADRIANA:
I do wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because my my daughter like, hates reading and I'm like, oh whatever, I don't care. Because like, the, the amount of cool shit she learns on YouTube is, incredible. Like she was just telling me all all this, like, stuff, like she follows, like, astronomers and cosmologists and like, she's learning about dinosaurs. I'm like, okay, I, I don't care that you don't read books because you're learning cool shit on YouTube.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, there's tons of stuff out there. But I am the person who's like, oh, that video looks cool. And then I'll open the transcript. And totally stop seeing. Anything that's going on in the video. And just like be engrossed in the transcript. But I think part of it is just I learn better that way if I, if I hear it, okay. But if I read it, it sticks with me longer.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. It’s like the visual that visual aspect of the words on the page. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm the same way. I, I find videos too distracting. I'm too ADHD for it. I start watching a video and then they'll say something and my mind wanders, and then I'm like. Shit. What did they say again? And then I'm finding myself rewinding.
CORTNEY:
I do that as well. I do that as well. Whereas if I'm reading it, then I, my mind goes off and then I come back to...
ADRIANA:
Yes, yeah, yeah. It’s easier to come back to it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. Yeah
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Exactly. I... same same. Yes.
CORTNEY:
Also. This attributes to the massive number of just excessive browser tabs I have open. Or when I force myself to stop like once every six weeks and go look at them and like, what was I on this page for? Like, why in the world did I go on this rabbit hole of a tangent? And I have like four browsers in a row that, like, clearly are all there because I went from one to the next to the next down some rabbit hole.
CORTNEY:
But I can't fathom why I was there. It's like it's been six weeks since they opened this, and it was really important to me at that time. I can't remember why now. It's just it's astounding that I do that, but I learn more, I guess, reading and than watching.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I feel you and I can very much relate on the browser tabs. Like even when I start with like a fresh slate. Fresh browser, I'm like, okay, I'm going to be good. And the next thing I know I've got like 20 tabs open in the span of ten minutes. I'm like, what happened?
CORTNEY:
How does this happen. No. And and I had a whole bunch of browsers, like I go through these very odd anxiety where it's like, I know I need to close these tabs. I know they're pointless, and I know I haven't looked at them for weeks, but if I accidentally close the whole thing, it's just like overwhelming anxiety. Oh my God, I need to get it back. And then I have to stop myself and be like, Cortney, just let it go. You don't need to... like, you don't need to do the command to bring it back up. Like there's no reason for this. It's slowing everything down. But it will sit with me and then I won't restart my computer for a while because I'm like, just in case. Just in case it comes to me what was in a browser tab that I needed. It's a weird anxiety that I don't know why I have it, because I have yet to, like, not be able to find something again. But but but it's still there.
ADRIANA:
There's something comforting about keeping it. I also like, my computer even it screams at me like my work computer's like, you haven't rebooted in ten days. I'm like, mmm hmmm. I'm like, but all the stuff I have here is so important. And then it starts to slow down. I'm like, okay. Just start my computer again.
CORTNEY:
No, I do the inevitable do you want to reopen all of these tabs. Yes I do.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah.
CORTNEY:
But also there should be like a checkmark on that dialog box. It's like ALWAYS. Don't ask again. It's always going to be yes. So stop asking me.
ADRIANA:
Okay. Final question. What is your superpower?
CORTNEY:
Probably being willing to just say, “I have no idea” about stuff all the time. And ask for help. I, I don't think I saw it as being a superpower. I used to think that it was like me just being inevitably dumb. And now I've realized it's actually empowering for me because it's allowed me to adapt and change the thing in my life over and over. And be reborn, professionally and personally. Because I'm willing to say that, I don't know, but also it's liberating for for the other people who are around me. So they can say they don't know too. So that's that's probably it. Just being so blatant about I have no idea what you're talking to me about. Can can you explain it to me like I'm your grandma or your mom? Because I probably could be.
ADRIANA:
Honestly, like, I used to be so intimidated in meetings to say, like, I don't know, but now I'm just like, just for my benefit. Can you explain what that means? And as you said it, it gives other people permission to like, oh, thank God I didn't get that either. There's probably like a room full of people. Who have no idea what the fuck's going on. You just said you just ask the the question. Please explain to me. It's great. It's liberating. I think this is a good segue into, you know, our, our main, conversation. I always love to hear about, like, the journeys of, of my various guests, like how they got into tech. Sounds like you've had an interesting tech journey. I'd love to hear about it.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah. I, I actually didn't realize how strange it was, or is until recently. I gave a talk at KubeCon in Hong Kong. And my my very dear friend Amit DSouza, like the day before the CFP closed for Hong Kong and Japan, is like, let's submit, something. We’re just, kind of. It was like, oh, okay, yeah, I should I, I'm doing DevRel. Like, I should, why haven't I done this yet? And we were just kind of having this snarky back and forth conversation about things and we submitted a talk, about Crossplane. It was like, Crossplane is the answer. What's the question? And the whole thing came up just kind of like a snarky conversation about what people around us are talking about. And we made up a talk submission, and it was supposed to be a workshop, and we submitted it, and then it got accepted. And after it got accepted, it was like a week and a half later, because when she sends you acceptance emails, it's like the same subject line, right? Congratulations. You've been accepted. And it's a big letters and that's it. And so I read this subject line and I screenshot and I sent it to him and we were like, oh yay. We’re going to Hong Kong. Yay! And it was just kind of like, oh. And then like a week later, I get a message from my friend Atul, who was like, congratulations, this is amazing. And I was like, oh yeah, I got accepted. Yeah. The schedule's out. Yeah, it's accepted. And he was... And then I thought to myself, I should start looking at flights. So I open up the email to like, look for more information. And it says keynote in the first paragraph. But it’s so far, down, that you don't actually see it on your phone, right. And you don't see it in the subject line. And it was like, wait, what?
ADRIANA:
That is amazing.
CORTNEY:
It was. Yeah. It was really amazing. It took weeks for it to sink in. It was it was terribly, overwhelming, to be honest. And my friend Amit was like we both, neither one of us had noticed, it was just like, oh, woohoo! And then when we realized it was, it was daunting to me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
It went very well. We had a lot of fun preparing it. It we were we submitted a workshop and ended up having to cut that down to 10 to 12 minutes. Which is... As an exercise I had never done before. Like, we've got 90 minutes of content that has to be put into 12 minutes.. That, that. That. I've done the exercise of, okay, we've got 15 minutes of content. Let's turn it into 30, never the other way around. So that was daunting, in of itself. But after we gave the talk, it took me weeks to actually post anything about it. And a huge part of that was just, in, in the hands small handful of years that I've been in tech, it's just been so fast and so extreme, and so much that I hadn't actually stopped to reflect on it. Yeah. At all. Because my first job in tech was, doing cold calls on the telephone for a Spanish startup. That was a startup. It was a web application security tool. It happened to be an agent that deployed everywhere. Now, in retrospect, I'm like, wow, I know a lot of stuff about agents and a lot of like and for the whole AI world and MCP world and understanding the difference between like this has served me incredibly well. But all of that came from making cold calls on the phone for a company that just needed an English speaker who could also speak to them in Spanish. And I happened to be an American living in the same town that they were in. And being curious. Right. So I'd get somebody on the phone and they'd finally not hang up on me and finally give me some sort of conversation. And then they'd say something that made no sense, and I’d go back to team, be like, okay, so they said this. I don't know what else to ask. That team was so incredibly generous. It was my first experience with techies, as well. The anything I asked if I asked them to teach it to me, they did. Anything. And everything. We ended up getting acquired by Datadog, which was also, I didn't know at the time that that is what everybody aspires to have happen in a tech startup is to then get acquired by some IPOed company. Because I had no experience with tech prior to that job. All of my life experience had been in totally different things.
ADRIANA:
What was your original education background?
CORTNEY:
Yeah, I studied philosophy, international relations, and world religion.
ADRIANA:
No way!
CORTNEY:
So I have three degrees. But, yeah, that that's what I studied. Had nothing to do with tech at all. I grew up in New Mexico. Ten minutes from my parents’ house, where I am right now, there isn't really even cell phone service. Once you get out on the Navajo reservation, there's just there's not a lot of of service. It’s gotten better. But, a lot of times, we’d drive across the reservation to go visit my grandparents in Utah. And, and yeah, you have to wait for the satellite to go over. If you, if you need to make a call. There's nothing. So it wasn't like I grew up in a place that had a lot of access to technology, either. Dial up internet was oftentimes at the library. That's where you could get it. And that was about it. And so I just didn't have access to it. And when I went to college, I didn't go with my own computer. I was using the ones that, in the study hall because I was an athlete. And so we had access to computers there. I remember they had Ethernet, and I had only ever seen and been around dial up, and it was like, whoa! What is that? But my, my experience with that also was very limited. It was like, I would use the computer when I needed to actually type a paper, and do schoolwork on it. Otherwise, all of research was Dewey Decimal System in the library, because that's what I knew. And that's what worked for me. And and I didn't have access to anything else. And nobody introduces you to it. It was just uh, people who knew were in the know. But they don't realize that not everybody else is in the know. And so and then I moved to Europe and again, no, no real access to it other than for emails and, and work, stuff.
So when I did my interview for this job, I had just had my son, and I was I had found a job that I really liked, but I had just had my son and I couldn't travel anywhere near as much with the newborn as what I had been doing. And I remember they asked me, how technical are you? And my answer sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I was being very sincere. It was like, well, if the electricity goes off of my house, I can probably like restart and like configure my printer on the second try, but I can google anything, right? Like I can figure it out. And turns out that was that was the answer that got me the job, because they were all devs who would Google, when they don't know what was going on, to find an answer. And and that was the right answer. And they were like, okay. You speak Spanish, speak English, and you can Google anything. We’ll hire you. Because they were in dire straits, obviously. But it was it was a massive change. Prior to that, I spent ten years running, international summer camps and language immersion summer camps with kids. We started off with 50 students and scaled out to, like, I don't know, 5000 kids and in six weeks doing abroad programs and summer camps and and half day programs and and random things. Nothing technical.
I worked for some marketing firms that were doing marketing for, for big, like big retail providers like Macy's or Mark and Spencer's or, Samsung. Just like, big retail and, and doing marketing campaigns for them. I was, the softball coach for the Spanish national team for a bit as well. So I had done nothing that was technically inclined, to the, to the world that I'm in now. And so after giving that talk in Hong Kong, it was just this moment of pause where it was like, do I actually belong? It all happened so fast. And and truly had to take a couple of weeks to just sit with myself and the insane imposter syndrome that happened of, “How am I even here?” And, How did this happen so fast? Do... all of the amazing people around me have helped me so much and explained so many things and are still so patient with me because I still don't. There's just so many gaps. I still just don't know. And it was very much this thought of, do I actually deserve to be there, and, and truly had to sit with myself for a bit and have this realization of, okay, so most people who are my age have been doing this for 20, 25 years. I don't fit into that group. There's a whole subset of people who've been doing this about as long as I have who are like, 20, 25 years younger than I am. I don't actually fit into that group either, but I've. I've worked insanely hard. And so I, I guess just on, on the basis of just constant working at it, there is merit to that. But I truly had to sit with myself for a couple of weeks to, to get to that point. And, and doing so was, taking a moment to be like, how did I even end up here? And so my, my journey into this space was
Not a typical journey into this space. I showed up through marketing and sales, doing cold calls on the sales side of things, moved into marketing, went back into sales and sales enablement, fell in love with the really techie stuff and just kept wanting to learn and and doing a lot of self-learning and, and community stuff. I learned about Kubernetes first, by writing the newsletter for the Data on Kubernetes community. My friend Bart, who lives nearby in, in Spain, is like the other American who survived long. It's not a lot of us who survived that long there. Being an immigrant from the US is is a totally different thing than being in the US with immigrants. Right. And I think, oftentimes a lot of my, a lot of Americans I know are like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to expat. And it's like, oh, no, no, you're an immigrant. Expat makes it sound really glamorous. But no, no, you're going to immigrate.
ADRIANA:
It's a different vibe.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. You can dress that up for social media all you want, but actually, give yourself a year and a half and you're suddenly going to be like, oh yeah, and I'm an immigrant. Realize what that is and how much work that is as well. And, and appreciate things in a different way, I think. But yeah, he was there and he kind of stumbled into the Data on Kubernetes community and was like, I, I also know nothing about tech and you studied religion. And so let's pray together that we can get through this. It was very much, and, and for some reason, I was like. Okay. Yeah. I had a newborn and I was, I was doing cold calls on the phone, and started writing this newsletter, and kept asking more questions about Kubernetes and got involved in the community. And then and then ended up in a DevRel role, that when they hired me also, I thought, why have these people hired me? I have no idea why. Like I told them, I don't know how to do any of this. Why have they hired me? And then three years later, almost three years later, made the move into community role, Nirmata, which is where I am now in the Kyverno project. So it's it's been a lot of just not knowing and being able to be like, I don't know this. Will somebody please help me. And and realizing almost everybody will. And I think that's the that's the astounding thing about this space that in my experience, because I do have, extensive more experience in other industries than in tech, it's still this point in my life, that that innate sense of. Absolutely. I'll teach you if you're willing to put in some work. Or I can see that you've been trying. Let me help you. That. That doesn't exist, at the same scale as it does here. And I think that's probably the first thing that I actually fell in love with it long before having any. Even the notion that I might like the technical side of things, it was just the human factor of, oh, well.
Look, look at this. Poor girl. She's really trying and she's trying to help us. And so, yeah, like, let's jump on a call and I'll give you time and time is the one thing that you you can't get back. Right. And people in this space are just incredibly generous with it. And so, yeah, now I'm, now I'm a techie for life. I hope.
ADRIANA:
I love that story. And, you know, you're you're so right about people's willingness to help out. I'm. Whenever I'm digging into something that I don't know super well and I reach out for help, I'm, you know, I still force myself to reach out for help, but I'm always scared. I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to think I'm an idiot. They're going to think I don't know what I'm talking about. And the patience. Like, more often than not, people are super patient. They'll send me resources, they'll do follow ups, and I'm so grateful. And I feel like Cloud Native especially, think because, and specifically like, Cloud Native open source, because of the nature of open source, there's so many contributors who are doing this. As you know, many do it as part of their jobs, but many not necessarily. Right. It's for funsies. They enjoy it. And I think that's reflected in their personality and willingness to help, right?
CORTNEY:
Yeah, it's it's incredible. Also, the refreshing thing about this space, is that there's so much to learn, like nobody is actually an expert on all of it. And when I first started, I did not realize that. I just didn't have context to realize it, either. The depth of everything. But the people who are the most expert, remind people of this all the time. Right. And, and they very much are like, oh that's a great question. Not for me. I'm an expert in this. Let me introduce you to this other person who is way more than that. And let's learn together. And there's always this undercurrent of oh, I know the basics, so let me tell you that. But let's see if we can find somebody else and learn together. I don't really know that much about that. Yeah. And that's that's phenomenal. I think that that sets those people apart. It probably is why they’re so amazing at what they do as well. But it's a, it's a constant. You come across people. I mean they're just really everybody knows who they are and and they know so much. But they consciously said, no, no, I know so much about this. But these other things I don't know about. Let's go learn about them together. And and that's that in itself is, is just really valuable. To to the community space at large, I think.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's what I love about tech is, like, the sky's the limit. I mean, even, you know, I, I'm one of those people has been in tech for 20 plus years. It's coming up it. Yeah. I've just hit 24, since I graduated school. I've been tech-ing for a while. But, like, the job I'm doing now is so wildly different from the job I started out with. Or even, like when you consider, AI was like, you know, not necessarily top of mind. You know, five years ago and now. And now there are people who had no expertise in the area and are gaining expertise in the area. Like it's such an opportunity for you to become an expert in a new area. I think as long as you're willing to learn along the way. And I think, you know, we're rewarded for for the desire to learn and keep up with tech.
CORTNEY:
Absolutely. That the AI space is, is mind blowing.
ADRIANA:
I know. I, I started dabbling. Like, I'm playing around with MCP servers. I'm like, there's so much I want to play around with. It's it's it breaks my brain in a, in a good way, in a good way.
CORTNEY:
In a good way. But also it's one of those things. It's like, I just don't have the time. I have this thing I need to do, and I really, really want to do a lot more of that. And where in the world do I find the time? The most lovely thing that has been said to me in a very long time. I was freaking out. I was like, I have so much to do. Where do these people find the time? And I said to my friend, Atul Sharma, who graciously gave me some of his time, and I and he, I’d seen him everywhere. Like the week leading up to our call. It was like, he was everywhere. He was. He was doing talks. He was on YouTube, he was on LinkedIn, he was everywhere. And I was like, thank you so much for your time, Atul, I'm really sorry. Like, I have to go because I don't have time. I mean, I have to go pick up my son. I have no idea where you find the time. And he starts laughing. He's so sweet. He starts laughing. He goes, oh, Cortney, I still live at home with my mom. You ARE a mom. That's why I have time. You need somebody to take care of you, and like basic things. Then you would have a lot more time to. I don't know where you find the time. I've seen you everywhere this week. Right? I hadn't said anything to him about. I've seen you everywhere. It was just like, I have no idea where you find the time to do all the things you've been doing. And that was his response. It was like, oh, I still live at home with my mom. Like she takes care of me when I when I'm not taking care of myself. I don't know where YOU find the time. And so every time I start thinking myself, oh my gosh, I don't have time for all these things, I remind myself , Atul says that I'm doing just fine. He sees me making time for a lot of things, and if he sees it then. Then it must be that way. I'm fine. Just stop pressuring yourself.
ADRIANA:
I love that, I love that, and I know I think it's such an important thing to touch upon because, like, I'm not going to lie. Like, this week, I was having a major bout of imposter syndrome, a major bout of, like, how is it that everyone else is doing, like, five kajillion things? And I'm like, I think I'm being productive, but it feels like everyone else of being like 20 times more productive than me. And also like, I don't want to burn out.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, yeah.
ADRIANA:
You know?
CORTNEY:
I can't afford to burn out. I yeah, that's exactly it's it's just a lot. I, I do. I fall back on what Atul said to me. It was about six months ago. And I fall back on all the times, like, stop, stop. You're doing just fine. You’re doing just fine. Other people see you finding time. They think that you're being really productive. Stop comparing yourself. Comparison is like the end of happiness. Just stop. You're doing what you can as best you can. Like, take a breath. Just focus on what's going on and and if you don't find time, maybe you will next week. But I have that. Like, I dial myself back that way probably 3 or 4 times a day, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, but it's, it's so nice that you have like kind of that anchor to pull you back. I think it's really important to have like kind of an anchoring thought or an anchor anchoring mantra to like, I'm doing okay. Sometimes for me, it's like I cry to my husband. He works from home as well. So like, I'll, I'll come down to the basement where he works.
CORTNEY:
Therapy session.
ADRIANA:
Give me a hug. And that helps.
CORTNEY:
It helps so much. Yeah. It helps so much to have that. But also, Adriana, I think I think you don't see how other people see you.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
CORTNEY:
You're amazing. You you give back to the community. You're maintaining one of the fastest growing projects out there. You're constantly doing DevRel work and community work and all kinds of other things and giving time to people. And you have a podcast and and you find some time to go bouldering and just... right? Take a breath and.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I, I need a reminder too.
CORTNEY:
Yeah, absolutely. Because the truth is I, we're all, I think, incredibly hard on ourselves in general. But when other people tell me how they see me, most of the time I'm like, wow, I can't believe you see me that way. I have really like, I'm just a stepped up my social media game, right? Like, wow, I got everybody fooled here. But also. But also there's there is truth to it, right? It's like, well, I actually don't post anything that I haven't done and I don't always there's all the stuff that I have done because I don't think it's actually worth posting, which you just posted the other day about self-promotion. And it really hit home with me because there's so many times and I'm like, oh no, I won't post it. It's not really like, oh no, I won't post it. But yeah, when other people tell you how they see you, right? And I'm always like, oh, it's not quite that, but also it's not, not that. It's, it's somewhere in the middle.
And I try to hold on to those moments. They're, they're few and far between. But I do, try to hold on to them for me. They're, they're priceless for my for my mental health and to keep myself balanced because it's like, okay, like you're being incredibly hard on yourself. There are other people who see the effort that you make, and they appreciate what it is that you get done. And if this week it's less, it's less and next week will be more. But like be kind to yourself. So if you're ever like, I'm not being productive, you just give me a call and be like, Adriana.
ADRIANA:
I know, I know.
CORTNEY:
Let me remind you that last week you were doing this and this, this, this. I'm like, I see you, I. See your effort, like, Be a little bit nicer to yourself.
ADRIANA:
Good advice on this podcast. And you're right. I mean, even what you were saying, like people see you and a like I think we, we are extra hard on ourselves even like when we look in the mirror, you know, you. Even my daughter the other day...
CORTNEY:
Oh my goodness.
ADRIANA:
She said, I look horrible. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, what are you seeing that I don't see? And yet, you know, we tend to do that. I think women tend to be extra hard on themselves. I'm not saying men also aren't, but I do feel like women get to be tend to be extra hard on themselves when it comes to this.
CORTNEY:
I think in different ways. I think many men are definitely hard on themselves. But they're hard on themselves in very different ways than than women. And, and, they have different, different types of pressures on them. I think a lot of pressure that men feel that they, they put it on themselves. Whereas women, we feel a lot of pressure that we haven't always put on ourselves. It's just completely there and it's coming from external forces and you don't. At least in my case, I don't always know how to handle that, or it takes me a while to figure out that, oh, like, that's not actually my criteria. It's somebody else's. Why am I feeling like I need to live up to that? I think men a lot of times they just, they have a the ones who are very hard on themselves have a very high criteria. Right. And and so it's, it's a different the external internal factors I think are different than also women. We just compound it with our own internal, dialogues as well. Like your daughter at the age that she is, being like, I look terrible. Oh my gosh. Like I see photos of myself and I come home to visit my parents when I was like 16, 17. And I'm like, dang, I was cute. Like like if I had realized then. That I was that cute, I would have taken over the world. But like, I didn't. And now it's late. And now I'm just. I'm just this. And it's good.
ADRIANA:
You're taking over the world.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. There's a different, different ways in taking over the world.
ADRIANA:
That's right.
CORTNEY:
But it’s just perspective.
ADRIANA:
It's so true. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, because, you know, I, I want to, I love talking to other like, working moms in tech. I feel like we need to have more of these conversations. Certainly. Like when, when I had my daughter, like, coming back to work right after mat leave. Holy crap. I just felt like I sucked at everything. And, you know, in, in Canada, we get, like, a year of mat leave. I'd been away for a year, and. And so this extreme guilt of, like, I haven't been productive. What are they going to think of me? And then having to, like, leave early because. Well, daycare.
Or or leaving extra early because your kid has a fever and can't be at daycare. You know, and you and you, you mentioned that you have, a 21 year old and a 6 year old.
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
And and I can imagine how, interesting that must have been.
CORTNEY:
My home is bipolar. I've got a 21 year old who I'm trying to convince she's not 6, and a 6 year old that I'm trying to convince is not 21. They keep me very, very preoccupied. But, yeah, this is something I don't think we talk about enough. Parenting in general is difficult. And it has its own emotional things tied to it. And, and moms and dads both live that. But, women working in tech, especially if you do take time off, things move so quickly in the space. Right. And so if you actually take the time off to focus on yourself and your child and your family, and by the time you come back, the feeling of I suck at this is because so much has changed. It doesn't matter if you took six weeks or if you took a year. So much has changed. And there's this thought as I've advanced to this point and so why am I? Why am I all of a sudden behind again? And, and I think it's that I just feel like you have to catch up and if it's six weeks or a year, but you've got that whole thing to catch up to, to all of the people around you who didn't take any time off. They've just been living that learning curve because it's happening in real time for them. And, and figuring out how to manage that and at the same time manage the mom guilt of I'm leaving my child at childcare.
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah.
CORTNEY:
Right. The mom guilt of I just left my child and I'm trying to get back into this, this other thing, whether it's career because I love it or something else. But, like, I just left my child. There's a stigma to that, whether people want to admit it or not. There is. And, and there's an emotional feeling of that as well, whether you believe the stigma or not, it like you still feel the guilt of, okay, so I just left my child behind on top of it to come take my career back over. And now here I am, and I'm not up to date on anything. And so I suck as a mom and I suck at my career. It's like I suck at everything going on in my life. And also, it might have been six weeks, it might have been a year, but this body still is not mine.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Right. And so I suck at that too. There's there's people don't talk about that because it's not a fun thing to talk about. But at the same time, there's so much power in it for everyone who actually goes through that curve and and goes goes through that life experience and for the people around them as well. Right. Because in order to catch up, it requires a lot of support from other people, whether it's a spouse or a co-parent, partner, or in my case, my, my older daughter. I was like, can you please hold your brother? I just really need to finish this right. And she so lovingly did. And that was a growth in our relationship as well. But for my my colleagues, people who are around you, they also participate in that knowingly or unknowingly. They're they're a part of that. And they can make that so much better and, and nicer for people or so much worse as well. And so not having those conversations really takes away the possibility for people who are around women going through this to be able to be helpful and supportive. Because a lot of times you don't know what to do or how to be supportive because there aren't conversations around it.
ADRIANA:
It's so true. It's so true. Yeah. I mean, even even when you're pregnant, a lot of people don't know how to act around you. Like when I was pregnant, I swear to God, I got so mad because everyone's like, how are you feeling? I'm like, what? Like, I'm not an invalid. I'm not sick. I'm just growing a human. Like, I'm fine. Like, I'll tell you if I’m not okay.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
I was a grumpy pregnant woman. I'm sorry to say. I'm like, just treat me normal.
CORTNEY:
Well, that's another thing, though. Exactly what you're saying. I had this whole phase with my son that it was like I'm still me, right? Because all of a sudden, you start having a first name and you just be. In my case, I'm just Ethan's mom, so, like, a whole subset of the world...
ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah.
CORTNEY:
That I actually knew prior to being Ethan's mom. I have now just become Ethan's mom. Oh, there's Ethan's mom, which I'm proud to be. Ethan's mom. It's not that, but also, it's like, well, but that's like a facet of who I am. Actually, I'm Cortney, and I'm still a whole human being who's got like, oh, a whole, like, life. And history long before I was Ethan's mom. And how does that suddenly get erased? Right. And and it and it's totally erased for some people. And that is really hard. It's it's really, really difficult to to just have a huge part of your being an existence just totally unrecognized because you have a cute kid. Right. And and not to take away from my super cute kid because he is, he's super cute, but also, I'm more than just his mom. And that that is very difficult, at least for me. It was it was very difficult to navigate, like, can you please just call me by my name or not say anything at all? Because I exist and and again, these are things that I think have been universally. Everybody is like, how are you? How are you feeling? Just like you were saying, right? Like, oh, look at you. How are you feeling? How how is everything going? And everybody tiptoes around. And then all of a sudden, just like that, it's like, oh, you don't really exist that much anymore. How’s the baby?
ADRIANA:
How’s the baby.
CORTNEY:
How’s the baby? How's the how's the child? How's the teenager? How's it? Which is great. And I and I love that people care. But also it's like, can you also ask me if I'm doing all right? Because like, also they're my my kids ability to be okay very much depends on whether I'm all right or not. So true. And so not having those conversations or just being able to say those things without worrying how they might trigger or affect other people takes away the possibility for others to to recognize that and and know that they probably should ask how you are and not just your not just your new baby or. Right, that they you still exist and you still want them to ask about you because I think a lot of people also think that you're so excited to be in a mom that that's what you want to talk about all the time.
And it's like, oh, look at you. That's because you're the dad. And so you get a break or oh, look at you, you're good. You're you're young. Your parents got tired of talking about you once in a while, too. And those things are fine. But not not having those conversations doesn't allow people to kind of have that that context. So.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think another one, that hit me, when I became a mom was like, get coming to terms with being a mom. Like, I could not for the longest time have that mom feeling. I'm like, I, I don't see myself as someone's mom. And to add insult to injury, for for my case, like I couldn't breastfeed my daughter, I had to rely on formula at an early age. And when my daughter was two months old, my grandma died in Brazil and I couldn't go to her funeral. And the minute I heard the news, my milk dried. Like I could just feel it go... So like, she was a formula fed baby. And first of all, like the shit I got from other moms for doing that.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
It's like it. It killed my self-esteem. And then I'm like, great. I can't even provide for my daughter. I am a terrible mom because I can't breastfeed her. And and so, like, that messes with you. The change in routine messes with you because you're like, I used to be able to do this, and now I am tethered to this human who depends on me for everything, and I have to wipe its ass.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. You know.
ADRIANA:
It's, it's very jarring. And, like, for me, I had postpartum depression as well, and I didn't even recognize that. It was my husband who was like, this doesn't look right. And, you know, saw it, sought help, sought support from some of our friends to, you know, help support me. And these are things that, like, when you're in the thick of it, you don't even notice.
CORTNEY:
So you're just trying to survive.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
CORTNEY:
I think one of the best things I ever read about motherhood, it was about the fact that in in war, they use lack of sleep as torture. Right. And so this is a very well-studied way to torture someone is to just not allow them to sleep or have quality sleep, or just let them barely fall asleep and. Wake them up.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That fucks with you.
CORTNEY:
That is the correlation of having a newborn, as a mother.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I and that's why I was laughing when you mentioned the lack of sleep thing because I'm like, oh my God, yes, I can complete. Yes.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
That is that is a form of torture.
CORTNEY:
It is a form of torture. And people who are around you who are sleeping well, at first it's like, okay, well I'm fine, I'm just a little tired, but after a few months it's like truly my like I would wake up and it was like I'd look at my husband still laying there asleep and really just despise him because it was like, how can you not hear this child? Like, how are you not? And he truly didn't. Right. How? I still have no idea. But it was infuriating.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah. Yeah.
CORTNEY:
Infuriating that he just didn't wake up. Right. And and at first it was fine, but after a few months, it was just so unbearable that I left the room and we just moved into totally different rooms that I wouldn't have to see him not wake up because I wanted to strangle him every time, like, kick in to wake him up once the baby was asleep, just so that he would have some idea of what it was that I was living through. The the number of times that I just felt insanely inadequate. Because also, you're given a human being that you have no idea what they actually need.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
CORTNEY:
I would look at other women around me, and, and also, I was, my, my daughter, I adopted her, and she's two and a half, so I didn't do the newborn thing with her. I did that the two and three year old thing with her, which was...
ADRIANA:
Always fun.
CORTNEY:
Yeah. And also I was clearly much younger. And so it was just like oh wow wow okay. Wow. Oh look. I actually adopted a dinosaur. Wow. I like I don't know what's going on. But my son, my he he showed up ten days late, and so the time that my parents had allotted to be there with us was cut short because she showed up late, and he was born, and then he suddenly, they suddenly left. And here I was living in Spain. No extended family, no community around me, no nothing. Dealing with all of it, all by myself. And my husband would get up and he'd go to work, and he's very sweet and whatever, but he'd come home and I'd be like, please, like, please take the baby. Yeah, because I was breastfeeding. It was like. And then he'd try to give me a hug and to be like, don't touch me. But it was because I had somebody attached to me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another thing too, that I. Am. So you're like, don't.
CORTNEY:
So overstimulated. Like, I understand you just want to give me a hug, but like, please don't. Because like, oh my gosh. I'm just I just can't and it took everything I had to just get through that. And I'd see these other women I was supposed to go to, to a breastfeeding like a couple of weeks after I'd had my son. And I remember I got up and I did not feel like being up because I hadn't slept at all. But it was like, okay, I'm going to drag myself to this thing. And I got up and I got dressed, and then he puked on me. And so I changed, like, I changed my clothes. And then I got him totally dressed. And then he had one of those explosive, like, just shit shows up the back of his, like, onesie. And it was like, oh.
We’re already running late. I'm never going to make it. And I thought, I like, bathed the child and like, redressed him. We finally get out of the house, I show up, everybody. There's like a whole room of women who are just very serene and very motherly and, like, who had stereotypical way. And they're all seated in dresses and, like, breastfeeding their baby. And I show up, I'm like scattered. My hair is everywhere. I have no idea what I'm even wearing. I haven't showered for a week because, like, when am I going to like, I just couldn't. It was everything it took for me to just breathe and function. And here they all are. They're all put together like, calm. And and I showed up like 45 minutes late, so it was like 20 minutes left. And the whole 20 minutes I sat there, my son was crying, right. Everybody else's babies were calm and they're doing tummy time. They're like, all fine. And my my kid is crying. I'm like tattered mess. And the 20 minutes I was there, I was just truly counting down the time to be able to leave because I was holding back tears. I just was like, I should not be doing this. I was not made for this. Clearly, I am looking at a room of women. I was not built for this. This is not what I was built for. I got home and got through the door and had my son on a blanket and dragged him to crawling while I was crying into the living room so that if I like, fell asleep, my husband would think that we were just there because I was so overwhelmed with with everything.
And here, a year and a half later, taking my son to daycare and a mom at this breastfeeding class who had had twins. And I vividly remember her sitting there changing from one to the other, and she was just totally capable of two. And I had never felt so incapable in my life. And now she's a very good friend of mine, and her kids are very good friends of my son. But I remember I told her, wow, the first time I saw you, this is the situation. And and truly, I just felt so overwhelmed. And it was because she was asking me for help and she was apologizing for asking me for help. And she she was like, I'm really sorry. But like, my sisters are all out of town and so's my mom. Would you be able to? And I was like, of course, yeah, I really and she felt so bad about asking me for help. And I told her it was the first time I saw you like you were. You were serenely taking care of two kids like, oh my gosh, it's fine that you asked for help and so on. And she told me she's like, well, that was because I have three sisters and my mom. And so they were staying with me like, I don't know how anybody could do it otherwise. And it was, again, that whole concept and having context, right, to take a moment and be like, oh, and realize everybody who was actually in that room, I live in this town. I know them all now because the kids go to school with my kids. They all have a community of help because they didn't immigrate somewhere else where they don't have extended family and they don't have anyone to call.
And so if they were, if they were scattered and needed to sleep, they had somebody to hold their baby where they did. So I didn't have that. And, and having that context and people just don't talk about it enough. If, if I had heard anybody say, take a moment for yourself and stop comparing, because if you don't have the same type of community support or the same type of similar support, or that you're probably doing just fine, you're actually going through a torturous situation that they do in war, right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah.
CORTNEY:
The fact that you're holding yourselves together is pretty good. Like, just sit with the fact that you're getting through it. I, I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. Right. I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. So every time. And I, I'm very grateful that you bring this up often because I think it's it needs to be it's not a taboo and it needs to be talked about. And the more people talk about it, the more others start to recognize it. One, it does take a community, whether we like it or not. It takes a community. And so be part of that community in whatever way you can be. Yeah, even if it's just showing some amount of moral support at work, let you be part of that community, in whatever way you can be. And to for women who are going through it, knowing this might be awful for a while, but like other people have survived it.
And so it's okay for me to say it's really awful. And nobody's going to think worse of me because somebody else has gone through this and has openly said, it's really awful. Makes it okay. And and making that okay actually helps the mother be better because it takes the shame away from things. And and shame is such a powerful thing that is not good for anyone. Right. And, and I think parenting is so hard on its own anyway, being a mom, going through all of those different things and challenges a lot of shame comes with it because you don't really know what, like how you're going to react.
And also every kid is different. And so a different mom, right? You're different if you have more than one. Turns out you end up being a different mom and you're at a different phase in your life and at a different age and a different everything. And you don't know how one might affect you in comparison to another, so being open about that empowers other women who are going through it to be like, okay, it's it's okay that I think this is awful. Because turns out it is, but it will be short lived, like there is another phase coming. And so I'm just I'll get through it and I'll live and I'll be okay. So, thank you for always bringing things like this up and advocating for it, because it is it's really important. And for the dads and the men who are around working with us, they want to be helpful.
Like, I've yet to meet a man that doesn't think that their own mother is a superwoman. It's like their moms, their sisters, when you look at it. And I always say this, in the techie world, people get really into manga and and superhero things. This is this is true. It's not just a weird stigma. It's not everyone. Right? But that there is like a subset of us that like these things. But almost all of that is written by men. And inevitably the most powerful characters are women. Even the Lord of the Rings the, the powerful person who, like, takes away the ring is a woman. It was written by a man. And so I think oftentimes we lose sight of that as well.
Yeah, like there are a lot of men out there who are advocates and who want to be supportive, and they want to be helpful, but they don't know what to do. And so unless we have these conversations, the the can't be added to be helpful because they don't know.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And by like raising that awareness so that they know like what we're going through I mean yeah you go through it to a certain extent with your spouse. If you're if your spouse has had a child and you know, you're, you're, you're helping to raise, but, it's it's a different vibe to I think oftentimes when you're in your own little world, you think, oh, this only applies to me. Yeah. And then have other people talk about it. You're like, oh, that happens to others. Like, you know, when I was pregnant, I was I was so grateful to be pregnant because we wanted a child, but like, oh my God, I fucking hated being pregnant. And I think both can exist, you know?
CORTNEY:
Yes.
ADRIANA:
I did not love how my body changed. I'm sorry. You know, I was used to running around and climbing, and then I couldn't.
CORTNEY:
No, I envy the women who were like, I love being pregnant. And for the longest time, I was like, I wish I did, but oh, my God, it's just that so uncomfortable. And I am so swollen and I am so sick, like. And I am so sick of thinking about every last little thing that I eat. And I really just miss caffeine.
ADRIANA:
I know, like, am I allowed to do this? I can't eat sushi. Oops. I ate goat cheese by accident. I'm fucked. Yeah, I, I.
CORTNEY:
Can, I just have a piece of sliced turkey because it's in the fridge and I don't have to cook it. Oh my God, turns out I can't. What is listeria anyway? I don't even know what it is, but I'm so afraid of getting it.
ADRIANA:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, all these things you have to worry about. But, you know, unless you're in it, you don't know. So to be able to talk about that, and have these conversations openly and, you know, make it a safe space for other, you know, moms, moms to be, to have, you know, to know, like, yeah, we got you. We've been through it. It'll be okay.
CORTNEY:
It'll be okay.
ADRIANA:
You can bitch about it, too. It's okay. Willing to hear all sides of the story, right. There will be. There will be women. And I'm so grateful for them. The ones who are, like, just by nature, super motherly and and caring and totally fine with setting themselves aside and being so-and-so's mom. Those women exist, and they should have a platform in which. But also turns out, at least in my experience, they're not the majority. They're part of.
CORTNEY:
There's not really a majority. Everyone's experiences is different, and unique, but there are certain things that, that tie us all together, like the lack of sleep and the overwhelming rage at your husband for not waking up and like. Like, those things are real. And they happened to to all of us at the end of the day. And so, making spaces to, to talk about that is, is helpful for everyone. And I don't care how uncomfortable it might make some people, at the end of the day, they're uncomfortable because they're struggling to hear things that they didn't know, and probably feel bad that they weren't able to provide more support. Right? Yes. And so it's important for them to be uncomfortable so that the next time they, they aren't uncomfortable with the situation.
ADRIANA:
Exactly. We got to normalize this at the end of the day.
CORTNEY:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Awesome. Well thank you. Well we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, do you have any parting words of wisdom?
CORTNEY:
I don't consider myself to be very wise. I think my my parting words of wisdom, I it's it's a it's a quote that I personally really like by Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. Don't stop there. If you're having a bad day, like, just keep going, keep going. The sun will come up. Tomorrow is a new opportunity. Go running to it with your arms open for for something better. That's a new day. Start over. But yeah, if you're going through hell, keep going. Don't don't stop there. Just just keep chugging through. And. And tomorrow's tomorrow will be a better day. That's that's it. That's that's how I try to get through my weeks.
ADRIANA:
That's great. I love that. That's such a great quote. Thank you so much for sharing. And, thank you so much, Cortney, for geeking out with me today. Don’t forget to subscribe, nd be sure to check the show notes and additional resources to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...
CORTNEY:
Geek out, peace out.
ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.
Geeking Out will be taking a short break for the holidays, but expect all new episodes starting in early January 2026. Peace out and geek out.