Episode Summary
Chloe Condon is a senior cloud advocate at Microsoft, where she evangelizes on behalf of Azure. Prior to that, she held developer evangelist roles at companies like Sentry and Codefresh. She’s also a freelance writer and has performed in over 30 musicals in the Bay Area, in theaters large and small (50 seats to 4,000 seats). Chloe, who holds a degree in theatre performance from San Francisco State University, is also a graduate of Hackbright Academy, a highly selective accelerated software development program.
Join Corey and Chloe as they discuss what it’s like to be a developer advocate, why Chloe built a fake boyfriend alert and how she got a retweet from Smash Mouth, the importance of making the cloud “fun,” what it was like to leave an industry dominated by women and join one dominated by men, how the tech industry stands to benefit from outside perspectives (e.g., stage managers and sommeliers), the role Chloe played in the resurgence of Clippy, and more.
Episode Show Notes & Transcript
About Chloe Condon
Chloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she was an advocate for their open-source & hosted error monitoring tool, and created the award winning "Sentry Scouts" program. Her unique demos and projects with Microsoft Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart "astrology", and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, is likely one of the only engineers you'll meet who has played an ogre princess, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage (a true "triple threat"), and is passionate about bringing folks with non-traditional backgrounds into tech.
Links
Chloe is a Bay Area based Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. Previously, she worked at Sentry.io where she was an advocate for their open-source & hosted error monitoring tool, and created the award winning "Sentry Scouts" program. Her unique demos and projects with Microsoft Azure have ranged from fake boyfriend alerts to Mario Kart "astrology", and have been featured in VICE, The New York Times, as well as SmashMouth's Twitter account. Chloe holds a BA in Drama from San Francisco State University and is a graduate of Hackbright Academy. She prides herself on being a non-traditional background engineer, is likely one of the only engineers you'll meet who has played an ogre princess, crayon, and the back-end of a cow on a professional stage (a true "triple threat"), and is passionate about bringing folks with non-traditional backgrounds into tech.
Links
- Twitter: @ChloeCondon
- LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloecondon/
- Personal site: https://dev.to/chloecondon
- Company site: https://azure.microsoft.com
Transcript
Announcer: Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of Cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.
Corey: And this episode is sponsored by InfluxData. Influx is most well-known for InfluxDB, which is a time series database that you use if you need a time series database. Think Amazon Timestream except actually available for sale and has paying customers. To check out what they're doing both with their SaaS offering as well as their on-premise offerings that you can use yourself because they're open source visit influxdata.com. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.
Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Chloe Condon, a Bay area based cloud advocate for Microsoft. Welcome to the show, Chloe.
Chloe: Thank you for having me. This is such a long time in the making. I'm so excited.
Corey: It has been a while. Originally I started trying to get you on the show way back when you were at Century where you were doing a bunch of open source work with their hosted error monitoring tool. You were doing the Century Scouts Program, which I always thought was just cheesy enough to be interesting.
Chloe: Yes.
Corey: And then you went past that, went to Microsoft. You started doing a bunch of unique demos and interesting projects with Microsoft Azure that are just phenomenal. You have a fake boyfriend alert, which is awesome because when he came over for dinner he was totally convincing. I would never have guessed he was fake.
Chloe: Oh, he's so convincing, that smug look and we brought my skeleton son over as well. It was a family affair.
Corey: It was a blast across the board for everyone. People have known you from all kinds of interesting places. You've been featured in Vice, the New York Times, Smash Mouth's Twitter account somehow.
Chloe: Yes.
Corey: What's the story there? That's what I haven't seen in a bio before.
Chloe: Oh my goodness. Well, it's so funny because a lot of the demos and examples that I use at Microsoft aren't really the traditional, not your dad's Microsoft as maybe one would say. My background of course is in theater performance, so my brain works a little bit differently than other people. And then I also have ADHD, so the left side of my brain is very creative.
So when I think of these ways and examples and demos for using Azure, my mind always goes to these weird places, but I can't take credit for this amazing Smash Mouth scenario. Because I did a workshop of my fake boyfriend workshop, which is a Azure functions workshop that integrates with Twilio.
And essentially it was built for those awkward situations at conferences or parties or events where you want to leave early, but you need that like fake call to come in to save you from the conversation you maybe want to leave. And I was giving this workshop in New York at the New York reactor. And one of the women in the group decided to repurpose it. I usually have a little MP3 of Rick Astley's Never Going to Give You Up that plays automatically.
Again, can't take credit for that. That's a Twilio docs Easter egg that I'm absolutely obsessed with. But this woman Khalila, She added Smash Mouth's All-Star to it. So it's just a never ending MP3 of, hey, now you're an All-Star and you press this button and you get a text that says, "Somebody once told me so." I love to see people, especially with these open-sourced workshops and projects, people taking it and running with it and making it a fake daughter call or a fake, you know, "Oh, Beyonce is calling me." It's always fun to see what people repurpose with it.
Corey: I will admit, in years past I've had an emergency panic button like that myself at conferences. Not that I had to use them very often, but every once in a while when someone follows you into the bathroom because they want to hang out with you but don't have anything to say, it gets a little on the strange side. And it's, "Okay, now I'm actively uncomfortable." Doesn't happen often, but when it does, it is a lifesaver.
Chloe: And it's one of those things where with the nature of our roles and specifically with developer advocacy, a lot of our job is being not only just like a kind of spokesperson and voice for the company and to give advice, but to also be at a nice human being all around. And I'm an ambivert, which for those who don't know as an introverted extrovert. And I cap out my social interaction after a couple hours.
And I'm too nice. So if someone says like, "Oh, I must be bothering you." I'll be like, "Oh my gosh, you're not bothering me." When they are a hundred percent bothering me. So I have to socially check in with myself. My boyfriend has a higher tolerance for human interaction than I do. So I always strategically go, "Okay, 30 minutes from now is when he's going to want to leave. So I'm going to start bugging him now."
So it's very mathematical. There's a whole algorithm to my social interaction. So this Azure functions app solved a lot of problems for me at conferences and even just house parties really.
Corey: It's a way out of awkward situations without making people feel bad.
Chloe: Yes.
Corey: If you don't have a way to extricate yourself from a situation like that without stepping on people's toes, so to speak, people don't really want to have you around anymore. I don't want to say that there's a requirement to be a public figure. Even framing it like that sounds ridiculous and self-aggrandizing, but when people know who you are more than you know who they are, it changes the dynamic in a way that I'm not sure people can necessarily understand if they haven't done that in some form or another.
Your background in drama is another great example. You used to do a lot of interesting things on stages of a different kind.
Chloe: Yes. Yeah. I did many a musical in my day. Actually we just moved apartments and I stumbled upon, I've never had a child, but a photo of me looking very pregnant in Jerry Springer, the opera has a pregnant teenager. So I had a lot of very kooky credits on my resume.
Corey: For some reason I feel like there's a few of us in this space who tend to go down that particular path. I can't speak for anyone else, but my personal reasoning behind bringing humor into things as much as I do is without that, I've got to say the entire world of cloud computing is kind of dry. If it's a just the facts story, if it's a just the facts style of retelling.
Instead, I much rather would see folks getting the audience engaged. Because you need people engaged or they're just going to stare at their phone and miss the whole point of what you came there to tell them.
Chloe: Oh my gosh. Absolutely. And I think that Smash Mouth repurposing of that demo was such a great example. One else is Smash Mouth going to retweet an Azure project. Never, really, right? Smash Mouth probably doesn't even still know what Azure is, but that was sort of the brilliance of what Khalila had done with this repurposing of the app is like make it a pop culture, funny, often named and referenced thing and make Azure relevant, which I thought was just so cool and such this weird hybrid. I've done some hardware hacking unrelated to work on things like Furbies and tapping into that humor, nostalgia. There's really something there. I see a lot of people doing this like April Vogan code on Twitter. People who really notice like, "Oh there's something about this throwback thing."
Clippy is a really great example that gets people interested and engaged or even... You and I make a lot of puns on Twitter. I mean we're probably two of the biggest offenders. I'm sure you're about to say a pun. And you're developing one as I'm speaking right now. But I truly do... My background is in musical theater. I told my boyfriend when I first started my journey into learning how to program and going to a boot camp that if I bring anything to this industry, "I'm going into it for the puns," I told him.
Because I just kept thinking of all these awful, the more you know, things like that in my early days of programming and it's gotten worse. My plans have gotten better and worse in a lot of ways.
Corey: Well, that's the trick is it's very easy to come at this world from a perspective of intense cynicism. And increasingly I've been actively trying to lift people up more than I tear them down. My rule has always been that I make fun of large successful companies. So for better or worse, congratulations Azure, you win. You're now in that club.
I own twitterforpets.com on the other hand, because making fun of a real small startup is not going to win friends, influence people or have the impact I want the joke to carry.
Chloe: And I think back on being a performer and doing musicals and if you look up a picture of me, I'm this quirky large-eyed, blonde, five foot two girl, which is every girl who does musical theater, spoiler alert. Also quick PSA, if you're a man looking to have a musical theater career, Broadway is calling, they're looking for you.
It's the exact opposite in theater and technology. It's all women, no men. And coming into tech was quite a culture shock, but this is all to say that I would always get typecast as the ingenue because I had these big doe-eyes and long hair. But I really, really loved playing the quirky sidekick. I played penny and hairspray once and it was just so much fun. I got to do 25th annual Putnam County spelling bee, which is literally just like a long form improv musical that's about adults playing children in the spelling bee, need I say more?
But I noticed towards the end of my acting career that that's what I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed the working of the crowd and finding the humor in things. And being able to find that in tech has been so fascinating. I think first of all, I'm a very weird anomaly to most people in tech. I don't look like the traditional engineer, although I do own one Patagonia jacket and I do own several pairs of Allbirds and I did drink Soylent exclusively for a couple of weeks, but we'll just like forget that ever happen.
I'm very much this quirky pink loving. I'm wearing an extra-large Target shirt that's a little girl's shirt from target right now. I don't look like a traditional engineer. But I think a really, really big part of my aesthetic is showing this other side of tech, this humorous side of technology.
And RIP, I'm going to pour one out for my favorite tweet I've ever tweeted that I accidentally deleted, me giving a thumbs up in a women's bathroom. Just wearing this pink shirt, had this crazy look on my face and I was like, "Hey women, where are you?" Like the bathroom lines don't exist. Come and join tech.
And I think what made that tweet go so viral was people were like, "Oh my God, we've never seen this before." And this is so funny that it's true. And I think back of like looking at my pin tweet right now and my highest performing tweets, they're always some sort of pun. Like I think I had one for a while that was like Google in the sheets, Excel in the streets.
And my pin tweet right now is I like my coffee like I like my browser tabs in excessive amount to the point where it causes me mild anxiety. And as much as I would like to think that's humor, that's just the truth for me. But I think people, Danny Donovan gave a great keynote about this at anxiety tech, which people really started to respond to her illustrations and visualizations of ADHD because it's this collective consciousness of like, "Oh my God, that happens to me too."
And we see people like Cassidy Williams doing this on, oh my gosh, she's hilarious on-
Corey: She's amazing and on my short list of people I'd love to meet someday.
Chloe: Oh my goodness. I didn't know I was in the presence of greatness when Sarah Chip's took Cassidy Williams and I out to dinner and then I discovered if you haven't watched this woman's videos on TikTok or Twitter, she is one of the funniest people in technology. But that just goes to show, I mean I'm looking at her Twitter right now and she's got 54.4 K likes on her very funny video about when your code works on the first try. There's really something to be said for that ironic humor that we all face every single day as engineers.
Corey: Oh my stars, yes. I frequently said that multi-cloud is a stupid best practice, and I stand by that. However, if your customers are in multiple clouds and you're a platform, you probably want to be where your customers are unless you enjoy turning down money. An example of that is InfluxData.
InfluxData are the manufacturers of InfluxDB, a time series database that you'll use if you need a time series database. Check them out at influxdb.com
I think that people who come into this space from alternative backgrounds for better or worse tend to bring a unique perspective that occasionally lends itself to interesting storytelling. I mean, my primary skill is wearing a suit, although if I'm being perfectly honest most days it wears me instead.
That for some reason lends itself to a particular way of presenting myself on stage that was early on in my speaking career, grabbed attention in a way that I wasn't at all expecting. And it's fascinating seeing other folks like you, for example, that remind me, oh wait, I'm not the only person out there who doesn't lead with this is my code editor and here's some code I wrote and wow, that was a fast 45 minutes. Why is everyone sleeping? I mean, power to people who can make a talk like that engaging. I never could.
Chloe: Yeah. And I think that so much speaks to... There's so much talk these days about like soft skills are important and it's important that you're able to command a room and things like that. Obviously I have this very bizarre leg up. Especially when I was entering the industry, I had to position myself as like, "Look, I'm a more junior engineer but you're not going to find an engineer who's been doing public speaking for 20 plus years of their life."
I've been on stage since I was four essentially. So, I think that's a really interesting place to come from to be up-leveling your tech skills. But having those person skills because they ask you in an interview question, "As a junior engineer with a theater degree have you ever dealt with any difficult people?" And it's like have you met an actor before?
Corey: Right. Well, I managed to keep a straight face in response to that question. So, yeah that should do it.
Chloe: And that's why I'm such a huge advocate for these transferable skills. I have this background in theater, there's so many stage managers. Oh my gosh, stage managers could be some of the best PMs. If you've never done a show before, a stage manager essentially is doing the job of multiple product managers, like balancing all the schedules and the scripts and making sure everything goes well. So I'm a huge advocate for...
I'm working on a project right now that's a wine bot with a former sommelier who is now going to a bootcamp. And I've met botanists and principals and bringing those perspectives into the industry, it's just so valuable. Not only does it create better products, but it often goes hand-in-hand with diversity because, spoiler alert, most... I come from a... I'm a white, to give you a picture, paint you another picture. I'm a white woman from Sacramento, California. Middle class family.
I had computers around, but I never saw anybody who looked like me or acted like me doing anything with computers. There would be nothing to push me that way. So I think it's not only important to show people like, "Hey, here's what engineers can look like and here's what engineering can look like." But finding all these little niche pads that it seems that both you and I have found for ourselves and Cassidy has found for herself as well of almost this, it's like a tech entertainer, but it's in no way acting.
It's being a personality. But Deverel is such a weird field, right? Because we're ourselves, but we're also representing a product. And we also want it to be realistic and genuine. And I think that's why I lean more towards these more humorous, quirky, funny examples because if I took it too seriously, I don't think I could do it.
Corey: I am right there with you. I mean, I take a look through my news feed right now apparently the day that we're recording this is the first day of Microsoft Ignite. And there have been a bunch of announcements out of there and some of them are fascinating and others are just a little out there. For example, Microsoft pre-announced this morning Azure quantum, which is apparently a quantum cloud computing service that is going to be rolling out in the coming months.
Now, there's a lot of deep math in something like that that I'm sure someone smarter than I am could talk about. But my immediate knee jerk response to something like that is, "Great. How can I make fun of it?" Because if I'm making fun of it, well at least we're having a conversation about it. And generally speaking, I tend to put Microsoft into that bucket of companies that are large enough that if I make fun of them, they're probably going to be able to withstand my slings and arrows.
Chloe: So I got to know them. Where did your mind go with quantum? Was it some sort of like Avengers villain or something?
Corey: It feels like it's one of those new names for a technology of some sort. Maybe it's a new kind of CPU. Maybe it winds up being a throwback to quantum leap, but it was a great show and we could do a whole skit based upon nothing other than that. Only instead of jumping randomly from time to time to time trying to get back home, we're crashing into various meeting rooms trying to figure out where the hell we're supposed to be to have a conversation because nothing is labeled sensibly in this entire building.
Chloe: It sounds like a Hulu, Hulu show maybe. Yeah.
Corey: Yeah. It really does. Or taking a meeting at any one of our number of companies I'm not allowed to name.
Chloe: Exactly.
Corey: And other times it's, for example, sure I can talk about some of the upcoming stuff that Microsoft might be doing for example. But it's way more engaging if I start building protest signs and marching downtown outside of the Microsoft reactor urging Microsoft to turn it off before it melts down and kills us all.
Chloe: I know! What is in there? There's all that like...
Corey: It is glowing at weird times and strange noises coming out of it. And it's not just Microsoft, I think that it is unconscionable that AWS has launched the AWS global accelerator. It is doing terrible things for climate change. And anyone who knows what any of these things are looks at me as if I've blown several IQ points out the back of my head the last time I sneezed.
It's not based out of not having anything else to say. It's the getting people to do a double take and suddenly engage. You meet people where they are because I'm sorry, press releases inherently are so watered down that even the people writing them by the time they go out just don't care anymore.
Chloe: And I think such a great example of that is, well there's been all this talk lately that Microsoft has really changed, especially in the last couple of years. I think such a great example of this, which I just have a lot of pride in because this is just like a silly thing that I love, but this resurgence of Clippy, which kind of in a weird way started from me making very silly business cards, but there's a whole definitely Google it type in or Bing it, I should say I'm a Microsoft employee.
Go to bing.com and type in unauthorized autobiography of Clippy. It's about an hour long video by two folks at Andreessen Horowitz. And it was all inspired by the business cards that I made, but specifically around, you know, Clippy was viewed as such a failure back then.
And to give everyone context, I just turned 30, I don't come from a computer science background. I have a theater degree. So, as a 30 year old, newer to the industry, I had no concept that Clippy was a failure. In fact, I thought Clippy was a very, very cute nostalgic thing, which I'm coming to find out is a pretty common sentiment among people my age. We were not in the software engineering field at the time that this was viewed as... that was such a strange thing for me when I started tweeting. People were like, "Oh, this guy is back?"
Corey: I know he was great. He was taken before his time. Microsoft took him out behind the shed and Google retired him.
Chloe: Exactly. And I love Clippy and I view it even to this day. I mean, obviously as I sit here at my desk, I have a Clippy coin purse and a Clippy, re-foldable straw. I love that little guy and it's been really interesting to learn about the history of Microsoft while working at Microsoft because there's a lot of little nuances that I didn't know. I had to watch the developer's, developer's, developer's video because why would I have watched it before this time in my life? I had no awareness of it.
So it's a weird kind of catch up that I have to do not only from a technical standpoint but also from a pop culture standpoint of understanding who the heck these people are that get referenced on Twitter often and like especially when I started in the industry, I worked at a Docker CICD company called Code Fresh and I'm like, "What the heck is a Kubernete?" Like, I go, "Okay, how do you spell that? K8."
Corey: If you're going to answer that one, please let me know because I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.
Chloe: Same. Same. Same. Maybe I need that children's book. Maybe that'll help me a little bit.
Corey: I'm right there with you. I mean, I spent this morning for example, talking with my new best friend on Twitter, Microsoft Excel. I made a reference a couple of days ago and someone mentioned, "Oh, don't joke spreadsheet Twitter is small but passionate." I'm like, "Yes, but you shouldn't date from it. Never hook up where you VLOOKUP." And Microsoft Excel chimed in on the conversation and we're best friends now. We're going to hang out.
Chloe: I love it. And also, and mind you, I don't know who runs these accounts, personally since Microsoft's really big, but I want to say it was either the Windows dev account or one of those verified major Microsoft accounts on Halloween said something like have a spooky Halloween on the web and it had all these spider emojis. And I'm like 10 years ago in what world would we see an official Microsoft account tweeting like the Wendy's account, you know what I mean?
Corey: And you could see what that was like today just by looking at any large banks, Twitter account or investment firm where they have no personality of which they are aware, and I'm certain if whoever was controlling that account expressed one, they would be immediately fired.
Yeah, that's what people tended to think of. It's the old school marketing voice, for lack of a better term. Now it's engaging with people who care. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As long as you don't wind up getting dragged by a social media mob, it's generally okay.
Chloe: Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting time to be on Twitter as a brand and specifically as a tech company, I feel, because there's sort of this... And it's totally what we were talking about earlier about this idea of incorporating humor and having it be successful, which is a whole other science, right?
Like what is funny to a particular demographic. When you look at the demographics of the people who follow me on Twitter, it's mostly tech people and my tech jokes do not land on Facebook. I'm not really on Facebook anymore, but all my Facebook, Instagram followers are people from my theater life. And I tell I a [inaudible 00:24:03] joke and then obviously it lands very flat, but it's been really interesting to find the different humors of these different sides of things and to really channel that. To really make that the thing that helps sell the product or make the product more interesting.
It's exactly what you said. You go to these, you tag a brand and you're like, Norwegian airlines a few my plane was delayed and you get the autoresponder, it's going to be very, very different than a quick back at you. Especially with someone like you, Corey, who, who can respond really well and they're going to have a hard time if-
Corey: Well nowadays, I mean again, everyone... Well, I think I go back two years now and I had fewer than 1500 Twitter followers and it took me seven years to get there. And some of my early tweets since deleted were pretty much me yelling at various companies about perceived customer service failures, which everyone can enjoy. I was the worst kind of Twitter user.
Wait, I take that back. There are several worst kinds of Twitter user, but I was one of the unpleasant to listen to types of Twitter user, not the actual horrifying type of Twitter user.
Chloe: This was early on. Yeah, and a funny story, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but my boyfriend Ty is a Android dev and when we first started dating, he was working at Twitter. He was an android dev at Twitter. And in theater actresses for the most part, at least in musical theater in the Bay Area, we mainly used Facebook and Instagram for social media.
So I was like, Twitter's weird. Who uses Twitter? And flash forward to today and Ty my boyfriend's like, "Can you please get off Twitter? Can we have a conversation face-to-face?" And I'm like, "I got to just draft this joke real quick." So it's been interesting to not only learn how to, there's a whole like learning process of knowing how to interact with people.
I'm 30 and trying to learn TikTok right now, shout out to Tyranny and Julian, Emily for you know, trying to get this old lady to learn a new platform. But yeah, there's a whole subculture to every, you know, LinkedIn is a, well, it's its own platform in itself to engage hashtag.
Corey: Meanwhile, I come from an era where our social network of choice was communicating with one another via BGP route announcements, which is, that's an inside joke for some folks. So what was the face mask you used? That must have been part of that.
Chloe: It was a eucalyptus. Yeah, it's a whole skin regimen treatment. I'm off to do a blog post about it.
Corey: I do have to thank you as well. One of the nice things about knowing people such as yourself who have a background in theater are that whenever there's a... there are periodically certain referrals I can benefit from. And the one that's stuck most notably in my mind was the person you sent me to get my headshots done.
Chloe: Yes. Oh my gosh. He's my neighbor now. Yes. Ben Cramps.
Corey: And we'll throw a link to that in the show notes as well. So, when he suddenly wonders where all these ridiculous people are coming from, don't tell him, just show up and get head shots done.
Chloe: Thanks for doing my headshots. Since I started doing theater professionally in the Bay area and a funny story, there's a woman named Lauren who works at Microsoft. And when I was working at century we had a call together and we were the first two people on the call. And you know when you have a teams meeting or a Skype call, if you're not doing video chat it just shows your image, which is usually your headshot.
And we were waiting for other people to join and I said, "I'm so sorry I have such a random question for you. Are you an actress?' And she said, "How did you know? I'm an opera singer." I have such a radar for headshots and photos from theater performers and actors. Because it's so different.
There's this sort of like, it's not a smize but it's like, "I'm acting." So I'm so glad you're the perfect person to go get a headshot shot from Ben, Corey.
Corey: And it worked out super well for the first three quarters of the shoot. And then I was like, "Yeah, let's do one for fun." And I do the happy with my mouth open face. And Ben is a professional. Professional enough not to ask what is wrong with you? He just smiled, took the picture and it worked out super well.
Chloe: He was like, "Okay Crazy." Yeah, he's great. And also Easter egg about Ben, he's also a really amazing performer. I saw him in Drowsy Chaperone once. I used to only know him as a photographer and he was a producer when we did Jerry Springer the opera. And then I saw him on stage and he blew my mind with his voice. Another multi-talented individual working in several fields.
Corey: Yeah, he was a consummate professional. That's BenKrantz.com. We'll throw that into the show notes and see if we can get him a few extra gigs for people wanting to look amazing on Twitter profile pictures, on conference speaking circuits, or even on their dating profile.
So, I've done a couple of ridiculous music video style things recently where I'll write song parody lyrics. I have other people perform them. Sometimes I'll perform them and then my staff laughs and won't let that get into the light of day. But one of these days we should collaborate on something.
Chloe: Oh my gosh.
Corey: I think that there's a certain affinity for interesting music, making fun of things in tech and more or less just, I think both of us were born without that part of our brain that experiences shame. So, there's no problem with either one of us going out there and being actively ridiculous.
Chloe: Oh my gosh, yes. There are so many cool people who are doing specifically music parodied stuff. My coworker, Cassie and I for a while we really wanted to do this twitch stream where we would essentially put up a Microsoft learn lab and then work with our audience to come up with puny songs and lyrics and things like that. But the other day I was programming with my friend Kimberly. And she's newer to programming and I told her, "Oh, for the blog post, just use a GitHub gist."
And she was like, "Oh, what's that?" And I was like, "Oh here, just use this gist." And I recently while out to just give you an insight to how my brain works. While out to dinner with my boyfriend was eating Lobster Bisque and was singing This Bisque by Faith Hill. Like this bisque, this bisque, this bisque.
So obviously Kimberly and I were like, "Oh wow, we have to do a parody of this gist. So coming to the billboard charts soon, maybe a collab with Kimberly Corey. We need to also the CCK CPK. We'll think of a better band name. But there's just so much-
Corey: We certainly can.
Chloe: Cassie and I came up with if I could deploy instead of If I Were a Boy from Beyonce. There's just so much there. And I'm saying it out loud on this podcast so you guys can steal my ideas. But yeah, Waffle JS always has an open call for performers. So, I think we've got to get in there, Corey.
Corey: I really think there's another opportunity around the, if I could turn back time only about how to use Git properly.
Chloe: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, that's so good. In a full drag share look. Absolutely.
Corey: Ah, so if people want to learn more about the exciting life that you lead, what you're up to next, and of course get to find out the latest on your album before it drops, where can they find you?
Chloe: Yes, of course. Well, you can definitely follow me on Twitter. Just my name @ChloeCondon. I also have a website. If you go to Chloecondon.com. By the time this is live, I'll have a cute little website that links to all my videos and upcoming talks and some of the fun projects that I'm working on lately. And if you want to check out how to get started with Azure very simply and easily, you can go to aka.ms/screamingwithChloe.
Corey: Excellent. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and of course for tolerating my ridiculous sense of humor.
Chloe: Well, thank you. And I'll probably be sending you a Twitter DM running a pun by you soon as per usual.
Corey: Yes, that doesn't tend to differentiate itself. We have so many of those back channel puns. Is this funny to anyone besides me? Don't care. Post in it.
Chloe: YOLO.
Corey: Chloe Condon, cloud advocate at Microsoft Azure. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave it a five star review on iTunes. If you hated this podcast, please leave it a five star review on iTunes.
Announcer: This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecloud.com or wherever fine snark is solved.
Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
