future of ai and transitioning into tech w/ rishab kumar staff eng twilio

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And for Shaba, let's get the people they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Sounds good. Sounds good. Yeah. So my name is Rishab. You can find me online. Rishab and Cloud, as on my hat, as you see it, on the banner. So good. And yeah, I have been working in tech for almost six years now. And for any of you who is interested to know a little bit of backstory I started as in tech support. So I don't have a computer science degree, but I was able to have enough funds to get a computer networking and technical support diploma, which was two years, and the least barrier to entry kind of role was tech support.

So I went in, did that. That's how I started in tech. Realized I don't wanna do that for my entire life. So I kind of found or started exploring with software engineering, QA testing, and cloud engineering. Those were the three teams. The company that I was working for, I was able to shadow. So I reached out, I'm like, hey, I'm looking for a round station. Can I shadow these teams? And everybody was super supportive. So I shadowed each team for like few weeks. Finally, I made the decision to pick cloud And I was super fascinated about, hey, you can rent servers instead of buying them.

Like, this is awesome. And this is back in 2018 when cloud became mainstream. Every company was moving to cloud. Sure. So I think it was a good decision. They promoted me to a cloud engineer, spent two years in that role. And then I was working with a lot of DevOps related stuff, whether it's CI CD monitoring or infrastructure as code. And there was also an acquisition that happened. So that's how my scales will be better suited for DevOps and union rules, who removed me to a different team, spent a year in that role, and finally moved to Google to work on the technical solutions team under GCP.

which was kind of exciting because Big Tech is kind of a dream for each other to have some people, especially ones that don't have a degree in the finding maker to Big Tech. I think it was a huge milestone, but we can talk about it more in depth, but I didn't like the role as much. So I joined 2DO later as developer evangelist. So that has been going amazing. It's been two years now, almost two months shot. So yeah, that's a bit about me and my kind of tech side, or career side. But yeah, I met Taylor in person at that conference a few weeks ago, which was awesome.

Yeah. So man, so many places to dive into. I wanna start with kind of your breaking into tech. So what were you doing before you got into tech? I want to set the stage. Sure, yeah. And I'm a Danny, shout out to Danny. He was his inspiration into what all happened, how trajectory. But the reason I'm shouting out Danny is because I used to work at a gas station. And I worked for two and a half years at a gas station as a clerk. I usually worked the night shifts because, you know, I was a student I had to go to college to get my technical support diploma.

Right. And during summers, I also used to deliver pizzas, which I liked better than the gas station. I don't know where it's here. So, I mean, let me ask you this, man. How did you break, how did you get your first role, man? Like, how did you go from gas station to your first role was a junior dev. Sure. It was interesting. So we had the college since this was a public college. It was involved within the community. And this is like, I'm talking about Kingston. So if anybody knows, Kingston is like, it used to be a small town in Ontario on the east coast of Canada.

And yeah, there were like five tech companies back in 2016, 17 within the city. And most of them did IT consulting. There was like one SaaS company. And we had in order to pass the diploma, you had to do like a placement at a company, which was not paid. Like an internship type thing? Yeah, an internship. So companies partnered with this college. So people could have hands-on skill. Yeah, yeah. It was not paid. And we had 86 students in the program that were looking for internships with these, you know, five companies in the city. And then you had like 10 other companies that would come out of the city.

So you would have to like travel. So you need a car and stuff to figure out the commute. The on-campus interviews, I didn't make any of it. did like six interviews with different companies and you know it was one of those things like it only had been one and a half year on this new country called Canada English was not my first language so right communication and resume was not my forte at the day but I had good relations with the professors with my dean because tech has been something that I'm really you know, I don't want to make it sound cliche, but I am passionate about tech.

Yeah. I loved Linux and networking. I love it. And that's how I was like in good terms with the professors and even the dean at some point because I worked at certain projects that, you know, gave me that visibility. And I was I was stressed and very anxious because you had this week of, you know, where companies would come to the college and you could get placed somewhere but I didn't so I shared those stress points with my professors and finally there were like three companies that couldn't make it to the placement round so they posted out an email saying that, hey, there are these three companies that are looking for people.

Yeah. And there were like 15 people who were still left. So I shot, like I shoot my shot and I get a call. Just lie into the DMs. Just say, hey, you shoot your email. It was a new, yeah, it was an email. Yeah. I was still old school back then. Yeah. I didn't know the power of LinkedIn, to be honest. Okay. So I just sent out an email. It was I would say it was very short email and direct to the point good. Um, that was great Yeah, that was something my professors had these like cut the fluff out nobody has the time to read it Just tell them how you can come and help them because this was unpaid, right?

So Just tell them your experience how you can be an asset to them and that was it. Like I'm like, yeah, these are my scales this is my forte, I can come help you with Linux and networking as junior IT admin, give me a chance and we can talk about it more in detail when we have a call and they ended up calling me. So that call lasted only 20 minutes. So I thought I did bad. But then I finally received an email saying that, hey this This is your joining date. You'll be working Monday to Thursday for these many hours. We don't expect too much because it's unpaid.

But you can still continue your part-time job. So I worked out what I gave. And I don't want to brag, but I gave 150% at this unpaid placement. Well, it's interesting. I'm interrupting you real quick. It's interesting we're talking about unpaid. So I made a video. I don't know if you saw it yesterday about taking on free work. And I know it's a very, this is a very polarizing topic, right? And I've had multiple, I've had different types of responses. It was yes, do free work to, don't do free work in a sense that it's free, make sure you're still getting something from it. And then there's the third, which was like, absolutely not, nothing's free, yada, yada, yada.

So I'm kind of curious, man, What are your thoughts? Because obviously you got your jump in your career by essentially free work. However, it led to something. So that's that middle ground argument where it's like, could you say it was free? I mean, you weren't getting paid for it, but it led to something. So I don't know, what are your thoughts on that whole thing? Yeah, so I think there are two factors to this situation. And everybody's situation might be different is, first of all, I wouldn't get my diploma if I didn't do this. So you can't graduate until you do any placement work or this free internship work.

This was like part of the curriculum to give you that hands on kind of, because college and education is different to the real world. I realized that during those two months, so I think that was the number one factor is like, oh, in order to complete and graduate from this college, I need to get placed somewhere and do this for too much. And there are two ways to look at it and people did. So this, so the supervisors that are God, he was the IT architect at this company. Within two weeks, he realized that I'm onto something and the amount of work I have been doing.

And he told me to take it slow. And the reason he said this is because he said, we have had past placement students, and they would do like one or two tasks in the entire week. And the rest of the time, they would just focus on their coursework or like homework or, you know, assignments and stuff that they got from college. Because again, it's unpaid. Right. So it's like, what you're doing is, you know, highly appreciated, but just to let you know, since you are not gaining any monetary benefit from this, you can take things slow, focus on your education and other stuff. I'm like, no, this is fun.

This is real life application of all the things that have been talked. Once that was clear what their expectations from me were, and how I was a little bit beyond their expectations. They started including me in IT projects, where I was not a part of, they didn't even plan to include me because you need enterprise licenses for my account. Sure. I needed access and once I gained that trust. So I totally think there are two ways to look at it, but my goal with this was that I needed a full-time job offer after this. Correct. At this particular place. Correct. And you knew that was potentially an option.

Yes. Right. I knew if I could turn enough people's head towards me and what I've been doing at this company. Again, I had the leverage that I'm doing this for free, right? Right. So I had that leverage that everybody taught, hey, like, why is this dude going so hard? even it's for free. So I use that as leverage. And after like first month, I collaborated with every damn team. Again, this to remind you, this is a 38 people company. So it was easy to do that. Sure. I helped marketing with few websites. I helped devs with like a Raspberry Pi project that needed a dashboard on every engineering meeting room that kind of showed of time status.

I didn't know what Raspberry Pi was, but I damn learned it with a few views and build a dashboard. So I knew what my goal was. It was to escape the gas station and get a full-time job. Well, and I think that's like going back to the free work thing. I mean, that's where you got to make a decision, right? And it's like you had a goal in mind. It was was the decision like listen, like I need to get a full-time job, this is the gateway for me to do it. And I guess like that's that middle-ground argument where it's like it may be free monetarily but you do you are getting something out of it which is which is a full-time job.

So I want to talk about you know I do want to talk about like getting into big tech right Twilio I still consider big tech Google you know I know it's a topic for a lot of people any general advice with folks that maybe want to try to break into big tech over the next year or two? Great question. I think the times are definitely different. That's, again, I don't mean to demotivate anyone of you or bring down your expectations, but I also want to paint a real picture of where we are with the tech industry at this point. And you might have seen the news and posts from several of us about the layoffs and how just the market is in general.

And I think it's going to stay that it's going to be like that for a while. and it is definitely harder to break just into tech compared to what I was able to do back in 2018. Not only big tech and even with big tech I did that in 2022, early 2022 which was still a better time than the times we are in now. Sure. But I think what will help you, first of all, never ever neglect the fundamentals. You go interview for Microsoft, AWS, Google, Tesla, any of the big tech companies, most of the times there's going to be a coding ground, there's going to be a networking like system design, system architect round, and you can only answer those questions.

And they're very fundamental. They can go as deep down as how does the DNS work? How does internet work? And you need to have that sort of knowledge to be able to explain it during the interview in a way that you don't come out as someone who doesn't know how internet works. Sure. And my experience, I have interviewed with all three of them. So my focus, as has been cloud, so I have interviewed the AWS Microsoft for a natural and Google for GCP. My experience has been that, yeah, they don't care as much about the platform itself. Yeah. So I had very less experience working with GCP, and even then I was hired for the GCP role, because it's the knowledge.

Underneath everything is same. You have servers that walk over networks in a data center that send packets with information and you need to know how it works. Yeah. Absolutely. Focus on the fundamentals and also don't neglect soft skills. If you can't communicate in a way that what you know, like how do, how they can trust you that you have the necessary information. If you can't communicate it to them. Yeah. Nobody has the power to read your mind. So learn soft skills, be presentable, and figure out a way that, hey, these are the XYZ projects I have done. This is the knowledge I bring. How do I communicate this in a way that the hiring manager and people who are interviewing you understand it?

And that not only goes into conversations, but also like, how do you translate it on the resume? How do you translate it in your emails and cover it? 100%. Well, a few things. A few questions for you in comments. One, how would you recommend folks get better at soft skills? Again, soft skills are crucial. So I don't know, I have my thoughts, but how do you get better at that stuff? Okay. And I don't think there's any wrong answers for the record for this question. I think it's a broader challenge for two reasons. And I'm gonna address two situations. The first one is if you are accustomed to the culture.

So for me, there were a lot of culture shocks and a lot of getting to know things because there are pop culture references. There are, you know, just things that you don't know, that don't translate to simple English, because of the phrases that people will use. So I think that will take time. I think that was a bit of a challenge for me. But you can only learn that by interacting with people. So go do interviews. Go do mock interviews if you have people around you, if you have friends that are available. They don't even have to be technical. Just try to communicate with them, talk about personal other skills that you might have, if your friends are not technical.

See if they understand the depth of your answers. Practice is the only thing that will make you perfect. So one thing that I had to do is I had, I have huge tapes of me just speaking to different topics. And then I re-watched them. I was not this fluent as you're seeing me right now. You can look up my video. I have very old videos that I published just because I want to show people that there is a way to grow. You can look at videos that are from 2020. Yeah. And you can see the amount of times I stutter. And the amount of times there is just complete silence for like 10 seconds.

And you can see my videos that I published this year or last year is definitely growth. But that also shows you need to be consistent and be practicing these skills. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think you made such a good point too, man, with the email. And I want to encourage folks who are watching this now in the future that man being direct right now is kind of its own superpower I could say. I think being direct in meetings, I think being direct in emails, I think being direct in just general communication I think is I think is a very underrated skill and it's not surprising that you found your first job by sending a very direct email and the advice you got was take out the fluff.

So I'm kind of curious if you have any more thoughts on that especially as you grow in your career. I think don't focus on yourself. Like when you send that cold email out, don't be all like, I know you're trying to sell yourself. At the end of the day, that's what it is. You're trying to sell, it's as similar as, if you're trying to sell a product. In this case, you're trying to sell yourself. But keep in mind that they're probably looking for a person who can come help them with challenges that they are having, and that's why they have posted a role that defines those challenges.

So do your research and figure out a way on how you can list the items and kind of make this as a map of, okay, I have Linux and networking skills, how you can come that and help with that, with this XYZ company. So that's how you generate value, right? So look at ways how you will be bringing value to a certain role and communicate on that instead of saying, okay, hey, I have this much amount of experience. I have these XYZ certifications and I have these skills. Just don't leave your email to that or your message to that. Go do research and then be like, Hey, I do have XYZ years of experience, but this is how it can come and help you or the organization in a certain way.

Be direct, show them how you can bring value to the team or to the organization. Most of the times, if you nail this, you'll get a reply back, trust me. So it's in stress you brought that up. I was talking with the senior engineering manager who was recently on the job search now, was recently laid off last week. And he said he was panicking the first three weeks of his interviewing process because he wasn't getting anything back. But then he started to be very direct in his LinkedIn messages to engineering leaders of the positions that were being hired on LinkedIn and being very direct. I mean, like, Hey, I know you're getting a lot of DMS or a lot of applicants.

Here's why I'm a fit. Let me know if you want to talk. And he said, he's probably batting over 50% from a response rate perspective. So again, I just want to reiterate this for everybody who's watching this. like be direct, not the whole, hey, how are you doing? Or I have a question and, you know, waiting for the person to respond back to you, right? Be direct. It's okay. Be aggressive. You're going to have to be borderline aggressive. So, so with, with the last like 10 minutes, I do want to talk about AI. Um, talk to me about what you're just kind of your role, maybe set the stage a little bit, um, on the AI side of things and how involved you are there.

Yeah, I think I started like, like, we, we saw this, like, he, he, kind of jump within the machine learning and AI world last year with the progress we made with large language models and how they are impacting our day-to-day kind of lifestyle. Given that, I work in tech, so there are a lot of things that I can leverage from large language models at this point. I've been fascinated from like day zero when chat GPT was announced. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning because last year I did take up a contract of teaching cloud computing at the same colleges that I graduated from.

That's cool. So I was teaching a course there for one semester and students started using chat UPD and you could tell. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And you would know that was a personal kind of filter but there were no tools at the point to determine if the assignment or the papers were plagiarized by using AI. I saw that as a challenge more back then than as a tool that could help. So, that was my starting phase with AI. I had a huge rant on TikTok which for wrong reasons went viral. And after that, I started exploring the applications of this and the like opening, I made some leaps with chat GPT, we had 3.5 and then 4.

We had Langchain as a framework that came out and I was super interested into that and we had an internal project at 3DO that I got to work on because I was exploring Langchain. So it was more like, okay, I was exploring a certain topic and there was an opportunity within the company to work on a certain project, which aligned perfectly when it comes to the timing. So I spent the last six months, diving really deep into the LMM world and how you can build LMM-powered applications to solve your own problems and challenges and for certain use cases, which ended up, some of you are familiar, which ended up me creating a Langchin course for a free code count.

Oh, nice, okay. Which by the way, is already outdated because of the things and the pace we are moving in this space. So yeah, I think that has been my experience or how I started with AI at the first place. Yeah. That's awesome. And then, and so I think the big question is, Is AI going to take our jobs? What are your thoughts on that? That whole argument? Again, this is my personal opinion. And opinions can change over time. But at the point that we are in, specifically for this year, I think AI is deaf. There's no denying that it's rising when it comes to the usage.

So if you look at the stats from GitHub, because of their GitHub co-pilot, and if you look at the stats from OPI, the usage of AI with day-to-day tasks have been rising. Given the fact is, I'm not just strictly talking about software development, but also other use cases. Well, I use it a lot of times to help me with drafting up an email or even with my content to not generate content but help me refine it, you know, certainly that it has a hook, you know, how can I get more engagement, things like that. And it's amazing. So there's no denying that. I think in terms to tech, specifically like development and software engineering, it can definitely speed up the coding process.

It can definitely help you identify patterns and lead you to identify errors because now it has the capability to go through large chunks of information at a speed that human brain cannot. So like for example, like I was onboarded to a project, you know, you can ask co-pilot to be like, and this is, I'm talking about GitHub co-pilot, you can ask, and you can select functions within your code file and say, ask, hey, what does this function do? And I'll explain it to you in like two minutes instead of you going through the entire code base. So there are definitely benefits. I think it will become as a tool to have your, have your in your pocket, which will definitely, you know, help you with your productivity.

But my personal take, if it will replace us is it will not, as of now, though, not completely replace software engineers. But it will definitely will be more reliant on AI. And when it comes to, you know, increasing our productivity, we'll be able to complete more tasks in less time. And then there's whole, you know, situation with responsive AI and ethical implications. So we'll see where that goes because at this moment, you're definitely seeing some challenges, you know, people not being credited for their work that the AI has been trained on and also like the leaks that happened, you know, with Samsung's case. Yeah. So it's definitely interesting space to be in, but I don't think it'll take away our jobs at any time sooner.

Yep, I agree, I agree. All right, man, so as you wrap up here, I have four questions I wanna ask you, rapid fire. Actually, I do wanna get to two questions real quick. This was earlier on, Lava said, what cloud platform do you prefer? I'm kinda curious. I'm assuming is probably the answer. Yes, and it depends upon. So there are two things personally. It also depends on the product that I'm trying to build and what services I'm used to. I'm at a point in my kind of career where. I don't. I can't spend much time and learning a new product then to leverage the information that I already have office and service within a cloud provider.

so it could be Azure, it could be AWS. For work, again, it depends if the decision is made from top to bottom. Sure. Kind of is like, oh, we have picked the service that will use, go, acquit it. Yeah. But yeah, Azure and AWS, both of them, I love it. I can work with both of them. I love that. Then one from Tages, Rashad, what are some areas in cloud which are very important? Obviously, this is a very broad question. if you want to give a quick tip or two on this. Sure, I think learning about different architecture and different patterns and how it can help companies.

So don't just focus on like, oh, you know, DynamoDB is the AWS service for NoSQL. Love about how it can help with databases. Where are the use cases of NoSQL databases and what are some performance kind of factors? So like learn the patterns and how that can solve problems for an organization. Yeah, they're definitely great engineering blogs from like Netflix and Shopify. What's the other one? Account remember, stripe. So go look into those blogs and see how they're using different cloud architecture patterns and we can learn from these big organizations. And yeah, also see how AI applications will be hosted on cloud. So that is a good place that will grow pretty rapidly.

I love it. I love it. All right, last four questions. Rapid Fire, man. You ready? First question. If money was the same, what would you do outside of tech for your job? I'll have a coffee place and I'll be a barista. Nice, I love that. I love that. What is your go-to coffee drink? Usually espresso, but every now and then I like mocha's and lattes. I love it. They're on the senior side. Do you want to give a shout out to your favorite coffee spot in your area? Shout out to your coffee spot. It's a good one. It is fortunate. I don't know if it's going under, it's under construction or if they're closing it.

Oh, no. There's a change in the management. Okay. But it's right just down the block. I live on the King Street. It's called coffee culture. It used to be an awesome place. But yeah. Well, hopefully it's just construction and not closing down. What brings you joy outside of work? Oh, what do you like to do outside of work? I think education is, yeah, education. I love those light bulb moments when you see someone grasping a technical concept that I was able to, you know, kind of empower that. Yeah, I love that. And last question, man, the shows called guidance counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school and college, but now as adults, we don't really have them.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Rashab? Who? That's a good one. Everybody reacts that way to this question. I was like, whoa. It's deep. Yeah. What would be, I think, being consistent, not that I'm saying that I wasn't consistent, but always remember the big picture goal. I had I had few dreams. I don't know why I came to Canada. Even though there were challenges with them but always remember what your big picture goal was. Yeah, just stay consistent. I love that. I love that man. Alright y'all again thank y'all for hanging out with us today. We appreciate it. Rashab, stay on Swag City.

Bye to you backstage. But again go connect with Rashab. Rashab how could people find you? Where's the best place for people to find you? You can go to my website. It's reeshup.cloud. Pretty simple. Just type in reeshup.cloud. It has links to all of my socials. It's one place. You can also find me on YouTube at reeshup.cloud. I do a lot of cloud computing DevOps and now AI stuff. I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, you all have a good one. Thank you all so much for a shot. Thank you, my friend. You all have a great Tuesday and we'll see you all tomorrow at 9.30 AM Central.

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