The One Where We Geek Out on the Plan from Which to Deviate with Diana Todea

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Recorded10 Feb 2026

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Key takeaways:Diana took the "failure" of being downgraded in her PhD program as a wakeup call.Although being downgraded in her PhD program was a shock for Diana and made her extremely angry, she found the strength to finish her studies, and reinvented herself through a career in tech.Learning from failure is an important part of personal growth.Don't spend your time ruminating on the negative from years ago, because there are other, more important things that come up in life that we have to deal with.Find humility in your failure and move on.Diana's early experience in tech working at a call centre, and then in customer support prepared her for a later role as an SRE.Diana's call centre work taught her how to: Push past her introversion and phone anxiety; Manage her emotions; Filter; Have empathy; ListenDiana's work doing tech support in AWS, Azure, etc, introduced her into the cloud native space, and naturally primed her for a role as an SRE, and eventually as a developer advocate in the Observability space.Working in tech support meant being on-call, which prepared Diana for on-call work of SREAs a working mom in tech, it's hard to fully excel at work and at family life. It's a balancing act, and you do your best to manage.Nobody gives you an award for being a mom. You just do it.Updating docs, either to clarify a concept or to provide translation into another language is a great way to start contributing to cloud native projects.Having translation of OTel docs in different languages makes it accessible to those who aren't fluent in English.About our guest:Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.Find Diana on:LinkedInBlueskyGitHubFind us on:All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillelaLinks:Erasmus ScholarshipGeeking Out Live: Working Moms in Tech, featuring Diana as one of the panelistsCloud Native Days Romania 2026 (web site)Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on InstagramCloud Native Days Romania 2026 on LinkedIn

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