Carissa Morrow: Learning to be Resilient

Break Things on Purpose

In this episode, we cover:

• 00:00:00 - Introduction
• 00:02:00 - Carissa’s first job in tech and first bootcamp
• 00:04:30 - Early Lessons: Carissa breaks production—on a Friday!
• 00:08:40 - Carissa’s work at ClickBank and listening to newer hires
• 00:10:55 - The metrics that Carissa measures and her attitude about constantly learning
• 00:16:45 - Carissa’s Chaos Engineering experiences
• 00:18:25 - Some advice for bringing new folks into the fold
• 00:23:08 - Carissa and ClickBank/Outro

Links:

• ClickBank: https://www.clickbank.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissa-morrow/

Transcript

Carissa: It’s all learning. I mean, technology is never going to stop changing and it’s never going to stop being… a lot to learn, [laugh] so we might as well learn it and try to keep up with the [laugh] times and make our lives easier.

Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, asking questions, and learning from failure. In this episode, we talked with Carissa Morrow about what it’s like to be new in tech, and how to learn from mistakes and build your skills.

Julie: Carissa, I’m really excited to talk to you. I know we chatted in the past a little bit about some horror stories of breaking production. I think that it’s going to be a lot of fun for our listeners. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Carissa: Yeah, so I actually have only been in this industry about three years. So, I come with kind of a newbie's perspective. I was a certified ophthalmic tech before this. So, completely different field. Hit my ceiling, and my husband said, “You want to try coding?” I said, “Not really.” [laugh]. But I did. And I loved it.

So, long story short, I ended up just signing up for a local boot camp, three-month full stack. And then I got really lucky; when I graduated there and walked into my previous employer’s place. They said, “Do you know what DevOps is?” I said, “I have no idea.” And they still hired me.

And it was really great, really, really great experience. I learned so much in a couple years with them. So, and now I’m here at ClickBank and I’m three years in and trying not to break things every day, especially on a Friday.

Julie: [laugh]. Why? That's the best day to break things, Carissa—

Carissa: [laugh]. No, it’s really not.

Julie: —preferably at 4:45. Well, that’s really amazing. So, that’s quite the jump. And as you mentioned, you started with a boot camp and then ended up at an employer—and so, what was your role? What were you doing in your first role?

Carissa: So, I started on a really small team; there was just three of us including myself. So, I learned pretty much everything from the ground up, knowing nothing coming into DevOps. So, I had, you know, coding background from the boot camp, but I had to learn Python from scratch. And then from there, just kind of learning everything cloud. I had no idea about AWS or Google or anything in the cloud realm.

So, it was very much a rough—very, very rough first year, I had to put my helmet on because it was a very bumpy ride. But I made it and I’ve come out a heck of a lot stronger because of it.

Julie: Well, that’s awesome. How about do you have people that you were working with that are mentoring you?

Carissa: Yep. So, I actually have been very lucky and have a couple of mentors, from not only my previous employer, but also clients that I worked with that have asked to be my mentor and have stuck it out with me, and helped not just in the DevOps realm or the cloud realm, but for me as a person in that growing area. So, it’s been pretty great.

Julie: Well, that’s awesome. And I guess I should give the disclosure that Carissa and I both worked together, for me a couple of jobs ago. And I know that, Carissa, I’ve reached out to you for folks who are interested in the boot camp that you went through. And I know it’s not an advertisement for the boot camp, but I also know that you mentored a friend of mine. Did you want to share where you went?

Carissa: Yeah, definitely. So, I went to Boise CodeWorks, which is a local coding school here in Boise. And they did just move locations, so I’m not quite sure where they’re at now, but they’re definitely in Boise.

Julie: And if I remember correctly, that was a three-month very intensive, full-time boot camp where you really didn’t have time for anything else. Is that right?

Carissa: Yes, it is absolutely 1000% a full-time job for three months. And you will get gray hairs. If you don’t, you’re doing something wrong. [laugh]. Yep.

Julie: So, what would you say is one of the most important things you learned out of that?

Carissa: I would say just learning how to be resilient. It was very easy to want to quit because it was so difficult. And not knowing what it was going to look like when I got out of it, but part of me just wanted to throw my hands up half the time. But pushing through that made it just that much sweeter when I was done.

Julie: Well now, when we were talking before, you mentioned that you broke production once. Do you want to tell me about that—

Carissa: Maybe a few times. [laugh].

Julie: —[crosstalk 00:04:34] a few times? [laugh]. You want to share what happened and maybe what you learned from it.

Carissa: Yeah, yep. So, I was working for a company that we had clients, so it was a lot of client work. And they were an AWS shop, and I was going in to kind of clean up some of their subnets and some of their VPN issues—of course, this is also on a Friday. Yeah. It has to be on a Friday.

Julie: Of course.

Carissa: So, I will never forget, I was sitting outside thinking, “This is going to be a piece of cake.” I went in, I just deleted a subnet, thinking, “That’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen.” Five minutes later Slack’s blowing up, production’s down and, you know, websites not working. Bad. Like, worst-case scenario.

So, back then we had, like, a team of, I think I would say ten, and every single person jumped on because you could tell I was panicking. And they all jumped in and we went step-by-step, tried to figure it out, figured out how we could fix it. But it took a good four hours of traumatizing stress [laugh] before we got it fixed. And then I learned my lesson, you know? Double-triple check before you delete anything and try to just make Fridays read-only if you can. [laugh].

Julie: Well, and I think that’s one of the things right? You always have to have that lesson-learning experience, and it’s going to happen. And showing empathy for friends during that, I think, is the really important piece. And I love the fact that you just talked about how the whole team jumped on because they saw that you were stressed out. Were you in person or remote at the time?

Carissa: I was remote at the time.

Julie: Okay.

Carissa: Yeah. And we were traveling in our RV, so nothing like being out in the woods, panicking by yourself, and [laugh] roaming around.