API Evangelist Conversation with Sue Smith, Senior Learning Experience Manager at Fastly

Hello again, Kin Lane here, API Evangelist. This is one of my API Evangelist conversations again, where I just kind of bring people in from across the space who are doing interesting things with APIs and everything that surrounds APIs in our technical world. So let’s not waste any time, let’s bring them out here and see who we’re talking with today. Hello, who are you?

Hi, I’m Sue Smith. What do I do? It changes frequently. I work in something around experiences to help people build with technology, usually developer technology, and usually for the web.

So you and I have known each other for a while now, and I think the intersection of learning, education — whatever that means when it’s swirled up in startups and dev — what is education when it comes to startup land? What are we teaching folks?

I enjoyed the happy sigh even when you said that earlier. I feel that. Do you know what, it’s always been the kind of poor relation. The bit of education was kind of included in whatever dev was, it varied wildly between companies, but it was always a kind of neglected piece of it. I believe that that’s changing, because whatever our world is, it’s radically changing, for lots of different reasons. I think partly because startups are changing, because the way that funding works is changing, I don’t think we have the kind of luxury that we had to not be able to demonstrate impact effectively through that kind of work. And I think that we probably focus too much on things like awareness and not enough on enablement. For me it was interesting over the years to see where people in more customer-facing functions, people who maybe in the sales cycle started to do more in education than we did in developer community settings like dev rel. So there was some understanding that it was a necessary piece of the puzzle to enable people around the technology. Exactly what that looks like in the future I’m not sure, but I do believe that education is one of the pieces of what we used to call developer relations that will survive.

So dev rel and education in the context of dev rel is oftentimes very, I don’t know, focused on fun things and what you can do with the platform and the tool. You’re very much trying to get people’s attention and teach them things, but it didn’t always feel like they were the fundamental building blocks. Teaching and education and learning should be fun and should be exciting — I’m not saying it’s not and what we’re doing wasn’t that — but do you feel like you’re having now, the stakes are a little higher and people don’t have really the kind of fundamentals that are needed to be successful in their jobs, and you’re having to shore up those pieces?

You know, the fun piece is interesting, because I think one of the reasons that education wasn’t invested in heavily was that it’s not cool, it’s not like shiny and interesting. But in terms of fundamentals, I don’t know what those are anymore. I don’t know what the fundamentals are going to be for an AI-assisted coding reality, I don’t know what people are going to need to know. And it’s always been difficult — when you teach people about a technology, it’s really difficult to keep track of changes in the industry and ecosystem and to be confident that you’re teaching people valuable skills that they’re going to go on to use, because it changes so rapidly. But right now it’s changing so fundamentally that I don’t know what people are going to need to learn, and I don’t know what they’re going to be able to just outsource to some tool.

So let’s kind of zoom out a little bit. Venture capital doesn’t always prioritize education and learning. I think we kind of snuck it in as part of this dev rel concept, but it feels like we’re bouncing around — and you and I have been doing this for a number of years — but it feels like we’re bouncing around from cycle to cycle, just kind of doing whatever dance is we need to do, and what’s the latest technology, is it GraphQL, is it service mesh, is it whatever it is. What fundamentals should people be learning? Actually, you’ve mentioned — I’ve heard you say it several times now — engineers and developers, like, what do we need, what are the fundamentals for our jobs to help us be successful? Or is that what you’re talking about, it’s changing so fast and we don’t know?

Do you know what, in some ways it is changing fast, but I also think that the AI situation is kind of forcing us to better articulate those things. You know, a few months ago when a lot of these AI-assisted coding tools just suddenly exploded, there’s this panic that we’re going to make software engineers obsolete. To me that was a reflection of the fact that we don’t have a compelling, robust definition of what a software engineer does, of what the skill set is. There seems to be this, in my view, misunderstanding that it’s writing code, that it’s writing syntax, when it’s not, that’s the detail. What would be really interesting to me would be for us to come up with a real definition of what a software engineer does. If you look at a more experienced engineer and you were to articulate what kind of value they bring to an organization, writing the correct syntax wouldn’t make the list, would it? That’s not the skill set, it’s a more abstract set of skills that they’re able to deploy in different settings, different languages, different frameworks, different problems. Probably the more API-relevant piece of that, I think a huge part of software engineering now is managing complexity, because we build software in such a modular way where we’re plugging all these little Lego block components in, and the managing of all that complexity is a really huge, challenging part of the job, and I have a suspicion that it might be one of the parts that’s least automatable. I feel like that’s one of the pieces we’re going to need a human for, because it’s kind of complex and nuanced and it depends on an understanding of the context, business context, technical context, all the rest of it.

That’s a point where I’d like to ask you a question. You mentioned online, I think, probably something about AI and not perhaps necessitating a return to the notion of semantic AI. Am I remembering that right? I’d love to know more about that.

Yeah, I mean, the semantic stuff is one of those cycles in the API land that kind of has come and gone several times, and has gone away, you don’t hear a lot of folks talking about it. So JSON-LD is a semantic way of expressing JSON and using it, but that’s part of a larger academic tradition, or discipline, around language and semantics and ontology and linked data. So there is actually a lot more — you speak of engineer and kind of discipline, I think semantics has more of a root in the real world, but it just was never deemed useful enough in API circles. And JSON-LD is actually very used, it’s used if you — schema.org, so if you go to schema.org and everything’s represented as JSON-LD there. And if you want to zoom out more practical, when you Google something, you search and you see those little cards at the top. So if you search for Sue Smith, if you search for Fastly, if you search for these concepts that are a person, a company, these are all semantically labeled with JSON-LD, and that’s why you see that card at the top. So a book is a book, an event is an event, and so these semantics are really important, but they’re not easy, and you have to do a lot of work. And I’m definitely not an expert, I’m very new to that space, but every time I dive in and spend time and work with folks in academia who are doing interesting things there, I realize how much I don’t know and how much foundation that is — language, meaning, relationships. There’s a lot that goes into it before you actually get to the actual semantics, there’s a lot more foundational things that you have to go into.

And so kind of bringing this back to AI, I’m just not convinced there’s enough will to do the work there. Because if we weren’t willing to semantically enrich and decorate our APIs before, in our data, I just don’t have a lot of faith that we’re going to do it in service of AI, and we’re going to expect AI to digest it, and there’s a lot of devil in those details. Back to your use of the word engineer, I think we like to play engineer and call ourselves engineers, and I don’t think we are. I mean, if you think about architectural engineers that are building things, and kind of what you were alluding to, the code itself is just an output, the bridge or the building is just the result of that work. But what are all the things that an engineer has to learn — physics, geology — there’s a lot of things that have to come in to know if that building or bridge is going to stand. And do you feel like those things exist in our world, that we have enough discipline and have been doing that?

Absolutely not. So what else I would like from traditional engineering disciplines: apprenticeships. Wouldn’t that be nice if we didn’t keep gatekeeping tech jobs, and we actually trained people on the job, and you were able to access these jobs without having had access to some sort of super degree? I’m not going to go on, but this is really interesting to me, because one of the things I’m doing just now — we are at the moment at Fastly, we have an edge computing platform, so I’m trying to teach people about edge compute, and a huge part of the challenge is conceptual. I’m trying to articulate to my co-workers that for technology like that you have to leverage abstractions and mental models and that kind of thing. So I’ve been doing a bit of reading about it, and the code comprehension and that kind of thing, and one of the distinctions I came across was that when an engineer is understanding a system, the knowledge that they have about that system is both semantic and syntactic. The semantic knowledge being understanding how the components interact, how it interacts with the context around it, the technical context — you could maybe stretch that to say understanding the business or social cultural context even. And it kind of sounds like, if I’m understanding correctly what you’re talking about, if we did actually have semantic versioning, that would be some sort of machine-processable version of that knowledge. Does that sound right?

Yeah, no, I think so. And I think there’s a lot of groundwork laid when it comes to networking, when it comes to how the internet works, how the internet came to be, that people gloss over and people just take for granted at this point, and you don’t need to understand it, it just works. But how that large system, the web, works — I think this is why we’ve ended up with GraphQL and WebSockets and other things, not that there’s not a need for those layers, I’m not trying to bash those, but I just don’t think people have done the work to go, well, what are we doing on GraphQL, on HTTP, what are we doing with the basics of networking, what models are there out there, what patterns. There’s a lot of architectural patterns when it comes to software that are 30, 40, 50 years old, they’re not even near as old as classic engineering concepts, they’re still pretty in their infancy. And I just don’t think we have the forces, the money, the resources, and time to teach people these things in their jobs. It’s the underlying funding model, the winds are changing, and I don’t think people see the negative influence of venture capital in changing the winds and not prioritizing these foundational concepts and people learning them.

Totally. Something else I’ve started becoming aware of recently, but having lost touch, having gotten older and haven’t been around in the tech industry for a while, is that for a lot of younger people, the way that they’ve accessed the web has been through platforms, through walled gardens and all that. And so one of the things that I’m spending some of my time doing now is explaining to people some of those web fundamentals, like why it’s a good idea to have your own domain, that kind of thing, that people have just never even been introduced to those ideas, and they don’t necessarily have a solid distinction between, like, looking at an app on your phone and the web. There’s so much there that’s part of the same story, because it’s about these big platforms that wanted to keep people within the bounds of their apps. And I think we have even more work to do now because of that loss of knowledge.

Yeah, I mean, when I first — early days of the web, I had a client one time who was my best-paying client, and he thought the web came to you in an email, everything, there was no browser, you accessed it through your email, so someone had to invite you, it was like this invite-only club. Do you feel like mobile apps, that TikTok and these things, are just the future of that?

Yeah, it’s interesting, because when people started leaving Twitter en masse, it seemed like there was a moment when people started to become aware of this idea of an algorithmic timeline, and that there was something going on determining your experience and the information you were exposed to that was not transparent and that wasn’t under your control. In platforms like Mastodon, I feel like there was a brief opportunity, we could use that to educate people, but unfortunately it’s something that’s written off so strong that it’s extremely difficult for people. But I’ve seen one of the things I find really encouraging, is that I see young people on TikTok getting angry about the fact that, like, they’re looking at the same thing on their phone and their pal seeing something different, and they’re going, “wait a minute, what’s going on here?” And it’s not just the fact that it’s not a chronological feed, it’s the fact that there’s some mechanism that they can’t see. That’s a tremendous opportunity for education.

Yeah, do you think it’s going to trigger more curiosity in the younger generations to start scratching at this?

I think so, because especially through that platform in particular, it’s such a kind of empowered community of young people, they want to know, they want to understand the mechanisms of power, they want to know what the dynamics are that are leading to the experiences that they’re having, whatever it is.

Including, you mentioned the word — how do you recharge your batteries, how do you keep your curiosity alive doing what you do? You’re able to —

You know what, I’ve never really lost my love for doing this education work, because education changed the trajectory of my life. When I was younger I don’t think I had a future, that sounds melodramatic, but you know, I came from a poor background, and I had access to this course that was free because the Scottish government was funding any software course, and it was a foundation in software development, and it just put my life on a completely different trajectory. I’ve had so many opportunities, I’ve had my own experience of life that I couldn’t have imagined. And it’s also slightly fueled by the rage, how gatekept it is, that feels meaningful as well.

Yeah, I think that’s going to be key. We’ve got to figure out how to light that fire, light that, keep that curiosity. I feel like everything right now, especially AI — won’t go too far down that rabbit hole — but is just kind of squashing and obfuscating and not nourishing and feeding us in those ways. Well, I’ve already kind of blown my — we’re at 20 minutes, so I could talk to you forever, Sue, but that’s great about this format, is you can come back as often as you like. We can continue these conversations, I have in mind some of these topics, but I appreciate you coming by today. Thank you for letting me.

Thank you so much.

All right, I could talk to Sue forever, I didn’t even look at the clock and I looked up and we’re at 20 minutes. So I will definitely have Sue back, I want to dive into a couple of those topics, as well as kind of — I think the education piece and the fundamentals of HTTP is what I’m focusing on right now, it’s kind of part of my career and part of the API Evangelist message, something I want to keep diving in with into with her, talk some more. So she’ll be back, but I appreciate it, everyone, thanks for coming by, tuning in today, and we’ll see you at the next one.