I needed to write a social media post to promote a speaking event and I froze. I couldn’t authentically celebrate my small professional accomplishment on a platform where I had just read another post grieving lost progress. This is what came out.

It feels catastrophic to lose PDXWIT and Women Who Code, but we persist.

We go back to work; product has to ship.

We work in teams; no one does it alone.

We keep learning.

We share what we know and leave this practice a little better than we found it.

This year, I’ll speak to audiences in real and virtual spaces about Humanizing FinOps, Learning to Collaborate by Unlearning Anti-Patterns.

Is this tech talk a response to AI? Yes and no. Isn’t everything in 2024 some kind of response to it?

And… would there be a need to humanize any topic whether or not AI were in the air? Of course there would be.

I borrowed the term from “Humanizing Tech” - a podcast produced by volunteers of the now defunct Portland Women in Technology, PDXWIT. They renamed the podcast from “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” around the time that they were revising their mission. Perhaps the leaders at the time realized that the language of an older wave of feminism over-emphasized the identity of cisgender women, to the erasure of our non-binary and gender fluid members.

They put their trust in the community, recognized that harm had been done, and embraced change to be more inclusive.

To me humanizing is always a process of unlearning, of dismantling practices that diminish the humanity of anyone. It is my way of speaking the unspoken complicity with casual dehumanization that we witness every day.

dehumanization

_n. any process or practice that has the effect of reducing human beings to the level of mechanisms or nonhuman animals, especially by denying them autonomy, individuality, and a sense of dignity. —dehumanize vb.__

The words we use are important enough for Github to change the name of their default primary branch to main from master in 2020, the year none of us can ever forget. In a name, one of the most impactful tools in devops perpetuated a casual dehumanization and they agreed to stop.

My talk will cover a practice we now call FinOps - and the way I practice is informed by what I learned I could no longer unsee about the world we practice in.

We can’t really talk about advancing careers or making progress, breaking barriers or ceilings of any material, if we haven’t recognized our own safety and privilege. It’s uncomfortable. It’s always a little bit risky. All this comes with growth.

Back in August 2023, Dr. Curtis Bullock hosted a virtual series for ThinkNW about navigating careers with and without an MBA.

He asked why I decided to get my degree, and here’s my recorded answer, courtesy ThinkNW on IG.

By now you’ve noticed I don’t tire of talking about being invisible, but the way I talk about it has evolved and matured. It doesn’t make me weak or strong. It is something I have learned to control.

I understand well that when I am not perceived as an object to possess, I could be perceived as a threat. Invisibility keeps me safe. And if people choose not to acknowledge me, forget my presence, I am capable of gathering more information for making better decisions. However I might choose visibility when I need to influence or when my visible representation can serve my community. I hadn’t thought of it in over a decade, but I knew at the time that three letters, M-B-A, would make me more visible.

My degree from Portland State University paid for itself many times over. I was lucky that I found a local program that aligned with my values and served my needs. I considered it diverse at the time, but I’m not even sure I had the language to consider whether it was inclusive.

I mentioned the challenge of inclusivity in selecting an academic program later in the interview.

If you want to see the whole conversation with my fellow panelists, it’s still on LinkedIn.

Earlier this month, I posted about being invisible and how my identity as a daughter of immigrants contributed to feeling unseen.

And I am not alone. I grew up in Alhambra. Monterey Park was the neighboring town where the restaurants didn’t make my family feel like second class citizens. My cousins and siblings escaped to the bowling alley in MP. That’s where we could get into trouble like all the other kids and not be singled out for our racial differences. I think the population today is well over 60% Asian.

I woke up last Sunday to a text from my cousin asking, did I hear about the mass shooting? I told her no, but a quick search and I knew exactly where it happened. The local news took a couple of days to catch up, or I was avoiding it.

The shooting took me back to the 80s, the English-only street sign legislation debates in LA Metro neighborhoods. They took me back to 2021, the Atlanta shootings. My heartache. My community.

Last year, I spoke at a conference and the title of my talk began with My Invisible Journey…

By then I had learned to control it, use invisibility strategically, as my power. The conversation about being invisible began with my AAPI community a little more than a year before the conference. We were grieving the hate and violence against Asians. Portland Women in Tech, PDXWIT, offered a spot on their blog for a few of us to tell our stories. Asian hate doesn’t stop because we make a hashtag. It stops when our own humanity becomes visible to those who would dehumanize us without giving it another thought.

I am a descendant of people whose names were replaced by Spanish ones some centuries ago. I am the daughter of immigrants who stopped speaking Tagalog to their children after my older brother was bullied in kindergarten for his accent. Kindergarten. I am a cousin to people who have lived and worked in shadows after arriving some decades ago on student or tourist visas. I know something about making myself invisible.

Yet on a day a few years ago at the Clark County Fair, a military veteran I had never met considered himself perfectly congenial as he took hold of my arm and hand with both of his. He then declared that of all the women in all the countries he was stationed, Filipina women were the BEST. Emphasis his. I did not thank him for his service.

I could have been one of those women killed in Atlanta but for the sacrifices that my ancestors made to lift me on their shoulders. I could stay quiet, as my ancestors would have it, to protect myself. But in unlearning my power of invisibility, I am learning to value my voice. I am learning that the rules of survival they taught us as children were made by the people who would deny us humanity. I choose to be seen, to exist, to thrive.

To my resilient API family, I see you. We are as diverse and abundant as our languages and dialects. We share the loneliness of isolation, the pressure of expectations, the gift of endurance and the grace of community. We cannot be erased. We are not their model minority, but let us be models to our descendants. The fight against white supremacy must be our fight, not one we leave for our children. We have always known the rules were rigged and how to best the systems used against us. It is time to make better rules, ones where people are not property, not disposable, not less than. Together, let’s use our power.

PDXWIT volunteer, mentor, and member of the speakers bureau, FinOps and DEI leader at Smarsh, winner FinOps Evangelist of the year.

If 2020 was the year I realized I wasn’t invisible if I didn’t want to be, and 2021 the year I learned how to use my voice, I have this year to thank for the opportunities to use those skills in service of building community. Twelve months ago, you couldn’t convince me I’d cohost virtual and in-person meetups, appear as a guest (even guest-host) on a couple of podcasts, and be asked to speak in rooms full of strangers in strange cities. Excited for what’s next. #womenintech #womeninfinops #introvertsunite #fearasfuel

I joined the FinOps Foundation in 2020 amid the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I saw the value in real time cost data as a feedback loop for iterating cloud engineering and devops practices, I was eager to level up my skills.

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Did I mention I’m an introvert? That I self identify as an introvert doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. I do prefer to be quiet. Both things are true. I didn’t expect to have much to say about building trust or fear as fuel, or intentionally fostering culture that aligns with my values.

Bear with me as I brace myself to start writing personal things. It takes a second to warm up.