Exploring The Intersection between Technology And Music

Aida Alonso Iglesias Transcript

Intro - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond the Screen: An IONOS Podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence. Hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. We're your hosts, Joe Nash and Liz Moy.

Joe - 00: 00:22: Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Screen: An IONOS Podcast. Today we're joined by Aida Alonso Iglesias, who's not only a DevOps engineer at Voxel51, an AI software Company, but also a renowned Spanish rapper known as Aid. Aida is a shining example of how creativity and technical expertise can coexist, bringing a unique perspective to our discussion today. From her beginnings in the music industry to her journey in the tech world, she has continuously pushed boundaries, leaving an indelible mark in every field she steps into. Aida, welcome to the show.

Aida - 00: 00:50: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here.

Joe - 00: 00:52: Thank you so much for joining me. I am very excited to speak to you. I had a great deal of, I get sent a whole bunch of stuff by all of our guests before the show. And this has probably been the most entertaining dive into all of those materials I've ever had. I greatly enjoyed watching some of your recent videos. You've released a bunch of stuff recently, right?

Aida - 00: 01:08: Yeah, let's wait.

Joe - 00: 01:10: Congratulations. I hope that's going well. And that's you. I think that'll be a fun place to start. Let's talk about your journey into tech. So I think if I'm correct, the music career came first, is that right?

Aida - 00: 01:21: Yeah, It came first because it came at years old. Wow. So I was still really young, so it did come first. But I've been always doing both at the same time. I think they both are part of my identity. So people tell me, take a decision, focus on something. But that wasn't for me.

Joe - 00: 01:39: Right, right. So there was never, there wasn't like a point in time where you were like, oh, I'm bored to this, I'm going to switch into tech. It was always these two paths you were exploring thing.

Aida - 00: 01:48: Yeah, definitely. I always had an interest on tech. It feels magical, you know, that you can open your car with your key, go back in time 500 years and you show them that, you're probably, it'll kill you or something. I think it's pretty magical. And the music, it just talks to my soul. It's just, I think it's very similar to me, but.

Joe - 00: 02:07: Interesting. So DevOps is obviously the role you're currently in. It's quite a particular era of technology. Was there anything in particular that motivated you to explore DevOps in particular?

Aida - 00: 02:17: The short answer is no. The long answer is I started as a QA engineer out of college, transitioned into tried a little bit and transitioned into SRE, then Software Engineering, and then DevOps. Lately, I've been more able to choose a path. And so DevOps seems interesting to me because you have an overview of the infrastructure. I think it's more challenging and I think there's also more, it's more interesting from engineering.

Joe - 00: 02:42: Interesting. So when you were just talking about your historical interest in tech, there you gave the example of like opening, making devices to open cars and things, which I think is a very interesting example because that's very creative and hacky, which obviously, you know, your music background, I imagine there's a lot of interplay there in the creativity that you must be able to express as a musician, but also technologically. Do you find that, is it a case of, Hey, I've got like my creative pursuit over here and my tech pursuit over there, or is there a lot of interplay between those?

Aida - 00: 03:09: Yeah, so unfortunately it's very difficult to be creative at the real job at this point in my career. I think if you're just a DevOps engineer it's really difficult to actually do something this creative because you got to do what you got to do.

Joe - 00: 03:23: Got a super creative CI pipeline going on here, right?

Aida - 00: 03:27: Yeah, so sometimes it can be, but usually it's not. But I do see technology as a way to... I think, let's say I draw something and I paint something magical, some fantasy. I see engineering is a way to make it real one day. I paint myself in the moon, then through engineering I can make myself in the moon someday.

Joe - 00: 03:50: Yeah, absolutely. Which I guess that leads me nicely into asking about your current role at Voxel51, which I understand is looking mostly at computer vision in AI. Is that correct?

Aida - 00: 03:59: No, that's correct.

Joe - 00: 04:00: So my understanding is you joined that role fairly recently, it was in March this year. And I guess that must be just an absolutely fascinating time to have joined an AI Company. I imagine your life has been a real rollercoaster for the past couple of months.

Aida - 00: 04:13: Yeah, definitely it is. I think the AI is a really interesting topic right now. All right, talking about it, there is a lot of war is going to end, there's a lot of movement, a lot of opinions. And so there is this big storm that comes when something big is coming. And that reminds me too, something I read about the photography when it was invented that some people say that photography is still their soul. And I think some people have this belief in. So regardless of what you do, what was going to be some mis-stuff about something new.

Joe - 00: 04:44: Yeah, that's a really fascinating parallel. That reminds me as well of when people talk about everyone always being on their phones, and then you see the old pictures of everyone reading newspapers when print first happened. Yeah, that's a really interesting comparison.

Aida - 00: 04:56: Yeah, every moment has its own new thing. And you can see this pattern with music too, when the L-Bass was becoming really famous and then everybody would say, non-music.

Joe - 00: 05:04: Yeah, the rock is the devil's music and all this stuff.

Aida - 00: 05:07: Yeah, kind of that. So it just keeps repeating. And each generation, including mine, I listen to the music on the radio nowadays and I'm like, what is this crap? I mean, it's been the same. I'm doing the same thing that people have been doing over and over again.

Joe - 00: 05:21: Yeah, I can definitely see how that cycle plays out in tech. And I guess that leads us nicely into our topic for today, which is digital trust. Because obviously trust has been at the height of a lot of conversations about AI, but is also very important in your work as a DevOps engineer. So I guess to kick us off, could you talk a little bit about what you mean by trust in the context of your work?

Aida - 00: 05:41: Yes, I guess trust is a big term. Trust means belief from the perspective of the business of organization, have the trust of the customers or the users of the platform. It means that they believe that what you provide is going to work. So I think DevOps, especially also term SRE, that is sometimes confusing between. But a lot to do with the trust from the Observability, monitoring the incident response, the whole SRE lifecycle that helps in that regard. But also something that now is not very friendly is Test Automation as a preventive measurement to be able to build something that doesn't have to be fixed after. That's a little bit my vision, I think. It's a cycle, you know, you try to prevent things to go wrong. And if they go wrong, you try to be able to monitor what is going on and then you fix it.

Joe - 00: 06:34: So when it does go wrong, you're accountable to that. You're able to report that like, hey, this has gone wrong and this is what we're doing to resolve it and keep that trust building. And people have expectations to manage, I guess, is a whole part there. So you mentioned a couple of terms there, our audience may be less familiar with, I guess, like Observability, obviously SRE, the title itself. What practices and frameworks do you think contribute to digital trust? Are those the, you mentioned like those different disciplines, are those how you frame that idea, or is there tools and techniques you use to build up that trust picture?

Aida - 00: 07:01: Yeah, I left something outside because you asked Me about DevOps and like more specific, but I think Cybersecurity is a huge part too. Right. It's usually also not taken care of, at least in places I've worked before. So I think it's a big part too, because if you don't have Cybersecurity, what do you have?

Joe - 00: 07:18: Right.

Aida - 00: 07:19: It's main thing. So I'll say Cybersecurity is important and then Test Automation. So any framework, it doesn't matter, the tool, and then some good response and monitoring tools and some of the ability of what's going on in production of the environment and then have some process around a team that can respond to that.

Joe - 00: 07:39: Makes sense. Yeah. You mentioned a couple of areas there that I guess pose particular difficulties to companies, obviously having cybersecurity, knowing that your platform is secure and having a response ready for that. What are some of the other major challenges that you think organizations face in building trust?

Aida - 00: 07:54: There's two, one is I work for startups mostly, so not having enough people to take care of everything. So not having press automation, or not having observability, not having monitoring, not having incident response, not having a cybersecurity engineer that happens that's almost all the time. So I'd say mostly that I think for bigger Companies, most likely it's maybe lack of process or just having things too stuck on the same place and have to write too many papers in order to do something instead of just do it. I think there is also one thing that I'll probably mention it later too, but it's that this is a little bit more of a general overview, but I think most the engineers and most professionals nowadays society are very specialized. So as I mentioned, engineering only knows about this dimension, engineering Cybersecurity engineer, people that knows a lot about a lot of things, but there's a lot of specialization. So with Cybersecurity, especially, I think it's important that everybody knows about Cybersecurity as well as automation. Everybody should know about Test Automation because the person that is writing a new feature is breaking the test as well. So I think everybody should know about a little bit about everything and if something is not happening, that's breaking the process. I see that's creating a lot of struggle through the way.

Joe - 00: 09:12: Right, so everyone needs that foundational layer of at least enough to understand the context and the requirements of what's happening, and then they have their specialisms, but they still need to understand, you know, what the person next to them is doing, that stuff, right?

Aida - 00: 09:23: Yeah, and have consideration about it.

Joe - 00: 09:27: Every engineer having some consideration of security issues would be very nice. Yeah, absolutely.

Aida - 00: 09:33: We should all have, like, individually as an engineer, it's one of us, it's our duty to try to be proficient on a little bit of everything that is involved with security.

Joe - 00: 09:47: Right, right. I think I can't remember who said it, but someone at some point said this thing to Me, which was like... You don't necessarily have to like know how to secure this application in a particular way, but you should recognize what you don't know how to secure and ask the person who does know, right? Like you should be able to say like, hey, I don't know if this is, I don't know how to secure this, put my hand up and say, can someone make sure this is secure rather than just saying, oh, it's fine. I'm moving on.

Aida - 00: 10:12: Yeah, the problem is that we know, but we never know what we don't know. And that goes for it

Joe - 00: 10:16: Known knowns and unknown unknowns and yeah whatever the famous quote is. So obviously you mentioned that one thing which is is resourcing. Resourcing is a problem with a pretty clear solution which is hire people but what are some other practical steps that you think organizations can take to solve these problems and to build their digital trust?

Aida - 00: 10:34: Yeah, I think a way to break the gap between this hardcore specialization with the software engineers focused on the code and just this part of code will work and everything else doesn't matter because they will take care of it. I think that could be cure by doing some training and maybe rewarding people for knowing things. I mean, yeah, there's not really one to learn that is not in their job description in ways But yeah, so I think training and also doing some cross plenary work sometimes and do fun things too, because I think no hackathons and those things.

Joe - 00: 11:11: Yeah, capture the flags for security and yeah.

Aida - 00: 11:13: Yeah, they're very helpful to, you know, get together and work in a project that is fun and there's no better way to learn that have fun. I don't know how much I stress that but there's no better way to learn to have fun. When you have fun, you work better and everything just goes good.

Joe - 00: 11:30: Yeah. Yeah. Do you have an example of like somewhere you've worked that's done this really well?

Aida - 00: 11:34: I think no place have done it perfect. I think it doesn't exist as well. But I think all the startups I work at, they're pretty similar on, you know, trying to figure out this process, like working in startups because of this. But I think startups are also very busy constantly and they don't have time to figure out. They put away things that are not released, whatever the customer is asking for now, because if we don't have these, we don't have the money, and then we just, well, we're not here. We all lose our job. So that desperation situation, I think, is really good to speed things up. But it's bad in the part that things are considered not as important, that is usually Test Automation. And observability doesn't go away sometimes.

Joe - 00: 12:27: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that when there's that pressure to keep the company going up until its next investment event or whatever.

Aida - 00: 12:37: And we're all going to eat.

Joe - 00: 12:39: Right, right. So I want to go back to you, Cybersecurity because you gave the high-level overview its importance there, but you said you wanted to go back to it. So can you explain the role of Cybersecurity in building that trust? And I guess it would be interesting to hear precisely what should businesses be doing to ensure that they're on top of Cybersecurity threats?

Aida - 00: 13:00: I think I should hire a Cybersecurity engineer, a high-levelized specialist, and then ask him, how can we train everybody else on this? And then do it.

Joe - 00: 13:12: Yeah, I think that there's a surprising amount of problems that I think we dance around in tech industry and various tech industry concerns that are like, the real talk is like, hey, hire an expert in this. That we try to look for really complicated automated solutions to and it's just, no, just go hire the person who knows how to do that, please. I think moderation is another one that comes under that.

Aida - 00: 13:32: You can learn your size, if you have the money, you don't have the time, then do it. But if you don't have the money, you have the time, then maybe learn it. It's just the person, the situation. You ask me about a company, companies usually have the money.

Joe - 00: 13:43: Sure. Yeah. And even going to the, you know, the startup case that you were discussing, a startup might have the trade-off of like, oh, the expertise is going to be expensive. But like, when you talk about Cybersecurity, the expertise isn't going to be as expensive as you being hacked, right? It's, there's a real cost-benefit analysis to be done there.

Aida - 00: 13:59: I think there is a risk assessment that anybody with a business has to do. And, um, it can be short-sighted or long-sighted and then depends how you take your decisions that they'll play a role in, however, that thing goes in the long-term. So if a lot of places are just driven by really, I don't know what, but some other places, they try to take decisions more in the long-term and try to take, put these things into place. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but somebody that is able to think more than two weeks ahead, should be able to think about Cybersecurity engineers is probably a good idea. You can sue, you know, it is going to be hard for everybody.

Joe - 00: 14:38: I guess to go back to some particular techniques and tools for building trust in your organization, one of the concepts we hear about is the Secure Software Development Life Cycle, SSDLC. Have you encountered this? Would you say this is a tool for helping build digital trust?

Aida - 00: 14:51: I've been in places where there has been an effort to implement this. But however, the whole, just the software life cycle itself wasn't like fully working with the part implementation part, the plumbing part and the monitoring parts, it gets really hard and really complicated to cover everything. And it goes back to the idea, the whole idea of is there enough people looking at all the parts here, or is just bunch of engineers throwing things to production and closing their eyes, hoping that everybody is there to help. Most of the times I've seen that there was a will to cover this, but I think we talked about it before. If, if not, everybody's aware of what security means, then nothing happens because you make an app that is not secure, you deploy and nobody knows about it until there is a security risk. And then that point is when we all put our heads in the head and start yelling and screaming.

Joe - 00: 15:47: Yeah, absolutely. So another area that I don't know if it interacts, well, actually I’m intrigued to the extent to which it interacts with your roles. Obviously we're hearing more and more about the data privacy and compliance with various privacy regulations. And those obviously are key components of digital trust for many vectors, knowing what the Company is doing with your data and how they're treating it. Like, how do you ensure that those issues are dealt with in your roles, DevOps engineer?

Aida - 00: 16:11: I think there's different parts and some are not even covered by DevOps. There is maybe a, I don't know if I've called it like a product-side or a business-side with the fairness, do things that you can audit the transparency. Those are not our hands to implement, but those are things that have to be there because if you're not transparent, then you're really not doing much, nobody's going to trust you. Nobody's going to trust the product. If you don't audit things, then there's no logs of what you're doing. So it's also not something trustable. And there's also fairness, which is, I think it's an interesting topic. I work for a company that we were working on fair lending analysis, which is pretty interesting and fairness with AI now, it takes a new whole level of significance because of all, you know, these protected categories and parameters when doing analysis of data of people. And I understand that it's a hot topic because it's really hard to deal with fairness in AI model in that data set. No, you have a day set of hundred people and then 70% of the people that are criminals are brunette people and then 30% are blonde, then there you have, you feed that to AI and then the AI thinks that brunette people are more criminals than blonde people, whatever reason. And so is that fair? That's the question. And then you can argue about that, obviously, all the way you can. And that's what the argument is. I think fair is really important too for trust. Because if you don't offer something that seems fair by whatever standards are the customers, then they're not going to believe you.

Joe - 00: 17:42: Right, right, right. Do you find that, you know, we started talking about AI and the terms of AI and we've come back around to it. Do you find you have, where does being a DevOps engineer link into that in your role of dealing with AI? Is there much in your ability as an engineer day-to-day to build trust for the organization? Are you finding AI has a part to play in that?

Aida- 00: 18:03: I think it's a little bit out of my hands as a DevOps to play with things like fairness or transparency. I think those are more like marketing or, you know, topics, maybe more business thing. Within my job, I can work with privacy, Cybersecurity, safety, reliability of the product. So it's more from a technical point of view. I think words like fairness and transparency are more based on communication. How you communicate and also what you show about the product to the users. So in that regard, I guess if the product is good and it works good, then yes, you can be transparent about it. But if the product doesn't work good and there is something wrong about it, you can also be transparent and say this thing is not working and we're going to fix it or we are not going to fix it. And that honesty and that transparency is valuable. And that's not up to me because I'm on the technical side. But yeah, well, I'd say out it in and have it log everything. That's something, yes, we can work on.

Joe - 00: 19:05: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess we might have already covered this talking about, you know, AI is going to be a big trend throughout the rest of the year, but do you think there are any significant changes or hurdles coming up that will affect how companies build and maintain trust?

Aida - 00: 19:19: I wish I knew. I'll invest in some Companies. Now I retire early. No, I think AI is going pretty fast and it's advancing a lot. I do have a personal opinion about AI that is totally based on my perception. So it's probably wrong, but it is more what I feel than what I think. So, and I've seen this with AI Creating Art. So when I create art with AI, I've seen wonderful art. I love it. It's a tool that is great. You can create these beautiful pictures. But when you create poems, AI, This is why I say it's I feel, it's not I think.

Joe- 00: 20:05: Yeah, of course, of course. And this is an area that I think everyone is exploring and trying to work out like how they feel, but also, you know, the ethics and the more formal part of it. So I think sharing how you feel is a space that everyone is currently trying to work out how they feel about it, you know.

Aida - 00: 20:19: Yeah, so I'll tell you the feeling and then after I'll tell you what, why I think it might be, but I feel is not as a human yet. My team will probably be in the future. I think it lacks something, but I can tell you why or what specific. It lacks something. It lacks error to me. It's like good.

Joe - 00: 20:40: Right, right. And too good in what way? So I mean, not to make this welcome to the poetry podcast. So when you say like it lacks errors and like, oh, the meter is too perfect. Like, in what way is it too good?

Aida - 00: 20:50: Yeah, it's like food without seasoning. It's a...

Joe - 00: 20:54: Right. That's fantastic.

Aida- 00: 20:56: There is something missing. It's good, but there's something missing. So I'm thinking that might be, that's my theory, but I don't know. I don't know that much about AI anyways. But I think it could be because the models that are built, as far as I know, they're based on the simplification of how the human brain works, because we don't even know how the human brain works. We know there is neurons, things that connect neurons, and then we are like, let's just make something that looks like a brain. I think our brain is a little bit more complex than that. We still couldn't get to know how it actually works, because what we're doing is a simplification of our brain. It's not our brain itself. I think the results that it's providing is also a simplification of our own brain. So I still think there is a little gap between what our brain is and what AI is. At some point, we'll be able to discover the brain at some point, and we'll be like, oh, okay, so that's how it was. Hopefully, that's a great day to kill people from mental illnesses first, and then after that, the way up.

Joe - 00: 21:56: Yeah, absolutely.

Aida - 00: 21:57: What other cool stuff?

Joe - 00: 21:59: That's a very good point. I think a lot of people, when they were talking about AI currently, were talking about large language models, these things that have been given all of the text on the internet. I think people often get the large language bit, they know that it's had lots of text, and they forget the model. They forget that this is being applied to something that's meant to be simulating a process. They often critique the data and the training, the text that's gone into it, and not the model. I think that's a very good point. It's also fascinating when you think about the way people have reacted to AI art. They're often pointing out the flaws, the fact that hands are weird, the facts that teeth are weird. To hear that your issue with the poetry is almost the opposite of that, that it's too shiny, it's too perfect, is really fascinating. That's such an interesting dichotomy. Yeah, thank you for sharing those feelings.

Aida - 00: 22:46: I think it's cool. I'm grateful that I can do art and also engineering because it gives you a little bit of a different view on art. And I know that everybody is able to, I mean, art is ambiguous, you know, so it could be anything, but not everybody is sensitive to art as much as other people. And personally, they're sensitive to art, realizing that art is an act of reverie. And you know, you want to do things really beautiful, but they're imperfect too. And so there is something about AI poetry that is not on human poetry. And there is human poetry that looks like AI poetry. Don't get me wrong, no? But yeah, something there is missing, in my opinion.

Joe - 00: 23:27: Yeah, that makes total sense. I think that discussion on AI is a great way to close this out. But before we go, I have a slightly silly question for you, which maybe you've explored before. I don't know. If you could combine your musical career with your DevOps career and create a song, a performance about DevOps, what would it be called?

Aida - 00: 23:49: I've never thought about that.

Joe - 00: 23:50: That surprises me so much.

Aida - 00: 23:53: I'm currently working on projects that combine the knowledge on the two areas, but it's a lot of song specific. I would probably go with something that is fantasy. Something fantasy.

Joe - 00: 24:05: Or that cuts deep.

Aida - 00: 24:07: Yeah, I'm visualizing the music video first for some reason, but something with technology.

Joe – 00: 24:12: It's a good way to start.

Aida – 00: 24:13: Yeah, something technology, you know, maybe robots or like some virtual reality or mental reality glasses, you know, people walking and then post-apocalyptic, maybe a song that is happy, but you know, when you put a happy song in a sad environment, they create that contrast. I guess something like that. It wouldn't be about the DevOps specifically. It would be more about technology, about robot, something fantasy. Yeah, absolutely.

Joe - 00: 24:39: Perfect. Thank you so much. And thank you for joining us today and chatting about Digital Trust. I've definitely learned a lot and I'm sure I'll learn it. Readers have as well. Readers, listeners have as well. So thank you for joining Me today.

Aida - 00: 24:50: Thank you. My pleasure.

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