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

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; Listen
• Diana'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 SRE
• As 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:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• GitHub

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela

Links:

• Erasmus Scholarship
• Geeking Out Live: Working Moms in Tech, featuring Diana as one of the panelists
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 (web site)
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on Instagram
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on LinkedIn