Victoria Guido of thoughtbot: Helping Businesses Every Step of the Way

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You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am your host, Neal Bloom and I am thrilled to be joined by Victoria Guido, managing director at ThoughtBot. Hey Victoria, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me.

It's been fun getting to know you on our founder hikes and now we get to get to know your background a little bit and what ThoughtBot's up to. You want to give us an overview of what ThoughtBot is?

Yeah. So ThoughtBot is known worldwide as a leading design, development and product management consultancy. We provide end to end services along the complete product development lifecycle. So we have an agile human centered strategy for digital products in every stage from upfront research through design and development. So since 2003 we've worked to produce higher quality products while improving team processes and we've done so for over a thousand clients. Wow.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to get to know some of the projects and companies you've worked on. But how about you? You've had a little bit of a journey to get to San Diego and to this. Where did it all start for you? How did you end up down this crazy tech world?

Yeah, so my background, I'm originally from Washington D.C. so I have a huge history in federal consulting for big agencies and trying to bring modern digital services practices to them. And then 2020, my partner's job decided to move him to San Diego and he's like, you want to get married and move to California? I was like, yeah, let's do it. So that's how I got here. And after about a year of working remote still in the D.C. space, I decided it was time to do something different and get into a different industry. And I found ThoughtBot and it just worked out and we're a fully remote company so that works out and we meet up in person twice a year. So I've been to England and the Azores. I'm going to Mexico this fall. So it's been really cool to have that experience.

Those are some cool spots to meet up, that's for sure. When you're working on federal, in the federal area, was it also in the software and kind of the technical space?

Yes. So programs like the platform for all the public facing homeland security websites like FEMA and the ones that you probably know and also for banks, like for Fannie Mae for a while, Pensions Benefits Guarantee Corporation as well. So it's just a different agencies and I think a lot of people think about federal IT as being more old fashioned but there's actually a lot of progress in a lot of places that are doing very modern software delivery approaches. So that's what I've been working in and trying to promote within there for a long time.

I was going to ask about that. Yeah, I would imagine the expectation versus what reality is got to have changed a little bit. Especially during COVID Is there a lot of development agency work doing work for the government or does the government do a lot in house?

Generally it's really mixed. I mean it's a huge industry. So my experience actually started at citizenship and immigration services around the same time that Mark Schwartz came in as CTO and he brought in a lot of modern industry practices and was like we're going to do Agile, we're going to do DevOps and they're one of the more forward leaning agencies where they're, you know, some of the applications they have are deploying 30 times a day, they're doing feature flags and all that type of stuff. So he was really a pioneer in bringing in some more modern practices into the government. So you can actually find some pretty advanced techniques in the government. And they also are just a little bit different around security and like disaster recovery and failover practices sometimes can even be more advanced than private companies. So it's really an interesting space to be in, but I'm glad to be in the private space now. Yeah, different.

Yeah, yeah, A little more nimble.

Can close clients in a day. That's a really nice perk.

Yeah, totally. And get to work on probably like a very wide variety of things. So, yeah, kind of take us through maybe a little bit of the history of Thoughtbot, like, where did it originally start? And focus on versus where did it. Where is it today?

Yeah, so originally when IT first got started, it was really just regular IT services consulting and then they found a niche in Ruby on Rails and being able to spin up applications very quickly and with low operational costs for startups. And that was where we really contributed to the community in a big way. Publishing our playbook. We have quite a few open source projects that are still very popular today and in use. So if you're a Ruby on Rails developer, you've almost certainly heard of Thoughtbot and are using some of our gems that are very popular. And then we also branch into React and Django and Python. So we have a little bit of a mix of different technologies and then my team is focused on platform engineering and DevOps. So what we found is that once companies are really ready to get to that enterprise level and they want to go to a cloud provider like aws, there's just a million different ways you can deploy to AWS and everyone is kind of doing their own bespoke deployments. And so my cto, Joe Ferris, designed a system where. And we open source it. So we have our playbook of how we deploy to aws. We have open source Terraform modules that you can use that anyone can go and look at and use and expanding on that. And that type of delivery has been really interesting and exciting for me now.

Yeah, and what area did you kind of originally start and dive in on versus? What have you expanded with?

Yeah, so we started with the platform guide. So we have our process for deploying to the cloud and we have these open source Terraform modules and we're starting to expand more into the site reliability engineering Space. And so working with clients. One of our clients is a fast food chain and if their site's down, that's thousands of dollars for every minute that it's out. So we're designing alerting and monitoring tools to be able to prevent those issues from happening and to let us know as soon as they happen, how do we get in there and how do we intervene and get it back up and running. So that's been a really cool thing to expand on and to try to connect those concepts back into design and product. So if you're building a product and you're thinking about the full user experience journey and what are those critical steps to get them to like the end of the transaction and think. Getting designers and product people to think about, okay, how do I. How does latency play in here? What is a tolerable amount of time for someone to wait for that website to respond? So that's been really exciting for me to dive more into.

Yeah, I imagine since COVID as well, people just have less patience for, especially on the E commerce side, food ordering, delivery things just have to work because we don't have other options. Any other use cases like that where you've just kind of seen like the need for tech to be more of a band aid versus, you know, vitamin in that regard.

Yeah. So one of our projects had to do with the vaccine website. So when people are trying to log on and get an appointment to go to their vaccine, and then there's also bad actors who are attacking that site constantly. So figuring out how do we build this to be more resilient so that we can handle this huge increase of traffic once the states open up for their appointments was part of what went into how we built our platform guide and how we designed it so that it's resilient and that if you are suddenly going to have 100,000 more users getting into your site, how do you respond to that and make it so they can get what they need.

Interesting. Yeah. What other industries have you spent some time in since you've been there at Thoughtbot?

Yeah, it's really been all over the place. So we have a couple health tech companies and sometimes it's for those large companies who they're servicing hundreds of thousands of users and other times it's a brand new startup. Front Row Health is a new startup that is connecting those products. You see, I'll advertise like on Instagram, like they'll be like, take this pill to, I don't know, make your hair better or whatever. And giving access to doctors, to the information on those products so that when their patients ask them about them, they have more information about like what's in the product, what does it interact with. And so being able to facilitate those conversations a little bit more instead of, you know, when you go to the doctor and you randomly ask them like, oh, I saw an ad for this hormone injection or something and like should I get this or not that they have a little bit more information and they can actually recommend to their clients if there are things like that would benefit them. So that's one.

Yeah.

And the educational services. So we have one client who does just building educational tools for schools and communities. And so we're really like across the spectrum on industry wide here.

Really interesting. And you mentioned your team's remote. What's collaboration like, you know, beside. Because everyone's guessing on a bunch of different projects. But how do you as a team learn from each other and stay up on like what's the latest, especially with AI right now, like new tools that.

Are coming out all the time so much. Yeah. ThoughtBot is a really unique remote culture. So we have an extremely active slack community within the company. So we have social channels and we also have topic channels like the things that you mentioned. And I think one of the interesting things that our leadership did was to put our handbook and a lot of our custom tooling that we have into GitHub so that people can open an issue on something in the handbook and we can all message about it and collaborate. And so that way it's a very open, kind of talkative, communicative thing. So we have that for everyone who's remote. They can see the conversations that are going on. It's almost overwhelming. Like there's so much happening and then the in person meetups have been fantastic. So we all get together once a year. It's been in London the last two years, so in Brighton actually. And then we do team, smaller team meetups. Last year I went to one of the Azores which was super cool. And then now I think we're going to Mexico this fall. But we're globally distributed in the Americas and in the European and West African and West Asia. So that way people can have different places. So one team's going to Rwanda, one team's going to Mexico, another team might be going to Japan again later this year. So that's been a way we've kind of been able to stay connected and going to conferences too. So since we're a part of this big open source community, we Want to connect and share our ideas and we went to Railsconf in Atlanta. I was just in Ruby Kaigi in Japan and Matsumoto, so that's. I feel actually very connected to my coworkers even though we're fully remote.

Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. Anyone else in Southern California that you've actually been to randomly see once since you've been here?

There's a few people in la, so every time I go out there and actually was just connected up through LA to go to Japan, so I was able to go to happy hour with a co worker in LA before we took the flight. So that. That's been fun. Yeah, I'm actually pushing. I'm like the first San Diegan. I'm like not the last. Yeah, we're gonna get some more. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah. What's the San Diego scene been like for you since you've been here? I know you've been getting out and you know, doing the founders hike, but have you gotten to know some of the developer meetup and communities here?

Yeah, I've been to a web design and accessibility meetup which was really cool. They had like five great lightning talks last fall. I was able to attend. That's been super fun. I think that's something really special about San Diego is that you can do meetups outside or they're on a patio or you know, we're going on a hike. So it's been really fun. Especially the. What was the name of that event? It was the big San Diego tech meetup that I saw you at, actually very briefly, the March Mingle. That was so fun and just in a beautiful place in Balboa Park. So it's been fun to get to go out and meet people and in a maybe slightly safer networking environment than you know, in dc. It's cold and you got to be inside and you're taking a risk. A little bit more that way.

Yeah, for sure. Next big event, if not on your radar yet, is the summer social in mid June, depending on when this episode goes out. But yeah, it's worth looking up by Connect. There'll probably be another 5, 6, 700 people out in Encinitas, so close to where we are and probably all outdoors. So should be a good time as well too.

I love it. Sounds like my kind of event.

Yeah, exactly. The developer meetups here as well. There's a deep, you know, Ruby meetup here and SD JavaScript. I know them more from pre Covid. Have you gotten engaged? Have you seen much engagement with them since or.

No, I haven't yet. I need to. It's on my list. It's funny being in Encinitas and that's also what I've noticed a little bit is that the meetups are a little spread out. Right. Because there's not quite like a central hub for meetups as much as there was in dc. So giving the motivation to leave my house and go meet some people, I am going to do it, I think. But yeah, it's taken a little bit time. I was really involved in the meetup community in D.C. and I was organizing DevOps DC and Women who Code and I actually continued to do that virtually for about a year being here. And then I finally like was like, okay, I'm stepping all the way back and I'm just here for advisory purposes. So it's been almost like an emotional journey to let go of those groups and reach out to form new groups. It's scary and making new friends can be hard, but I'll get there.

Yeah, no, and San Diego is like a really, really giving like welcoming town. So if you haven't felt that yet, you will in other communities and groups. The other group worth getting to know in north county is San Diego Tech Hub, a north county focus more for like general tech employees I would say, which would be good to meet there. I think they always have events in Carlsbad and I think the next one is next Tuesday.

Oh great.

More for you is more important Tuesday the 23rd I think so there another one. Let's make sure you get connected. You also, I know have gotten connected on the startup Slack group which has been pretty active. So yeah, what else do you kind of envision? Maybe not just San Diego, but community wise where do you see communities going? Especially in a way that thocbot is looking at engaging developer communities.

Yeah, I'm. What I like about San Diego is there's just so many people doing really interesting things. So I'm curious to meet more founders and more like tech leaders who are working on hard problems. There is a strong women who Code San Diego group so I've been to a couple of their virtual events and I'm curious if they're going to start having in person. I'd like to go to that but yeah I would. I want to get more involved with the Ruby group and meet those people. I'm sure they've heard of that but it's one of the nice things working there is if you meet some Ruby people they're like oh, thank you for this content that you put out and I'm like, you're welcome. I definitely, I don't know if I contributed that much to that the last year, but I think it'd be cool to hear from people and. And I think when you're putting open source projects and products out there, it's important to reach out and get that feedback, like, how are you using it? What do you wish would be better? Sometimes not everyone's going to open up an issue in GitHub to say that. So it's really cool to get that real feedback. And there's an interesting discussion about Ruby on Rails and the future of it. So there's a lot of bootcamps have stopped teaching it, but I know that Learn Academy in San Diego still teaches it and teaches it as a way to kind of get developers with the whole experience of web development because it's so fast to spin up an application and have all the pieces that you need. So it's kind of coming back around. I think like that Ruby on Rails is still one of the top programming languages. It's still one of the most popular used in the web. There's some huge applications that are running on Ruby on Rails. And so I think it'll be interesting to hear from the community what do they feel is really the barriers to continuing to use it or why they choose not to use it for their startup projects and how do we get that interest going again and really demonstrate that, you know, it does work really well with react libraries and you can use it in like collaboration with like data science and AI projects and like, where does it really fit in and what makes it the right choice for a project or not?

Yeah, no, you mentioned a good point around the boot camps, right? Training new people on this is really important. This is kind of their foundation to pick this code base. So, yeah, it's been great to see. San Diego has some history with some boot camps, but a lot went virtual during the previous years. So I'm hopeful that you being here and kind of being an advocate for the community, we can get more junior talent kind of focused in this pathway as well. So I'm excited to see you dive into that area too. Okay, well, the last area obviously, and the most important really community of San Diego is our taco scene. I don't know if you had heard about it much before you moved here, but now you're obviously immersed in it. Do you have a favorite taco spot? So we have to know first.

I do. So we're in Encinitas So we're very lucky to have both taco stand and City Tacos. And I was talking about it with my husband last night. We were at City Tacos and we said that City Tacos is our favorite. And the Mexicali taco that they have is very good. I also really like. They do like a chorizo potato taco thing that's just amazing. But we like. But it's hard to choose. There's so many. And I think that's really the thing is, like, there's very good tacos here, but there's also just. There's so many to choose from. And you can go to a different taco place every single night of the week probably for like a month.

It's true.

Still have more new ones to explore.

Yeah, well, you nailed. My current recent favorite is the Mexicali at City Taco. I am literally sitting about 100ft from it right now and probably will go order some for to have right after this podcast. But I don't know if I picked where I'm working because I'm proximity to City Tacos or vice versa. But my goal now is to try everything on the menu because there's so many good options there. And different kind of tacos too. Right. They've got the old tacos, the fried, the fresh tortilla, you know, soft like.

Mm. I just tried the scallop taco for the first time last night. And the zucchini taco, which I thought were both excellent. Yeah. But I'm on the same boat. Like, I have more favorites. And then I'm gonna also gonna rotate it and get some new ones. Yeah.

Yeah. I pretty much always order Mexicali and then something new. Right.

Just, you know, they have a good breakfast deal. So you can get a breakfast burrito and a beer for $10 and you can go. Or you can get two tacos and a beer for $10 at breakfast time. So I'll put that out there as well.

I like how you party. Great thing to do in the morning.

Yeah. Maybe this summer if I get my surf game back on, I'll go get a surf session in and then grab a beer and a couple tacos afterwards. That sounds like a great weekend plan.

That sounds like a great weekend and sounds like a meetup we need to do as a group at City Tacos and then bring everyone back to Bluma for the taco to eat them.

So that sounds like a great plan.

Yeah. Well, Victoria, it's great having you here in town. I'M excited to collaborate on more community building but also do some taco eating and some founder hikes. Again, first Wednesday of each month at Torrey Pines South Lot, we trek up and down the big hill and the beach. I don't think you were there when we did the beach side recently, were you?

No, I just made the hill one one time and it was raining a little bit, but it was still beautiful.

Yeah, well the beach is unfortunately pretty much gone. There is no sand left, so it was all just like hiking on rocks. So it was just as challenging as doing the hill. So, you know, we will add that to a repertoire if the tides allow in the future. That's kind of what's happened the last six months. The tides have just been too high. Good for surfing. Maybe not. Well, actually, no, not. I can't claim that to be the case either. But in either case, we will see you soon. And thanks again for joining the podcast.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

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You to want on tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got it hey.

Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech you know we got it Hey.