Tech leader Nana Janashia dispels myths about engineering being harder than other professions

TechWorld’s Nana Janashia abandoned one startup to lean into another, four years and nearly 1 million subscribers later, she is helping DevOps teams with practical tutorials and advice

Q: What inspired you to start TechWorld with Nana, and how has it evolved since its inception?

Nana: My first freelance project was at the biggest telecom company in Austria where I joined as a lead software engineer but soon found myself setting up a complete production-grade Kubernetes cluster for the project (Kubernetes or K8 is is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management). I was kind of forced into the K8s administrator role, since I was the only one with a little K8s pre-experience. I found it great but super challenging at the same time. This was a big part of my K8s and DevOps experience.

Over the course of a year, I worked closely with an IT operations team and multiple product teams to configure various services in the K8s cluster. While I was learning all sorts of concepts around K8s, I was trying to transfer the relevant knowledge to developers and operations within the project so they could take over after my freelance project was over.

And I have to be honest - even though I loved learning K8s and configuring the whole thing, it was a very stressful and challenging experience. Things were badly documented and most of the integrations with other tools didn’t work properly. It was just a complex, overwhelming new world, so there were lots of trial and error, misconfigurations and things breaking down. There were a lot of lessons learned for me. That was when I actually started thinking about creating videos on K8s to make this journey easier for others and share what I learned.

Nana Janashia

Another major factor was that I was working on my own startup on the side, and I knew if I started working on it full-time, I would abandon K8s and may never have anything to do with it because my startup was in the real estate field. However, if my startup failed after one or two years, I might have had to go back to K8s and would probably have forgotten most of the things I had learned. I thought turning my countless chaotic notes into structured videos would make it easier for me to refresh my knowledge and get back into working on K8s if I needed to at some point.

I gathered hundreds of pages of my notes and planned the whole K8s playlist videos, which were my first videos on YouTube to share my DevOps experience. The idea was just to create all these playlist videos, post them on YouTube, so other engineers would also benefit from it and then go back to my startup. Long story short, before I was even done publishing all the videos in the playlist, they were receiving amazing feedback. My co-founder and I decided that this should be the startup and that’s how TechWorld with Nana was born.

After that, while creating the videos on YouTube, I moved to another large energy company where I did software engineering with a focus on setting up and configuring CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and implementing Git workflow and continuous deployment best practices. In January 2021, I started consulting companies and training employees who needed support setting up their CI/CD processes and setting up and managing K8s environments. Of course, I learned a lot on top of that while making my videos, because I think you don’t always learn the best practices at work in actual projects; rather, you learn what doesn’t work and you learn how to make things work as fast as possible due to the stress of deadlines. Doing research and theoretically learning things adds to that experience of how to use those tools correctly and not just in a way that simply works.

Q: How do you stay updated and informed about the rapidly changing tech landscape?

Nana: This is the most challenging and the most exciting part of my job.

When I started as a K8s administrator, I was overwhelmed by technologies and tools and their integrations with each other. However, when I started producing YouTube videos, I realized that I needed to REALLY understand the technology or a concept in order to explain it simply. Even if I was able to use those tools in practice as a practitioner, there were some details or nuances I didn’t understand properly. I had to dig in and learn not just how these tools worked but how they worked with best practices. I discovered the more tools I learned, the more clear the underlying concepts were becoming. It was easier to make parallels and comparisons with every new tool. And learned tools, by comparing them with alternative tools, like advantages and disadvantages, and conceptual differences, which helped me understand the tools better and from various angles.

Over time, I developed a strategy that focused on concepts first and tools second, because there are a handful of concepts but hundreds of tools. I first learned and understood every aspect of a new concept, like platform engineering or GitOps. I asked questions like, why was this concept needed, why we even had to come up with it, and what in the traditional approach was not working or not enough. Once I understand the concept, then I start learning about the tools that implement this concept and are related to it. It makes learning and staying up-to-date way more efficient. It also allows me to share my findings with my audience in a similar way, first explaining the whys and then the hows.

Q: What are the key challenges you face when explaining complex tech concepts to a broad audience, and how do you overcome them?

Nana: If I have a complex topic that has many aspects, such as needing to understand the architecture, the usage, and the why behind it, I take a lot of time thinking about how I create a continuous flow of explaining these aspects. That means that in our videos I never just list features or use cases of the tool and explain them in isolation one by one. I try to think of a logical transition between each of the features and use cases. Even in 40 to 50-minute videos, there is a continuous, unbroken chain of explanations about various aspects of the tool or concept.

One thing that also helps me structure the videos is to try to anticipate what questions the viewers/learners will have while learning about the tool or watching the video, and I try to integrate those questions into the video.

“I think many engineers aren’t doing a good job of dissolving this fear to newcomers, making it sound like engineering is something exceptionally challenging or difficult.”

Q: How do you think the tech industry can become more inclusive and diverse? What steps can we take to achieve this?

Nana: I believe people don’t choose a profession or a job; they choose to replicate the path of someone they admire or look up to. This could be a parent, an older sibling, or just someone they admire. That’s why role models are so important.

I had a few people I admired who were business people, and that’s why since I was a teenager, it’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t know anyone who was in tech, so I studied business and marketing and planned my career in that direction. Out of pure luck and coincidence, I got into a situation where I had to choose IT. Even though I had no idea about it, I simply wanted to have a chance of getting a work permit in Austria after my graduation.

I thought it was a “man’s profession.” For me, it was a complete black box. I had no idea what I had to expect, but my motivation for a solid chance of getting a stable job prevailed and I committed to learning whatever I had to learn. It turned out that it is not a man’s profession; it is not difficult and scary, and you don’t have to be a math prodigy. It is just another normal profession. You have to learn the skills just like you have to learn in any other profession you choose. Nothing spectacular or different here. I think many engineers aren’t doing a good job of dissolving this fear to newcomers, making it sound like engineering is something exceptionally challenging or difficult.

The combination of having role models who say, “Hey, it’s challenging just like any other profession, but with the upside of being an exciting future-proof profession with a wide range of professions to choose from,” is going to make a ton of difference in making IT in general more appealing to people outside of the male demographic group.

Q: What advice would you give to someone who is just starting a career in tech and wants to make a significant impact?

Nana: Tech is huge. There are tons of different fields and professions. When you are just starting, have an open and exploring mindset. Instead of trying to cozy up in one specific small field, try to explore, try to test what you like the most. Remember, no knowledge is wasted in tech. If you start in data science and later decide you wanna do cloud engineering, and end up in mobile app development, all the previous knowledge will just give you more of an advantage.

Don’t be afraid to spend the first 2-3 years exploring before you settle. Once you find a profession or role you absolutely enjoy, double and triple down on that. It is always much easier to make an impact with something you enjoy doing.

Q: We host a popular Book Club and our community is always looking for recommendations, whether career-focused or just a great read. What are you currently reading?

Nana: I’ve recently finished reading two books and I can fully recommend both of them: The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz and Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance.