Interview with Cloud Advocate Tanya Janca
Tags: podcast, interview, advocate, owasp
Published: 2020-10-20 07:26:55

Interview with Founder Tanya Janca

This is the transcript of my conversation on [@FromSourcePod](https://twitter.com/FromSourcePod) with [Tanya Janca](https://twitter.com/shehackspurple).

Tanya Janca, also known as SheHacksPurple, is the author of [Alice and Bob Learn Application Security](https://amzn.to/3ikqt7u). She is also the founder of [We Hack Purple](https://wehackpurple.com/), an online learning academy, community, and podcast that revolves around teaching everyone to create secure software. Tanya has been coding and working in IT for over twenty years, won numerous awards, and has been everywhere from startups to public service to tech giants (Microsoft, Adobe, & Nokia). She has worn many hats; startup founder, pentester, CISO, AppSec Engineer, and software developer. She is an award-winning public speaker, active blogger & streamer and has delivered hundreds of talks and training on 6 continents. She values diversity, inclusion, and kindness, which shines through in her countless initiatives.

*This has been edited for clarity. Tanya is no longer a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft but was at the time of this recording*

**Michelle**: Tanya, what is your current job title and how long have you been there?

**Tanya**: My job title is Cloud Advocate at Microsoft and I've been there a year and a half. It's an unusual job. It's part of developer relations with the idea that companies want to understand better what developers need and want, rather than them creating lots of random features and hoping people like it. Instead, what if they got feedback directly from the source? That's a lot of my job,

**Michelle**: What is an average day for you?

**Tanya**: I do a lot of a few things. One thing is that I do a lot of public speaking. I get a lot of feedback from customers and potential customers when I do that. I also write blog posts and other content, white papers, or instructional documents and videos. I get a lot of feedback about that. I answer a ton of technical questions. People seem to think that I know all the security of every single Microsoft product, and I love that they think that I am that brilliant. That would be impossible, to fit all in my brain.

**Tanya**: I tend to go dig for things and help find things. If we can't figure out a way around it, maybe we need to change something. Then I give a lot of feedback to the product teams like this is cool, but it costs 10 times more than anyone can afford. Or you added these three new things and people are in love with two of them. The other one, no one seems to care. Maybe make more of number one and number two, if you can, things like that. Trying to help the product teams understand what people want and need.

**Michelle**: So you're like a facilitator between the users and the product team?

**Tanya**: Yeah, and more like the community specifically because we can hire people to come in and do beta testing. Because I'm part of the community and I contribute back to the community regularly, people feel more open to sharing. So this thing happened with this product and this is making us crazy. We're considering switching because of this or stuff like that. People that maybe wouldn't come directly to the company might be more comfortable coming to me. Does that make sense?

**Michelle**: Yeah, definitely. Since you're in a public-facing role is there ever an issue with not being able to turn it off and people contacting you all hours of the day and night? Do you feel like you have to be available?

**Tanya**: Oh my gosh, yes. Especially with time zones. Yeah, people contact me all the time. I tell them that my inbox looks like someone with a fire hose aiming at a small cup. I have trouble keeping up, I do my best.

**Michelle**: What has been your favorite long term project?

**Tanya**: This guy named Brooke on my team dared me to start a blog. For whatever reason, I thought no one would read it. I'm not sure why I just assume no one would be interested. I'm going to write out my thoughts on various technical things and this is how you do this. I learned this. I thought it was cool. Maybe you'll think it's cool. Now people are following my blog and reading it, like more than just me and my mom and my dad. It's been so rewarding. If there's a technical thing that's been bothering me to dissect it in-depth and add a million links and research and resources and stuff to it so that people can see why I think that way, or how I did whatever thing I'm doing. I found that really, really fun.

**Michelle**: I think it's an achievement if you can get your mom and dad to read your blog. I'm pretty sure my parents are not listening to this podcast.

**Tanya**: My mom and my grandma both asked me how to use Twitter and made Twitter accounts so they could follow me. I thought it was so touching and it's really cute because sometimes my mom will respond to things and then she'll sign her tweets with love Tanya's mom. It's so wonderful. I was so flattered that she would follow me and make an account just for that. It's so sweet.

**Michelle**: That is amazing. I love it. What is the most boring but essential part of your job?

**Tanya**: Answering emails. Answering so many messages, I feel like I can never get back to everyone. I find it hard to keep up because I want to answer with detail. I did a talk last week with my friend, Terry Radical about how to do your own security assessment on the Azure platform. How you could do it yourself rather than hiring a professional. That came from an email from a customer who was like, hey, we want to do this and we don't know where to start. We can't afford a pen tester.

**Tanya**: I ended up spending like an hour and a half writing back to him this whole outline. Then I was like, oh, I guess I should submit this as a talk. I made a blog post and I convinced Terry to come on my show. Then she made it way better and it grew from there. I want to spend like an hour and a half answering each email, but then I'll die. So I'll never sleep again. It's essential, but it kills me.

**Michelle**: Do you have a collection of blog posts that you keep ready to respond to? If you get the same question over and over again, do you say, just read this blog post it has all the information you need?

**Tanya**: Yes, yes. They're always how do I break into infosec? Where do I get started in application security? I have a blog post for each of those. I want to be a better presenter, how do I do that? I wrote a blog post about that because I get asked those three things quite often.

**Michelle**: How do you prioritize when you're getting a flood of emails?

**Tanya**: Ones from my boss are number one. Then his boss, and then that guy's boss, also number one's. Teammates that need something from me. There's one other person that knows security that's on my big, wider team, but he does infrastructure. He handles most of the infrastructure-related security questions. I know some infrastructure security, but he's really on it. He answers those questions.

**Tanya**: Most of the people on my team are developers and developer advocate. The questions are like how do I make this serverless app secure? Then I need to have a meeting. We talk about it and do threat modeling and stuff. It's super fun because they all do different things. It's an exercise for my brain, like, wow, I never thought of that. It's pretty fun.

**Michelle**: It sounds like you get to learn all the time. People ask you a question and you get to say oh, that's an interesting topic I could jump into.

**Tanya**: Yeah, that's a big reason why I took the job. I wanted to learn Cloud and more about infrastructure. I already knew a lot about application security and I was a software developer forever. But I want to know all the security. They hired this guy named Orin Thompson on my team and it's awesome. Every time I don't know the answer he always knows it's great.

**Michelle**: It sounds like you can outsource some of the emails you get to your team, which cuts it down a little bit.

**Tanya**: Yeah, definitely. Although, they do the same to me. So it might work out even in the end.

**Michelle**: Yeah, so maybe not, maybe you're just all flooding each other's email inboxes. What is the most stressful part of your job and how do you manage it?

**Tanya**: I was going to say the emails, but that's not true. One of the things about being a public figure, you get people that follow you and it turns out that not all of them are nice. The most stressful thing for me is if that 1 in 5000 person writes me a really bad message or takes it upon themselves to try to completely breakdown something that I've done. I don't understand their motivations, but I find it stressful. Someone recently sent a message to me, which I will not say what it said. Once I blocked that person, they proceeded to attack several people I care about on social media. Then I had to have all the different phone calls with all the different people to apologize even though obviously it's not my fault that this person targeted me. That this person responded to getting blocked with harassing people connected to me. It sucked so much and was super stressful.

**Tanya**: What I did to manage the stress is, I wrote a thing on social media, "How do you handle it if someone sends you a really hurtful message?" When a thousand people responded with different ideas of how to deal with it, I can't tell you how much better that made me feel. Other people telling me, "I am a really sensitive person too", "I have too much empathy sometimes, too". The person who harassed me, they probably have a mental illness because of the level that this person went to. It's such a ridiculously abnormal behavior for a person I've never met, right? Then I have empathy for that person because probably, they're hurting a lot. It's not something that I expected would come with the job of being a giant nerd that makes proofs of concepts and writes little tutorials. Like, there's like, oh, I'm important, what?

**Tanya**: I manage the stress by reaching out to the community and also remembering when people reach out like that, it's often their thing. It's not your thing. If it's constructive feedback, like, Tonya, "I didn't like how you said this thing, that hurt me or didn't seem appropriate?" Absolutely, I want to listen to all the constructive criticism. The accusations were pretty reflective of someone that's not 100% on the same page as the rest of us. There are all sorts of people out there, I do not have control over them. Does this person matter? Is this person important in your life? No, well, then why are you making their words important to you? Right, and going from there. That has helped a lot. That is the weirdest and most stressful part of my job. I know others on my team have similar things that are way worse than anything I've had to suffer. I'm kind of like, oh no. So we'll see how it goes.

**Michelle**: Since you do work for a big company, and you're on a team of people that have had a similar problem, is there anything you can do to protect each other? Or is there anything Microsoft can do?

**Tanya**: If someone is particularly awful to one of us, sometimes we all block the person. 50, or 60, or 80 of us block them, which certainly sends a message that their behavior was not acceptable. One of my co-workers had someone comment very negatively about her personal appearance and all of us just blocked. If one of us goes and does a talk somewhere, it is not so that you can talk about our bodies. It was really gross. So all of us just blanket block. Then at least like that person has a much smaller audience. None of the rest of us are going to be hurt by that person's feelings, or have our feelings hurt by them, etc.

**Tanya**: If it's past a certain level, you can call the police, or we have lawyers. But generally, like the person that recently I had the run-in with, I reported it to Twitter and they said, we don't see a problem. Okay. Mmmhmm. Okay. I guess it's unless your safety is in question, it's something you are just supposed to tolerate. It's an expectation of being a public figure on the internet, especially being female. Apparently, that's just a thing. The women I know of color, it's way worse. It's just not cool. But we have not figured out a way to solve this problem yet.

**Michelle**: It is a systemic problem that can be very difficult for an individual to manage. At least you have your team and it sounds like reaching out to the community and working together has helped you manage it, even if you can't prevent it.

**Tanya**: Yeah, absolutely. I have this mantra that has been with me since I was young. Someone in my class was mean to me. I was at a bar later and a friend in my class came up to me and he's like, "Tanya, not everything's about you." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Oh, the world revolves around Tanya. You're not that important. That student is mean to everyone. It's not you. It's that person. Don't think you're so special."

**Tanya**: When something like this happens to me often I'm like, I'm probably not the only person that this person has done this to. This person probably has a lot of hate inside them. I got burned today, but two other people got burned tomorrow. This isn't specifically my fault. Or I have this tendency to be like, "Tanya, what did you do wrong that caused this?" So then I remember, Tanya, you are not the center of the universe. You're not so special. It helps me, if that makes any sense.

**Michelle**: Yeah, that does make sense. It's not personal to you, it's just someone attacking. You shouldn't take it to heart and think there's something wrong with you. It's just someone who wants to spew this vitriol to someone.

**Tanya**: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That helps, too. Usually, I can be pretty good about muting that person. All of it's a learning process, I'll leave it at that.

**Michelle**: That sounds like a very different skill than software development.

**Tanya**: Oh, my gosh, yeah. With software development it was so awesome, I never had to talk to anyone. I just sit at my desk. I used to tease them that I was a hamster, just running on the wheel. If they put one of those little water bottles that I would never have to get up.

**Michelle**: Now I'm imagining a water bottle full of black tea at my desk. Just gave me neverending tea and I would never have to go anywhere.

**Tanya**: Right? And then I just like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Me and Stack Overflow till the end.

**Michelle**: Speaking of skills, what skills do you find most essential on a day to day basis?

**Tanya**: Good writing skills, good listening skills, being able to communicate a concept, and understand when someone else is explaining a super complex concept to me. As an example, someone was asking me about Azure AD. He's like, "Oh, it doesn't log anything." I was like, "What? No, it does." Then it turned out there's one specific thing that this person was looking for that it's not logging. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but it took me a while because at first he's like, it doesn't log and like, well, that doesn't make sense.

**Tanya**: I don't want to be like, "You're wrong." Then I look and according to all these official documents it does. I ask, "What do you hope it will log that it's not logging?" and then we went from there.  Then we have a coffee planned to go deep into it so I can understand exactly the types of things that would be better. He's a big Microsoft fan and he's totally into it. He probably knows Azure AD way better than I do. I'm like, please enlighten me, show me that way. He's going to take time out of his day to tell me, which is awesome. If I was like, you're wrong, then the conversation would have been over.

**Tanya**: Listening, communication, and then writing. My job is rather global so I don't usually have the luxury to spend time in person with most people. I'm lucky when we both happen to be going to the same event in a few weeks. Quite often, it's me typing out. When you type things out there's no tone of voice or body language to go with it. I want to make sure that people feel heard and respected. That my writing comes across the way that I mean it to as opposed to how it could come across. I have been burned at this job with like that came across pretty rude Tanya. I'm like, oh, crap. I was in a hurry. That's not how I meant it. Tone, writing, and listening communication are really important.

**Michelle**: It sounds like part of it is empathy with the people you're communicating with. To ask questions so you understand what they're trying to say?

**Tanya**: Oh, good point. Yeah, definitely. Empathy is required to because I guess if you're like, I don't care it wouldn't go very well?

**Michelle**: Since you do have a global audience, is there anything you do to make sure your writing can be understood by people for whom English is not their first language?

**Tanya**: There are a couple of things that I do. I have a video channel and for most of the episodes, we've paid to have them subtitled. I have some friends in Japan and they told me no, you don't need to translate to Japanese, we can mostly read and write English. It's just listening to you, it's impossible. I have a really strong Canadian accent. It's funny because internationally people think it's an American accent. In America, they're like, oh my God, your Canadian accent is so strong. Now that I know what to look for, it's really strong. Sometimes, if I'm speaking outside of North America, and I know that English is not their first language, I'll explain at the beginning certain things I will say or sounds I'll make and what they mean.

**Tanya**: I make it a fun, cute joke, but also I want them to know, I know I have an accent, I'm sorry. It's okay. If you ask. My feelings are not going to be hurt. Every person has an accent. If you're away from home, you're the one with the accent. Whenever possible, I add the possibility of captions or subtitles. Then, especially if I'm in a country where English is not even one of the official languages, I make a definite point of speaking significantly more slowly and more clearly, which is a thing I have to remind myself to do.

**Tanya**: For instance, I did two talks in Korea recently. English is not one of the primary languages there. All the people that came, it's probably their second or third or even fourth language. I ended up shortening my 60-minute talk. I only did around two-thirds of the content. I finished in time because I wanted to make sure that people could understand and it wasn't painful for them. We also had automatic electronic digital captioning. It's not perfect, but it was live captioning along the top of the screen, to be more accessible. One of my uncles is deaf and my mom is hard of hearing, so I'm pretty sensitive to everyone. I want to make sure everyone has an equal chance. I try hard to make sure that they do. I listen to feedback if people tell me I could do more.

**Michelle**: The ways you're working to be accessible can help a wide range of people, for anyone who has trouble understanding what you're saying.

**Tanya**: For our videos with the OWASP desktop team, we made the captions, and then we opened it to the community. A lot of the community members have translated episodes that matter to them. If there's a specific one that they really like, they went through and added captions. Then we put them into the official project, onto our YouTube channel so everyone can benefit from them. That's been amazing, that the community would do that for us. Many, many episodes have been translated into one or more languages, which is incredible. It's great knowing that your community's engaged and wants more people to have access to that technical content.

**Tanya**: I joke that I have a love affair with OWASP, but they're just so wonderful. They're so great. When I started information security and I joined OWASP, it felt like the community really, really wanted me there and made me feel like I was important and welcome. I wasn't doing anything at first. Before I knew it, OWASP opened so many doors for me. I met so many amazing human beings. They did so many things to enable me to learn and to share. I was not used to that. I used to be a professional musician and you better believe it's competitive and cutthroat. Then I joined security and people are like, "Oh my gosh, we're so happy you're here!"

**Michelle**: Can you tell our audience a little more about the groups that you're a part of and how they can join?

**Tanya**: Yes. Oh my gosh, good idea, Michelle. Okay, so OWASP is the open web application security project. It is a collective of 200,000 - 300,000 people loosely involved. You can pay to be a member, which means you're donating to the foundation because you care. You don't need to be a member for any reason. There are different chapters all over the world. I've been part of the Ottawa chapter for years and years now. We have monthly meetups where we get together. We have talks, discussions, capture the flag contests, networking,  social time, and it's like a party and all my friends are there. We do that all over the world. We have ~270 chapters.

**Tanya**: We also have projects. I'm also on a project. Each project does a different thing. Some of them make tools, some of them do documentation. They've released several free books. In my group, Nicole created this super cool vulnerable app. Then Franziska and I created a bunch of security pipelines. Nancy and I have been working on a streaming show where we show the audience how to use all the things and learn while we drag the audience on our voyage together. Whatever you want to do, OWASP probably wants it, as long as it's trying to make things more secure.

**Tanya**: There's also the foundation and the foundation supports all the chapters and projects. They hold these giant conferences. I know that every other conference will be upset when I say it, but they're my favorite. AppSec conferences are the Carebears of security. There's not going to be a crazy party, there's not going to be some wild time, you're just going to go and then every single talk is going to be making you better at what you do. It's very professional and vanilla, not like a crazy hacker conference or anything. I go to almost all of them if I can, I'm a big fan. That's what OWASP does. To join, look up in your city, go to Meetup and see if they're there, or go to an online search engine of your choice.  Look for OWASP and the name of your city, because we have so many chapters. If you don't have a chapter, you can start one. I've helped a bunch of cities start one, it's not that hard and it won't cost you anything.

**Tanya**: I'm also a part of [WoSec, women of security](https://wearetechwomen.com/wosec-women-of-security/). We just turned one year old. We are an international community of women for women in security or looking to join security. We have meetups all around the world. We're on a few different continents. We have 18 chapters now in one year, which is wild. We do three things. We're not like a lot of the other women's meetups, and we're not going to teach soft skills generally, or how to speak powerfully when speaking to men. We feel those things are covered, other women's groups are kicking butt at those things. What we do is crash boy meetups. If I want to go to a Python meetup, and I know it's going to be 100 men and me, that might make me nervous. So I'll make a meetup with WoSec to go to the Python meetup and then a bunch of other women will join me. Then I'm not the only one there. We crashed the RSA conference this year, we crashed Microsoft Build, we crashed BSides Ottawa.

**Tanya**: The idea is that you show up with this group of friends. Another thing that we do is, we brunch and bitch. It's like a stitch and bitch, but with food. It's a social gathering where we get to meet each other and hopefully, you make new friends. There's a big problem with women in STEM, they keep leaving. If you have friends, you're a lot more likely to stay. I have met so many amazing friends from WoSec. It started as this selfish thing where I asked my friend Donna if she wanted to do it. I was like, “What if no one comes?”, she's like, “Well, then you and I will have brunch, just the two of us.” Lo and behold, 20 women showed up the first month. We have this gaggle of women every month that show up and now some of them have started a business together. Lots of them are friends.

**Tanya**: We've had so many nice things that they're doing for each other. One of the women did her first talk ever. We all surprised her and showed up and cheered for her in the front row. Nice things like that have come out of it. The third thing that we do is technical workshops or talks that are in a safe space that are just for women. I find that women speak up a lot less if there are men in the room. I know that a lot of people will argue that we shouldn't segregate. However, I gave a cloud security workshop, which I've given it all over Ottawa. But I gave one just for WoSec, just for women.

**Tanya**: 20 women showed up. Everyone was talking, asking a million questions, or giggling and laughing, it was super great. Then a man walked in by accident, he hadn't realized it was for women only. He went in, sat at the back, and all the women were silenced. All of them were so quiet and uncomfortable that he was there. After 20 minutes, he looks up from his computer and looks all around. Then I see him checking his phone and he figured it out. Then he stood up, and he's like, “Oh, Hi, thanks, this has been great. I really have to go. I'm sorry.” He sent a letter after to apologize and he was super embarrassed and like it's okay. Then as soon as he left all the women were super loud and smiling and laughing and giggling again. It is a different atmosphere when it's just women. All women are welcome. There are no membership fees, or anything, you just show up and hang out. And it's cool. I just want to make more friends.

**Michelle**: When people ask me, how do you network I always say just make friends and see what happens. You never know which of these friends that you can help or they can help you later. It's how I've built my network.

**Tanya**: Yeah, now that I think of it, a lot of us have referred other ones for jobs or made like key introductions and stuff. That's a really good point. Yeah. So also networking.

**Michelle**: I love how you are making sure everyone is getting something positive and actionable at the events.

**Tanya**: Yeah, that's what I want to do. I also run this hashtag on Mondays, called #MentoringMonday. People tweet the hashtag #MentoringMonday when they want to be a mentor or mentee. If you've worked in security, or whatever it is that you do, for two years or more, you officially know enough to mentor a junior person. I mentor lots of people and I am so lucky to have had several amazing out of this world mentors in my career. A mentor pushes you to that next level, shows you the way, and introduces you to things that you otherwise might not have seen.

**Tanya**: I encourage everyone who's listening to participate in #MentoringMonday.  You can search the hashtag and respond to people. Even just telling someone, "I'm an expert in Python, and here are the books you should read or the podcasts you should listen to." is helpful.  Several people have been pairing off and forming long term mentoring relationships, which is super beautiful. It's amazing.

**Michelle**: I cannot stress enough how great my mentors have been and how much I've been enjoying mentoring people over the last year, both one on one and in groups. One thing I don't think people realize is that when they get to be a mentor, they get to feel like a genius. After a long day at work, you can get imposter syndrome from running into roadblocks. Then you talk to someone a little less experienced and you give them some new information. It turns out you did know things and it brings that boost of confidence.

**Tanya**: Well, and you get to see them blossom. It's so amazing. Almost all the women I've been mentoring have started public speaking. One of them, she's spoken at a whole bunch of conferences all over Europe now.  She's the most introverted, shy individual, and I'm just so proud. I'm like, you're amazing and now you're letting other people see how amazing you are. It feels so good to help someone else and then see how happy and successful they are.

**Michelle**: Absolutely. It can be very frustrating sometimes when you think about the state of tech, but every time you help someone, it makes it a little better and a little brighter, and then they help people, it all ripples out.

**Tanya**: Yes, exactly, exactly.

**Michelle**: Oh, boy, we're good at talking.

**Tanya**: I always go over time. I'm sorry.

**Michelle**: No, no, no, we didn't.

**Tanya**: If I was a bash script, I would be verbose.

**Michelle**: If someone wanted your job, what's a good path to take?

**Tanya**: Oh, that's such an excellent question. I got my job sort of by accident.  I had started contributing to the community quite a bit. I was running the local OWASP chapter and I'd started an OWASP project. I had been speaking all over Europe and North America. I was already doing the job for free. I was already doing interviews and not writing my own blog post, but writing third party articles for syndications. Then Microsoft approached me and they're like, we heard we need to talk to you. They're like, you know, we have this Developer Advocate role. I responded I don't understand, I'm a security nerd, what are you talking about?

**Tanya**: Then the manager called me to explain, I'm like, that's not a job. That's my hobby. He's like, well, I'm telling you, we would pay you to do it. I'm like, are you messing with me? Once he assured me for sure, he was not just fooling me, they brought me to Seattle. I met a whole bunch of people. They're super smart because they got a bunch of people that I admired to interview me. I'm like, well now I have to work here dammit. Yeah, it is pretty cool.

**Tanya**: Besides getting involved, contributing, and helping, you can apply for those jobs. All Cloud providers have those jobs. I'm a security person, so I'm going to talk about security space. A whole bunch of different companies have approached me, like “How can we find someone to advocate for this or that?” and I'm like, “Yo, do your own recruiting.” People don't know that it's a job that they can apply for.

**Tanya**: The key thing is that you help. It can't be that you're trying to get famous, because that comes off that way. People can see through those things. If you have a community, you serve your community and take care of your community, then that's your example of how you can work for them on behalf of your community, right. If you don't have a community, then that's pretty hard to sell.

**Michelle**: Would you also recommend tasks while at work like mentoring or writing documentation to prepare for a job as an advocate?

**Tanya**: Definitely. I also got started because I launched my first application security program at work and I wanted everyone to start using this tool called OWASP zap. I wanted all the developers to zap their code. I made a presentation and I did a demo. Then I taught everyone how to use it. I gave the presentation over and over and over. Then someone said, you should do it at a meetup.

**Tanya**: Then I did it at a conference. My first presentation was awful. I was so scared. Oh, my gosh. Very bad. Getting comfortable being in front of an audience, getting experience making sure that the audience actually learns the things you're trying to teach them, and hopefully enjoys themselves. That is a skill that takes a long time to hone. Writing skills and communication skills. You can create a community where you work. Before I was doing things with OWASP, I was doing things within the Canadian government where I worked.

**Tanya**: I had a lunch and learn program where I was the host. I had over 30 different people come into my office, make presentations, and teach all of us. The monthly lunch and learn became this thing that everyone was looking forward to. You can create community wherever you are if you want to. I have a community on my street, we're all friends. We have a party every six months where one of the neighbors opens their house to everyone. You have the opportunity to create community You just have to do the work.

**Michelle**: What's your next step? Where do you see yourself growing in your career?

**Tanya**: I have a lot of nerdy goals. Microsoft just released their first blockchain and I'm like, oh my god blockchain. I would like to know that. I want to make a blockchain. I want to name it Betty the buggy blockchain and then I want to smash it because that's how I am.

**Tanya**: I'm doing a thing on my own that I will tell everyone when it's ready. I want to keep learning. I don't feel like I'm a complete expert at all the security areas of Azure yet. I like to master things and then move on to another thing and master that. For instance, with blockchain, building my blockchain, hacking my blockchain, and then making a workshop out of that. That's conquering that topic. It's how I roll. I would like to speak at more places. I hope more people read my blog. Those are such vague goals. But anyway, I think they're noble goals.

**Michelle**: Your process for learning new things is to do a project, get good at it, and then teach other people.

**Tanya**: Yeah, definitely. Oh, my gosh, whenever I get asked a question and I don't know the answer, I'm like, well, I'm gonna go learn a new thing today. It's great.

**Michelle**: The joys of working in technology.

**Michelle**: Our listeners want to reach out to you via social media, how can they reach you?

**Tanya**: Look up [shehackspurple](https://shehackspurple.ca/) and then that will be me. On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/shehackspurple), [YouTube](https://youtube.com/shehackspurple), [Medium](https://medium.com/@shehackspurple) and [shehackspurple](https://shehackspurple.ca/). I am on LinkedIn, but I'm not accepting new connections. I apologize in advance, but you can follow me.


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