Meet the Writer: Priya Kumari - Having a Reliable Community is the Actual Superpower

Hey Hackers!

I'm Priya Kumari and I'm currently working as an Assistant Manager - Content Strategist at Valasys Media. I am glad to announce that I have been nominated for the 2022 Noonies Award.

A huge thanks to the HackerNoon community and staff for considering me worthy of this opportunity. I've been nominated in the following 9 (by the way, the number 9 in spirituality represents the completion of a cycle; also my destiny number 😊😊😊) categories and if you like my writing, please do check out these award pages and proud the vote button against my name by clicking:

As a tech writer, I believe that the most exciting technology of the present is AIOps (Artificial Intelligence in IT Operations) because it adds more insight and automation to enable seamless operationalization of the traditional DevOps tasks, largely by evolving effective use of cloud and cloud-native ecosystem for sources and operationalizing IT resources.

The cloud-native ecosystem directed at simplifying IT Operations and Management (O&M) brings into play AIOps which has revolutionalized the IT world by better-allowing organizations to run scalable applications. Parallelly, AIOps has also fueled the proliferation of analogous technologies such as containerization and container orchestration and monitoring tools such as Kubernetes and Prometheus.

AIOps coupled with container adoption and the orchestration tools, Kubernetes primarily, allows enterprises to streamline, orchestrate and optimize data flow, and provides greater flexibility in helping the organizations deploy their services. A consistent flow of pipeline operationalization is maintained wherein everything is monitored and resolved almost in real-time. As the human intervention is minimal this saves enterprises thousands of hours manually seeking the hidden sources of errors and trying to fix them.

Also, AIOps enables organizations to anticipate and reciprocate potential future threats well in time by risk assessment and mitigation. Learn more about my thoughts and opinions on AIOps and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below.

1. Tell us about your journey. What do you do and what do you love about it?

I started my career in Life Sciences and was a hard-core research scholar for two years post the completion of my post-graduation. I had a flair for writing and was doing well in the projects (primarily Cytology and Cytogenetics) that I laid my hands on.

After dedicating two years to Life Science research, I switched to the role of a Business Analyst. Having a statistical background, I was able to solve real-time business problems quickly. I think the thing that I love the best about my journey is that I am able to amalgamate the power of emotional, empathetic, and compassionate storytelling with the power of data. As a technology writer, you still need to speak to the audience in an impactful way that involves appealing to both the emotional and logical sides of the spectrum. I love the fact that creating thought leadership content has immense power and how it can play a pivotal role in inspiring positive transformations in the lives of people around us.

2. Tell us more about your work. What do you make/write/manage/build?

I operate with a philosophy of choosing corporations and collaborations over the competition. I am blessed and grateful for the fact that pretty early in my career I learned the power of teamwork. At the end of the day, it's all about people and teams; individual contributions matter and should be highly acclaimed but the fact is ultimately the teams win remains undisputed. Though I also believe that individual contributions deserve all the honor in the world.

I work within a fast-paced and agile setup. Currently, I am working with a B2B Media Publisher company Valasys Media and head a really small but dynamic team of 4 content writers that report directly to me. We are all ‘CreativeOps Crusaders,’ as I lovingly and elatedly call my team, who work closely with each other and cross-departmentally to create high-quality technical content.

I along with my team am working on several new home-grown and client side of ventures. Some pivotal ones include assimilating intent data into creating highly convertible content pieces including all kinds of lead magnets, landing pages, white papers, and case studies, and working closely with a team of instructional designers to infuse that visual magic to enhance the appeal of the content and working on designing and orchestrating a seamless and invincible multichannel marketing to accentuate ROI for our clients.

I am also working to educate myself about how we can infuse the latest technological innovations into our MarTech stack. The practice of designing a well-thought-of PR Strategy for the in-house and client side of things is something I specialize in. I have worked with some reputable journalists from Thrive Global, and the CIO Group of Magazines and have recently interviewed the PR Man - Maxim Behar.

When it comes to exploring and bringing technical innovations in marketing and advertising endeavors, I follow the trends but I also learn a lot by experimenting and innovating my own unique hacks experientially. And, that's important because that's what makes us who we are instead of just being clones or replicas of each other. In the former case, the downside of blindly following the trends is that you never realize when your passion for work takes the shape of monotony or all sorts of mid-career crises, whatever way you want to put it across as.

3. How did you start writing? What made you choose HackerNoon for publishing your work?

I come from a family where writing runs in the blood and also inherit this logical approach to problem-solving from my late grandfather who was a renowned scientist. I had a knack for writing since my childhood days. Though professionally I embraced writing only after my post-graduation.

I initially chose Hackernoon for guest blogging as it is a highly credible website with very high domain authority. Soon after, before I could realize it, I was smitten and awestruck by the amazing community at Hackernoon – ranging from editors to individual contributors all of them are amazing. Before I could realize it I had become a regular contributor to the platform.

I love being visible and having a voice amongst several like-minded people on the platform. Hackernoon has become a part of my habit, my daily ritual, and somehow every noon I have a few minutes to devote to Hackernoon. I am enjoying publishing my work here and getting immense respect and exposure as a writer. I think being on the platform has been among the most fulfilling career experiences.

4. What excites you in tech? Tell us about your favorite technology and why you are passionate about it.

The most interesting thing about technology is its dynamism and impact. So what's trending today may very well become obsolete 10 years down the line. However, if someone is able to precognitive analyze the impact of any emerging tech even before it becomes a trend and amalgamate it into solving business problems; that's when he/she can make the most of it. So, even if that technology is merely ephemeral, you'll be able to make the hay while the sun shines. So three things are important here: a) being someone who can develop a futuristic vision for technology to harness its complete potential (a great community helps in that) and b) being someone who can think of bringing an emerging technology as an integral part of initiating crucial business innovation and c) being someone who can develop a community around that technology to pave the way for the evolution of the technology to solve real-time business problems (which will make that technology thrive and prevent it from being obsolete sooner).

At this point, my favorite technology is AIOps and allied cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes. AIOps is the practice of bringing artificial intelligence into IT operations to help enterprises optimize their IT footprint and to help them simplify the ever-increasing complexities of their infrastructure, services, and applications.

AIOps is an evolving field and according to Gartner, its global market share is expected to grow at an annual rate of 43.7% and reach 3.12 billion by 2025.

Another crucial report from IDC titled 'Worldwide Future of Digital Infrastructure Predictions' published in 2022 affirms that almost 90% of the Global 2000 CIOs by the end of the year 2026 will employ AIOps solutions to optimize their SDLC processes for cost and performance and key performance metrics. AIOps will also aid them to develop a more resilient and automated business remediation process for improved business resiliency and agility.

The increasing adoption of AIOps catalyzes and is almost synchronous with proliferation in the adoption of cloud-native operationalization and maintenance technologies (such as increasing adoption of open source platforms primarily Docker for containerization, and the increase in the adoption of container orchestration tools Kubernetes in particular and in turn the tools for Kubernetes ecosystem monitoring such as Prometheus).

Gartner predicts that by the year 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running leveraging containerized applications in production & the worldwide container management revenue will surge from $465.8 million in 2020 to reach $944 million in 2024.

As AIOps keeps on addressing crucial O&M challenges, it leads to the proliferation of cloud and cloud-native ecosystems to solve the most obvious problems of business operationalization such as distribution, and risk perceptions.

5. What were some of the challenges you faced being a tech writer and how did you overcome them?

I've been a writer for over 8 years and one of the challenges I face as a technical journalist is late or last-minute changes to the product or services that need to be addressed in the technical documents. These changes are typically made after I have tried to extract all the relevant information from a subject matter expert. This means that I am often left without a final deadline until the next day when new information becomes available. The lack of time has caused many delays in my work and therefore, for an increase in productivity proactivity is required more than anything else. It's absolutely paramount if one wants results within time frames.

At times, I was faced with tight deadlines. The job is not always glamorous. Nonetheless, I saw it as a chance to grow as a professional and improve my skills. Wrapping up a project was not always fun for me because of the time pressures and lack of information about my audience. Working under pressure helped me become more efficient in completing tasks within limited time frames. If you want to make technical writing your profession, you have to know how difficult it will be at times but how rewarding the end result can be.

6. What are you learning/reading currently? Any recommendations for our readers?

I am currently training myself on MLOps. MLOps presents the opportunity to learn about Machine Learning, deploying code and software in production. The core concepts are based on the focus on building applications that support the business. This can be easily achieved by learning about the technical aspects of machine learning and how it enhances your existing processes.

My advice to readers is technology has several interdisciplinary aspects, such as Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Machine Learning. Try to look at why you need technology in the first place and understand the business use case before you delve deeper into getting a hands-on experience on the core technology and its interdisciplinary "essential complementary technologies."

Also, focus on being a part of flourishing open source communities and share your knowledge as much as you can. Hackernoon is also an impeccable community that amplifies the power of a technology writer 100x because of an awesome community that it's built around and thrives on.

7. What is your biggest achievement so far?

This question can be answered in multiple ways. To start with the question has both personal & professional significance, and importantly so. I think being a good daughter to my parents is an achievement, and so is being a trustworthy employee. I think my biggest achievement is that I have been able to transform myself and turn into who I wanted to be. My parents have always pushed me to aim high and achieve great heights, this has also helped me become a better person overall.

I have always believed that more than seeking a work-life balance, integrating work-life is more essential. Personal accomplishments are important because they have ripple effects on the professional side too.

The biggest achievement though remains the ability to impact and influence people's lives positively. Tangibly, having been featured in Noonies 2022 nominations and having interviewed for this platform remains amongst the biggest achievements as it has accentuated my professional branding quotient multifold, establishing me as a multi-facet technology writer, after being nominated in so many categories for 2022.

8. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?

I would love to invest in democratizing technology for a large community. Technology can be a great enabler and create the space for training and sensitizing community members to educate many other people to initiate a technological revolution. I would also spend it on sensitizing people on why they need it.

As we are currently living in the first Information Age (the next phase of evolution), digital learning and education should be a top priority. A digital revolution will empower more people to gain access to knowledge and skills, through high-tech equipment like iPods, laptops, and online resources; it will also allow students to access learning when and where they want it. The benefits of sharing your thoughts and the ability to engage with other community members are the ultimate keys to inspiring a technological revolution. Investing in human resources means that you're in turn creating the space and scope for the trained and sensitize community members to educate many other people. The ability to create more dialogue, encourage more participation and help create a public sphere would be awesome for us all.

I would also try to work on ideas to develop an open-source community around my idea wherein a technological renaissance can be initiated and some enterprise prototypes can ultimately be designed and monetized (which would be analogous to monetizing a small portion of value being generated by the community). This would keep the community thriving, evolving, and profitable post the initial investment, and the community will include, indulge and inspire many.

9. What advice would you give to someone just starting in this field?

Don't be scared to ask the most difficult questions first and work through questions to figure your way out to the concepts. Always focus on the 360-degree sight of the business landscape before you jump into devising a solution for the business problems. Be "Outcome" focused instead of being "Output" focused. Stay focused on what you are doing and not just what you are trying to achieve.

Listen and stick to the most popular and reliable industrial practices but don't forget to invent your own unique hack or style of problem-solving. Train yourself on interdisciplinary aspects of concepts rather than blindly and ardently following one single concept or solution without even fully understanding why. You should always know the answer to – "Why you're doing what you're doing?"

Great solution engineers are good at finding multiple solutions for one problem, so it would be great if you try to match those ratios in your selection of lessons.

10. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

There're many but here's one that really changed my life. This in fact is from my higher self to me.

Before you can succeed, you have to discover new ways of failing at things, the faster the better. This means that fear and procrastination have to be taken out of the mind. You have to stay highly positive and high-vibe even when you're failing. Keep trying and keep screwing things up miserably unless you figure out the hack to do it correctly. The crux is to do a thing awesomely well, you first have to learn to screw up with it in new ways every time you try; without feeling ashamed, despite all the peer pressure, and despite what the popular public opinion might say.

Stay resilient and patient and develop a personal support system around you; a community that may comprise your personal coach, freelancers, coaches, and mentors to get you through the tough times. This can help you when you are feeling stuck in life and find it hard to get over the fear barrier. A reliable community is your actual superpower that inspires audacity and innovation. Constructive community support will uplift you and help you trailblaze your path to heights you would have never thought of.

If the read inspires you, please like, share, and comment.

Also, vote for me using the links above; voting lines open on 15th August 2022.

Below is my sign to vote for; all you amazing nominees vote for me 😉!

About HackerNoon’s 2022 Noonies Awards

The annual Noonies Awards celebrate the best and brightest of the tech industry, bringing together all who are making the Internet and the world of tech what it is today. Please be sure to check out our award categories, nominate, and vote for the people and companies who you think are making the biggest impact on the tech industry today.

The 2022 Noonies are sponsored by: BingX, and .tech domains. Thank you so much to these sponsors who are helping us celebrate the accomplishments of all our nominees.