Exploring the Capabilities of eBPF | Author Liz Rice

**Liz Rice** (0:00)
So, the slightly ironic thing is, I don't really think very many people will need to write their own eBPF code.
So, I've kind of written a book that I kind of think nobody needs to read. But a lot of the time, you do things not because you need to, but because you're interested and you want to, you know.
And I'm the sort of person who doesn't, I don't learn very well from, you know, pictures and diagrams. I need to feel the thing working. I need to, you know, try it out for myself. And I need to see the code and that's what I've tried to do in the book. So explain for people who are interested in what is this eBPF thing that people are talking about and how does it achieve all these amazing superpowers that people are talking about.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:46)
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**Dan Lines** (1:24)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted.
This is your host, Dan Lines, co-founder and COO at Linear B. And today we're joined by Liz Rice, author and chief open source officer at Isovalent. Liz, welcome to the show.

**Liz Rice** (1:42)
Hi, thanks for having me, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (1:44)
Yeah, super great to have you on with us today. You have a really interesting, great technical skill set with a background in system software engineering. You're also a regular speaker at conferences like reInvent, Velocity, DockerCon.
You've earned this reputation for making kind of these complex concepts more accessible and more understandable, which is really great because today we're going to talk about your most recent work as an author. You have a book titled Learning eBPF Programming the Linux Kernel for Enhanced Observability, Networking, and Security.
In the opening line of the book, you describe eBPF as one of the hottest technical topics of recent years in the cloud native community and beyond. So we're really excited to dive into your book and what is eBPF and all of that kind of stuff. But first, we want to start out with you and your background. I looked you up on LinkedIn before we talked and you had a really, I think, interesting career path because I see all these different titles and you're involved with these different like organizations and companies. So can you give our audience a little bit about who you are, what your career path looked like and how you kind of like, you know, got to where you are today?

**Liz Rice** (3:14)
Yeah. So I always knew I wanted to work with computers. You know, since I was a kid, it was always going to be something in software. My first job out of university was for a company that it's taken a very long and securitas path, but it's now part of Microsoft. But we were doing networking stacks.
So my first foray into professional programming was all about portable networking stacks. And that made for really boring party conversation in my 20s. So after a while doing that, I moved to Skype for a bit. And that was something that everybody had heard of, so that was brilliant. And then I moved from there to spend a little bit of time working on recommendation systems. I worked for a company called Last FM, which did music recommendations. And then I did some startups around TV and movie recommendations.
And this was all kind of taking me further and further away from the nuts and bolts of the technology. It's a long way from a network packet to a movie recommendation.
And at some point, I was having a conversation, actually in a startup accelerator. Somebody mentioned Docker to me, and I thought, well, that sounds interesting, maybe we should look into that. And I ended up co-founding a startup that did sort of container scaling way before its time. Terrible business idea, but got me back into this much lower, into the weeds of the technology.
Got me involved in the container space and then the cloud native space. And I guess as part of that, I learned, I was doing a lot of presentations. I think, you know, if you're working for a startup, you spend a lot of time pitching your products and talking about what you do. And I somehow learned that I was kind of quite good at explaining these complicated things. So I mean, it's really nice for you to mention that in the introduction, because I think it's something that it took me a long time to learn about myself. But I think I am quite good at understanding how to break something complicated into like a story line that people can build up and follow and, you know, take people on a journey from knowing nothing to actually having a pretty good understanding of how something quite complicated works, whether that's a container or now eBPF, I hope.