Develomentor: Recent Episodes
Grant Ingersoll
The Develomentor podcast is an interview-based show designed to help you find your path in technology. Each interview explores the career path and lessons learned of individuals who have built successful careers in technology across a range of roles, including software engineering, data science, engineering management and sales engineering. A monthly bonus episode features a panel discussing timely topics in technology, like compensation, freelancing, joining a startup and much more.
Prior to GoodRx, Jody Mulkey (@jodymulkey) was the Chief Product Officer at Aspiration. An accomplished technologist and inspirational engineering leader, Jody is known for building high-performance systems and teams.
Prior to Aspiration, Jody spent 5 years as CTO of Ticketmaster leading the global product and technology transformation. Prior to Ticketmaster Jody spent over 14 years at Shopzilla, now Connexity, a leading source for connecting buyers and online sellers that reaches a global audience of over 40 million shoppers monthly. Jody was the CIO of Shopzilla and part of the inaugural team building the company’s data platform, analytics, and infrastructure.
Born in Texas, Jody attended military school and got his degree in shenanigans before moving to California. Jody studied Business Administration at USC with dual emphases in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems.
Outside of work, Jody is an active startup investor, Laker fan, Trojan fan, and tennis enthusiast. Jody lives in Westwood, CA with his saint of a wife, 2 amazing children, and 2 obstinate yet adorable pugs.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers Episode Summary
“With good leadership, good people on your team, clear expectations and clear systems for accountability in a really beautiful, positive way that solves most of the management problem.”
—Jody Mulkey
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Jody ran a consulting business from his fraternity house in college
- What it’s like working for Ticketmaster, Aspiration, and GoodRx
- Why Jody quit his job at Sony Pictures after just 23 days
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Eric Bowman.
Eric Bowman is SVP Engineering at TomTom, which he rejoined in 2019 to help shape TomTom’s engineering culture for an increasingly online future. Previously, Eric was Zalando’s first VP Engineering, where he drove Radical Agility and led the engineering team into the cloud and oversaw huge growth and change at the company. A 25-year industry veteran, Eric has been a technical leader at multiple startups as well as global companies including Gilt Group, Three, Electronic Arts, and Maxis, where he was one of the three amigos who coded The Sims 1.0
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Episode Summary
"I'm constantly humbled when I look back at just how very difficult it was to create this sort of immersive experience. Essentially the standard is to recreate something that matches reality. It is humbling to try and do that."
—Eric Bowman
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What it was like being one of 3 programmers working on The Sims
- Why going into video games is a super risky venture
- Timeless principles that helped Eric come into organizations and change the culture
- Why the west coast is unique in terms of tech entrepreneurship
Key Milestones
[2:01] – Eric wanted to be a physicist but programmed on the side while in school. His first job was at Maxis, the sim city franchise. Eric decided to join the team for what would eventually become 'The Sims'.
[4:30] – After leaving Maxis, Eric worked at plenty of companies including a startup, a phone company, a fashion flash sale company as well as others. He's currently at Tomtom.
[10:38] – Eric talks about what it was like working on The Sims in the early days. Unlike today, back then teams for videogames were small! He explains why video games are a risky venture and most video games fail.
[15:33] – It took some time for Eric to transition from programmer to engineering manager. Though it was a challenging move or him, it came down to making a greater impact.
[20:34]- What Eric looks for when hiring? Leadership, impact and growth mindset are major pillars to consider.
[25:29] – Why are more and more people hiring senior managers to change the culture of their company? Eric often looks for timeless principles when managing his teams and organizations, not necessarily new ideas. How can slack and chat ops change the culture?
[30:09] – What are the pros and cons of the tech culture in the US versus Europe. Why the Europe tech scene can be more stable but the boldness of Silicon Valley and the West Coast is unlike any place in the world.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Daniel Tunkelang is currently an independent consultant or, in his words, a 'high-class consultant' for technology companies. Previous to this, he was a data science and engineering executive who has built and led some of the strongest teams in the software industry.
Daniel studied computer science and math at MIT and has a PhD in computer science from CMU. He was a founding employee and chief scientist of Endeca, a search pioneer that Oracle acquired for $1.1B. He led a local search team at Google. Prior to this, he was a director of data science and engineering at LinkedIn, and he established their query understanding team.
Daniel is a widely recognized writer and speaker. He is frequently invited to speak at academic and industry conferences, particularly in the areas of information retrieval, web science, and data science. He has written the definitive textbook on faceted search (now a standard for ecommerce sites), established an annual symposium on human-computer interaction and information retrieval, and authored 24 US patents. His social media posts have attracted over a million page views.
Daniel also advises and consults for companies that can benefit strategically from his expertise. His clients range from early-stage startups to "unicorn" technology companies like Etsy and Flipkart. He helps companies make decisions around algorithms, technology, product strategy, hiring, and organizational structure.
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Episode Summary
"Well it started with pretty much the people that reached out to me were trying to persuade me to take full-time jobs and I'd say, Hey, I have a better deal for you. You could just have me one day a week"
—Daniel Tunkelang
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Endeca got started? Why did the founders reach out to Daniel?
- The pros and cons of being an independent contractor versus a full-time employee
- What made Daniel interested in search?
- Why Daniel became lost while working at Google
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Caine Tighe is the CTO and first employee of DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. This private search engine is #4 in the U.S., Germany, Australia and dozens of other countries, answering over 9 billion queries in 2018.
Prior to DuckDuckGo, Caine founded and ran opensesame labs, a startup consultancy focusing on companies with great ideas struggling to execute them.
For other tech roles and descriptions click here.
Episode Summary
"We did 9 billion searches in 2018 with less than 70 people. We're at 40 million searches a day now"
—Caine Tighe
Caine Tighe is the CTO of the upstart web search company DuckDuckGo that is slowly and surely taking a bite out of Google through laser-sharp focus on their one big weakness: privacy.
Along his journey in tech, he’s transformed from a computer programmer to CTO to a leading thinker on privacy, all while living outside of the usual tech hubs.
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Caine met his partner and co-founder of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg
- The culture at DuckDuckGo and the amount of effort Caine puts in to ensure his employees are happy
- How DuckDuckGo is competing against Google
- Why understanding how you spend your time is absolutely essential
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Today's guest is Dr. Chris Bouton. Dr Bouton is the CEO of Vyasa Analytics, applying novel deep learning (ie A.I.) approaches for life sciences and healthcare clients.
"Deep learning algorithms are basically the reason that everyone is talking about AI right now."
--Dr. Bouton
As a kid, Chris Bouton loved sharks. Sharks turned into biology and biology turned into molecular biology, which evolved into computational biology. Chris followed his curiosity and received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University.
In this episode we’ll also cover:
- Why did Chris bootstrap instead of raising money when starting Entagen
- Why AI is just a fancy word for deep learning
- Important personality traits for any entrepreneur
- How Chris's Ph.D. in molecular neurobiology makes it extra satisfying to build AI algorithms
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Camille joins us on Develomentor to talk about her path in technology. She offers incredible insight to anyone navigating the world of technology with an engineering background, especially those looking to manage and lead.
Camille was on the fast track to becoming a booming success in technology - she graduated from a prestigious university with a shiny master's degree and had experience working for a major company. But instead of looking for a cutting edge tech company, Camille chose to work for Goldman Sachs. Paradoxically, she attributes this decision to saving her career in tech.
After succeeding at Goldman Sachs, Camille joined a startup ‘Rent The Runway’ where she learned to manage and lead people. After wearing many hats in the organization, Camille became the CTO. But the startup life came with a cost, and Camille found herself overworked and drained.
Instead of jumping into another job, Camille took some time to reflect and eventually decided to write her first book ‘The Manager’s Path’. The book offers practical advice to technical managers solving problems in the real world. It was a success, and not only for managers, but also, somewhat surprisingly, for younger employees interested in management.
Camille currently works as the head of platform engineering at Two Sigma, a tech hedge-fund.
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Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. He is a developer advocate and a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. Kelsey is an expert in Kubernetes and has written a book about it called "Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure" (link in show notes). When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration. Learn how Kelsey went from tech support to dev advocate to keynote speaker!
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In today’s episode of Develomentor, we have Nick Caldwell. Nick has held almost every technical role one can imagine: software engineer, engineering manager, general manager and VP of engineering. Nick is currently the Chief Product Officer at Looker, a business intelligence company. But prior to this, he worked at major companies from Microsoft to Reddit to NASA. Today we will not only decode Nick's new position, but we'll also discuss strategies on how to shift YOUR career from engineering to product!
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kyle Campbell
Kyle Campbell is a high school dropout. He is also the founder and CEO of CTO.ai, a platform that helps DevOps teams scale through streamlining developer productivity 10x. Previous to CTO.ai, Kyle founded Retsly, a company that helped developers access real-estate data, which was sold to Zillow after 8 months. As an investor and advisor to a wide range of technology startups, Kyle’s mission is to democratize DevOps to help the next generation of workers reach their full potential.
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A note from Grant
Our guest today is a high school dropout turned developer, consultant, founder and CEO. Over the past 15+ years, Kyle Campbell has steadily built up a career in tech. It started in tech support, then as a developer and finally as a Founder, CEO and Advisor.
Over the years, this Canadian native has worked for the likes of Blast Radius and Datahero, amongst others. He founded his first company Retsly in 2013 which he sold to Zillow in 2014. After working there for 2.5 years, Kyle was back at it, this time as an advisor to a number of Vancouver area startups as well as becoming a core member of the FeatherJs team.
In 2017, he founded CTO.ai, a platform focused on developer operations like continuous integration and delivery to production. Be sure to stay tuned as we check in with Kyle Campbell and learn how this self-taught developer built his career in tech.
-Grant Ingersoll
Check out Kyle’s company CTO.AI – https://cto.ai
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Tabitha Sable
Tabitha Sable has been a hacker and cross-platform sysadmin since the turn of the century. As Systems Security Engineer at Datadog, she can usually be found teaching adversarial techniques to other engineers, sharing systems engineering viewpoints with security staff, bicycling, and saying “I wonder what happens if we…”. You can follow her on Twitter at @tabbysable.
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A note from Grant
Tabitha Sable is a self described hacker and sysadmin who loves teaching adversarial security techniques to engineers. In addition to her day job at Datadog as Systems Security Engineer, she is also a regular public speaker and contributor to Kubernetes. Please stay tuned as we catch up with Tabitha Sable and hear how she built a career in tech.
-Grant ingersoll
Kubernetes Clinic Spotlight on Tabitha Sable: Helping People Level Up – click here to read the article
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kiara Bickers
Kiara is a writer and SysAdmin at the Bitcoin company Blockstream. Her gateway into tech and Bitcoin started as a slight obsession with Austrian economics. After first hearing about Bitcoin, she spent the next few years learning how to code with the aim of understanding it. It was during this process that she learned: knowledge of how to code doesn’t automatically translate into an understanding of why a system works.
It wasn’t until she started working at Blockstream, with the cypherpunks who work on Bitcoin, that she got closer to real understanding. She documented these realizations in her recently published book, Bitcoin Clarity. The book is a guide to understanding Bitcoin with mental models instead of code, for the non-technical audience that’s been tempted to fall into the “learn to code” trap themselves.
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A note from Grant
Kiara Bickers is building a career at the center of one of today’s hottest trends: cryptocurrencies. She went from working at Stanford in the catering department to working as a self taught SysAdmin at Blockstream to authoring a book on bitcoin clarity.
Whether you are into bitcoin or think cryptocurrency isn’t ready for primetime, there are a lot of really interesting career opportunities and challenges in the field. Be sure to stay tuned as we catch up with Kiara Bickers and learn how she is crafting a career at the center of a potentially revolutionizing new technology.
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jason Hughes.
Jason Hughes has spent over 10 years in the data and analytics space in roles ranging from BI developer to business analyst, business intelligence, and management. He’s worked in a variety of industries and for Fortune 200 companies as well as companies with under 200 employees.
Currently, Jason serves as the Director of Data & Analytics at Delta Dental of MN—a role he’s been in for the past year. In his free time, Jason unwinds by playing guitar, running and spending time with his wife and two dogs.
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A note from Grant
From English major and professional musician to business intelligence and now Director of Data Analytics, Jason Hughes path into tech and data science started ten plus years after earning his English degree.
Since finding his path in business intelligence, Jason has steadily gained experience holding down roles like business analyst, senior business analyst, business analyst developer, commercial analytics manager and now in the Director role.
Along his journey, Jason has worked for the likes of Horizon Hobby, Audigy Group, Service Now, C. H. Robinson and now Delta Dental as well as earned an MBA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Be sure to tune in as we welcome Jason Hughes to Develomentor and find out how this one time working musician built a career in tech.
-Grant Ingersoll
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Andrei Lopatenko.
Andrei is Vice President of Engineering at Zillow Group. He is the head of search and discovery engines. This including search science, development, infrastructure, and operations. As part of this role, he heads Zillow Group’s conversational AI efforts, which consist of initiatives around natural language processing platforms, speech analytics, call center AI, and conversational interfaces. The goal is improving Zillow’s business and customer services using natural language processing and speech understanding.
Before joining Zillow in 2019, Andrei led search science teams within eBay and Walmart. Prior to Walmart he worked at Google and Apple, serving as a core contributor to products like Google web search, Apple Maps, Apple’s AppStore, and iTunes search engines. He previously led engineering efforts for Recruit Holdings’ AI Lab. He also sat on the advisory board of Ozlo, a Conversational AI startup acquired by Facebook in 2017.
Andrei earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from The University of Manchester, United Kingdom and Master of Science Degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
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A note from Grant
Andre Lopatenko has worked around the globe in his career as a search and natural language processing expert. He turned an undergraduate and master’s degree in physics and a PhD in Computer Science into a long and successful career as a software engineer and engineering leader.
Over the years, his specialties have carried him from his early days in Moscow to Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Austria, California and now Seattle. Along his journey, Andrei has risen the ranks from software engineer to Principal Software Engineer, to Director of Engineering, Head of Search Science and now VP of Engineering for the likes of Apple, Google, Walmart Labs, eBay and Zillow.
Andre was also the co-founder and advisor of Ozlo, a company focused on conversational artificial intelligence that was purchased by Facebook. Andrei is also a long time public speaker often giving talks on how to build a career in natural language processing or how artificial intelligence is used in search. Be sure to stay tuned as we catch up with Andrei Lopatenko and search for answers to his career in tech.
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ali Spittel
Ali loves teaching people to code, and is currently doing so as a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. She have been employed in the tech industry since 2014, holding multiple software engineering positions at startups, and a Distinguished Faculty and Faculty Lead role at General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive. Ali is also a software blogger!
Ali blogs a lot about code and my life as a developer. Her blog posts have had over well over a million reads and have been featured on DEV’s top 7, the top spot on HackerNews, FreeCodeCamp, and in JSWeekly. You can hear about her new posts on her newsletter.
Ali also has a podcast with two other incredible women: Ladybug Podcast. They talk about the tech industry, their backgrounds, and they go in depth on code-topics. When Ali is not coding you can find her watching her favorite New England sports teams, taking runs with her dog Blair, or rock climbing.
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A note from Grant
Ali Spittel started down the computer science major route in college before deciding it wasn’t quite right for her. But she would return to coding in her first job as a means of automating some of her work and realizing that she really enjoyed it.
From there, Ali Spittel, has steadily built a career in tech as a software engineer, developer advocate, and instructor for the likes of Amazon, General Assembly and her own venture, WeLearnCode. In addition to all of her work coding and teaching people to code, Ali is the co-star of the popular Ladybug Podcast with Kelly Vaughn, Sidney Buckner and Emma Bostian. If you’ve ever wanted to get into coding and aren’t quite sure where to begin, be sure to learn how Ali built a career in coding without a comp sci degree.
Quotes
—Ali Spittel
Additional Resources
Check out how Ali became a software engineer without a computer science degree or completing a bootcamp
Follow AWS Amplify on Twitter
Learn more about the Ladybug podcast
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Philip Noyed.
Philip Noyed is the tech creative director at Caring Bridge and a multimedia artist living in Minneapolis.
Philip Noyed is an innovative multi-media artist living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His art work represents the quintessential contemporary art movement making use of creative technology that is changing the way art is viewed today. His artwork is often called “contemporary stained glass” and can be customized for a variety of architectural and design applications. The finalized artwork can be incorporated into acrylic, glass, tubes, fabric, wall coverings and can be customized to meet your design requirements. While located in Minneapolis, he has shipped artwork across America and Internationally.
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A note from Grant
After 120+ episodes of Develomentor, I finally have the opportunity to interview someone who is in the very role that inspired this show in the first place: the creative director. All the way back in episode 1, I talked about how my son inspired this show through his love of both art and technology and how that led to wanting to showcase all the different ways people can participate in tech. Today’s guest, Philip Noyed, has indeed combined a love of art and technology to build a successful career as a Creative Director. As with all of our guests, there is of course more to the story.
Philip started his journey by earning a degree in East Asian Studies from Hamline University before living in Japan for a number of years working as a communications specialist while studying Japanese and honing his artistic side. Since returning to the United States and joining the tech revolution in the early 90’s, he has helped companies like Fingerhut, Schwan’s, Harland Clarke, Caring Bridge and Target establish and grow online presences with a deep focus on user experience and usability.
Philip has also, along his path, developed and grown as an artist, combining the physical and digital, including virtual reality, into a deep and rich portfolio at the cutting edge of modern art. I’d also be violating my Minnesota heritage if I didn’t mention that he worked as a Production Assistant on Prince’s Purple Rain movie.
Additional Resources
Check out Philip’s Vimeo – https://vimeo.com/user8614335
(Books)
Deep Work by Cal Newport
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Nick Burling.
Nick Burling, has steadily built a career in tech working in Product Management. He graduating Amherst College with a dual degree in French and History, a Master’s from Oxford University, also in history, and an MBA from Duke University.
Throughout his career, Nick has held down titles like Consultant, Project Manager, Head Product Manager, VP of Product, Principal Product Manager, CEO and Co-founder, and Head of Product Strategy working for the likes of IBM, Blue Stripe, Microsoft, and ACME General. Nick has also started two different companies Stackforce and Illume Hire.
Additional Resources
Learn about Nick’s company Illumehire – https://www.illumehire.com/about-us/
Pragmatic Marketing – https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/
Additional Resources
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is David Wong.
David Wong is a security engineer working on the libra Blockchain at Facebook. He is an active contributor to internet standards like Transport Layer Security and to the applied cryptography research community.
David is a recognized authority in the field of applied cryptography; he’s spoken at large security conferences like Black Hat and DEF CON and has delivered cryptography training sessions in the industry. He is the author of the soon-to-be-published Real-World Cryptography book.
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A note from Grant
If you like math, secrets, privacy and cryptocurrency, today’s guest is right up your alley. David Wong is a security engineer currently working for Facebook, with deep expertise in blockchain and more generally cryptography.
After earning his bachelor’s in Math and his masters in cryptography, David has worked for the likes of Matasano Security, NCC Group and now Facebook. In addition to his day job, David is the author of the upcoming Manning Publications book titled “Real-World Cryptography”, which you can purchase now in early access from manning.com.
As always, we are doing a give away with this episode. For the first 5 people who email us here at hello@develomentor.com, we will give you a code good for one free ebook copy of David’s book. If you don’t want to email, you can use the discount code poddevmen20 for 40% of David’s book as well as all Manning books.
Quotes
“Cryptography started as a military thing in the beginning. But today everybody is using it without even know it. It all started with how we can hide communication from observers.”
“Especially if you’re in tech, understand that if you have one offer you’re probably going to have several offers. It’s not true for every field but tech is hiring and we’re in a good position. Keep going, don’t be afraid to say no or to ask for more time to decide.”
—David Wong
Additional Resources
David’s book – https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography
David’s blog – https://cryptologie.net/
Course on how to learn on Coursera – https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
Additional Resources
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Peter Mckee.
Peter McKee is the Head of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Docker and maintainer of the open source project Ronin.js. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA but currently residing in Austin, TX, Peter built his career developing full-stack applications for over 25 years. He has held multiple roles but enjoys teaching and mentoring the most. When he’s not slapping away at the keyboard, you can find him practicing Spanish and hanging out with his wife and seven children.
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A note from Grant
Peter Mckee is currently a developer relations manager for Docker, the de facto standard in software containers, but his career has taken a number of turns throughout the years. After working on a comp sci degree from Point Park College and then leaving early, Peter has held down a variety of roles in the tech industry including programmer, software architect, principal engineer, front end engineer, director of technology, and senior software engineering manager.
Over the years, Peter has worked for the likes of Dell, Perficient, MarketVine, SuperNaut and ClickVine. He’s even co-founded his own company, Checkmate Technologies and served as their Chief Marketing Officer.
Quotes
“Folks coming out of boot camps or learning on your own, you’re writing a lot of things from scratch. In the real world, you don’t do that a whole lot. That’s rare, especially in larger companies. So I learned how to read code, how to understand code and how to hold a lot of information in my head.”
“What really drives me now is mentoring and teaching. I love research, I love to build things. I’m a great starter but not a great finisher. But I found that I could explain technical things to lay people and to more junior technologists and even to senior technologists.”
“I do about 5 or 6 people at a time and take them through about an 8 month program. I can tell you what to do, but having someone there alongside you and mentor you will 10X your development.”
—Peter McKee
Additional Resources
Learn more about Peter’s mentoring – https://codingadventures.io/
Books:
Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types – by David Keirsey & Marilyn Bates
What Color Is Your Parachute? 2019: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers – by Richard N. Bolles
Additional Resources
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Peter McKee
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Luc Constantin.
Luc Constantin, our guest today, represents so much of what this show is about: there is a path for you in tech. Luc grew up in Romania, one of the poorest of the old Soviet Bloc countries. At 13 years old, Luc dropped out of school. By the time he was 18, he was addicted to drugs and fulfilling his country’s military service obligations. At 21, in his own words, he was finished with the military and had “no hope, no future, no desire to live”. Luc had no idea that he would one day become a programmer or be in the tech space at all.
At 23, Luc decided to go back into the military. From age 29 until 42, he worked in logistics for a packaging and bottling manufacturer in Toledo Spain. At 42, he started learning to code and landed a full time junior web development role by the time he was 43. These days, he’s a front end developer having held down roles for the likes of Gadacons World and Bioclimatic Green Home in Spain. If you think its too late for you to get into coding, be sure to tune in!
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“I was one hopeless drug addict in the 90s, I got 4 kids, I’m 43 years old, I live in a foreign country. Of course it’s challenging [to learn how to code], but it can be done!”
“What is the internet? How does it work? What is Google? The way I understood how HTML works is by understanding how a browser works.”
“I was waking up at 4 or 5 AM and for 2 to 3 hours I was coding, learning and studying. Then I would go to my daily job until 3. Coming back, I would eat and have time with my family for 3 and 4 hours. During evening time I was doing the same – coding, learning and programming!”
—Luc Constantin
Key Milestones
Check out Luc’s personal blog about his journey into tech – https://blog.accolades.dev/
Free Code Academy lets you learn how to be a programmer from your home – https://www.freecodecamp.org/
Additional Resources
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Luc Constantin
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jennifer Byrne.
Jennifer is currently an independent advisor, speaker, and author. A lot of her work is centered around digital transformation.
Previously, Jennifer was Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft US. She infused innovation practices into Microsoft’s technical field teams which led to high-value and well-publicized digital transformation strategies with top global companies.
Jennifer led the fifteen Microsoft Technology Centers across the US, hosting thousands of customers and community events each year. In previous roles at Microsoft, Jennifer was responsible for market expansion initiatives leveraging business model and technology innovation for government, healthcare, and education providers around the globe. She joined Microsoft as the Chief Security Officer for the Worldwide Public Sector Division in 2014.
Prior to Microsoft, Jennifer was a leader in Cybersecurity, having held technical, sales and executive positions at companies such as Intel, McAfee and Symantec. She began her career in technology as an Information Security Analyst and Engineer serving US Government clients.
In high tech or any role, Jennifer Byrne is an advocate for applying original thinking and an innovator’s mindset to create opportunities for success in work and life. Advances in technology can create as much risk as opportunity. Jennifer uses wisdom gained from twenty years in the tech industry to advise startups and mentor young women and leaders on topics related to making the most of today’s fast-changing, tech-infused world.
Quotes
“I think you need to find the place inside yourself that actually cares deeply about the people on your team. It’s ok that it doesn’t come naturally and its ok that you have to work hard at that with some people. But however you get there, you gotta get there.”
“As a pre-sales engineer you have to make everything work. You’re always running the demos. And you’re highly accountable for deeply understanding your technology.”
“What I finally figured out is that you’re not trying to sell them [customers] the value of the product as it is today. What you’re really selling is an investment. They’re not making a purchase, they’re making an investment. And investments are all about what’s going to happen in the future. Where is this technology going? How is this technology going to help me do the things I want to do?”
—Jennifer Byrne
Additional Resources
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Jennifer Byrne
LinkedIn
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Amar Ghose.
Amar Ghose is a Software CEO, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu lover, marketing nerd and compulsive audiobook listener. He is also a full time digital nomad
For the last 6 years Amar has been running ZenMaid, where he leads an awesome team who help thousands of Maid Services every day.
As a SaaS marketing specialist, Amar also helps software companies to think outside the technical box and reach their customers in creative, and often unorthodox ways.
Amar has been traveling the world full time since 2015. He regularly donates his time to help aspiring nomads make the jump into a location-independent lifestyle.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
Joining us today from Bali, Indonesia is Amar Ghose. Amar is a full time digital nomad and the co-founder and CEO of ZenMaid.com, a Software as a Service company targeted at Maid Service owners.
Amar’s journey to tech CEO is built on an economics and philosophy degree from the University of California, Davis and a number of years working in sales, marketing and account executive roles for the likes of BidMail and UserVoice, as well as starting his own maid service called Fast, Friendly, Spotless.
In addition to his role as CEO, Amar is a regular advisor to people in the SaaS industry as well as for those wanting to lead the nomad lifestyle.
-Grant Ingersoll
Additional Resources
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Amar Ghose
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ruby Shrestha
Reiner Kraft has more than 15+ years of experience leading high-impact technological organizations both large and small, and has spent 20 years in the Silicon Valley. (Master Inventor)
During his 20 years in Silicon Valley, Reiner was one of the most prolific inventors in the area, filing more than 120 patent applications with the US Patent Office. Both IBM Research and Yahoo recognize Reiner as a Master Inventor, and the prestigious MIT Technology Review (TR 100) in 2003 also nominated him as a top innovator under the age of 30. Alongside were other nominees including Larry Page (Google) and Jerry Yang (Yahoo).
Reiner also has a proven track-record of building up and balancing long-term strategic research (Zalando Research) with short-term tactical product requirements.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
Reiner Kraft has spent 20+ years working in tech across companies big and small. During the span of his career, Dr. Reiner Kraft has held down roles like senior software engineer, director of engineering, assistant professor, VP of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer.
Along his journey, Reiner earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California Santa Cruz and he’s also garnered the title of Master Inventor due to his prolific work in inventing new technologies. He filed more than 120 patent applications over his career while working at the likes of IBM, and Yahoo!.
In 2003, MIT Technology Review named Reiner one of the Top 100 top innovators under 30. In 2016, Dr Kraft left Silicon Valley for his native home in Germany to help scale the fast growing fashion startup Zalando. These days, Dr. Kraft is based in Berlin Germany where he runs an executive coaching business called the Mindful Leader. This business is focused on helping technical leaders deepen their skills and scale their organizations.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“If you’re interested in a particular research environment I think it can’t hurt to get a phd. It’s probably a necessity to have it to actually get in. Otherwise you can still work as a research engineer m ore on the practical engineering side. For that, a PhD is not necessary at all.”
“I took a mindfulness based stress reduction class that was offered at Yahoo and it felt really good having more clarity, slow things down a little bit and reflect. Stress levels at that point were also decreasing and it made me more open to new things, new experiences.”
—Reiner Kraft
Additional Resources
Check out Reiner’s article ‘The 12 Mindfulness Leadership Principles’
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Reiner Kraft
LinkedIn
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ruby Shrestha
Ruby Shrestha is a People Ops Manager at tech co., a startup seeking to build technology to change the landscape of democracy in America.
Prior to her journey into the startup world, she worked as an administrator at a summer camp in rural New Hampshire after earning her degree in Engineering Science at the University of Virginia.
Ruby loves working in a startup environment where she is always kept on her toes and can see the positive impact her work has had even early on in her People Operations career.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
A key part of building any great company is hiring and retaining people that can not only do the work but add to the company culture. Accomplishing that requires a top notch people operations team that is more than just about selecting your healthcare benefits.
Today, we are going to check-in with Ruby Shrestha, a people ops manager for a Washington DC based tech startup. After earning her bachelor’s in engineering science from the University of Virginia and two years as a camp administrator, Ruby, has worked her way up the people operations career ladder.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I like to think of People Ops as HR’s cuter friend. When I think about People Ops, its all encompassing of the employee experience. So from when you first reach out to someone to apply to your company all the way to their last day. You are not only recruiting but thinking about employee engagement and also employee retention the overall company’s culture.”
“Within people operations there is a significant amount of data analysis you can do to cultivate your company culture. So we use a program called Lattice and it gives us a bunch of different data. But its really up to us to synthesize and use that data in a productive way to improve our company culture.”
—Ruby Shrestha
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Ruby Shrestha
LinkedIn
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Matthew Kelcey
Mat works part time at ThoughtWorks where he is the Principal Consultant for Machine Learning in Australia. He divides the rest of his time between advisory / mentoring work for early stage companies as well as maintaining his small farm.
Prior to ThoughtWorks, Mat was a senior research engineer in the Google Brain team where he worked across robotics & natural language understanding. Mat has held a mix of roles across his 20 year career ranging from machine learning research to engineering for large scale distributed systems; in both internet scale companies (such as Google & Amazon) as well as startups (such as Distra & Wavii)
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
Mat Kelcey is our first guest to join us from Australia where he resides on his farm near Melbourne. Mat has built a career over the years that has spanned the globe, spanned a number of industries and spanned a number of topics. Over the years, he’s stayed deeply focused on doing technical work, holding down titles like software engineer and senior software engineer.
Mat has worked in search, machine learning, big data and deep learning for the likes of Sensis in Australia, Wavii, Google, Lonely Planet, Amazon AWS and these days Thought Works. He’s also a prolific blogger and open source contributor who regularly shares his experiments and ideas in machine learning with the world. Please stay tuned as we connect halfway around the world with Mat Kelcey and hear his journey through the tech world.
-Grant Ingersoll
Key Milestones
- Matt started work on artificial intelligence and machine learning back in the AI winter. What inspired Matt to get a degree in AI at University?
- Throughout his career Matt somehow avoided management. Was this intentional?
- Matt worked specifically on the Google Brain team as a research engineer. What was that experience like?
- When did Matt have imposter syndrome throughout his career?
Additional Resources
Check out Matt’s Medium articles – https://medium.com/@alyjuma/the-regret-minimization-framework-how-jeff-bezos-made-decisions-4d5a86deaf24
Matt’s personal blog – http://matpalm.com/blog/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Matt Kelcey
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
Blog
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Carolyn Stransky
Biography
Carolyn Stransky (she/her) is a software developer and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She’s currently working with the GraphQL Foundation as part of the Google Season of Docs program. Out of the office, she teaches at ReDI School of Digital Integration, freelance writes for outlets like Curve Magazine and maintains an admittedly ridiculous skincare routine. You can find her most places on the Internet @carolstran.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
Carolyn Stransky is a graduate of Beloit College with a degree in Journalism and Media Studies. She spent the first few years of her career in roles like communications management and technical writing before deciding to go to SPICED Academy, a boot camp focused on full stack development based in Berlin, Germany.
Since that career change, Carolyn has held down roles in frontend development, software engineering, as well as technical writing. She freelances both as a developer and as a journalist. Over her career, she’s worked for the likes of Contentful, Blacklane, Meeshkan and is now on her own as a freelancer.
Quotes
“Almost all of the startups I’ve worked for are early stage. So what is a venture capitalist? How do we get our money? What do we need to do to get our next phase of money? How do these phases work? All of these things were things I needed to learn as well as technical vocabulary.”
“I wish I would have realized earlier that programming for many is a new way of thinking, mostly If you’re not used to breaking down problems into logic and putting everything in particular orders. Its a completely new approach to what you may be used to especially if you come from more of a creative field.”
“While I was in my marketing roles I was trying to learn how to code. I would bug our developers and do things like Code Academy. But I hit these blockers and I didn’t really know who to ask. It was hard to figure out on my own. I knew I wanted someone like a teacher who I could bug as much as I want. I chose SPICED because they were full stack java script.”
—Carolyn Stransky
Additional Resources
Carolyn’s writing and portfolio – https://workwithcarolyn.com/
Previous episodes mentioned:
Simon Willison – Data Journalism, The Importance of Side Projects
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Carolyn Stransky
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Marcello La Rocca.
Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer focused on optimization algorithms, genetic algorithms, machine learning and quantum computing. He has contributed to large-scale web applications at companies like Twitter and Microsoft, has undertaken applied research in both academia and industry. He also authored the Neatsort adaptive sorting algorithm.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
Joining us from Zurich, Switzerland, our guest today, Marcello La Rocca, has held down a large variety of roles in the software industry over the years, including full stack engineer, data visualization engineer, backend engineer, game programmer, and most recently, applied Research Engineer.
Marcello has held those roles at companies like Microsoft, SwiftIQ, Twitter and Apple. Marcello has even taught computer science in high school on two different occasions. In addition to his day job, he is a prolific blogger and the author of Manning Publications “Algorithms and Data Structures in Action”.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
My main job was creating nice meaningful visualization using javascript. Where there is data we have to figure out ways to present it to the customers where they can understand it very easily or at least get a grasp of how they were doing.”
“When I moved to twitter I felt it [imposter syndrome] very strongly. I was afraid of asking questions because I thought I would look bad.”
“I feel like discussing things with other engineers is one of the best perks of especially large companies. It’s also one of the ways you can learn better from your mistakes and from other people’s experiences.”
—Marcello La Rocca
Key Milestones
- What does a Data Visualization engineer do?
- Marcello is the author of Algorithms and Data Structures in Action by Manning Publications. What’s the book about and who is it for?
- How will tech and more specifically data visualization engineering change in the next couple of years?
- Marcello got imposter syndrome when he started at Twitter. How did he deal with this?
Additional Resources
Algorithms and Data Structures in Action – by Marcello La Rocca
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Mada Seghete
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mada Seghete
Biography
Mada leads market development and culture initiatives at Branch and is also one of its co-founders. Branch specializes in deep linking for mobile applications. Mada was born and raised in Romania and she came came to the US to study Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. She later earned her Masters of Engineering and MBA from Stanford.
Mada enjoys playing the latest viral mobile game, binge-watching the hottest sci-fi show, and photographing Branch events. Mada regularly speaks about mobile growth at top tech events like Web Summit and SaaStr, and was included in Linkedin’s Next Wave: 150 top professionals in 15 industries all under 35.
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A note from Grant
Mada Seghete is originally from Romania. She did her undergrad in computer engineering and computer science at Cornell University before launching her career as a software engineer at Siemens Medical Solutions.
After her time at Siemens, Mada returned to school, this time at Stanford to get her master’s in Management Science and Engineering as well as her MBA. From that base of engineering, Mada Seghete pivoted into consulting, business development and product management for the likes of Deloitte and Yola.com. She then ventured out on her own to co-found Kindred Prints.
These days, Mada is the co-founder and head of marketing at Branch, a company powering mobile deep linking for the likes of Pinterest, Slack, Ticketmaster and Tinder. In addition to that, Mada is a regular public speaker on growth hacking and mobile, including via her own podcast “How I grew this”.
Stay tuned as we hear how Mada Seghete growth hacked her way from software engineering to co-founding a company that’s raised over $50 million in venture capital.
-Grant Ingersoll
Additional Resources
Learn more about Branch – https://branch.io/
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture (book) – by Ben Horowtich
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (book) – by Daniel Coyle
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Mada Seghete
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Noah Labhart.
Noah Labhart is the CTO & Co-Founder of Veryable, and the Founder & CEO of Touchtap, a digital solutions studio. A tech veteran himself, Labhart is intimately familiar with the challenges, risks and rewards of introducing new tech into the world.
Tune in to hear about how Noah became a two time tech startup founder.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“I got into math and started pursuing it but I really started to enjoy my computer science classes. In coding, I loved the creativity and I started building some websites for myself, throwing pictures up of my family and little bios. I learned html, css, javascript, and really liked it.”
“At the time there was an opportunity to work for Alcon Laboratories. I had a lot of friends that worked there. Great company. Takes really good care of their employees. Pretty good flexibility. So I was like ‘I can do my band during the weekends and have a really great job during the week’. And I worked for Alcon for 8 years.”
“As problems needed to be fixed, we brought on more help. We didn’t try to bite off more than we can chew. That’s how Touchtap grew and we’ve done a similar thing with Veryable. We’ve started with uncsontrained models. We’ve built things as we’ve needed them. And instead of building these intricate systems, we’ve built something, responded to market feedback, and then build it in a new way to meet the needs of the market.”
—Noah Labhart
Key Milestones
- What inspired Noah Labhart to get into tech and to pursuing a comp sci and math degree at Texas A&M?
- Why did Noah transition into IT management after starting his career in development?
- Noah was at Alcon Labs when he decided to found his tech startup, TouchTap. How did this happen?
- How does Noah think about building teams and businesses these days?
- What is Veryable why did Noah decide to build another tech startup company?
- Noah also has a successful podcast called Code Story. What is it about? who is it for?
- From a career perspective, why start and run a podcast?
Additional Resources
Check out Noah’s podcast Code Story – https://codestory.co/
Find out more about Veryable – https://veryableops.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Noah Labhart
LinkedIn
Github
https://noahlabhart.com/
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Evan Korth.
Evan Korth has worn many hats as an active member of NYC’s academic and innovation communities since ’99 — computer science professor, developer, investor, advisor, founder, expert witness, researcher, board member, coach and mentor.
Evan also advises Flybridge Capital and sits on the NYU Innovation Venture Fund’s investment committee.
Evan’s work in helping his students find opportunities at startups in early 2000’s led him to cofound his first non-profit, HackNY, to help federate the next generation of hackers for the New York City innovation community.
After helping the Bloomberg administration create NYC’s first two software engineering high schools, Fred Wilson and Evan co-founded CSNYC in order to ensure all 1.1 million NYC public school students have an opportunity to study computer science. In September 2015, Mayor Deblasio announced a $81mm public private partnership with CSNYC to meet its mission within ten years.
Today, Evan serves on the boards of hackNY, CSNYC and GirlsWhoCode.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“When I was offered an opportunity to teach a course in 1999 at NYU I thought, wow, what an opportunity to get over my fear of public speaking. I get to talk about something I know really well so I’d have the confidence to speak about it to undergraduates who wanted that knowledge.”
“We threw the first college hackathon as far as we know in April 2010. Then we started a summer fellowship program where we got the best hackers we could across the country, brought them to New York for the summer, and put them up in NYU dorms. They interned at different startups during the day and we had an educational program for them at night.”
—Evan Korth
Key Milestones
- Why did Evan choose to get a degree in Accounting?
- What was it like working as a sports agent?
- What inspired Evan to leave Bruce Levy after 8 years?
- How did Evan become a computer science professor?
- Evan founded two non-profits, HackNY and the NYC Foundation for Computer Science Education. What drew Evan to nonprofits?
Additional Resources
Previous episodes mentioned:
Adam Cheyer – Co-Founder of Siri, Viv Labs, and Change.org #67
Andrew Montalenti – From Morgan Stanley to Founding Parse.ly #92
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Evan Korth
LinkedIn
https://cs.nyu.edu/~korth/
ekorth@gmail.com
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Gianluca Mauro.
Gianluca Mauro is the founder and lead artificial intelligence coach of the AI Academy and the co-author of Zero to AI, a non-technical hype free guide to prospering in the AI era from Manning Publications.
Gianluca’s roots lie in energy engineering from his University days, including getting a master’s from Università di Roma Tor Vergata. Since then, he has been in the tech space building apps, freelancing and coaching people in data science and artificial intelligence.
Stay tuned learn how this Fullbright scholar has gotten past the hype of AI to the reality of working in a hot field in tech.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“The first tip [to write] is just do it. We definitely think that we don’t know how to write, but if you just write the way you speak, usually you end up with pretty good stuff!”
“[Zero to AI] is a book that is geared towards people who have an MBA in business management who really have no experience in computer science. But they want to be a part of this revolution, they want to have a place and want to be a part of the conversation.”
“Writing has some clarity of mind on what you’ve done, and I like to add some story telling to my blog posts. I just started by telling the story of how I started to solve a problem of something related to my field.”
—Gianluca Mauro
Key Milestones
- What is energy engineering and what drove Gianluca to get a master’s degree in it?
- When did Gianluca decide to be an artificial intelligence coach?
- Why did Gianluca also choose to pursue a business degree?
- What is AI Academy? Who is it for? And what will they learn?
- Gianlua co-authored the book, “Zero to AI”. What inspired the book, what is it about and who is the audience?
Additional Resources
Zero to AI (book) – https://www.manning.com/books/zero-to-ai
Check out some of Gianluca’s writing on Medium – https://medium.com/@gianlucahmd
Find out more about AI Academy – https://ai-academy.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Gianluca Mauro
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to our second panel on Develomentor. Today's topic is tech hiring as an employee and as a manager.
Today's guests are:
Aline Lerner – Aline is the founder and CEO of Interviewing.io, a hiring platform aimed at making interviewing and finding a job in tech way less painful. You heard her first on the show in episode 44 where she shared her career path from MIT computer science to being a professional chef to tech recruiting and software engineering.
Daniel Tunkelang – Daniel is a computer scientist and early employee at Endeca, the search company acquired by Oracle for over $1 billion. He also spent time at Google and LinkedIn before going out on his own as a, to use his own words, a High Class consultant.
Renee Saint-Louis – Renee is a long time product manager and the author of the Manager Mentor blog series, which you can find at develomentor.com. She was also a guest of the show way back in episode 2.
Key Milestones
- Why is talking to employees often a better way of getting a job than talking to recruiters?
- What are common mistakes people make in the tech hiring process?
- Ways to assess whether a company is a good fit for you or not.
- One of the controversies in hiring in the tech field relates to giving candidates homework as part of the screening process.
- What do manager's look for when adding to their team?
- Negotiating as an employee and as a manager.
- What is the “pipeline problem” as it relates to diversity and inclusion in hiring in tech?
- How to deal with 'brilliant jerks' in tech?
**Additional Resources
What is the pipeline problem? https://blog.interviewing.io/we-ran-the-numbers-and-there-really-is-a-pipeline-problem-in-eng-hiring/
Check out our Manager series on Develomento**r - https://develomentor.com/2020/10/28/avoiding-conflict-erodes-trust/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with the panelists:
Aline Lerner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinelerner/
Renee Saint Louis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-saint-louis-cbap-6bbb2a/
Daniel Tunkelang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dtunkelang/Aline Lerner:
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Chris Samiullah.
From self taught developer to teaching 10,000+ developers, our guest today has turned a degree in English Literature from York and a Master’s of Science in International Business and Management into a 7+ year in tech as a developer. Over the course of his career, Chris Samiullah has worked in consulting doing dental practice acquisitions, healthcare and fintech, holding down titles like analyst, software engineer, developer, development manager, AI Software Engineer and tech lead.
Chris has also worked globally, spending three years away from his home in the United Kingdom working in China. In addition to his day job, Chris teaches two popular Udemy classes on machine learning with over 10,000 students.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“Project based learning is so important and its definitely been the foundation for me. It has kept me motivated. Early on I had a series of projects, first of which was a choose your own adventure Brazilian jiu jujitsu game/tutorial.”
“For a structuring project learning I would start with something I could realistically do in a day then go on with something I could finish in a weekend. Whenever talking about the self taught route, difficulty calibration is something I talk about a lot. And I feel like its what boot camps are giving you, just in a structured way.”
“I think people want to help others if they feel like they are people who are ready to be helped. So its about demonstrating that you’re ready to be helped. The way I did that was by building all of these projects. It’s not just saying ‘I’m really interested’, but showing it. So I would send them code snippets, I would send them screenshots of what I was building, etc.”
—Chris Samiullah
Additional Resources
https://www.udemy.com/user/christopher-samiullah/
https://coursemaker.org
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Chris Samiullah
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Monica Lent
Monica Lent is an American software engineer and engineering manager living and working in Berlin, Germany.
She started coding when she was 10 years old, and hasn’t stopped since then. In her 10+ year technical career (not including coding as a kid 😉), Monica has worked in a wide range of domains such as cloud services, natural language processing, e-learning, and fintech.
She has taken on roles ranging from individual contributor to technical lead and manager.
Most recently, she was leading a distributed team of 15+ frontend engineers at SumUp, a German fintech company. During her time there the company grew from 80 people to more than 1,500 people over the course of 5 years.
Today, Monica is building her own startup called Affilimate, a tool that helps bloggers earn more from their content with actionable affiliate analytics. It’s currently in private beta, but you’re welcome to email her for an invite or about partnership opportunities. In my spare time, Monica blogs about travel and photography on Not a Nomad Blog, which reaches over 60,000 unique readers per month.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“I never really planned to blog for money or to be a successful blogger. So when I started this travel blog it was primarily just to document my time living in Europe. During that Time I also learned more about photography so it became sort of like a side project for me. And slowly what happened over time is Google became more and more interested in my content.”
“If you want to write technical tutorials it’ll be a better investment of your time to optimize for SEO. So in the future, when you’re googling your own problem, you come across your own blog post. You just have to put yourself in the mindset of whoever will be discovering your content.”
—Monica Lent
Additional Resources
Learn more about Affilimate – https://affilimate.com/about/
Learn more about Blogging for Devs – https://bloggingfordevs.com/
Check out Monica’s blog travel blog – https://notanomadblog.com/
Connect with James Tucker
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
https://jamestucker.dev/
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is James Tucker.
James Tucker is a developer, husband, dog dad, and former aspiring pastor.
Currently, he’s working at soona as a full stack engineer, building out a content creation platform primarily with Vue.js and Ruby on Rails.
James is passionate about making things and teaching others code. When he’s not coding, you can probably find him spending time with his wife Megan, reading, playing ice hockey, or camping.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
In yet another first for the show, we have our first Theology major turned developer as a guest today. That’s right, James Tucker, a once upon a time aspiring pastor with a Theology degree from Northland International University, spent three years working across manufacturing and insurance before deciding to go to a tech bootcamp and become a full stack developer for the likes of Journey Tellr and soona. In addition to his developer roles, he’s an avid blogger and public speaker. Be sure to listen in as we learn about James Tucker’s calling to code.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“When I took Strength Finders and I started thinking about my past and I remembered that I was really creative as a kid and I love legos. I loved painting, I loved drawing. And we sort of thought that coding and being a developer was somewhat like an adult version of playing with legos. That’s really when I decided to go off to my bootcamp.“
“One thing that really helped me with my job search was building out side projects and making sure I had these listed on my resume so when I got interviewed I had something I was really passionate about. I got actual feedback from hiring managers that this was one of my strengths of my approach to getting a job“
—James Tucker
Key Milestones
Additional Resources
Podcasts:
How I Built This – https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this
Hardcore History – https://www.dancarlin.com/
Note Taking:
Obsidian – https://obsidian.md/
Roam – https://roamresearch.com/
Connect with James Tucker
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
https://jamestucker.dev/
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Hilliary Turnipseed.
Hilliary Turnipseed is an experienced talent acquisition and management executive, specializing in early-stage startups, as well as the education technology, media production and advertising industries. Companies she has worked with include Discovery Communications, Black Girls CODE, POLITICO and Blackboard.
While Turnipseed’s primary expertise is in recruitment, she also focuses on implementing diversity and inclusion strategies along with employee engagement and wellness program initiatives. She is well known for her creative approaches to optimizing workplace environments and policies for the Millennial and Gen Z generations.
In addition to consulting, Turnipseed currently serves as a Director for Women Who Code, while also leading talent and employer branding initiatives for digital content media company, Women 2.0.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A word from Grant
Hilliary Turnipseed has turned a bachelor’s in History from American University into a 15+ year career helping companies in and out of the tech industry find and hire talent. Having worked for the likes of Axios, Black Girls Code, Discovery Communications, Blackboard, Women 2.0 and these days, on her own as the founder and president of Hill Street Strategies, Hilliary helps companies not just hire talent, but build stronger, more inclusive cultures.
When Hilliary isn’t recruiting top talent, she is often found volunteering for groups like Women Who Code, Tech Rebalanced, or speaking on podcasts or at DC Startup Week.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I love people and I consider myself just an organic connector. So I stumbled upon this industry that I didn’t know really existed. I did not go to school to recruit or for HR.”
“For me, it was really important to link the importance of people with the overall business strategy. So I view people as the most valuable asset within an organization.”
“Women apply to roles where they meet 90 to 100 percent of requirements whereas for men its usually 10 to 20 percent. So if you just take that one stat into consideration, your job descriptions alone could be preventing that pipeline from coming through.”
—Hilliary Turnipseed
Additional Resources
The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table – https://www.amazon.com/Memo-Women-Color-Secure-Table-ebook/dp/B07L2WRVSW
Check out Women Who Code – https://www.womenwhocode.com/about
Look into Hilliary’s talent consultancy – https://www.hillstreetstrategies.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Hilliary Turnipseed
LinkedIn
Twitter
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Raz Shuty.
Raz Shuty has held titles like Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Founder and CTO throughout his career, but he didn’t start there. In fact, after getting his degree in computer science he took one of the routes I believe can make for the strongest of developers: he went to work as a test and QA engineer before working his way into software engineering and lead software engineering roles.
Along his journey, he’s worked for the likes of PicScout, Wikimedia Deutschland, Auctionata, and fring as well as started not one, but two companies. In addition to his day job, Raz is a co-host on the podcast Techpoint Charlie, a podcast focused on topics in tech.
-Grant Ingersoll
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A word from Raz
I am a parent to an awesome frog called Ethan, annoying spouse to Yael, Ironman Triathlon and many Marathons finisher, 12 years Software Engineer and 4 years Engineering Manager. I like to talk about culture, and I try to be a product driven Engineering Manager and I truly believe that Product and Engineering should talk more often and the earlier the better.
Sometimes our industry is so stuck in finding the perfect solution. As developer we all criticize product people for being waterfalls but we as developers tend to over engineer so much. We tend to always try to find the best solution to deliver to production instead of finding a solution and then iterate.
-Raz Shuty
Quotes
“If you do end to end automation you can have a product view, you can have a holistic view of a product. Whereas, as a software engineer its sort of hard to get your head out of the trenches and to see how things actually relate to each other in the big scope of things.”
“Sometimes our industry is so stuck in finding the perfect solution. As developers we all criticize product people for being waterfalls but we as developers tend to over engineer so much. We tend to always try to find the best solution to deliver to production instead of finding a solution and then iterate.”
—Raz Shuty
Additional Resources
Raz Shuty’s blog on Engineering Management – https://somehowimanage.blog/
Check out Raz Shuty’s podcast, Techpoint Charlie – https://techpointcharlie.blog/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Raz Shuty
LinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Edidiong Asikpko.
Edidiong Asikpo is a software engineer from Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. She is a passionate professional with multi-faceted skills and experience spanning across Software Engineering, Developer Relations, community building, technical writing, and Open Source contributions. Edidiong is one of the leaders of the devlopement of tech in Nigeria.
She is a strong advocate of sensitizing people, especially women about the importance of starting a career in Technology. This passion has led her to play a major part in building communities such as Developer Circle Uyo from Facebook, She Code Africa, and Women Will. She is an eloquent writer, speaker, and communicator with a keen interest in making open Source contributions and inspiring the next generation.
In 2019, she was one of the 40 people recognized by Facebook as an Icon of change because of her impacts and strong contributions to building the Technology Ecosystem in Nigeria.
When she’s not coding, you can find her exploring the beauty of nature and analyzing movies.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“If you ask me that’s definitely how I got into tech, not necesarily because I studied computer science but because I went for that industrial training and learned how to develop mobile applications“
“You might be a newbie in tech for 2 weeks but there is someone joining who is a newbie in tech for one week. So what you know in two weeks you can help the person joining with one week. So never feel like you don’t know enough or there is no one who is going to listen or you’re not good enough or something. Just start.”
“Being a developer advocate is just an opportunity to do a lot of things at the same time. I get to write, I get to speak, I get to also code and I also get to meet amazing people.”
“Some of the things I do is try to ensure that developers who integrate with our product have a good experience. So it can range from improving on documentation, writing tutorials, and creating demos of some of these different APIs that we have”
—Edidiong Asikpo
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Edidiong Asikpo
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://edidiongasikpo.com/press-kit
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ann Lewis.
Ann Lewis is the CTO of MoveOn.org. She is a technical leader, architect, and active coder with 15+ years of experience in software engineering and software management, with a focus on distributed systems and scalability. In her work at MoveOn, she in-housed tech and hired a tech team, modernized and upgraded MoveOn’s software infrastructure, created and scaled up new systems for MoveOn’s 2016 presidential election program, 2017 Resistance programs, and 2018 midterm election program, and co-ran and launched a rebranding effort across all MoveOn web properties.
Ann sees opportunities for new collaborations between the tech and organizing worlds, to modernize infrastructure, bring in best practices, and scale impact of tools. Ann is passionate about using tech and data to scale the impact of organizing, ensuring that systems of power are fair and accountable, and harnessing people power to hold governments and corporations accountable.
You can find her on twitter here: @ann_lewis
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“Political Tech as an ecosystem has a relatively small market cap so there is often not enough organic competition to make it so there is a good product offering for each price point in each thing that needs to happen.”
“When I discovered programming in general I realized that you can move at the speed of thought and build things as quickly as you can imagine them and I’ve been excited for that my entire life.”
“In the early 2000s, I think Amazon’s identity was largely based around having survived the dot com bubble burst and a lot of other tech companies had gone under. So Amazon survived and so did google and Microsoft. They were hiring up all the engineers out of college. There was a lot of pride around doing things efficiently.”
“At Amazon, without meaning to, I got deep experience in massively scalable distributed systems. It’s interesting, these big tech companies have so much data and so much scale. Even the smallest system you can build is going to have to handle thousands of request per second.”
—Ann Lewis
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Ann Lewis
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://annlewis.tech/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kent C. Dodds!
Kent C. Dodds is a world renowned speaker, teacher, and trainer and he’s actively involved in the open source community as a maintainer and contributor of hundreds of popular npm packages.
Kent is the creator of TestingJavaScript.com and he’s an instructor on egghead.io and Frontend Masters. He’s also a Google Developer Expert. Kent is happily married and the father of four kids. He likes his family, code, JavaScript, and React.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
A note from Grant
After considering a career as an accountant, some time spent as a missionary and a small business owner digitizing compact discs, Kent C. Dodds has steadily spent the last decade building up a career as a web developer and software engineer for the likes of USAA, Domo, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Paypal.
These days, Kent is on his own as a world renowned speaker, teacher and trainer on software and software quality, especially in the Javascript and frontend development space. His work can be found on several leading sites like egghead.io, Frontend Masters and his very own EpicReact.dev and TestingJavaScript.com. In addition to all that great educational content, Kent also is an active contributor and maintainer of hundreds of popular open source Javascript libraries.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I ended up switching from accounting to information systems which is in the business school. II still wasn’t convinced that I wanted to program. But I thought ‘hey I really enjoy computers, I’m really good at these computer things, and business seems interesting.’”
“I think that’s what got me started into UI was just that really quick feedback cycle of seeing the impact of the changes I was making.”
“Right around the time I graduated from college I started making videos for egghead. My first course I created was using JWTs with AngularJS. And My first month I got my royalty check and it paid my mortgage for that month. And it did so thereafter.”
—Kent C. Dodds
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Kent C. Dodds
LinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to our very first panel on Develomentor. Today's topic is compensation in tech.
Today's guests are:
Jacqueline Nolis – Jacqueline joins us from Seattle Washington. She was a guest on the show in episode 76, has built a 10+ year career in data science and analytics and is the co-author of “Build Your Career in Data Science”.
Gary Flake – Gary is the former CTO of Search and Data Science at Salesforce and is now an independent inventor, author and advisor. Gary was also a guest on the show in episode 42 and 43.
Renee Saint-Louis – Renee is a long time product manager and the author of the Manager Mentor blog series, which you can find at develomentor.com. She was also a guest of the show way back in episode 2.
Quotes
“Unless you’re willing to leave a job and investigate and do interviews, you never know really what you’re worth” – Gary Flake
—Guest
Key Milestones
- What are different ways of negotiating salary?
- Salary differences between big companies and startups
- Negotiating total compensation including stock options
- A few effective ways of negotiating a raise
- Is sharing salary information with colleagues a good or bad idea?
Additional Resources
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with the panaelists:
Renee Saint Louis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-saint-louis-cbap-6bbb2a/
Jacqueline Nolis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jnolis/
Gary Flake: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyflake/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ala Shaban.
Ala Shiban is currently the Director of Product at Tube Science. He started his career as a machine learning engineer and pivoted to product manager after a few years.
Ala got a bachelor’s and master’s of computer science from the University of Haifa and has held down a variety of roles across a variety of domains in tech. Along his journey, Ala has worked in domains like cancer detection using nano-sensors, developer tools and online gaming. He has held titles like software engineer, research engineer, teaching assistant, product manager, and director.
Ala has worked for companies large and small, including Microsoft and Riot Games. As if that isn’t enough, he has also co-founded a company, started a non-profit and also started a magazine focused on hardware.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“For me computer science isn’t about programming. At least this is what I found out early on. I call it computational thinking. The mathematical side and the algorithmic side of computer science is the one I find way more important than how you program.”
“We founded this website that one of the largest independent gaming websites online and that was an unbelievable experience. I went on to create HardwareHell, which was the hardware spinoff of it.”
“We have engineers that are brilliant. If you put smart and brilliant people together to solve a technical problem, they will solve it. The minute you get them together as groups or as larger organizations, it becomes harder. Tech is easy, the people are hard.”
—Ala Shiban
Key Milestones
- What inspired Ala to go into tech and to pursue a masters degree in computer science?
- While you were at university, Ala was also quite busy with work as he started a magazine! How was he able to balance work and school life?
- Ala spent some time doing cancer research as an engineer. What inspired him to get into that field and what was it like working as a research engineer?
- After working as a research engineer, Ala decided to leave software engineering for product management. What was going through his mind at this time?
- What are some of the key skills to be successful as a product manager?
- Some key lessons learned from working at companies like Microsoft and Riot Games?
Additional Resources
Learn Python online with Visual Python! – https://visualpython.dev/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Ala ShibanLinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ala Shaban.
Ala Shiban is currently the Director of Product at Tube Science. He started his career as a machine learning engineer and pivoted to product manager after a few years.
Ala got a bachelor’s and master’s of computer science from the University of Haifa and has held down a variety of roles across a variety of domains in tech. Along his journey, Ala has worked in domains like cancer detection using nano-sensors, developer tools and online gaming. He has held titles like software engineer, research engineer, teaching assistant, product manager, and director.
Ala has worked for companies large and small, including Microsoft and Riot Games. As if that isn’t enough, he has also co-founded a company, started a non-profit and also started a magazine focused on hardware.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“For me computer science isn’t about programming. At least this is what I found out early on. I call it computational thinking. The mathematical side and the algorithmic side of computer science is the one I find way more important than how you program.”
“We founded this website that one of the largest independent gaming websites online and that was an unbelievable experience. I went on to create HardwareHell, which was the hardware spinoff of it.”
“We have engineers that are brilliant. If you put smart and brilliant people together to solve a technical problem, they will solve it. The minute you get them together as groups or as larger organizations, it becomes harder. Tech is easy, the people are hard.”
—Ala Shiban
Key Milestones
- What inspired Ala to go into tech and to pursue a masters degree in computer science?
- While you were at university, Ala was also quite busy with work as he started a magazine! How was he able to balance work and school life?
- Ala spent some time doing cancer research as an engineer. What inspired him to get into that field and what was it like working as a research engineer?
- After working as a research engineer, Ala decided to leave software engineering for product management. What was going through his mind at this time?
- What are some of the key skills to be successful as a product manager?
- Some key lessons learned from working at companies like Microsoft and Riot Games?
Additional Resources
Learn Python online with Visual Python! – https://visualpython.dev/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Ala ShibanLinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dinesh Shenoy!
From graduating college with a double major in history and physics to changing oil at Jiffy Lube while he figured out what’s next to 7 years as an attorney for Aronson and Associates, Dinesh Shenoy has taken, in his own words “an unusual career path” to becoming a data scientist in 2016.
Along that path, in addition to that double major in undergrad, Dinesh picked up a law degree from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Minnesota before deciding to see what data science is all about. As a data scientist, he’s held down roles for Veritas and now CH Robinson.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“By the time I finished my education I had my feet in both camps. I thoroughly enjoyed my physics education, I liked the value of it. But history opened up my mind to a broader perspective rather than thinking of just some technical path in life.”
“Outside of the team, people don’t need to see the math they want you to boil it down for them and help them make a solid business decision one way or another. And boil it down in a quick way.”
“I first started hearing the term ‘data scientist’ when I started thinking about ‘ if I’m not seeking an academic career path, what is there for someone like me in the job market?’”
—Dinesh Shenoy
Key Milestones
- Dinesh took a year off after graduating from college, worked at Jiffy Lube and then decided to go to law school because it was “respectable”. What was going through his mind at that time?
- Dinesh spent 7 years as an immigration attorney. What inspired that area of law?
- After leaving law, Dinesh went back to school to become an astro-physicist. Why choose something so difficult?
- Dinesh find himself in tech after studying to become an astro-physicist?
- Dinesh’s experience as a lawyer and a physics PhD are definitely unique. How have they played into building a successful data science career?
- Tech fuels Dinesh’s intellectual curiosity. How does the ever changing field
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Dinesh Shenoy
LinkedIn
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mikolaj Pawlikowski!
Mikolaj Pawlikowski has been a chaos engineer for about four years. He began with a large distributed Kubernetes-based microservices platform at Bloomberg. Mikolaj is the creator of the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering tool PowerfulSeal, and the networking visibility tool Goldgpinger. He is an active member of the Chaos Engineering community and speaks at numerous conferences.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“I spent half of my time at the company that employed me and payed me roughly half of the money that I’d get if I was working there full time. During the other half of the time I had to cram in all the classes that you would normally have.”
“If you have your laptop and it runs for 10 years, you assume it is basically going to run forever. But if you have 1000 laptops, you’re going to start to seem them going down.”
“You can’t ever properly test things in any other environment than production. Because the data is going to be slightly different and the patterns of users will be slightly different.”
“We want to minimize the blast radius. The number of things that can be affected by what we do. In the practice of chaos engineering, it’s not completely crazy to introduce some of that failure to production systems.”
—Mikolaj Pawlikowski
Additional Resources
Sign up for Mikolaj’s newsletter for the latest on chaos engineering – https://chaosengineering.news/
Mikolaj’s Book – Chaos Engineering: Crash Test Your Applications – https://www.manning.com/books/chaos-engineering
Past Develomentor Episodes to check out:
Ep. 15 Kelsey Hightower – Tech Support to Dev Advocate to Keynote Speaker
Charity Majors – Systems Engineer & Cofounder of Honeycomb.io #66
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kamil Sindi.
Biography
Kamil Sindi started his young professional career as a financial analyst before getting into tech.
Currently, Kamil oversees engineering, data science and design at JW Player, the world’s largest independent video platform. Prior to being promoted to CTO, Kamil served as VP of Engineering responsible for infrastructure and data at JW Player, Lead Data Engineer at Better Mortgage, and as a senior technologist at a quantitative hedge fund. Kamil received a B.Sc. in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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A note from Grant
It’s often said that the best way to get the CTO title at a company is to found the company. In fact, that’s exactly how I did it, but it’s not the path Kamil Sindi, our guest on today’s show took to get into that role. In fact, Kamil worked his way up at his current employer JW Player from Data Science Manager to Director of Engineering to VP of Engineering before taking on the CTO role last year.
Kamil’s journey, however, didn’t start at JW Player. Prior to there, Kamil did a degree in math and comp sci at MIT before launching his career as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs. Along his journey, he’s also spent time at Nebula Capital Management as an Analyst and Better Mortgage as Lead Data Engineer.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“When I was graduating from MIT, I think I was 19 years old. A lot of my focus was in math and I was really interested in theoretical math. But I also wanted to make sure that I was employable long term. So I also did a focus in computer science.”
“I really wanted to specialize in quantitative finance. Over time I started realizing that I really wanted to be not a specialist but a generalist. You get to wear many hats and be good at many things, maybe not necessarily an expert.”
“I still sometimes code in my free time if its side projects. But for me I’m just so interested in the business aspect of things and the product that I never felt like I was giving up coding too much because I could always do it on the side.”
“When you think about your career path, 5-10 years from now how does that look like? How immune is it to the changing technology landscape?”
—Kamil Sindi
Key Milestones
- Why did Kamil pursue a math and comp sci degree?
- Kamil’s first few roles had the title of Analyst and were at financial companies. How did he end up in finance?
- Why did Kamil decide to transition into tech?
- Kamil tells us about his path moving up the management chain.
- What’s been the most surprising thing about joining the C Suite?
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ryan Latta.
Ryan Latta is an agile coach and independent software consultant. He has held tech roles including software engineer, CTO and scrum master. But there is more to the story, as this NC State Computer Science graduate actually started his career as an English teacher before launching his career in tech.
Along his journey, Ryan has worked for the likes of Appia, Thoughtworks, Amplify and several other companies before venturing out on his own as a freelance consultant.
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Quotes
“I always wound up in these unrecognized leadership positions. So I knew there was something there for me but I didn’t know what shape it would take.”
“I wasn’t the smartest kid in the room and I wasn’t sure if I loved programming. What I did realize though is when we did group work, we got our groups going.”
“I became this kind of like ‘when no shoe fits, you call me’. And that meant I started doing agile coaching gigs within the company and then from then on it stuck as my title and profession.”
“Find people that make you better than who you are. Do not go through your career alone. If you need a mentor, find them. Find people who have done this before that you can listen to and take what they have to say seriously.”
“My fear was mostly financial. So if you’re preparing to go start a new venture, have a few months of savings set up for when things go bad. Have a line of credit. Life has a funny way of kicking you.”
—Ryan Latta
Key Milestones
- Ryan taught English coming out of college. What inspired this decision and what brought him back into tech?
- After your time teaching, Ryan’s career has seemingly had 3 phases: a phase as a software engineer, a phase an agile coach and now as a consultant. How did he know when was the right time to make a change?
- What is an agile coach and what does it take to be successful in such a role?
- What’s the day to day look like for an agile coach?
- Going on your own can be a big leap, as there often is now safety net. How did Ryan prepare to become a freelancer and what are some tips for anyone considering a similar move?
Additional Resources
Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin – https://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766
Ryan’s book, ‘Land the Job: Six Months to Start Your Software Career’ – https://www.amazon.com/Land-Job-Months-Software-Career/dp/1734486139
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Taylor Poindexter.
Taylor Poindexter is the co-founder of Black Code Collective, an organization that strives to provide a safe space for Black Engineers to collaborate and grow their skills. In addition to this, she is a Senior Back End Engineer for a startup called tech co. A company that is working to make a more participatory democracy. Some awards she’s received include: 2019 Power Woman of DC Tech, DC Fem Tech’s 2018 Power Woman in Code, DC’s 2017 Top Technologist, and 2017 Power Woman of DC Tech. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, working out, whiskey tasting, and spending time with her two amazing nephews.
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A note from Grant
Taylor Poindexter is a proud University of Virginia alumni, earning her degree in computer science before launching her career in tech where she’s held down roles like automation engineer, test engineer, back end engineer and now senior software engineer.
Never one to slow down, Taylor also co-founded the Black Code Collective, an organization that strives to provide a safe space for Black Engineers to collaborate and grow their skills in the Washington DC area. She has collected several awards including being selected as one of DC’s Top Power Women as well as DC’s Top Technologist in 2017.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“The amount of imposter syndrome I’ve felt until the last 6 months has been at times overwhelming and there were genuine times when I thought that I couldn’t make it in tech.”
“On the back end I’m handling all the data that is passed to the front end for you to be able to see and manipulate. I also write the algorithms to potentially be able to save that data to the database and then serve to the user when they come back.”
“I have several mentors I’ve picked up along the way but they’ve all happened very naturally. And I think those are the best types of mentor relationships because they genuinely care about the advancement of my career.”
“While I may have my own tickets to complete, I have to also make sure to be thinking of the broader vision and the implication of the tickets we’re working on now so we’re set up for success.”
—Taylor Poindexter
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Pardis Noorzad.
Pardis is Head of Data Science at Carbon Health, a technology-enabled healthcare provider designed to make world-class primary and urgent care accessible to all. Her team’s mission is to improve health outcomes and increase operational efficiency.
Previously she led Connect Data Science at Twitter—covering Search, Trends, Explore, Events, Moments, Topics, and Notifications. Pardis reestablished the Product Data Science function at the company, ushering its expansion for the first time in four years. At Paytm Labs, she designed and built a fully automated fraud detection engine for Paytm—the P2P payments and marketplace app serving India. As an early employee at Rubikloud, Pardis proposed and built a promotions allocation system for retailers.
Pardis studied random graph models of online social networks at Ryerson University. At Amirkabir University, she published on music genre recognition and sparse linear classifiers. She holds a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Tehran, where she served as ECE Representative for three years. Pardis also served in the Ryerson Senate for a year.
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Quotes
“The internet was just so fascinating that I really felt like I need to know how this works. It looks like magic. And I was spending so much time on the internet that I had to find out how this works.”
“Honestly the problem with University is it tires you out. But it also humbles you to the point of no return. It takes a lot of years to build that confidence again.”
“Every time an opportunity came up in the bay area, I tried to make up some excuse to not make it happen. Even though I knew it would be a great experience. But ultimately when twitter came up, it was very difficult to say no.”
—Pardis Noorzad
Additional ResourcesCheck out Pardis’s personal website – https://djpardis.com/
Management Best Practices – by Pardis Noorzax – https://medium.com/@djpardis/management-and-coaching-best-practices-as-a-list-of-n-things-7a6d9c7f0fa5
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Andrew Montalenti
Andrew is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Parse.ly. Andrew was Parse.ly’s founding CTO, and he led the company through its early R&D, fundraising, and initial scale-up growth/hiring periods. He now leads the company’s product strategy and vision as CPO.
Based in NYC, Andrew is a regular speaker on topics including real-time analytics, open source software, fully distributed teams, and product management. He also spends time with Parse.ly clients, who include premium news publishers, high-growth digital startups, world-renowned entertainment brands, and corporate marketers making the transition to content marketing. Those customers use data to inform some of the web’s smartest content strategies at places like Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast, HelloFresh, WeddingWire, Policygenius, and Slate.
Andrew created Parse.ly in 2009 with co-founder and former NYU roommate Sachin Kamdar. Prior to starting the company, Andrew graduated with a Computer Science degree from NYU; focused on distributed systems and web services as a software engineer at Morgan Stanley; and ran a boutique software consulting firm that served clients in NYC and beyond. He enjoys reading and writing at the interaction of media, tech, open source, and startups. You can read his writing on the Parse.ly blog and on his personal website, amontalenti.com. You can also find his latest thoughts on Twitter at @amontalenti
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Quotes
“There was this huge tradition of almost applied research in operating systems and I just became fascinated by that history.I think that drove me to go into the study of operating systems where I could do things like learn about the history of operating system kernels but also implement my own kernel in C.”
“We pivoted the business from indexing content and giving analytics to anyone about it to actually being a direct measurement approach for content for the worlds largest media companies. So we turned Pars.ly to a software as a service company some point around 2011.”
—Andrew Montalenti
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Sean Melody
Sean Melody has held a variety of roles across a several companies since he started his career almost 20 years ago. He’s been an engineer, architect, team lead, dev manager, CTO, and now works for a small company as a Chief Technologist where he focuses on bringing new products to market in the automotive space. He does product development, especially with web front ends, and has done various back end and mobile projects throughout his career. He’s passionate about mentoring young and old, technical and non technical folks alike. Sean is an extrovert in a world of introverts and loves building things which is why he keeps finding himself close to the code, while still thinking about business and product concerns so that he can advise C level executives.
Sean is an avid gardener and loves being outdoors with his family. He turned his passion for trivia and “fun facts” into an appearance on Jeopardy in 2019. Sean serves as volunteer Care Pantry Director for a local food pantry. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Northwestern University and is a big supporter of the Wildcats.
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Quotes
“We were tasked to build the final size of the organization, like 120 people, very rapidly. Within 3 to 4 months we had to hire all of these people across 3 locations and bootstrap everything.” (originally by Katie Thompson of Rally)
“We were tasked to build the final size of the organization, like 120 people, very rapidly. Within 3 to 4 months we had to hire all of these people across 3 locations and bootstrap everything.”
“When you’re the son of teachers, there’s definitely this environment where you’re always learning something.”
—Sean Melody
Key Milestones
- Sean was a guest on Jeopardy! What was your experience like?
- What inspired Sean to get into tech?
- The eternal question for many engineers often centers around deciding to go into management. How did Sean approach that question and what was his first engineering management job like?
- What is the role of a senior architect?
- Sean has also held very senior technical roles over the years, with titles like architect and principal software engineer. What are some of the key skills that you had to develop to function in those roles?
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Abdel Tefridj.
Abdel is leading the product development at Data Bid Machine to optimize companies’ traffic acquisition. He is a technology and product executive with an extensive background in eCommerce, data science, and software development. Abel has also held roles as chief innovation officer.
He is advising several growing companies in their digital transformation and scaling their data science initiatives. Strong background in the Search, NLP, deep learning, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, and Data Analytics spaces.
Led a +1000-person global product and engineering teams that build, innovate, and maintain B2B and B2C global platforms across several industries: Energy, Chemical, technology, finance, and retail. Experienced general manager with strong results in managing and growing digital and product revenue volumes ranging from $100 million to $5 Billion+.
Abdel speaks regularly at conferences, is fluent in four languages, loves to travel and meet new people. To connect the dots you need to collect the dots.
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Quotes
“Leaders provide 2 things for their team: clarity and hope. I think if you can do those two effectively, people will follow you.”
“The MBA will give you validation that you understand the business. Plus it will give you a bigger network. For me, the biggest value was the big network.”
“I think the fastest way to learn is not by reading but by talking to people.”
“The biggest things I’ve learned over the years in product management is follow the money and prioritization.”
“Ask 5-10 customers what they’re willing to spend on. Just go check with the end user and buyer.”
“When I promote a new engineer leader they tend get fixated on people’s weakness. They try to just address weakness. I say ’no, no, no we all have weakness, how to we leverage everybody’s strengths?’”
—Abdel Tefridj
Additional Resources
Learn more about Southern Data Science Conference – https://www.southerndatascience.com/
More about Trey Grainger – https://www.treygrainger.com/about/
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Deepanshu Madan.
“Deepanshu is a full-stack software engineer, Product, and Business lead. He has recently co-founded ProcessLabs.ai, to help technology leaders optimize their engineering processes and ship high-quality software, faster.
Deepanshu has a Bachelors’s and Master’s in Computer science and has worked across a variety of technology development roles. He started his career as a Software engineer in Test, moved on to become a Senior Software engineer and led Android teams at companies like Expedia and OpenTable.
Most recently, he was a Product Manager on the Android team at Google, where he led multiple product areas for app development tools. Before this role, Deepanshu was a Product Strategy and Commercialization lead on the AdMob team, where he led product and business strategy for Google’s Mobile Ads product.”
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Quotes
“Most of the stuff I learned in the classroom isn’t really helping my career. But one thing I learned in college is how to learn.“
“I started looking up product manager roles just for fun. Funny enough I found all my jobs by just messaging people on LinkedIn.”
“For a product manager role, understand what your users want, execute, and get it out there.”
“It may look easy how I got the opportunity at Google. But I actually messaged hundreds of people on LinkedIn; hundreds of people even internally at Google too.”
“As a product manager, I had meetings all day and I basically never got time to work. You have to prioritize really well and you have to find out what’s really important at this second.”
“A key part of Process Labs is connecting engineering function to business value.”
—Deepanshu Madan
Key Milestones
- What was Deepanshu’s career mindset in the early years of his career and how has it evolved?
- How to send LinkedIn messages to get any tech job?
- How much of Deepanshu’s early career was focused on mobile development. What attracted you to that space?
- Deepanshu left development to join Google to work as a product manager. What influenced him making that kind of switch?
- How has being a product manager changed the view of development?
- Deepanshu is the co-founder of Process Labs. What does the company do? What was the inspiration to start it?
- How to send LinkedIn messages to get any tech job?
- How does Deepanshu approach hiring?
Additional Resources
Cornelia’s book ‘Cloud Native Patterns’ – https://www.manning.com/books/cloud-native-patterns
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Cornelia Davis.
As the Chief Technology Officer at Weaveworks, Cornelia Davis is responsible for the company’s technology strategy so as to aid enterprises who are transforming their business through the leverage of cloud computing platforms.
Cornelia cut her teeth in the space of modern application platforms at Pivotal where she was on the teams that brought Pivotal Cloud Foundry (Pivotal’s PaaS), various data products and Pivotal Container Service (Pivotal’s Kubernetes service) to market. She is the author of the book Cloud Native Patterns: Designing Change-tolerant Software.
An industry veteran with almost three decades of experience in image processing, scientific visualization, distributed systems and web application architectures, and cloud-native platforms, Cornelia holds the B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from California State University, Northridge and further studied theory of computing and programming languages at Indiana University.
When not doing those things you can find her on the yoga mat or in the kitchen.
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Quotes
“Those were the algorithms we were building in 1990 and are now running on this phone, this supercomputer you have in your pocket. We were building those algorithms when I started my career.”
“I’m a change junkie. I need change all the time. That is why it’s so brilliant that I landed in a career like I did. it’s always changing!”
“I would say 80% of my motivation of writing this book is just being able to take what I had been teaching to individual customers and be able to teach that to a broader set of people.”
“What I’m really talking about is redundancy of interaction because redundancy is a big part of what you do in the cloud. You have multiple instances of your running programs so if one of them goes down you still have another one and the load balancer will just shift over to that.”
—Cornelia Davis
Additional Resources
Cornelia’s book ‘Cloud Native Patterns’ – https://www.manning.com/books/cloud-native-patterns
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is David Glick.
David Glick is the CTO of the FLEXE fulfillment technology platform.
Before FLEXE, he spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, including five years as the VP of Fulfillment Technology, where he oversaw the development and functionality of the technology within Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the technology for Amazon’s transportation
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A note from Grant
If you’ve ever wondered what the technology behind the scenes of some of today’s largest retailers looks like, you’re going to want to tune in as we catch up with Dave Glick, the CTO of Flexe, a warehousing and logistics company.
After getting his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill (Go Heels) in physics — I think this is our 3rd physicist turned technologist — Dave spent 20 years at Amazon building out their fulfillment and transportation systems, amongst a variety of other roles throughout the company, before leaving to join Flexe as their Chief Technology Officer.
When Dave is not making sure your order arrives on time, he holds down several advisory and humanitarian roles, including being a board member for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking.
-Grant Ingersoll
Quotes
“I ended up having to deal with pricing errors. We went through the process of setting prices on promotions automatically and manually. And what we found was that every time a human was involved, defects were injected.”
“We were able to reduce pricing errors by 90 percent year over year.”
“Put the engineer close to the customer. Thats the number 1 piece of advice I’d have for an engineering leader.”
“You’re basically automating the walking. If you think about automating the robot arm that picks an item out of a bin, that is a super hard problem, and no one has ever cracked the code at scale for that. But if you think about picking up a 300 pound pod and bringing it to a human, that is super easy. Robots are really good at that.”
—David Glick
Additional ResourcesLearn more about FLEXE – https://www.flexe.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dan Papandrea.
Dan “POP” Papandrea is the Field CTO for Sysdig, a cloud-native security and visibility platform. Dan became a tech sales engineer after starting his tech career in tech support and IT.
POP spends his days learning and contributing to the orchestration and container ecosystem. POP is the host of the hit podcast The POPCAST by Dan POP which explores the leaders and creators and stories behind the code. twitter: @popcastpop
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Quotes
“I moved over to Advent SS&C. I basically started there in tech support and I worked my way up to the director of IT of the east coast and Europe.”
“When I started we were at 5 hedge funds and then we grew out to 499 of the 500 largest hedge funds in the world.”
“There’s gotta be this love of humility and empathy for the people that you are selling a software or a service to. I never look at myself like I’m selling anything. It’s ‘what can I do to help the customer get to their goals easier’? What can I do to help them go see their children?”
—Dan Papandrea
Key Milestones
- What inspired Dan Papandrea to get into tech?
- While at SS&C Advent, Dan switched jobs to tech sales engineer.
- What does a sales engineer do on the day to day?
- How does compensation work for a sales engineer?
- These days Dan is a Field Chief Technologist. What does this role consist of?
- How does one build a sales engineering team?
- Dan also created the hit podcast – PopCast. What was the inspiration behind the show?
Additional Resources
5 Rules to be a Solution(ist) by Dan Papandrea on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-solutionists-salesfield-engineers-5-rules-thumb-dan-papandrea/
Listen to Dan’s podcast ‘Popcast’ on Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-popcast-with-dan-pop/id1503966242
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Boris Paskhaver
Boris Paskhaver is a New York City-based software engineer, author, and consultant. He’s also been an online educator on Udemy since 2016.
After graduating from New York University in 2013 with a degree in Business Economics and Marketing, Boris worked as a business analyst, systems administrator, and data analyst for a variety of companies including a digital marketing agency, a financial services firm, and an international tech powerhouse. At one of those roles, he was fortunate enough to be challenged to build several projects with Python and JavaScript.
A small work interest quickly blossomed into a passionate weekend hobby. Eventually, Boris left his former role to complete App Academy, a rigorous full-stack web development bootcamp in NYC. The rest is history.
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Quotes
“A lot of times I would start with excel and think about something I would do typically in excel and try to replicate it in python and pandas“
“I wanted to go to the hardest bootcamp and I chose App Academy because it had the lowest admission rate. I wanted to invest fully.”
“App Academy took a percentage of the first year’s salary rather than charge a huge tuition fee up front. After 4 years in college and 200K in debt I was not eager to invest in educational experience again with that model. I wanted someone who was willing to invest in me.”
“Bootcamp was harder than being an engineer on a day to day basis”
“Pandas is excel on steroids. It allows you to do the same operations you do in excel. When you’re dealing with large datasets in excel your limit is about 1 million rows. And even when you have more than about 3000, it begins to slow down.“
—Boris Paskhaver
Key Milestones
- Boris accidentally got into Python programming while at Indeed.com.
- Boris actually landed his first couple of jobs in tech before doing a bootcamp.
- Why did Boris decide to enroll in App Academy Bootcamp?
- How did Boris get involved as an online educator on Udemy?
- Boris also wrote a book – “Pandas in Action”, from Manning Publications
Additional Resources
Boris’s book “Pandas in Action” from Manning Publications –
Data Analysis with Python by Wesley Kinney – https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/python-for-data/9781491957653/
Check out App Academy Bootcamp – https://www.appacademy.io/bootcamp-prep?location=san-francisco
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Atri Sharma!
As a database engineer and open source committer, Atri Sharma has built a career in tech deeply focused some of today’s most popular databases. Some of these include PostgreSQL, Lucene, Elasticsearch, Presto and HAWQ.
After getting his bachelor’s from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Atri Sharma has held roles at Amazon, EnterpriseDB, Teradata, Barclays, Pivotal, Microsoft and Intuit.
Along the way, he’s become a prolific contributor to several open source projects like Lucene, PostgreSQL and a handful of other Apache Software Foundation Projects.
He’s also the author of the upcoming book “Practical Lucene 8”. Stay tuned as we take a deep dive with Atri Sharma into the world of databases and open source!
-Grant Ingersoll
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Quotes
“Google Summer of Code has been around for a while now. It is designed in a way to introduce college students and academics to the world of open source development.”
“One thing that open source really gives you is the people aspect. You build a network of smart and very accomplished people who can actually mentor and help you grow on the right path.”
“When I actually decided to commit myself to open source I always thought it would be in my spare time. I never actually anticipated having a job where I would be expected to contribute features back to open source projects.”
—Atri Sharma
Key Milestones
- What is Google Summer of Code
- How has Atri continually found jobs in open source
- Atri has spent his career working on some of the hardest challenges in the database world like adding features, making them faster. What’s it like working deep inside some of the world’s most heavily used data stores?
- What are key skills necessary to work as a database engineer?
- Atri has worked for many of the world’s largest tech companies. Why did he choose to work in big tech?
- Atri’s book ‘Practical Lucene 8’
Additional Resources
Order Atri’s book ‘Practical Apache Lucene 8’ – https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Apache-Lucene-Capabilities-Application/dp/1484263448
Mike McCandless is one of Atri’s mentors; read his blog here – http://blog.mikemccandless.com/
Connect with Atri Sharma
LinkedIn
GitHub
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Veljko Krunic!
Veljko Krunic is a data science consultant, has a computer science PhD, and is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Today’s topic – How To Align AI With Your Business?
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“Almost any engineer has a privilege of creating something that was not there before and that was something very important for me.”
“It’s not enough to just make an engineering product. You need to figure out how to get the biggest amount of people possible to use it. Otherwise that product cannot make a difference in their life.”
If you’re facing a situation where you’re interested in something really far away, I believe that is what academia is for. If you are working on something that is immediately commercially viable, I believe you should start a company.
—Veljko Krunic
Key Milestones
- Veljko started his career in the former Yugoslavia. Why did he decide to move to the states?
- You’ve gotten, as I like to say, “all the degrees”. What motivated him to pursue higher education?
- Veljko had a series of shorter term roles, a year or two here and there before landing on your own and making a go as an independent consultant. How did those roles lead to him becoming a constant?
- “Succeeding with AI”. What’s it about and who’s it for?
- How to align AI with your business
Like several of our recent guests, Veljko is a Manning Publications author And just like those guests, we are going to do a give away! The first 5 people who retweet or reshare this episode on Twitter or LinkedIn and tag the Develomentor handle or me will receive a code good for one free ebook of “Succeeding with AI” by Veljko.
Additional Resources
Buy Veljko’s book “Succedding With AI” by Manning Publications – https://www.manning.com/books/succeeding-with-ai
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Veljko Krunic
LinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Hayden Simmons
Hayden has been working in emerging market fintech for most of his career. He graduated from Colorado College in 2007, with an Economic Development major and Spanish minor, having written his thesis on the impact of collectivized remittances in rural Mexico. He spent the early part of his career on the non-profit side, connecting venture-backed remittance startups with immigrant communities for product-market fit testing.
Hayden later spent 4 years at Juvo, managing strategic partnerships across LatAm, Africa and Southeast Asia. He then helped Migo expand from Nigeria into Latin America.
Currently, Hayden is working on a variety of strategy and BD projects supporting Facebook’s global blockchain-powered mobile money project (Libra).
He is actively advising a number of early-stage African fintechs, is a fledgling angel investor, and recently joined Lateral Capital as a Venture Partner. In his spare time, he enjoys rock climbing, guitar and tending to his agave farm.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“The people you are trying to serve might have a smart phone, but maybe it has no balance. And they may be a dozen miles from the nearest ATM. That backdrop gets people that are interested in emerging markets very excited. How do you piece together all of these challenges to bring financial services to the last mile of consumers?“
“When you’re young and have the time, seek out adventures and take risks and have as many interesting experiences as possible because its all going to be valuable.”
“For emerging markets there’s nothing that can replace on the ground experience and understanding people and the products and the landscape. Just studying in your MBA is a fraction of the value you get from spending a month on the ground.”
—Hayden Simmons
Additional Resources
Learn more about Libra, Facebook’s blockchain powered digital currency – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libra_(digital_currency)
Learn more about One Million Advisors – https://nextbillion.net/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Hayden Simmons
LinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ken Youens-Clark.
Biography
Ken Youens-Clark is a senior-level programmer with 24 years of experience developing software in industry and research environments (scientific programmer). He is the author of Tiny Python Projects published by Manning Publications.
Ken has deep knowledge of the entire software life-cycle experience, from design, execution, testing, release, and iteration. Ken is a creative thinker and innovator, constantly looking for ways to improve upon systems and interfaces. Ken enjoys mentoring younger developers through code reviews, book reviews, and teaching.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“I didn’t know I would be a programmer. And I didn’t understand what that would mean as a career, but playing with computers seemed interesting to me.”
“I’ve always dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome at every single level. You go into a place with pretty cool people who have CS degrees, some of whom were from MIT. These people were clearly better prepared for what we were doing, but I think I brought a different way of problem solving.”
“I didn’t really understand maybe how languages were put together, but I could still use them very effectively.”
“I’m not qualified on my own to go off and do research. But I can create the software that other people can use for that.”
“You need to learn how to write 1 or 2 lines of code and then run your program. You don’t write 50 lines of code and get your program to work.”
“Your own personal happiness should come first. That means at home too with your relationships and your health and your mental well being. All of these things need to be in line for you to grow in any sort of way whether it is professionally or personally.”
—Ken Youens-Clark
Additional Resources
The first five people who email the show at hello@develomentor.com will receive a code good for one free ebook copy of “Tiny Python Projects”.
For those who don’t want to send an email, you can get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including “Tiny Python Projects” by using the discount code poddevmen20.
Click here to buy “Tiny Python Projects” by Manning Publications
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory – Advancing the frontiers of biology through education and research
Ken’s YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/kyclark
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Ken Youens-Clark
LinkedIn
Twitter
Website
YouTube
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Naomi Ceder.
Biography
Naomi Ceder earned a Ph.D in Classics several decades ago. She switched from ancient human languages to computer languages sometime in the last century. Since 2001, she has been learning, teaching, writing about, and using Python.
An elected fellow of the Python Software Foundation, Naomi currently serves as chair of its board of directors. She also speaks internationally about the Python community, and on inclusion and diversity in technology in general.
By day she leads a team of Python programmers for Dick Blick Art Materials, and in her spare time she enjoys sketching, knitting, and deep philosophical conversations with her dog.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
We are doing a Manning Publications give away!!
The first five people who email the show at hello@develomentor.com will receive a code good for one free ebook. You can also get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including The Quick Python Book by using the discount code poddevmen20.
Quotes
“When there are events going on I find it more rewarding to be a part of the event than to be a spectator”
“If you’re sincerely out there trying to help other people, I think that is the best way you can find contacts and build a network.”
“Over the years our more important purpose has been growing and fostering a global python community.”
(Transcode) “There were lots of events going on in tech like hackathons and hack days. But there was never anything focused around trans folk.”*
—Naomi Ceder
Additional Resources
Find out more about trans*code – https://www.trans.tech/
Check out Naomi’s book The Quick Python Book from Manning Publications
Follow Trans*Code on Twitter – @trans_code
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Naomi Ceder
LinkedIn
Twitter
Twitch
https://naomiceder.tech/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Stephen Wolfram.
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Stephen is shaping the future of computing every day.
Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking. He has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.
(https://www.stephenwolfram.com)
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“Most of science is incremental. But there are these rare moments when fields of science have this explosion of activity and there’s tons of low hanging fruit to be picked.”
“We’re trying to raise the level of how computation can be used by a much broader range of people and its working!”
“The idea that space and time are the same kind of thing is basically wrong. It was a sort of mathematical gloss on top of Einsteins theory of relativity. The mathematics works on nicely, but on the conceptual level it’s the wrong way to go.”
—Stephen Wolfram
Additional Resources
Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine and an incredible tool – https://www.wolframalpha.com/
Listen to Guy Kawasaki interview Stephen Wolfram – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guy-kawasakis-remarkable-people/id1483081827?i=1000459949118
Stephen’s writings about his personal infrastructure –https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/
Check out Stephen’s book – A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics – https://www.wolfram-media.com/products/a-project-to-find-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics.html
Stephen Wolfram’s TED talk about Wolfram Alpha and the future of computing
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Stephen WolframLinkedIn
Twitter
https://www.stephenwolfram.com/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Ryan Rosario!
Dr. Ryan Rosario is currently a Data Scientist at Google, in the Search area, and Lecturer for the UCLA Department of Computer Science. Prior to Google, Ryan has worked at both Facebook and Amazon. Ryan has split his time between industry and academia.
His research, academic and work interests include Machine Learning, Text Mining and Natural Language Processing.
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Quotes
“It wasn’t until I was in the middle of my undergraduate career when I realized how much computer science and statistics went together.”
“For me, security is most important. Although I’ve worked at startups and really enjoyed them, I personally like the bigger company culture better.”
“99 percent of the time as a data scientist is spent with data management. I actually enjoy this! It should actually be a passion for people to enjoy data management.”
“You have to find your own projects on your own using data that’s in your interest area. If you’re interested in the problem being solved you’ll be able to develop the intuition to solve the problem.”
—Ryan Rosario
Key Milestones
- Many of our listeners are often wonder about pursuing graduate studies after college. Ryan did two master’s and a PhD. What inspired him to go so deep?
- Ryan has managed to keep one foot in both academia and industry. How has he been able to organize this kind of balance?
- Ryan got dual master’s degrees in statistics and computer science.
- What is a quantitative engineer?
- Ryan explains how to develop data intuition.
- Text and natural language processing
- What are some key skills that will help you be successful in data science?
Additional Resources
Guide to learning R for data science – https://www.dataquest.io/blog/learn-r-for-data-science/
Check out Ryan’s blog – http://www.bytemining.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Dr. Ryan RosarioLinkedIn
Twitter
Blog
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Michael Hartl
Michael is an education entrepreneur and the founder of Learn Enough.
Michael is the author of over ten books, including the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, one of the leading introductions to web development, and received a Ruby Hero Award for his contributions to the Ruby community. He is also the author of the influential mathematical essay The Tau Manifesto and founded the internationally celebrated math holiday Tau Day in 2010.
Previously, Michael taught the core physics curriculum at Caltech, where he was a popular instructor with the students and received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator entrepreneur program.
Apart from his interests in education and entrepreneurship, Michael enjoys choral singing, studying languages, and reading old books. He is also an advanced student of Krav Maga, holding a Level 5 rank (a “black belt in self-defense”).
(https://www.learnenough.com/about)
If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!
Quotes
“It took me a while to figure out as an entrepreneur that what should I be doing is taking the teaching and writing skill sets that I learned in grad school and applying them to product creation.”
“Don’t all move to Silicon Valley. Realize that Silicon Valley is on the web and you can find it with a web browser.”
—Michael Hartl
Key Milestones
- What inspired Michael to start companies and to be in tech?
- Michael recalls some of his early failures as an entrepreneur.
- Insoshi was a Y Combinator backed social network that Michael founded. What was it like working with Y Combinator in the early days?
- Michael shares his path for becoming an education entrepreneur
- How was Michael able to write a book on coding without having the a computer science background?
- What is some background on Michael’s tech education company Learn Enough?
- What does Michael you have against the number Pi?
- The Tau manifesto
Additional Resources
click here for full episode show notes
Essays by Paul Graham (one of the founders of Y Combinator) – http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
Ruby on Rails Tutorial – tech book written by Michael Hartl
Learn Python the Hard Way: by Zed Shaw
The Tau Manifesto – Michael explains that Pi isn’t all its made out it be – https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
Connect with Michael HartlLinkedIn
Twitter
https://www.learnenough.com/
https://www.railstutorial.org/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest are Emily Robinson and Jacqueline Nolis, authors of the book 'Build Your Career in Data Science'.
Emily Robinson works at Warby Parker as a senior data scientist on a centralized team tackling some of the company’s biggest projects. Previously, she was at DataCamp, where she built and ran their experimentation analytics system, and at Etsy, where she worked with their search team to design, implement, and analyze experiments. I regularly give talks on A/B testing, R programming, and data science career advice at conferences and meetups (see all talks here) (www.hookedondata.org/about)
Jacqueline Nolis is a data scientist in Seattle with over a decade of experience helping business solve problems with data. Today she works at Brightloom as a principal data scientist where she builds tools to help companies use data to improve customer experience.
Jacqueline has aided companies and led teams at places from DSW and Union Bank to Microsoft and Airbnb. She bas spent years consulting both independently and with consulting firms.
Jacqueline earned a PhD in industrial engineering from Arizona State University. Her academic research covered optimizing road networks for electric vehicles.
Jacqueline coauthored the book Build Your Career in Data Science with the excellent Emily Robinson. This book is a great resource for people wanting to become data scientists or grow in the role. (www.jnolis.com)
If you are enjoying our content please leave us a rating and review or consider supporting us
Additional Resources
Emily learned data science from Metis bootcamp – find out more about Metis here
A/B Testing in the Wild – talk by Emily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-ryGgLOgQ
Josh Willis, former director of data engineering at slack, on Develomentor – click here for full episode and show notes
Connect with Emily Robinson
LinkedIn
Twitter
Hookedondata.org
Datascicareer.com (promo for book)
Connect with Jacqueline Nolis
LinkedIn
Twitter
Jnollis.com
bestbook.cool (promo for book)
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is James Schaffer.
James Schaffer is a founder, strategist, product designer, and currently a freelance software engineer. He has over a decade of experience managing small organizations including a social justice advocacy firm.
James is skilled in entrepreneurship, planning, curriculum design & development, data ETL and financial modeling. James is committed to leveraging excellent product design and data engineering for social equity and progressive policy.
If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!
Episode Summary
“The core thing was providing training and tools for community organizations and social justice groups to be more powerful in their lobbying work.”
“I loved what I was doing but I wanted to be closer to the code. Software engineers would say ‘this is hard to do for X, Y, Z reason’. And its not that I didn’t believe them, but I just didn’t understand why.”
“Flatiron bootcamp is a bit different than university computer science. I think its way more applied and way less theoretical. We did basically no algorithm work.”
“10 hours of email coaching has been more impactful than years of psychotherapy.”
“Try not to write emails that are longer than 5 sentences.”
—James Schaffer
Key Milestones
- Why fascinated James about Classical Latin? What did it teach him about himself and his learning style?
- James has had at least 3 different inflection points in his career so far: bookkeeping, social justice advocacy, and now programming.
- How did James decide to go to a boot camp? Why did he pick Flatiron?
- What was the Flatiron bootcamp experience like?
- After graduating from a bootcamp, James started freelancing. How does he find clients?
- Why is email coaching and inbox zero? And how has it been a game changer for James?
Additional Resources
James learned to code at the Flatiron Bootcamp – https://flatironschool.com/
Geoff Harcourt on Develomentor – CTO of Literacy Non-profit, CommonLit #48
What is inbox zero? – https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/inbox-zero
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with James SchafferLinkedIn
https://www.thisjames.com/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Simon Willison.
Simon Willison is a JSK Journalism Fellow. When selected as a fellow he was an engineering director at Eventbrite. He originally joined Eventbrite through its acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator-funded company he co-founded in 2010. Simon has made huge leaps in data journalism.
Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework. He has also been blogging about web development, programming and data journalism since 2002 at simonwillison.net.
Simon is the creator of Datasette, a new tool for publishing structured data as a web API. Datasette is based on Simon’s experiences working as a data journalist at the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. One of Simon’s projects included the Guardian’s crowdsourcing application for analyzing expense claims by members of Parliament.
If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!
Quotes
These days python is used for data science. None of that tooling existed back then. The website of python was very nascent. People were still figuring out ‘whats the best way to build things with python‘?
You can use software engineering skills to help tell stories and to help break the news.
“My wife and I got married in 2010 and we decided that we’d quit our jobs and go off traveling as long as we could. We’d take laptops and see if there were freelancing clients we could work with.”
—Simon Willison
Additional Resources
What is a content management system (CMS)? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8MkRr9gu0
One of Simon’s side projects Owls Near Me – https://www.owlsnearme.com/
Learn more about the Django Project – https://www.djangoproject.com/
The Pendulum Approach – by Charity Majors – https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/
Charity Majors on Develomentor – https://develomentor.com/2020/06/18/charity-majors-systems-engineer-cofounder-of-honeycomb-io-66/
Check out Simon’s newest side project Datasette – https://github.com/simonw/datasette
The Manager’s path – https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897
Ask a manager blog – https://www.askamanager.org/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Simon WillisonLinkedIn
GitHub
https://simonwillison.net/
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twi
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Caitlyn Greffly.
Caitlyn Greffly is a software engineer who recently transitioned from beer sales into tech via Thinkful bootcamp. She also tries to advocate for others who are making the career switch, and enjoys talking about tech with anyone who will listen.
If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!
Episode Summary
“I spent a good chunk of time working in the beer industry. And I just got sick of the travel. There was a lot of mandatory drinking events and I was just burning out. So I decided to make a career shift and joined the Thinkful coding bootcamp. Its a remote boot camp. After 6 months I got hired and became an associate software engineer.
“I still can’t believe how generous people are in the tech industry with their time. There were so many people who didn’t know me and would just offer me their time to help me or to just talk to me.”
“As a junior (developer) its easy to feel like you know nothing and everybody else knows everything.”
—Caitlyn Greffly
Key Milestones
- Before we talk tech, Caitlyn spends a moment digging into that psychology degree and those early years working in the beer industry
- Caitlyn studied to become a beer cicerone – it required 6 months!
- Caitlyn was able to hold a full time job and attend data analytics bootcamp. What was that experience like?
- Why did Caitlyn choose the Thinkful bootcamp for data analytics?
- Caitlyn’s networking tips coming out of bootcamps involve meetups, LinkedIn talking, and much more.
- Most junior devs don’t jump right in to speaking and writing. Caitlyn wanted to share her experience coming into tech.
- Caitlyn’s first junior developer role had great on-boarding. Unfortunately this isn’t the case at all companies. What can senior engineers do to help support junior developers?
Additional Resources
Learn more about Thinkful Bootcamps – https://www.thinkful.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Caitlyn GrefflyLinkedIn
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Leon Mallett
Leon Mallett accepted a job in digital marketing when real estate investing became too risky. Before he knew it, digital marketing became his passion! Leon is currently the chief operating officer (COO) of IAM Cloud (IAM Technology Group Ltd).
Leon Mallett is a biology major turned digital marketer and tech executive who I first met on Twitter on a thread on careers and jobs people have held. Turns out we were both paper boys growing up and are now in the C-Suite at tech firms.
Along his career path, Leon has worked in real estate and customer service. He has also worked in digital marketing for a number of companies including Tesco and the University of Sheffield. I’ll have to check the archives, but I believe Leon is also the first COO of a tech company we’ve had on the show, so I’m eager to dig into what that means
–Grant Ingersoll
If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!
Episode Summary
“The idea of a marketer is you have to be a generalist. There is a broad set of skills and its really important that you have a breadth of skills across good copy writing, technical skills, as well as an understanding of social platforms.“
“What I learned from my MBA, weirdly, is not so much a load of facts. instead I learned that it does not matter if you don’t know everything because you can work things out. That mindset shift was the real game changer for me.”
“For me, when hiring someone, personality is 90%, skills are 10%.”
—Leon Mallett
Key Milestones
- What inspired Leon to transition into digital marketing?
- While marketing is as old as time, digital marketing is still a fairly young field and it covers a lot of ground, especially these days with all the tools available. What is the scope of digital marketing?
- What are some of the key skills needed to be in marketing?
- Major differences between working in industry and university
- What does a COO at a tech company focus on?
- Why does Leon prefer hiring people who have either owned a business or worked as a contractor?
Additional Resources
Geoff Harcourt – CTO of Literacy Non-profit, CommonLit #48
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Connect with Leon MallettLinkedIn
Website
Twitter
Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor
Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/develomentor)
Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen
Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen is the CEO & founder of AuCoDe, an AI-based FinTech startup that detects online and social media controversy. (Controversy Detection).
She has fifteen years of academic and industry experience, including Google and Facebook. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (cum laude) at the University of Haifa in Israel and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she researched computational models of controversy.
Dr. Dori-Hacohen is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2011 Google Lime Scholarship and first place at the 2016 UMass Amherst’s Innovation Challenge. She is married with two kids; identifies as a person with disabilities; and has taken an active leadership role in broadening participation in Computer Science on a local and global scale.
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Episode Summary
“I could go to Israel and get my entire undergraduate (degree) for the cost of 1 year at a public school in the states.”
“Part of what was fun for me in opening a startup was this steep learning curve of all the stuff about business that I didn’t know anything about and then bringing that together with my technical experience.”
“I’m also the technical co-founder. So I definitely get my hands dirty with the technical work. But my main role is to raise money so that everyone else in the company can get their job done.”
—Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen
Key Milestones
- Shiri went to school in both America and Israel. What was it like having academic parents?
- Why did Shiri decide to get her undergraduate degree in Israel instead of sticking around in the US?
- Shiri was working in industry after getting her master’s degree, Why did she end up pursuing a PhD?
- When did tech become dominated by men?
- What is AuCode and what inspired Shiri to start her own company?
Additional Resources
Do you have many passions and don’t just want to pick one? Check out Renaissance Souls – http://renaissancesouls.com/
Learn more about automated controversy detection and Shiri’s company – http://controversies.info/
Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action – By Susan Jeffers
The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup – by Noam Wasserman
Check out Ramit Sethi’s online courses on business – https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Diane Burley..
Diane Burley is a storyteller. She helps executives in all industries understand technology’s role in solving many of the challenges they face today. What is tech content marketing? How does it differ from marketing in other industries?
Diane is a former journalist and multi-media executive. She put the first daily newspapers on the web in 1995. Diane is fully aware of the complexities of integrating vast amounts of data, facing political hurdles, and changing up processes to support the technologies-all while facing that “existential threat.”
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Episode Summary
“My thrust is never to look for a technology for technology’s sake. It is to solve a business problem, and look to match the technology to the problem. From a storytelling standpoint it helps resonate with your audience. They have the pain. They have the problem.”
“You don’t want a wandering generality. You want meaningful specific – something that is meaningful and specific to truly answer a person’s needs.”
“When you’re talking about enterprise technology and enterprise sales there’s so many different audience members. And I think one of the biggest mistakes most companies make is say ‘oh this is technical, and the technical person is going to understand all of this’.”
“I’ve worked in networking companies, cybersecurity companies, development companies, database companies. I can tell you that the top engineers in each of those places wouldn’t have a clue about what a technology is that another company is offering. So you really need to break it down to those basic levels. You don’t have to do it in a condescending way, you do it with metaphors.”
—Diane Burley
Key Milestones
- Diane got degrees from SUNY Oswego and Rutgers in Communications and information systems. What did these degrees teach her?
- What were newspapers like in 1995 and how did they go from print to digital?
- How does Diane approach tech content marketing and storytelling?
- What are some practical skills and tips for content producers to improve their SEO?
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Vicki Boykis.
Vicki Boykis is currently a machine learning engineer at Automattic as well as a published writer on topics in the data science space.
Vicki received a Bachelors degree in Economics from Penn State and her MBA from Temple. That’s right, she didn’t study computer science in university! She became curious in software engineering at her job at Comcast. She decided to learn on her own with a little help from her peers. Oh, and she took a few online courses from a community college!
Vicki has 10+ years’ experience in helping companies across a broad range of industries make their data actionable. Most recently, she has built machine learning data products in Python but she has also worked with R, Tableau, Spark (Scala and Python), and Hadoop.
In her spare time, she enjoys reading, running, and mentoring people new to the tech industry.
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Episode Summary
“Moving into the data science space was almost like a stroke of luck because I had no idea that it even existed.”
“I knew that if I did a Coursera course I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it because I wouldn’t feel like there was enough at stake. But the community college program was for actual credits and you get an actual certificate. It felt a little more structured and a little more real to me.”
“For my MBA program what really helped me was taking accounting and finance classes. I started to understand that the people who manage companies and the people who are responsible for budgets think in terms of revenue and costs of projects and opportunity costs.”
—Vicki Boykis
Key Milestones
- How did Vicki get into economics and financial analysis?
- Vicki worked at Comcast in a business intelligence role. How did this role allow her to move into data science?
- In 2016, Vicki went to community college to take some computer science courses. What was it like going back to school after working for more than a few years?
- Data science engineer vs machine learning engineer
- How has having an Econ and MBA degree helped Vicki in her career?
- These days, Vicki is a manager of data science and engineering. Why did she choose to move into management?
- How does Vicki approach team building in data science?
- Vicki is also a writer an an author. In what ways has this helped her career?
Additional Resources
Vicki suggests anyone getting into tech should read Hacker News! – https://thehackernews.com/
Mike Gualtieri – Tech Analyst at Forrester (#38) – Previous episode mentioned
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Adam Cheyer.
Adam Cheyer is an inventor, entrepreneur, engineering executive, and a pioneer in AI and computer human interfaces.
Adam has been a co-founder or founding member of four successful startups, including
- Siri (sold to Apple, where he led server-side engineering and AI for the Siri assistant).
- Change.org (the world’s largest petition platform),
- Viv Labs (sold to Samsung, where as VP R&D, Adam leads product engineering and developer relations for Samsung’s voice assistant),
- Sentient (massively distributed machine learning).
Previously, Adam was VP Engineering at Verticalnet (enterprise software) and Dejima (mobile software). Adam also spent more than a decade at SRI International, where his most recent role was as Chief Architect of CALO/PAL, the US government’s largest funded AI project.
Adam has authored more than 60 publications and 37 patents. He graduated with highest honors from Brandeis University and received the “Outstanding Masters Student” award from UCLA’s School of Engineering.
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Episode Summary
“I started 3 companies at the same time. Siri was my day job. I started a company called Sentient, that was my night job. And change.org was my side side project.”
“After 2 years, Apple saw Siri. Steve Jobs called our office, unannounced, after we launched a free app in the app store.”
“Timing is super important. I was doing Siri – like systems since 1993. Literally exactly half my life. If I tried to launch it as a company any sooner or later, it would not have had the success that it did.”
“I thought that social networking would take off. And that led directly to our work at Change.org.”
—Adam Cheyer
Key Milestones
- What was it like studying computer science in the early 1980’s?
- Adam was told he couldn’t join his school’s computer club. This made him him angry and curious.
- How does Adam predict which technologies will be important in the future? He created a model called trends and triggers that he uses to organize his own thinking.
- Siri was partially created to give other phone manufacturers a shot at taking down Apple. How did Apple end up acquiring Siri? What was it like receiving a phone call from Steve Jobs unannounced?
- Change.org is a massively influential petition platform. Yet, Adam views it as a side project. Why is this?
Additional Resources
Bixby Developers is a conversational assistant marketplace. Its part of Samsung. Learn more about it – https://bixbydevelopers.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Charity Majors
Charity Majors is a former systems engineer and manager at Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab. She is also the co-author of Database Reliability Engineering.
Charity is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, a company dedicated to building production engineering and observability products
“With distributed systems, you don’t care about the health of the system, you care about the health of the event or the slice.”
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Episode Summary
“Our [systems engineers] expertise is around everything from performance and optimization to capacity, projections and provisioning.”
“Ops teams have a dark sense of humor. In my experience, they also tend to have the most cohesive teams out of all engineering teams. And i think its because they walk through the fire together.”
“I think that new managers need to commit to it [management] for about 2 years. That’s about how long it takes for your brain to rewire itself and learn how to build that inner voice that you can trust that tells you if you’re doing well or not.”
“I wanted to write go code for 2 years straight. That’s all I wanted to do after Facebook. Just heads down, write software!”
“Looking at the way we build software now its so painful and its so inefficient and it doesn’t have to be. The biggest obstacle I see between us as an industry and a better way is that we’ve come to believe that this is just how it is.”
—Charity Majors
“Basically in a large site with tens of thousands of servers, every day something is breaking.”
—Grant Ingersoll
Additional Resources
Ep. 4 Goldman Sachs Saved My Tech Career, with Camille Fournier
What is observability and cardinality? https://thenewstack.io/observability-a-3-year-retrospective/
Learn more about honeycomb.io – https://www.honeycomb.io/
Check out honeycomb.io blog – https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/
Read Charity’s blog – charity.wtf
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson.
Erik Bernhardsson is the CTO of Better. Better is on a mission to change the enormous and hopelessly broken mortgage industry. Erik runs the technology team, which consists of roughly 50 engineers.
Before Better, Erik spent six years at Spotify, mostly building the core of the music recommendation system. He started out writing recommendation algorithms and eventually built a team of 20 people to help out with this.
In his spare time, Erik enjoy building open source software, for instance Annoy (6k stars on Github) and Luigi. Erik also co-organizes the NYC Machine Learning meetup, and writes a tech blog which has a few hundred thousand visitors per year.
Earlier in his life Erik used to do a lot of algorithm competitions. He won an IOI gold medal in 2003 and won the Nordic programming competition five times.
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Episode Summary
“The most impact a CTO can have in many ways is recruiting.”
“At Spotify, for the first year, no one told me who my manager was. No one told me a single thing about what to do. I just did things I thought would be valuable to the business."
“You’re going to want to find vectors of who wants to listen to what track. Using these vectors you can do all of these recommendation operations.”
—Erik Bernhardsson
Key Milestones
- What is it about physics and math that makes them such fertile ground for preparing programmers?
- Erik helped build recommendation algorithms and systems for Spotify as a developer and a manager. How do these recommendation systems work and what impact can they have?
- Erik made the leap from a successful company to joining a startup as the CTO. How did he know the time was right for such a transition?
- What are some of the things Erik looksRange: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World for when hiring people for his team?
- What are some concrete interviewing tips?
Additional Resources
Check out Erik’s website/blog – https://erikbern.com/
Develomentor Ep. 17 Jake Mannix – Self-Professed Math Nerd Physicist turned AI Engineer
Develomentor Ep. #44 Aline Lerner – Pro Chef Starts Tech Recruiting Firm, Interviewing.io
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World – by David Epstein
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Michael Tuso
Michael Tuso is currently Director of Revenue Performance at Chili Piper.
He has held a variety of sales roles both inside of and outside of technology. Over the years, he’s sold for Citrix, SnackNation and now Chili Piper. He’s also done a different category of “sales” work as a campaign manager.
To make his story even more colorful, Michael built much of his early sales experience working from South and Central America in places like Costa Rica and Bolivia. So, if you’ve always wondered what it’s like to do technical sales, stay tuned!
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Episode Summary
“There’s a lot of parallels I’ve been able to draw between selling a candidate and selling an actual tech product.”
“When you use too many words it portrays you aren’t confident in what you’re saying.”
“Outside of school, I spent most of my time coaching and training people in various forms of martial arts. I always try to find ways to make my interests mutually reinforce each other and I still do that today.”
—Michael Tuso
Key Milestones
- Michael was working in politics but decided to move to La Paz, Bolivia to work at Citrix. What influenced this decision?
- The early years of sales + living and working in a new country
- The key skills required to be successful in tech sales
- Product knowledge alone does not equate to success in sales
- The difference between a sales engineer and a sales architect
- How do you build an effective tech sales team?
- What kind of people are cut out for sales? What makes them succeed at it?
Additional Resources
Michael Tuso on ‘future stating’ in the sales process – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYLIwbQLqeU
Learn more about sales enablement? – https://www.hubspot.com/sales-enablement
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Roman Yampolskiy.
Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas of interest are behavioral biometrics, digital forensics, pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial super-intelligence and games.
Dr. Yampolskiy is an author of over 100 publications including multiple journal articles and books. His research has been cited by numerous scientists and profiled in popular magazines both American and foreign (New Scientist, Poker Magazine, Science World Magazine), dozens of websites (BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo! News) and on radio (German National Radio, Alex Jones Show).
Reports about his work have attracted international attention and have been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Spanish.
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Episode Summary
“My interest is artificial intelligence. Specifically I’m trying to understand how to control it and how to make sure it’s beneficial for everyone.“
“You’re not going to find some perfect role model. Take something good from a dozen people.”
“Whatever the product is, people will find ridiculous ways to abuse it. You need to see this ahead of time and get ready for it.“
“If a system is smarter than you, you cannot predict what its actually going to do. By definition. If you could, you’d be just as smart.”
—Roman Yampolskiy
Key Milestones
- Dr. Yampolskiy was able to bypass getting a bachelor’s degree and go straight to getting his Master’s and PhD. How did he do this? And how was he able to save money on education?
- What is Dr Yampolskiy’s approach to deep work? How is he able to juggle teaching and his own research?
- Computing is advancing at an increasing pace, what are Dr Yamposlkiy’s thoughts on artificial super-intelligence?
- Why is Dr. Yampolsky working on finding failure models for systems that don’t even exist today?
- How has Dr. Yampolskiy been able to have multiple mentors and take away bits and pieces from each one of them?
Additional Resources
Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach – by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy
Ep. 6 of Develomentor Freedom – From Side Hustle to a Scalable Business, with Fred Stutzman
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Sona Maniyan.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to change careers into the tech industry after a long time as a stay at home parent, stay tuned!
Sona Maniyan received both her bachelor’s and master’s in accounting and finance. Subsequently, she landed roles ranging from consultant to customer service supervisor and financial analyst.
But Sona’s career path took a turn after a few years as a stay-at-home Mom. She decided to go back to school to become a software engineer. In this second phase of her career, Sona has held roles for the likes of Symantec, Target and General Mills.
In addition, Sona is also the leader for the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and the cofounder of the Social Data Science meetup in Minneapolis.
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Episode Summary
“I wouldn’t say relaunching my career was just me alone. It took a whole village. Everybody has in some way contributed to help me get to where I am.“
“I didn’t care so much about grades. I cared more about what I was learning. So I would do the harder projects.“
“Data science is becoming more of a consultant role where we work very closely with the business. Communication skills and understanding business requirements are becoming a lot more important.”
—Sona Maniyan
Key Milestones
- What attracted Sona to finance and accounting at the start?
- What was it like living in Kuwait during the Gulf War of the 1990s?
- Why did Sona choose software engineering and tech? Why not go back into finance and accounting?
- While colleges have certainly gotten better at supporting working adults, they aren’t exactly optimized for it. What was it like going back to school a bit later in life?
- One of the things we see often on the show is how different backgrounds help people become better more rounded developers, managers and colleagues. How have Sona’s experiences in customer service, finance and consulting shaped her career as a developer and data scientist?
Additional Resources
Learn more about AnitaB and how it is helping women in technology – https://anitab.org/
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything – by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner – https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338
Develomentor Ep. 20 JP Sherman – US Army PsyOps turned SEO Expert
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is John Carnell.
John Carnell is currently the team lead at Genesys.
He comes to us with 20+ years of experience working across a variety of technical development roles including consultant, tech architect, developer and team lead.
He has a background in both computer science and criminology and has also gone on to get an MBA. Along his path he’s written a book and taken on a number of speaking engagements.
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Episode Summary
“When you look at a problem, you got to look at the process. Its not always a technical problem you’re solving. What are the human elements in a problem that are driving a certain outcome?”
“I’ve always followed tension between an open internet and regulations. I find that a lot of times I go back to ‘where does it balance out in the constitution?’.”
“A lot of the elements and methodologies that are now mainstream in software development had borrowed heavily from that background that earlier business people had drawn upon.”
—John Carnell
Key Milestones
- John tells us about his criminology background and how that area of knowledge has helped shape his career
- Why did John decide to get his MBA
- How was John able to point out problems in companies without complaining?
- Cloud Engineer vs Software Engineer
- When did John decide he wanted to go into tech management and leadership?
- What is lean 6 sigma program and how is it used to improve process inefficiencies.
- What are some similarities between tech architect and software engineer?
- John’s book, Spring Microservices in Action
Additional Resources
What is lean six sigma? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma
Spring Microservices in Action – John’s book published by Manning Publications
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Peter Bell
Peter Bell has a long history of building tech companies and holding down roles like CEO and CTO. After studying electronics and communications systems engineering, Peter promptly went into private practice as a psychotherapist. He then returned to tech to add a long string of founder titles to his resume.
Over the years, Peter has built web design companies, digital agencies, and sales and tech training companies. He’s worked for the likes of Github and General Assembly, as well as a variety of smaller firms. Peter is also an active community builder, public speaker and a fellow podcaster.
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Episode Summary
“I was doing fine with this degree thing, but I didn’t want to work for a company that was dumb enough not to hire me without a piece of paper.”
“I wanted to be the next Tony Robbins and start a psychotherapy practice. Then I figured out that sales and psychotherapy are fundamentally the same practice just with different payment mechanisms.”
“There is a lot more commonality between being a VP of engineering and an individual contributor. Being a manager is almost something totally different.”
—Peter Bell
Key Milestones
- Before we dive into the tech Peter tells us more about his private practice as a psychotherapist
- When did Peter first recognize you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
- Going the founder route is often a roller coaster of a ride. Peter recalls some of the key inflection points that helped define him as a founder?
- What was the inspiration for CTO School, CTO Summit and the CTO Connection and who is the target audience?
- What are some of the key lessons Peter has learned about being in the CTO role over all these years?
Additional Resources
Introduction to domain specific languages – https://www.codemag.com/article/0607051/Introducing-Domain-Specific-Languages
Learn more about CTO connection – https://www.ctoconnection.com/
Ep. 4 Goldman Sachs Saved My Tech Career, with Camille Fournier
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change – by Camille Fournier
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@CTOSummit
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jonathan Cutrell
Jonathan Cutrell is a communications and media studies graduate who started his early career as a writer and editor before entering the world of development.
He’s held a variety of roles including software engineer, director and CTO. These days, he’s an engineering manager and fellow podcaster who started the Spec.fm podcast network. Spec.fm currently hosts 12 different podcasts and sees an average of 100,000 downloads a week
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Episode Summary
“What a lot of people get out of journaling I get out of making podcasts.”
“I think the best way to think about Developer Tea, and incidentally to think about almost anything, is in the smallest possible chunk you can consume.”
“Frankly, I think Developer Tea is as much of a me talking to myself as me talking to the people that listen to it.”
—Jonathan Cutrell
Key Milestones
- How did Jonathan get into tech and how was he able to get into early leadership roles like Director of Technology
- How was Jonathan able to hold so many management roles? What drew him to management?
- Jonathan hosts the podcast called Developer Tea. What was the inspiration for starting the show?
- Spec.fm consists of 11 different podcasts focused on developers and technology. How did Jonathan create this platform?
- As a manager and a podcaster, Jonathan focused much of your career on helping developers succeed. How did Jonathan find this niche?
- What does Jonathan look for when hiring and building teams?
Additional Resources
Check out our previous interview with Podcaster Charles Max Wood – Charles Max Wood – From Programmer to Full-Time Podcast Wiz
Follow Jonathan’s podcast Developer Tea – @DeveloperTea
Visit the spec.fm podcast network – https://spec.fm/
Follow Specfm – @specfm
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Arun Ganesan
Arun Ganesan is an Embedded Systems Engineer at Ford Motor Company.
Arun obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona. He then started working at Ford Motor Co. as an Analytical Programmer due to his knowledge in Matlab programming.
Arun started writing Matlab scripts for durability analysis which then expanded to systems level analysis. At that point he jumped to being Systems Engineer. Arun continued with Matlab programming as well as C# programming – this is where he got exposed to Embedded Systems.
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Episode Summary
“When I was small, I would always tinker around with electronics and take things apart and put them back until I got yelled at for doing things like that. That was my interest. When I was 17, My dad and I had a talk and he said, Why not electric engineering?”
“Digital design is designing the logic within a CPU. You’re always working on the same framework. The same set of rules apply. In analog design, its more real-world based. You’re using circuits to solve real world problems.”
“The code goes with the hardware. C# is just for the application on windows. The actual code that goes on the transmission or on the chip is C.”
—Arun Ganesan
Key Milestones
- What exactly is electrical engineering and what attracted Arun to pursuing a career in it?
- Who is an embedded systems engineer and what are some of the key skills necessary?
- Understanding how to code lean is essential for embedded systems!
- What type of tools does Arun use? What is the day to day of an embedded systems engineer
- How has Arun’s electrical engineering background served him in his role?
Additional Resources
Ep. 18 Kavita Ganesan – Software Engineer turned NLP Data Scientist
Introductory online course to embedded systems: https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-embedded-systems?
This course is a 3-part course offered by UT Austin
- https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-woroller-i ld-microcontr
- https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-world-multi-threaded-in
- https://www.edx.org/course/real-time-bluetooth-networks-shape-the-world
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
CONNECT WITH ARUN GANESANLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/arun-ganesan-677b7729/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Drew Lazzeri
Biography
Drew Lazzeri is a former lumberjack who then went on to get a degree in math and theater from Santa Clara University. From college, he has gone on to be a freelance web developer and full stack engineer.
Interviewing.io Referral Code for Develomentor Listeners!
While he currently works for another guest of the show, Aline Lerner at interviewing.io, he’s about to take a sabbatical from tech to go to music school in Hungary for a few months.
Episode Summary
“The rare and valuable skills that enable a lot of people to be successful in either tech or other parts of knowledge work come out of relationships you have with mentors. Mentors who were able to hand down those skills.”
“I think its useful to just think about the users. What change you could make for them? It’s always interesting how you could make changes all over the stack that can help with loading time or make a feature easier or harder to implement.”
“Hearing the stories and the paths people have taken through in their career is so vital. It leads to success in bringing people in and having good mentorship and all sorts of the relationships that this industry is founded on.”
—Drew Lazzeri
Key Milestones
- Drew began to teach himself tech at age 12. He also spent some time as a lumberjack! In college although he started down the path of computer science, he decided to switch majors to abstract math and theatre.
- ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond had a huge influence on Drew.
- How does Drew approach the role of being a full stack developer? What are some of the key skills to be successful in this role?
- How has theater played a part of in Drew’s career?
- Who were Drew’s mentors throughout his career?
- Why did Drew decide to take a break from tech to go study music?
Additional Resources
Read the article ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond – http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Free online book to learn Python, ‘ How to Think like a Computer Scientist’ – http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/
Mike Gamson – CEO of Relativity, Former VP of Sales at LinkedIn (#53)
Ep. 14 Duretti Hirpa – Secrets from a Self Taught Software Developer
Aline Lerner – Pro Chef Starts Tech Recruiting Firm, Interviewing.io (#44)
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
CONNECT WITH DREW LAZERRILinkedIn
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guests are Chris Love and Jay Vyas.
The first five people who email the show at kube@develomentor.com will receive a code good for one free ebook. For those who don’t want to send an email, you can get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including Core Kubernetes by using the discount code poddevmen20.
Get 40% off on Core Kubernetes or anything from Manning Publications using this link!!
Biography
Chris Love is a 20-year veteran consultant who started his career early by leaving school and then running the engineering and radio production departments at his first company. After this, he started his own consulting firm, which he has been successfully running for 20+ years now.
His partner in crime on the book is Jay Vyas. Jay sits in contrast to Chris in that he did an undergrad in math, a master’s in comp sci, and a PhD in bioinformatics. Post education, he went on to work in a variety of software engineering roles at companies like UConn Health, Red Hat, Synopsys, and VMWare.
Episode Summary
"If you understand Kubernetes as a developer as an engineer, then you understand how any cloud works, it's just gonna be the common currency for how people talk about cloud computing moving forward."
"I don't know if I would go get a PhD in 2020. I might though and there is one reason why. You really get to think about problems very deeply for a very long period of time when you're getting a PhD, and I think that's a lot of fun."
"Don't stay stagnant. If you wanna work on a software project, get into some open source. If you wanna get in the product development, start an open source or closed source project and look at starting a company."
—Chris Love and Jay Vyas
Additional Resources
Buy Core Kubernetes or anything from Manning Publications for 40% off! – http://bit.ly/core-kubernetes
Kubernetes in Action – by Manning Publications
How to Win Friends & Influence People – by Dale Carnegie
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
CONNECT WITH CHRIS LOVE
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
Personal Website
CONNECT WITH JAY VYAS
LinkedIn
GitHub
Twitter
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Michael Hausenblas.
Biography
Michael started his career in academia as a PhD academic researcher.
These days, Michael is a Developer Advocate at AWS. He is part of the container service team, focusing on container security. Michael shares his experience around cloud-native infrastructure and apps through demos, blog posts, books, and public speaking engagements as well as contributes to open-source software.
Before AWS, Michael worked at Red Hat, Mesosphere,
MapR and in two research institutions in Ireland and Austria.
Episode Summary
“I found that industry overall is way less stressful than academic research. If it’s weekend or if I’m on PTO or whatever, I’m offline.“
“I’m a developer advocate. Basically, it's kind of like a guinea pig. We’re the first ones who get to play around with software and give feedback. It’s like, the UX here is great or here the UX sucks. So we are guinea pigs representing for the customer.”
“I just love to be on-site with customers discussing things, trying things. The greatest part is being with actual users of the software that you’re producing and going over that in 400 level details.”
—Michael Hausenblas
Key Milestones
- What led Michael into academia and academic research at the start of his career?
- After about 4 years doing research focused work, Michael left for a startup and took a role doing pre-sales work. That’s a pretty far cry from doing research. What led to that change and what went into his decision process?
- What does a sales engineer do?
- Now Michael is in a dev advocate role, how does that compare with being a sales engineer?
- What attracted Michael to more public-facing roles like developer advocacy?
- Who is Ted Dunning? And why was he such a big influence for Michael?
Additional Resources
Connect with Ted Dunning on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddunning/
Support Us at Develomentor – https://develomentor.com/support-us/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Michael Hausenblas
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mhausenblas/
Twitter: @mhausenblas
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Nadeem Chaudhry.
Nadeem Chaudhry is the proverbial college dropout who left school early to get started on his software career. After leaving college before his junior year, he worked his way up from software engineering and architecture into engineering management and leadership. These days, he’s the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Jobot, a startup focused on using artificial intelligence to transform the career recruiting space.
Nadeem has worked in a variety of industries including ecommerce, recruiting, and customer relationship management. All along the way, he has always been building products.
Episode Summary
"When I was in college, I really got my hands dirty and started building very early on. So by my second year, I had already completed an entire platform for students to buy and sell books, goods, other things with each other on campus"
"You want the people that you're mentoring to continuously grow, and that may mean that they outgrow what you can offer."
—Nadeem Chaudhry
Key Milestones
- Why didn't college work out for Nadeem?
- Nadeem's first title out of college was “Lead Software Developer”. How does one land a lead role straight out of dropping out of college?
- Many engineers struggle with deciding whether to code or go into management. What was Nadeem's thought process in making those choices?
- Who were Nadeem's mentors throughout his career?
- Key traits Nadeem looks for when hiring and how does he think about team building?
- What are some tips for a developer getting better at the business side?
- What are a few quick tips you can enact to make you stand out to recruiters (and the bots who are filtering resumes and profiles)?
Additional Resources
Start with Why - by Simon Sinek
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - by John Doerr
Develomentor Ep. 5 Design Thinking and Your Career, with Drew Farris
Ep. 12 How to Shift Your Career from Engineering to Product, with Nick Caldwell
Ep. 10 From a Bachelor’s in Psychology to CTO, with Stephen Carvelli
The Hacker News - find out what's trending in technology
Learn more about Jobot - https://jobot.com/
Follow Jobot on twitter - @JobotJobs
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Nadeem Chaudhry
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nadeem-chaudhry/
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Twitter: @gsin
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mike Gamson.
Mike first joined the Relativity team in 2017 as a member of the advisory board. He got the unique opportunity to get to know the company’s business and team extremely well before stepping up to the role of CEO in 2019. Mike brings over 20 years of recruitment, sales, and product marketing experience to Relativity.
In his former role at LinkedIn, Mike oversaw LinkedIn’s Global Solutions Organization (GSO) for its more than 30 offices worldwide, focusing on servicing corporate customers in three primary areas—talent solutions, marketing solutions, and sales solutions.
Before LinkedIn, Mike was director of product marketing at Advent Software, a provider of enterprise software for investment managers, where he led the trading and order management business. Mike received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.
Episode Summary
“We ran out of money in Costa Rica. It was from that necessity of finding a way to perpetuate our ability to stay in Costa Rica, that we ended up starting a business, and the business was a restaurant at first.”
“I had a lot of insecurity around how my choice of study, religion, and fine arts, would be viewed by the business community. So I did ultimately think that spending some time in a bank would be helpful. And it was helpful both in what it taught me and what it reinforced in me that I did not want to do for a living.”
“I found myself in a sales role without any real sales management experience. I had managed a very small team of salespeople for a year, but now I was VP of sales at a company that we thought we had something special, but we didn’t know exactly how big. We didn’t know that it was going be the killer app at LinkedIn that turned into a multi-billion dollar revenue line for the company.”
—Mike Gamson
Additional Resources
Learn more about Relativity, focused on e-discovery https://www.relativity.com/
Escape Velocity – by Geoffrey A. Moore https://amzn.to/2FPwUPi (learn about rapid business growth and scaling)
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Mike Gamson
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikegamson/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Liz Phillips.
Liz Phillips is a full-stack software engineer in New York City. She has a strong background in design from her previous career working in theater and film. Every week you can tune into her educational Twitch stream where she’s creating a welcoming community for coders of all skill levels to meet other coders, ask questions, and learn by working on a real open source projects and answering questions.
Liz is a proud member of the The Live Coders Twitch stream team. Liz believes in using coding powers to help others. If you’re on the streets of New York you might see her skate by.
Episode Summary
"With coding. You have an input and you have an output and like all the stuff in between is kind of artistic."
"In the boot camp you were going through HTML, CSS jQuery, React all the way up through building the whole stack. In three months."
"Try some free resources. Try code academy. Try free code camp. See if you like it. If you can afford it, take a boot camp prep class, see if you like it. And if you do those things and you're like, 'Wow, I really enjoyed this', you can totally do it for a living."
"I feel like if I wanted to, I could go a lot of different places and thats something I just never had with theater, which is really nice. Also, I now have this skill set that opens a lot of doors for different things that I want to do, whether that's trying to teach other people things or making an app that might make me money or doing the twitch streaming."
—Liz Phillips
Additional Resources
Tune into Liz's Twitch Channel - Illuminated Space - https://www.twitch.tv/illuminatedspace
Liz is also a part of the the group Live Coders - Learn about coding by watching coders! - https://livecoders.dev/
Learn more about Grace Hopper Bootcamp - https://www.gracehopper.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Liz Phillips
Twitter: @lizcodes
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lizkristinaphillips/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Josh Wills.
Josh Wills is a former engineer on Slack's Search, Learning, and Intelligence Team helping to build the company's production search and machine learning infrastructure. He's a recovering manager, having most recently built and led Slack's data engineering team and before that the data science and engineering teams at Cloudera and Google.
Josh is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, the founder of the Apache Crunch project, and a co-author of O'Reilly's Advanced Analytics with Spark. In May of 2012, he tweeted a pithy definition of a data scientist as someone who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician, and his Twitter mentions have never been the same.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“Statistics in school, at least when I was there, was very much focused on the problem. 'How do we extract as much information as we can from a relatively small subset of data.' Statistics at Google and Facebook was much more concerned with ‘we are drowning in data, we have an overwhelming amount of data. How do we not delude ourselves?'"
"If you want to be a mentee, there's no work that you're too good to do. The best learning opportunities of my life came from situations where I was more than willing to roll up my sleeves and do things that are not sexy and are not cool."
“I didn’t go back to engineering. I never stopped engineering. I was always engineering while I was doing this management stuff on the side. Recruiting and hiring, I enjoy. And I very much enjoy mentoring people. But I do not personally care about or tolerate sitting through a sprint review or doing a budget planning meeting or, god help me, sitting through a promotion process.”
—Josh Wills
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What are the differences in studying statistics in school versus working as a statistician at Google or Facebook?
- Why Josh chose to be a high-level individual contributor (IC) over management.
- How Josh worked a full-time job at IBM while getting his master's degree.
Additional ResourcesThe Manager's Path - by Camille Fournier
Software 2.0 by Andrej Karpathy - https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
How to Take Smart Notes - by Sönke Ahrens
Josh's talk how to play well with others about mistakes he has made during his career
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Josh Wills
Twitter: @josh_wills
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/josh-wills-13882b/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Chidamber Kulkarni.
Chidamber has been working on various aspects of FPGA technology for 16+ years now. In the last 5-6 years his primary focus has been acceleration of database and related technologies. Chidamber is a founder & CTO of Reniac Inc, a company that specializes in database acceleration with FPGAs.
Prior to Reniac, Chidamber was at Xilinx for 9 years as design engineer.
Chidamber has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke, a research university in Belgium.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“We are getting larger and larger chips. But the power density is something that has been almost constant for the last 5 or 7 years. That has been a limitation, and that's why they started scaling the number of cores in one chip. GPUs did that almost 10 years before the processors and the reason they had to do it is because they discovered parallelism in rendering. So they already had 64 cores and 128 cores by the time the uni-core became the dual core."
"So there's literally 100 X that you can get with FPGAs. But the effort required to realize that implementation today is still quite high. The challenge for FPGA vendors is how to make that programming easier."
"Skill is very important, but I think skill can be learned. What cannot be transplanted easily is aptitude and motivation."
—Chidamber Kulkarni
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why did Chidamber leave academia for the FPGA space?
- What is the difference between CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs?
- When did Chidamber start rENIAC? Why did he choose to dive into accelerating open source databases?
Additional Resources
Learn more about field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
Learn more about Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
Ep. 4 Goldman Sachs Saved My Tech Career, with Camille Fournier
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @chidamber
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chidamber/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jeff Meyerson.
Jeffrey Meyerson is the creator and host of the podcast Software Engineering Daily (@software_daily). He is also the founder of FindCollabs, a platform to find collaborators for ventures.
Jeff definitely took a non-traditional path to software engineering. Before getting his degree he played poker professionally for 3 years and then became a poker coach!
Post-college, he worked at a number of software companies including Amazon and eBay as an engineer. Pretty quickly, Jeff realized that he prefers to work for himself. These days he is a podcaster, founder, and investor.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why did Jeff start his tech podcast, Software Engineering Daily? How does it make money?
- What should you do if you feel out of place in tech? Is it worth it getting a remote job so that you can have more flexibility?
- Where is the podcast space headed? Is it saturated or is there still room to grow?
Additional Resources
Software Engineering Radio - Podcast by Robert Blumen.
https://www.indiehackers.com - A good place to learn how to start a small business
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-software-engineering-daily - Interview with Jeff Meyerson about podcasting!
Charles Max Wood – From Programmer to Full-Time Podcast Wiz - Episode 31 of Develomentor
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Jeff Meyerson
Twitter: @the_prion
Follow Software Engineering Daily @software_daily
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeff-meyerson-05275716/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Geoffrey Harcourt.
Geoff Harcourt is the CTO at CommonLit, a non-profit that provides reading curriculum services in English and Spanish to students and teachers around the world. CommonLit currently serves over 15 million students between the 3rd and 12th grades.
Before joining CommonLit he was a product engineering consultant at thoughtbot, where he worked with high-growth startups to help them tackle process and scaling problems.
He previously worked as CTO of Cortex Building Intelligence, a startup whose product helps commercial real estate operators reduce their utility use. Geoff began his career working in several product-side roles and transitioned to engineering after learning how to code on nights and weekends. He majored in history in college.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“I want to work with people that are relentlessly curious. They don’t have to be a total expert at Ruby or Rails or PostgreSQL or the core technologies we use at CommonLit. But if I feel 6 months from now, their skillset will be even bigger than it was before, I think they can be a really good fit working with us.“
“I was a consultant sort of acting like a fill-in technical cofounder for startups that didn’t have a technical cofounder.“
“For me to learn a technical concept, I have to use it in a project I care about the results of.“
—Geoff Harcourt
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What is it like working for an education nonprofit, CommonLit? What does Geoff look for when building his team as CTO?
- What did Geoff do after graduating with a history degree from Harvard?
- Why project-based learning is so important for Geoff in acquiring new skills?
- How Geoff got introduced to coding by running a website for his fantasy baseball league?
Check out Geoffrey's startup Cortexintel - https://get.cortexintel.com/
Learn more about CommonLit - https://www.commonlit.org/unsupported_browser.html
Learn more about thoughtbot - https://thoughtbot.com/
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @geoffharcourt
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/geoffharcourt/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jennifer Creighton.
Jenn Creighton is a frontend architect and conference speaker. She lives in New York with her two cats and maintains a Home for Abandoned Succulents, Mismanaged Plants and Otherwise Ailing Flora. You can find her online @gurlcode.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“Doing a major in English is very technically heavy, and so I think a lot of that transfers into engineering. You pay attention to composition a lot. You are working in specific languages, and so you’re getting used to what they look like, how they’re composed and what are the best practices with them.”
—Jennifer Creighton
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why Jenn chose not to get a formal degree in software engineering
- How is it that so many English majors become front end engineers?
- The differences between junior engineers, senior engineers, and software architects?
Key Milestones
[1:52] – Jennifer got a degree in English. She fell into the role of a content manager for several companies including The National Academy of Sciences. To manage websites, Jenn had to relearn HTML and CSS. This led her to become more and more technical.
[3:45] – Jenn built a website when she was 14 years old and learned HTML and CSS.
[6:20] – How did Jenn accidentally use Javascript when she was 14 and didn’t know it?
[8:20] – Jenn describes lucking into her first technical role at Ralph Lauren. For a while, she was convinced she needed a formal degree in computer science but then chose the self-taught route.
[13:40]- As she decided to leave Ralph Lauren, Jenn spent her nights and weekends preparing for legitimate technical interview. She had a few subpar interviews that served as early learning experiences.
[16:05] – Jenn recalls finding her first mentor at Lover.ly, a startup she worked at.
[20:02] – The differences between junior engineers, senior engineers, and software architects. How did Jenn’s expertise with React get her promoted quickly at ClassPass?
[24:20] – Why do so many English majors get into front end software engineering?
[28:20] – Jenn’s first speaking engagement was at the conference, Women Who Code 2018. But it was attending Write, Speak, Code that really put her in that position. In 2018, Jenn spoke at 10 conferences!
[31:10] – How has speaking at conferences taken Jenn’s confidence and career to a whole new level? Why does Jenn monitor her pulse?
To learn more about Write Speak Code Conference, click here
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @gurlcode
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jennifercreighton/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Olivia Liddell.
Olivia Liddell is a Technical Curriculum Developer at Amazon Web Services. Over the course of her career, she has created innovative teaching and technical training solutions for learners from diverse backgrounds and skill levels.
A Certified Ethical Hacker, Olivia frequently speaks on topics such as social engineering and security awareness. In her spare time, she enjoys distance running, studying linguistic anthropology, and developing web applications for Arabic language learners.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“If I gave kids a worksheet and said ‘do this’ they would feel bored. After playing this computer game, not only were they saying ‘Ms. Liddell, I want to learn more about this’, but they were also competing with each other. They said ‘Arabic was fun!’“
—Olivia Liddell
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What is social engineering?
- Mischievous activities Olivia did to get her family kicked off AOL
- What is the day to day of a curriculum developer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- How sharing your ideas on Twitter will help you speak at conferences
Key Milestones
[2:19 ] – In college, Olivia studied anthropology and middle eastern studies. After taking on jobs assisting higher education, Olivia decided to become a teacher through The Academy of Urban School Leadership. This was a big move for her.
[4:49] – Olivia taught Arabic in middle schools. She had to work hard to engage her students, After some time, she started to incorporate her love for technology into teaching.
[7:05] – There weren’t many language computer games out there. Yet there were plenty of games for math and science. This is when Olivia decided to take a shot at creating content and developing games.
[10:30] – Olivia recalls talking to a mentor who inspired her to develop educational games.
[14:30]- Olivia started writing content and games on AOL. She also recalls first encountering the ‘view source’ button and how it changed her life!
[17:27] – Olivia talks about how she keeps up with new technology. She has cultivated an inspiring twitter feed. She often prefers learning in tidbits as opposed to taking formal online classes.
[19:24] – How did Olivia get into speaking at conferences? Listen to one of her speeches here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFiSHyUmCk
[21:50] – Practical tips to improve your communication skills: Think about literally where is this person coming from? What was their morning like?
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jody Mulkey.
Prior to GoodRx, Jody Mulkey (@jodymulkey) was the Chief Product Officer at Aspiration. An accomplished technologist and inspirational engineering leader, Jody is known for building high-performance systems and teams.
Prior to Aspiration, Jody spent 5 years as CTO of Ticketmaster leading the global product and technology transformation. Prior to Ticketmaster Jody spent over 14 years at Shopzilla, now Connexity, a leading source for connecting buyers and online sellers that reaches a global audience of over 40 million shoppers monthly. Jody was the CIO of Shopzilla and part of the inaugural team building the company’s data platform, analytics, and infrastructure.
Born in Texas, Jody attended military school and got his degree in shenanigans before moving to California. Jody studied Business Administration at USC with dual emphases in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems.
Outside of work, Jody is an active startup investor, Laker fan, Trojan fan, and tennis enthusiast. Jody lives in Westwood, CA with his saint of a wife, 2 amazing children, and 2 obstinate yet adorable pugs.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“With good leadership, good people on your team, clear expectations and clear systems for accountability in a really beautiful, positive way that solves most of the management problem.”
—Jody Mulkey
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Jody ran a consulting business from his fraternity house in college
- What it’s like working for Ticketmaster, Aspiration, and GoodRx
- Why Jody quit his job at Sony Pictures after just 23 days
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @jodymulkey
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jodymulkey/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Aline Lerner.
Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical recruiting platform where companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Quora have hired great software engineers. Before that, she was a software engineer for 5 years, ran hiring at Udacity, and wrote a lot of stuff about hiring on the internet.
Aline’s data-driven posts about how typos matter more than pedigree, how resumes are a low-signal filtering tool, and how technical interviews aren’t deterministic have been read by millions of people. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and Fast Company.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careersInterview.io Special Discount for Develomentor Listeners!
Episode Summary
“We now hire for a ton of great companies including Goldman Sachs, twitter, uber and a bunch of others. But about 40 percent of our top performers and by extension about 40 percent of the hires we’ve made to date are people that frankly don’t look that good on paper!”
—Aline Lerner
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What did Aline learn from working long hours in the kitchen?
- How important is spelling and grammar on a professional resume? (Hint: it’s very important!)
- Is technical recruiting more tech or sales?
- How Interview.io helps candidates that don’t look great on paper?
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Additional Resources
Read Aline’s articles on Quora
Read Aline’s articles on Medium
Books Mentioned:
Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach – by Dandridge M. Malone
The Hard Thing About Hard Things – by Ben Horowitz
The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training For Climbers – by Arno Ilgner
Follow Aline Lerner
Twitter: @alinelernerLLC
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alinelerner/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Gary Flake.
Dr. Gary William Flake is an independent scientist, author, and inventor, that currently advises over a dozen startups, public companies, universities, and non-profits.
Gary was previously the CTO of Search and Data Science at salesforce.comwhere he managed salesforce’s entire search business unit. Prior to that, Gary was CEO of Clipboard Inc., which was acquired by salesforce.com in May of 2013. Before founding Clipboard, Gary was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft (2005-2010), where he was responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN, and for helping set the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. In this capacity, he founded and directed Live Labs, Microsoft’s greatest investment in applied research focused on the Internet, which was responsible for groundbreaking technologies such as Seadragon, Photosynth, Deepfish, Listas, Volta, and Pivot.
Gary has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 20 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and complex systems. Gary has also appeared in leading national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Nature Science, CNET News, Computer World, Fast Company, TechCrunch and Mashable, and has presented at leadership events such as the TED Conference.
Gary earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, has served on numerous academic committees and university advisory boards, and wrote the award-winning book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide. Gary was also the 2010 winner of the World Technology Award in the category of individual achievement in software, and was named one of the “Creativity 50” in 2009.
“The type of work I do is all over the map. I mentor a lot of CTOs. I work with other companies on their core strategies. I often serve as a sort of domain expert for certain things around machine learning and data science. So i get into the technical weeds for some of them. That’s a way of keeping me relevant and making sure I don’t lose track of whats going on in the rest of the world.”
-Gary Flake
Watch Gary's keynote speech about his startup, Clipboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5dJVfipkhY
Watch Gary's Ted Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration
Gary's Book:
Computational Beauty of Nature
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @flakenstein
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garyflake/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Gary Flake.
Dr. Gary William Flake is an independent scientist, author, and inventor, that currently advises over a dozen startups, public companies, universities, and non-profits.
Gary was previously the CTO of Search and Data Science at salesforce.com where he managed salesforce’s entire search business unit. Prior to that, Gary was CEO of Clipboard Inc., which was acquired by salesforce.com in May of 2013. Before founding Clipboard, Gary was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft (2005-2010), where he was responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN, and for helping set the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. In this capacity, he founded and directed Live Labs, Microsoft’s greatest investment in applied research focused on the Internet, which was responsible for groundbreaking technologies such as Seadragon, Photosynth, Deepfish, Listas, Volta, and Pivot.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Gary founded Yahoo! Research Labs, ran Yahoo!s corporate R&D activities and company-wide innovation effort, and was Overture’s Chief Science Officer. Before joining Overture, Gary was a research scientist at NEC Research Institute and the leader of its Web data-mining program.
Gary has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 20 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and complex systems. Gary has also appeared in leading national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Nature Science, CNET News, Computer World, Fast Company, TechCrunch and Mashable, and has presented at leadership events such as the TED Conference.
Gary earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, has served on numerous academic committees and university advisory boards, and wrote the award-winning book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide. Gary was also the 2010 winner of the World Technology Award in the category of individual achievement in software, and was named one of the “Creativity 50” in 2009.
"Your work can only go so far if you can’t communicate it. Your ability to communicate the importance of it can really make a difference between it having an impact that is tremendous versus nothing at all."-Gary
Watch Gary's Ted Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration
Gary's Book:
Computational Beauty of Nature
Learn more about Gary Flake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_William_Flake
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @flakenstein
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mark Imbriaco.
Mark Imbriaco has done everything from scaling and systems operations to starting his own company. His focus has been on an emerging part of technology: DevOps and site reliability engineering.
Mark often leads scaling (for sites and applications) and builds teams that manage those sites. Mark has held positions at AOL, Bank of America, Github, Basecamp, Heroku, DigitalOcean and now Epic Games.
**Episode Summary
“DevOps is all about how do we take the code that gets developed, and the code that lives in production, and bring them closer to being the same thing.”**
“There’s a balance between following your passions and paying your bills. Finding that balance in between has been an ongoing back and forth struggle.”
—Mark Imbriaco
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What exactly is DevOps and site reliability engineering
- How Mark dropped out of college after 2 years to start a hosting company back in 1994
- The story behind 37Signals, now Basecamp, and how Mark got a job as a system administrator for them
- How Mark got connected with Epic Games after reading a blog post
Key Milestones
[2:05] – Mark dropped out of college to start a company with his friends. But after a few years, he joined Bank of America and then AOL to support his family.
[3:05] – Imbriaco became a java developer for the heavy truck industry for 5 years. With time he increasingly became dissatisfied with what he was doing. He started going to conferences and getting introduced to new people and ideas. This is when he got exposed to Ruby on Rails.
[4:30] – The story behind 37Signals, now Basecamp, and how Mark got a job as a system administrator for them. He later left 37Signals for Heroku, later acquired by Salesforce
[6:30] – Why was leaving Heroku to join LivingSocial a mistake? After LivingSocial, Mark became part of GitHub. And later joined DigitalOcean
[9:30]- Mark goes into cofounding Operable, a startup on chat ops, with a friend. Although his ideas were good, Mark was subpar at implementing them. The company shut down 2 years later.
You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Mark Imbriaco
Twitter: @markimbriaco
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/imbriaco/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Hyoun Park.
Park has an MBA from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Amherst College.
Hyoun Park is the CEO and Founder of Amalgam Insights, an industry analyst firm focused on managing technology at scale for emerging business models. Over the past 20+ years, Park has been at the forefront of trends such as Moneyball, social networking, Bring Your Own Device, data monetization, and the Subscription Economy working with startups, large enterprises, and the investment community.
Park has been quoted in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Barron’s, and a wide variety of mainstream and technology press sources. Although he primarily works with enterprise technologies, Park has a soft spot in his heart for new and innovative technology startups and is dedicated to supporting greater gender and cultural diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
“Part of being a market-facing analyst is doing the webinars, speaking on stage, the executive presentations that you don’t necessarily think about as an individual technology contributor.”
—Hyoun Park
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Hyoun chose not to go to medical school and instead majored in gender studies
- What its like learning computer science on your own terms without a formal education
- The day to day of a market-facing tech industry analyst. Hint: There’s more to it than just conducting research.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Hyoun Park
Twitter: @hyounpark
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hyounpark/
Amalgam Insights: https://amalgaminsights.com/
Amalgam Insights Twitter: @amalgaminsights
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mark DiMassimo.
Mark DiMassimo (Creative Director) is Chief of DiMassimo Goldstein, an “inspiring action” agency which he founded in 1996.
A creative entrepreneur since his teens, DiMassimo began his agency career working for the author of “Direct Marketing: Strategy, Planning & Execution."
DiMassimo set a goal to start an agency that would bring the benefits of great brand building to direct model innovators, particularly those that offer life-changing services directly to clients.
The promise would be simple: drive brand value up and cost-per-acquisition down.
This immediately led to his participation in over fifty historic firsts, including the first social network (SixDegrees.com) the first Internet delivery service (Kozmo.com), the first online weight loss company (eDiets) and the first electronic stock trading network (Island ECN, INET, INSTINET, NASDAQ).
Before starting his own agency, DiMassimo spent a decade of making tongues wag with his work for a who’s-who of top direct and integrated Madison Avenue agencies, including BBDO, J. Walter Thompson, Chapman Direct Advertising, Deutsch and Kirshenbaum & Bond.
Mark is the author of Digital@SPEED, and co-founder of the Tappening and Offlining movements. He serves as the Chair of the Creative Development Board of the Partnership to End Addiction, and has served on the board of Rare and of the Financial Communications Society. He was named a Future 50 CEO by SmartCEO magazine in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
DiMassimo is featured in the best-selling book Leadership Secrets of the World’s Most Successful CEOs, by Eric Yaverbaum. He is co-author of Inside the Minds: INNOVATION and Branding as an Advertising Strategy and is featured in Passion Brands, by Kate Newlin, for which he also wrote the foreword. A familiar face on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, FoxNews, and Fox5NY, DiMassimo is often quoted in the media.
Mark teaches advertising undergrads at The School of Visual Arts. Mark lives in Rye, NY, and is the happy husband of Jill and the devoted father of Max, Alex and Jack.
About DiMassimo Goldstein (DiGo)
DiMassimo Goldstein is an inspiring action agency. We help life-changing brands grow by helping people make more inspiring decisions and form more empowering habits. We've done this for WW, WeightWatchers, HelloFresh, Jackson Hewitt, Shutterstock, Nasdaq, Avon, Ideal Image, National Jewish Health, Sallie Mae, CVS Health, Rare, The Wildlife Conservation Society, The Partnership to End Addiction, and several clients so prestigious we have agreed not to mention them here.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Mark DiMassimo
Twitter: @MarkDiMassimo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-dimassimo/
DiMassimo Goldstein: https://digobrands.com/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mike Gualtieri.
Mike Gualtieri has more than 25 years of experience in the industry helping design and develop mission-critical applications in eCommerce, insurance, banking, travel/hospitality, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology for organizations including NASA, eBay, Bank of America, Liberty Mutual, Nielsen, EMC, and many others. His background is that of a practitioner, having written thousands of lines of code, managed development teams, and architected complex systems.
Mike's research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, platforms, and practices that enable technology professionals to deliver digital transformations that lead to prescient digital experiences and breakthrough operational efficiency. His key technology coverage areas are AI and emerging technologies that make software faster, smarter, and transformative for global enterprises and organizations. He advises enterprise decision-makers and executive leaders around the world on the intersection of business strategy, AI, and digital transformation.
Mike is a recipient of the Forrester Courage Award for making bold calls that inspire leaders and guide great business and technology decisions.
He is a frequent and highly sought-after speaker at industry, corporate, educational, and technology events for his audience-designed, insightful, and energetic speeches.
Mike provides technology vendors with actionable, fine-tuned advisory sessions on strategy, messaging, competitive analysis, buyer-persona analysis, market trends, and product roadmaps for the areas he directly covers and adjacent areas that wish to launch into new markets or use new technologies.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"This is one of the best jobs in the world for me because of the level of access I have to CEOs of very large tech companies and CTOs. A lot of learning just comes naturally with the job."
—Mike Gualtieri
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Mike stays ahead of trends to influence some of the largest companies in tech?
- How often does Forrester publish reports? What are the differences between tech journalists and tech analysts?
- Why taking an online class on machine learning is often a waste of time?
- What is it like working as a software architect at a bank?
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Mike Gualtieri
Twitter: @mgualtieri
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mgualtieri/
Forrester: https://go.forrester.com/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Eric Bowman.
Eric Bowman is SVP Engineering at TomTom, which he rejoined in 2019 to help shape TomTom’s engineering culture for an increasingly online future. Previously, Eric was Zalando’s first VP Engineering, where he drove Radical Agility and led the engineering team into the cloud and oversaw huge growth and change at the company. A 25-year industry veteran, Eric has been a technical leader at multiple startups as well as global companies including Gilt Group, Three, Electronic Arts, and Maxis, where he was one of the three amigos who coded The Sims 1.0
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"I'm constantly humbled when I look back at just how very difficult it was to create this sort of immersive experience. Essentially the standard is to recreate something that matches reality. It is humbling to try and do that."
—Eric Bowman
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What it was like being one of 3 programmers working on The Sims
- Why going into video games is a super risky venture
- Timeless principles that helped Eric come into organizations and change the culture
- Why the west coast is unique in terms of tech entrepreneurship
Key Milestones
[2:01] – Eric wanted to be a physicist but programmed on the side while in school. His first job was at Maxis, the sim city franchise. Eric decided to join the team for what would eventually become 'The Sims'.
[4:30] – After leaving Maxis, Eric worked at plenty of companies including a startup, a phone company, a fashion flash sale company as well as others. He's currently at Tomtom.
[10:38] – Eric talks about what it was like working on The Sims in the early days. Unlike today, back then teams for videogames were small! He explains why video games are a risky venture and most video games fail.
[15:33] – It took some time for Eric to transition from programmer to engineering manager. Though it was a challenging move or him, it came down to making a greater impact.
[20:34]- What Eric looks for when hiring? Leadership, impact and growth mindset are major pillars to consider.
[25:29] – Why are more and more people hiring senior managers to change the culture of their company? Eric often looks for timeless principles when managing his teams and organizations, not necessarily new ideas. How can slack and chat ops change the culture?
[30:09] – What are the pros and cons of the tech culture in the US versus Europe. Why the Europe tech scene can be more stable but the boldness of Silicon Valley and the West Coast is unlike any place in the world.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Eric Bowman
Twitter: @ebowman
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/boboco/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jono Bacon.
Jono Bacon is a leading community manager, speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, developer workflow, and other services. He also previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, OpenAdvantage, and consulted and advised a range of organizations.
Bacon is a prominent author and speaker on community management and best practice. His most recent book, People Powered, came out in 2019. Jono also wrote the best-selling The Art of Community (O’Reilly), is the founder of the primary annual conference for community managers and leaders, the Community Leadership Summit as well as the Open Collaboration Conference. He is a regular keynote speaker at events about community management, organizational leadership, and best practice.
Bacon has provided community management consultancy for both internal and external communities for a range of organizations. This includes Deutsche Bank, Huawei, GitLab, Intel, SAP, HackerOne, data.world, Sony Mobile, Samsung, Open Compute Project, IBM, Dyson, Mozilla, FINOS Foundation, Executive Centre, AlienVault, and others. He holds advisory positions at AlienVault, Moltin, data.world, Open Networking Foundation, and Open Cloud Consortium.
In addition to author, Bacon is also a columnist for Forbes and opensource.com, author of Dealing with Disrespect, and co-authored Linux Desktop Hacks (O’Reilly), and Official Ubuntu Book (Prentice Hall). Bacon has written over 500 articles across 12 different publications. He writes regularly for a range of magazines.
Bacon was the co-founder of the popular LugRadio podcast, which ran for four years with 2million+ downloads and 15,000 listeners, as well as spawning five live events in both the UK and the USA, and co-founded the Shot Of Jaq podcast. He co-founded the Bad Voltage podcast, a popular show about technology, Open Source, politics, and more.
He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in California with his wife, Erica, and their son, Jack.
Episode Summary
"Community managers are knee-deep in the community engaging with people on forums, social media, doing talks, generating content; all the nitty-gritty kind of work that you need to keep the community engaged"
—Jono Bacon
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Jono's latest book - 'People Powered'. Its a business book written for a broad audience to shift our thinking around communities in the new era.
- The difference between community managers, community evangelists, directors of community and developer relations
- Why Jono Bacon LOVES open source? And why he helped build Jokosher, an open source multi-track recording software for editing podcasts?
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Jono Bacon
Twitter: @jonobacon
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonobacon
Website: www.jonobacon.com/
Email: jono@jonobacon.com
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Simon Willnauer.
Simon is one of the main developers of Apache Lucene and a Lucene committer. He is also a PMC member and Apache Software Foundation member.
Simon has led Elasticsearch's core development for over five years and co-founded the Berlin Buzzwords conference on search, store, and scalability.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"The big common denominator between concurrency problems and other big problems is that they usually are not solved in front of the computer"
—Simon Willnauer
In this episode we’ll cover:
- The founding stories of Elasticsearch and Berlin Buzzwords!
- What is the future of search? Why is Java limited in its capabilities?
- Why the most challenging computer problems are best solved AWAY from the computer. Simon has had breakthroughs while running!
Key Milestones
[1:43] – Simon wrote his first line of code when he was 22. He was working at a computer security company when he got introduced to Lucene. Open source captured Simon's attention, and a few years later, he co-founded Elasticsearch
[7:23] – Simon was a mechanic before going to university. He got into coding because it was creative and had endless possibilities.
[9:43] – Simon mentions his early career mentors. Now, as a mentor himself, Simon points out that mentorship is bidirectional: he always learns from his mentees as well.
[12:39] – Solving challenging problems involves making a mental model and solving them away from the computer. Simon solves many problems while exercising!
[15:15]- The founding stories of Elasticsearch and Berlin Buzzwords!
[18:59] – What goes into running Berlin Buzzwords? Hint: running a conference is stressful!
[24:22] – What were the difficulties in founding Elasticsearch?
[28:09] - How to deal with founding a company and dealing with handing responsibility to others. At first. it's challenging, but success is when the company can run without you at the center of it.
[31:08] - What is the future of search? Why is Java limited in its capabilities? It's great that we're increasing computing power, but we also must change the way we think about search
[37:29] - The importance of Lucene and how many companies and products are inspired by it.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
Follow Simon Willnauer
Twitter: @s1m0nw
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/simonwillnauer/
Github: github.com/s1monw
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Rebecca Watson.
Rebecca Weeks Watson is a digital media and tech entrepreneur who has been awarded two U.S. patents. After starting her career in finance and then consulting for Match.com, she decided to pursue her interest in the startup world. She was on the founding team and led Business Development for two different marketing technology companies, one of which was acquired by Meredith Corporation. During that time she led the product development, launch, and distribution of social media products that became adopted by publishers and brands with a total of 200 million users worldwide.
She has spoken at 50 conferences nationwide and founded a groundbreaking interview series called The Reveal that uncovers the personal stories of world-class leaders. Currently, she enjoys teaching a Lean Startup class at Davidson College and lecturing at UVA’s undergraduate school of business.
Episode Summary
"Too often I think people in the startup world feel like they have to know all the answers. They have to build these perfect shiny bright products to then reveal to the world. And at that point, it's too late."
—Rebecca Watson
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What is relationship building and why it is key in any venture
- Why Rebecca often reads headlines on LinkedIn instead of books
- How technical do you have to be to do tech sales?
- What is pre-selling? Why it is an essential tool for startups to build a product that users crave.
Key Milestones
[1:53] – Rebecca fell in love with finance in school and decided to become an investment banking analyst. She got an early opportunity to work in Silicon Valley with founders and operators.
[2:57] – Doing analysis got monotonous, so Rebecca moved to LA and accepted a job organizing summits for digital media creators. Soon Rebecca decided to co-found a software company focused on facilitating digital media.
[4:56] – Being recognized in business development, Rebecca joined another startup to help them optimize software. She was the first person involved in sales before the product was even built! In 4 years, Rebecca helped build the company from no revenue to 90 million.
[6:02] – Rebecca became a consultant when she had kids. She also kept producing summits for thought leaders. The summits led to her creating her own video series, The Reveal.
[10:23]- Initially, money drew Rebecca to finance. Why did she get out of finance? Rebecca talks about visiting a career counselor for gaining clarity.
[12:49] – What is pre-selling? Why it is an essential tool for startups to build a product that users crave.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Rebecca's interview series, The Reveal
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Laurie Barth.
Laurie is a Staff Software Engineer on the Gatsby Learning Team as well as a conference speaker, egghead instructor and member of the TC39 Educators committee. As a technical blogger, Laurie is a contributor to various publications, including CSS Tricks and Smashing Magazine. When she isn't writing code you can find her playing board games and eating cupcakes with her puppy, Avett.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"I'm a very plan oriented person and I never had a plan to be a speaker or a blogger or an instructor. It was more of, I tried something out, and it led to something else, and it led to something else".
—Laurie Barth
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why technical blogging led Laurie to become an instructor at Egghead.io
- How much did a Masters in Computer Science help Laurie with her career? The answer is somewhat surprising!
- Why Laurie didn't accept jobs at Disney and SpaceX to work from home in DC.
- How Laurie stays up to date with all the front end frameworks? Some frameworks mentioned are: Svelte, Angular, React, Vue, GraphQL
Key Milestones
[1:45] – Laurie thought she would end up in law school. But while interning, she was forced to take a computer science class and this changed the course of her career.
[4:35] – After college, Laurie worked as a program manager for the federal government. She hated it and decided to apply to become a software engineer. As an engineer, she worked at several companies before joining Gatsby.
[9:40] – Laurie talks about how she got involved in the speaking circuit and how she picks out conferences. She mentions how much insight she got from the Kansas City Developer Conference.
[13:18] – How Laurie got into blogging? And how technical blogging led her to become an instructor at Egghead.io.
[16:42]- Laurie talks about different mentors she's had in her career. She also talks about how she decided on her first junior level developer job.
[23:38] – How much did a Masters in Computer Science help Laurie with her career? Would she recommend it to others?
[26:40] – Laurie learned Java, Python, PHP because she was a consultant and needed to be knowledgeable for her clients. Lately, she gravitates more to front-end development.
[31:33] - Laurie explains why she didn't accept jobs at Disney and SpaceX to work from home in DC.
[35:52] - How Laurie stays up to date with all the front end frameworks? Some frameworks mentioned are: Spelt, Angular, React, View, GraphQL
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Kim Maida.
Kim is the Head of Developer Relations at Auth0 and is a Google Developer Expert in Angular and Web Technologies. She's passionate about identity, authentication, constant learning, and developer communities. As a developer advocate, engineer, and international speaker, she loves learning from and sharing with other inhabitants of the tech space. She also enjoys mentoring engineers who are interested in leadership.
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Episode Summary
"I basically want to come up with ways that the company can interact with developers through us to get the developers the best experience that we can give them and also sort of bring their feedback back into the company in an effective way"
—Kim Maida
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Kim got into tech after studying biology, zoology, neurobiology and animal behavior in college.
- Strategies for dealing with burnout. How do you move forward when you are feeling exhausted?
- How Kim got her first speaking opportunity. What are some strategies for practicing?
Key Milestones
[1:40] – Kim studied biology, zoology, neurobiology and animal behavior in college. After working in the field for a bit, she decided to go back to school to become a dietician. She got her first tech job in tech doing web development for the university and finally saw it as a viable career option.
[4:07] – In school, Kim switched her degree to web and digital media and worked at various media agencies, where she worked her way up to engineering manager. She really enjoyed working with engineers and decided to make that her career
[6:32] – Kim explains how she performed bee research and how bees 'waggle dance'
[8:59] – Kim reflects that she never saw herself getting in tech and development. She thought she would become a scientist, and always did web development on the side to help pay for bills.
[12:56]- What it's like working in academia as a non-professor? Kim talks about advantages universities. This includes benefits, cutting edge research, and having a lot of funding without having to talk to investors.
[18:12] – Why did Kim become a developer advocate after working at digital agencies? She felt disconnected from clients working at digital agencies. This is when Kim started blogging for Auth0 and started to grow her content/branding skillset.
[20:06] – Kim talks about her first speaking opportunity and how it came unexpectedly. She never spoke at a conference before, but she accepted the opportunity. This was outside of her comfort zone, but she enjoyed the experience so much, Kim decided to make speaking a full-time gig.
[23:11] - How does Kim prepare for speaking engagements? She recommends talking in front of a mirror, practicing in front of people, and recording yourself.
[27:15] - Kim talks about dealing with burnout. How do you move forward when you are feeling exhausted?
[30:56] - What is the day to day of a developer advocate? Its to strategically form relationships with developers. Sometimes this means speaking at conferences, sometimes it means setting up a booth at trade shows to answer questions.
[42:33] - Kim talks about hiring. Why culture fit is crucial not just within a company, but also within a team
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Charles Max Wood.
Charles Max Wood guides developers in being successful developers and building terrific lives through programming at maxcoders.io. He's also on a mission to create a podcast for every programming community. He loves connecting with new people, talking about code, and hanging with his family.
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Episode Summary
"I've had mentors and people to help me build my career and I want to help other people do that too."
—Charles Max Wood
In this episode we’ll cover:
- What steps did Charles take to make podcasting profitable?
- Why it's essential to reach out to mentors! Charles sat next to David Heinemeier Hanson at a conference and asked him to be on a podcast
- How did having a podcast help Charles get clients when he was an independent contractor?
- Why it is still a great time to get into podcasting! Charles thinks podcasts will be much more mainstream in the future.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Tracy Lee.
Tracy Lee is the Co-Founder of This Dot Labs, a consultancy focused on helping companies with digital transformations. She is also a Google Developer Expert, RxJS Core Team member, a Women Techmakers Lead, and a frequent keynote speaker at conferences.
She heads up Community Relations for Node.js at OpenJS Foundation, is the host of the Modern Web podcast, organizer of This.JavaScript, Contributor Days, Google Developer Group Silicon Valley and Triangle, and RxWorkshop. You can find her on Twitter @ladyleet or at http://thisdot.co/labs.
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Episode Summary
"Everybody on the team has kind of rallied around this idea that we're making money, we're helping companies. And we love helping companies. But even better than that, we can take that money and actually invest it back into the community."
—Tracy Lee
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Tracy started 3 companies while she was bored at her job
- Why are there are so few women in tech?
- How Tracy hires so many moms at ThisDotLabs and why moms have such a killer mindset.
- Why it's so important to start blogging and producing content about your journey as soon as possible.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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ThisDotLabs website
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Daniel Tunkelang.
Daniel Tunkelang is currently an independent consultant or, in his words, a 'high-class consultant' for technology companies. Previous to this, he was a data science and engineering executive who has built and led some of the strongest teams in the software industry.
Daniel studied computer science and math at MIT and has a PhD in computer science from CMU. He was a founding employee and chief scientist of Endeca, a search pioneer that Oracle acquired for $1.1B. He led a local search team at Google. Prior to this, he was a director of data science and engineering at LinkedIn, and he established their query understanding team.
Daniel is a widely recognized writer and speaker. He is frequently invited to speak at academic and industry conferences, particularly in the areas of information retrieval, web science, and data science. He has written the definitive textbook on faceted search (now a standard for ecommerce sites), established an annual symposium on human-computer interaction and information retrieval, and authored 24 US patents. His social media posts have attracted over a million page views.
Daniel also advises and consults for companies that can benefit strategically from his expertise. His clients range from early-stage startups to "unicorn" technology companies like Etsy and Flipkart. He helps companies make decisions around algorithms, technology, product strategy, hiring, and organizational structure.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"Well it started with pretty much the people that reached out to me were trying to persuade me to take full-time jobs and I'd say, Hey, I have a better deal for you. You could just have me one day a week"
—Daniel Tunkelang
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Endeca got started? Why did the founders reach out to Daniel?
- The pros and cons of being an independent contractor versus a full-time employee
- What made Daniel interested in search?
- Why Daniel became lost while working at Google
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Alice Albrecht.
Alice is currently an independent consultant. She is also building a brain-computer interface startup.
Prior to this, she led the strategy and advising portions of Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, where she was also a research engineer.
Before joining Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, Alice worked in both finance and technology companies as a practicing data scientist, data science leader, and - most recently - a data product manager. In addition to teaching machines to do cool things, Alice is passionate about mentoring and helping others grow in their careers.
Alice holds a PhD from Yale in cognitive neuroscience where she studied how humans summarize sensory information from the world around them and the neural substrates that underlie those summaries.
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Episode Summary
“We’ve had this huge surge in the use of deep learning and neural networks and all of these more complicated and very, very data-hungry techniques and organizations have seen a lot of benefit from those. But I think that in the next couple of years we’re going to see a plateau in the advancement there and we’re going to have to rethink the way that we’re developing these algorithms.”
—Alice Albrecht
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Alice started college when she was 15 and was on the fast track to becoming a professor
- Why Alice left academia to work in the private sector and technology
- How a neuroscience background gives Alice an advantage when working in data science
- What Alice looks for when hiring data scientists
- Why Alice believes deep learning will hit a plateau in the next couple of years
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Rikki Endsley.
Rikki Endsley is currently the Open Source Community Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She was previously the editor of Red Hat Developer and a 2016 recipient of an O’Reilly Open Source Award. In the past, she worked as a community manager and editor for Opensource.com; a community evangelist on the Open Source and Standards team at Red Hat; freelance tech journalist; community manager for the USENIX Association; associate publisher of Linux Pro Magazine, ADMIN, and Ubuntu User; and as the managing editor of Sys Admin magazine and UnixReview.com.
Rikki has an English degree from the University of Texas (Austin) and a Master’s of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Kansas. For her thesis, she researched how to highlight women’s contributions to open source technologies.
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Episode Summary
"I like helping a publication or website or magazine become its own life form, you know, have its own voice and stand out"
—Rikki Endsley
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why Rikki took a pay cut to jump-start her career as a tech writer.
- How technical do you have to be to be a tech writer?
- When is the right time to jump out of your comfort zone and try something new?
- Why it's a great idea to write a 'deep dive' article for a niche audience.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Caine Tighe.
Caine Tighe is the CTO and first employee of DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. This private search engine is #4 in the U.S., Germany, Australia and dozens of other countries, answering over 9 billion queries in 2018.
Prior to DuckDuckGo, Caine founded and ran opensesame labs, a startup consultancy focusing on companies with great ideas struggling to execute them.
For other tech roles and descriptions click here.
Episode Summary
"We did 9 billion searches in 2018 with less than 70 people. We're at 40 million searches a day now"
—Caine Tighe
Caine Tighe is the CTO of the upstart web search company DuckDuckGo that is slowly and surely taking a bite out of Google through laser-sharp focus on their one big weakness: privacy.
Along his journey in tech, he’s transformed from a computer programmer to CTO to a leading thinker on privacy, all while living outside of the usual tech hubs.
In this episode we’ll cover:
- How Caine met his partner and co-founder of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg
- The culture at DuckDuckGo and the amount of effort Caine puts in to ensure his employees are happy
- How DuckDuckGo is competing against Google
- Why understanding how you spend your time is absolutely essential
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Twitter: @cainetighe
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Beena Ammanath.
Beena is a managing director with Deloitte Consulting LLP and is an award-winning senior executive with extensive global experience in artificial intelligence and digital transformation. Her knowledge spans across e-commerce, financial, marketing, telecom, retail, software products, services, and industrial domains with companies such as HPE, GE, Thomson Reuters, British Telecom, Bank of America, E*TRADE and a number of Silicon Valley startups. Beena is the founder and CEO of Humans For AI Inc. She has co-authored the book “AI Transforming Business.”
A well-recognized thought leader and keynote speaker in the industry, Beena also serves on the industrial advisory board at Cal Poly College of Engineering, and she has been a board member and advisor to several startups including Flerish, Predii, iguazio, CliniVantage, and ProjectileX.
For other tech roles and descriptions click here.
Episode Summary
“ My bet is that computer programming, the way we know it today is going to fundamentally change."
—Beena Ammanath
In this episode we’ll also cover:
- Why statistics and Algebra are fundamental math classes for data scientists
- How Beena got involved in managing people after starting on a very technical path.
- What made Beena start a technology nonprofit?
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Cliff Schmidt.
Cliff founded tech nonprofit Amplio (formerly named Literacy Bridge) in 2007 to address global poverty and disease by making practical agriculture and health knowledge accessible to those who need it most. He led the development of an audio-based mobile device called the “Talking Book” for people with minimal literacy skills living in rural areas without electricity or Internet access. Cliff received the Microsoft alumni Integral Fellow Award presented by Bill and Melinda Gates twice (in 2010 and 2014) and was selected as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative by President Bill Clinton. He received the top prize at the Tech Awards in 2012 and Computerworld Honors in 2013 and was featured by the PBS Newshour as one of five Agents for Social Change in 2013.
Prior to starting Amplio, Cliff was a software developer for Microsoft and a nuclear engineering officer for the U.S. Navy Submarine Force. Cliff holds a B.S. in cognitive science from MIT and an M.S. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington. Cliff loves music and playing tenor saxophone.
For other tech roles and descriptions click here.
Episode Summary
"We're not huge in Seattle. We're only seven people, and in Ghana, we're about 15 or so. But we do reach nearly seven hundred thousand people with these talking books"
---Cliff Schmidt
Cliff Schmidt is a former submarine officer in the Navy with a background in cognitive science as well as computer science. He's now the CEO of the nonprofit, Amplio, focused on transforming lives through knowledge. If that isn't enough, he’s also been a long-time contributor to open source. Cliff has won numerous awards, including two from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as one from the Clinton Global Initiative.
Cliff started his career as a developer at Microsoft. As much as he loved coding, Cliff started getting pulled into more product and project management roles. Looking back at it, Cliff reflects he got "pulled towards the bigger picture ideas but it doesn't mean it's any less fun to write code."
While traveling, Cliff decided to be a tourist in Atlanta for a day when he came across a statue of Gandhi and the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. Suddenly it became clear to him that he wasn't making the impact he was capable of making. Right there and then, Cliff decided he was going to dedicate his life to "service humanity in some form." This was the beginning of Amplio.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Derek Butts.
Derek Butts is currently VP of corporate development at Workday. Prior to this, he was VP of product management and strategy responsible for planning and analytics, also at Workday.
Since joining Workday in 2008, Derek has served in various leadership roles focused on product, strategy, and business development including five years at Intuit.
Derek holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and psychology from Amherst College.
Click Here –> For more information about tech careers
Episode Summary
"Even when I took detours into industries that I wasn't necessarily going to be in long-term, they were still the highest integrity people who are awesome. In fact, I still have relationships with people across all of the companies that I've ever worked"
—Derek Butts
In this episode we’ll also cover:
- Important lessons Derek learned while buying auto mechanic shops
- What skills are necessary to be a successful product manager
- How is product management evolving?
- What Derek looks for people when hiring and building teams
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Chris Bouton. Dr Bouton is the CEO of Vyasa Analytics, applying novel deep learning (ie A.I.) approaches for life sciences and healthcare clients.
"Deep learning algorithms are basically the reason that everyone is talking about AI right now."
--Dr. Bouton
As a kid, Chris Bouton loved sharks. Sharks turned into biology and biology turned into molecular biology, which evolved into computational biology. Chris followed his curiosity and received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University.
In this episode we’ll also cover:
- Why did Chris bootstrap instead of raising money when starting Entagen
- Why AI is just a fancy word for deep learning
- Important personality traits for any entrepreneur
- How Chris's Ph.D. in molecular neurobiology makes it extra satisfying to build AI algorithms
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's episode is unique in that we don't have a guest. Instead, Develomentor founder Grant Ingersoll reflects on our first year of going live. Thanks to all our guests, listeners, and fans!
You can find more resources and a full transcript of this episode in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur and international business development guru Mark Heynen.
Mark Heynen (@markheynen) serves as PayJoy’s Chief (Business Development) Officer. Prior to PayJoy, Mark had an extensive career starting companies in the US and abroad, and striking complex deals in the mobile ecosystem. In 1999, Mark joined the founding team of LibertySurf, France’s first free ISP, and launched operations in the UK and Germany. Shortly thereafter in 2000, Mark co-founded retail analytics company Electrobug Technologies in London, which he eventually sold in 2006.
He moved back to the US that year to join Google’s early BD team, where he worked on mapping the developing world and launching Android. He was recruited to Facebook in 2010 to launch the company’s emerging market mobile strategy, including a number of complex carrier deals and the largest acquisition Facebook made at the time (Snaptu). Since leaving in 2012, Mark founded Photo Lab (sold to Dropbox) and led business development and operations for commercial drone startup Skycatch.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is JP Sherman.
JP Sherman (@jpsherman) is the manager for Search & Findability (SEO) for Red Hat. This means he makes content and information more readily findable to users in whatever channel they use to look for it. JP's been in the search industry for more than 15 years and has helped massive companies like Paramount Studios to quirky startups like a search engine for video games improve how customers find them and the content they have.
Growing up in Sacramento, California, JP has had nearly every job there is... barista, massage therapist, autopsy assistant, US Army Special Operations (Airborne), visual artist & illustrator, archaeological dig team leader, video game dialogue writer & SEO. He is probably the last person in the world to take career development advice from.
You can find more resources and a full transcript in the show notes
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Ross Gilbertson is a long-time IT manager. He worked his way up from the director level to Chief Information Officer and Senior VP of technology. Along the way, he’s worked across a variety of industries, ranging from banking to eCommerce to coffee and publishing!
When starting out, Ross recalls "a lot of the jobs were more along the programming bent", but Ross was more of a business guy with an interest in technology. He attributes curiosity as a major part of his successful career. Curiosity not only for learning new skills, but also a curiosity for understanding people.
For full episode show notes click here
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Kavita Ganesan is a data scientist with expertise in natural language processing, machine learning, text mining and search. Over the last decade, she's developed AI and data science solutions for companies like GitHub, 3M Health Information Systems and eBayas well as a handful of startups. Kavita also serves as a consultant for several companies.
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Jake Mannix is currently the Data Architect of Search Relevance at Salesforce. In other words, he's an AI Engineer. Jake lives in the intersection of search, recommender-systems, and applied machine learning, with an eye for horizontal scalability and distributed systems. Prior to his current position, Jake was the Lead Data Engineer in the Office of the CTO at Lucidworks.
In college, Jake studied algebraic topology and particle cosmology. He's ABD ("all but dissertation") from the University of Washington before transitioning into technology.
Some of Jakes previous accomplishments
- Built out LinkedIn’s search engine
- At Twitter, built user/account search system and lead that team before creating the Personalization and Interest Modeling team.
- Apache Mahout committer, PMC Member (and former PMC Chair).
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Mark Settle is a seven-time Chief Information Officer with broad business experience in information services, enterprise software, consumer products, high tech distribution, financial services and oil & gas. He has led IT organizations that support internal business operations, product development and customer-facing service capabilities. Mark is the author of Truth from the Trenches: A Practical Guide to the Art of IT Management. He currently serves as the CIO of Okta, a San Francisco company offering cloud-based solutions for identity and access management.
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Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. He is a developer advocate and a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. Kelsey is an expert in Kubernetes and has written a book about it called "Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure" (link in show notes). When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration. Learn how Kelsey went from tech support to dev advocate to keynote speaker!
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Duretti Hirpa is a writer and senior software engineer based in San Francisco, California. She's a ten-year veteran of the technology industry. Duretti has a humanities background and often thinks about the intersection between people and technology. She is a self taught software developer and continually excels at prestigious companies including Fastly, Slack, and most recently MailChimp.
Over the years, Duretti has held various roles including web developer UI designer, front end engineer, and back end engineer. She likes treats, the feeling of finding the perfect animated gif, and the vocal stylings of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
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Trevor Grant is a software engineer, active open source contributor and an AI evangelist for IBM. In college, Trevor started his own food delivery business and ran it for 4 years. Next, he decided to enter the US Army and went on to serve in Afghanistan as a combat medic. Since then, he’s held a variety of roles, including ones as a data scientist and an instructor. Virtually nothing about Trevor’s career is ordinary and neither is his current role as an AI evangelist. What does an AI evangelist do? Listen to this episode and you’ll find out.
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In today’s episode of Develomentor, we have Nick Caldwell. Nick has held almost every technical role one can imagine: software engineer, engineering manager, general manager and VP of engineering. Nick is currently the Chief Product Officer at Looker, a business intelligence company. But prior to this, he worked at major companies from Microsoft to Reddit to NASA. Today we will not only decode Nick's new position, but we'll also discuss strategies on how to shift YOUR career from engineering to product!
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Our guest today is Ellen Friedman. Ellen is currently the Principal Technologist at MapR, a data platform company. And she took the scenic route to get there! These days, Ellen is well known as a keynote speaker, tech writer and open source leader. But this transition didn’t happen overnight. Listen to hear how Ellen went from a career as a biochemist to principal technologist!
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Ellen received a PhD from Rice University and started her career in scientific research. But her curiosity for cutting edge ideas and her passion for communication has created a truly unique voice in technology.
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In today's episode of Develomentor, we have Stephen Carvelli. Stephen shares powerful insights about breaking into tech with a psychology degree and becoming a top level executive. Listen to hear about his journey from Psychology to CTO. Click here to learn more about tech careers.
Stephen is currently Vice President of software development at Comcast. Prior to this, he worked at at other publicly traded brands including OfficeMax, American Eagle Outfitters, Disney, Chico’s, and Lowe's.
Stephen graduated with a B.S in Psychology. He scored his first job at Office Max, where he got a crash course in both retail infrastructure and e-commerce. During this time, Stephen gained experience working with large companies and building lasting partnerships - skills propelled him for success in business and technology.
Stephen went on to work at big name companies and rose to leading technical roles. And he did this all without a computer science degree.
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Episode Summary
John Cambier joins us on today on Develomentor from Idea Fund Partners. John is the guy everyone is always asking for money. He represents a side of technology that is often behind the scenes, venture capital. Join us as John and Grant discuss venture capital and tech. Click here to browse different careers in tech.
In the early 90s John graduated from Michigan State University as a political science undergrad. He started his tech career in 1994 as the one non-technical person in a group of 13 engineers packaging semiconductors.
John eventually decided to attend business school at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC to get an MBA. He was also working full time while attending school and helped spin out three companies during that time. This was his first exposure to venture capital.
After John got his MBA, his company assigned him to assemble a team for early seed investing in tech companies. This became the nonprofit MCNC and John hired a few MBA grads from UNC to help him run the 15 million dollar investment fund. In 2007 Idea Fund Partners was born and became a major investor in MCNC. To this day, Idea Fund has backed 44 different companies.
Key Milestones
[1:01] Who is John Cambier?
[10:27] Going back to school while working full time
[13:48] About venture capital and tech
[16:02] Importance of network
[19:22] How jobs differ at small companies versus larger companies
[21:20] What kind of influence does venture capital have
[24:26] What surprised John most about venture capital
[27:04] Being able to read people and communicate
[31:17] Going out and finding investing partners
[34:41] What to look for when starting out in venture capital
[38:58] Advice for those just starting out
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Episode SummaryOur guest today, Divine, is a rapper and tech entrepreneur passionate about empowering the underprivileged. Many of our guests have uncommon career journeys, but we think we topped them all today!
Divine made the jump into tech when he was serving his last sentence for distributing drugs. While in prison, Divine came across the name ‘Ben Horowitz’, the famed venture capitalist. After reading up on Ben’s work and impact, Divine made it his mission to connect.
After getting out of prison, Divine reached out to the tech mogul. Ben had an appreciation for hip hop and often partook in philanthropic work – this gave Divine hope. While initially tempted to ask Ben to invest in his music, Divine took a different approach. He asked Ben to become his mentor.
Ben agreed to mentor Divine and the two became fast friends. Divine moved to Silicon Valley and completed a micro degree in digital marketing from Udacity. He landed his first job at The Last Mile, a startup dedicated to helping ex-convicts transition to life outside of prison. He then moved on to work for Udacity as a brand ambassador. Following his ambition, Divine founded his first startup, Blak, focused on empowering the underprivileged to build wealth through technology and education.
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In this episode of Develomentor, we are joined by Todd Lewis, a technology advocate, community builder and entrepreneur. Todd has organized some of the biggest open source technology conferences in the United States over the last decade, including All Things Open, Great Wide Open, and POSSCON. Each event has attracted thousands of attendees from all over the world and nearly every major technology company in the country regularly participates. Todd is a strong believer in open source technology and expects it to be a dominant approach/methodology in the future.
Todd got his start working for an internet company in 1999 and has since worked with large consulting firms, Fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits.
Just like us, you’ll be moved by Todd’s mission to share knowledge and create opportunities for other people. Tune in as we explore what goes into creating great and successful technology conferences as well as some major challenges and obstacles to look out for. Enjoy!
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Fred Stutzman is the founder and CEO of Freedom, an app that helps people stay focused by temporarily blocking apps from their devices. His first startup was called Claim ID, which was an online identity management service for the social web.
Fred built Freedom to help him focus on essential tasks in college and to avoid unnecessary distractions such as browsing on Social Media. Although Freedom was started as a side gig, Fred soon realized it could be scaled into a legitimate business. Today, Freedom has over 1 million users and is still growing.
In this episode, Fred Stutzman and Grant Ingersoll discuss transitioning a side gig into a full-time scalable business. You will also hear:1. How academics can impact your entrepreneurial path.
2. Why process management is critical to building a business.
3. How a positive mindset can help scale a business fast.
4. Why forming routines and habits help with business and personal growth
5. Mistakes made when growing a startup and how to rectify them.
6. How customer feedback impacts a business.
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Today we are joined by Drew Farris. Drew, currently a senior technology consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, wears dual hats as a software engineer and as a data scientist. He is also co-author of the book “Taming Text”. Drew is a master at taking complex topics and breaking them down into components that are easy to understand.
Drew attributes a lot of the success and fulfillment of his career to design thinking, a concept he got introduced to while studying art in college. We will spend significant time unwrapping the idea of designing your own career and lifestyle in today’s episode.
The traditional career path for programmers involves moving into management at some point, but this transition doesn’t work for everyone. Drew designs his own role to remain technical, or ‘nitty gritty’ and this means blocking significant time off to write code even when having to interface with clients.
In this episode you will also hear:
- How public speaking helps grow a business
- Why getting published will help you go professionally
- Why consulting is a great first job
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Camille joins us on Develomentor to talk about her path in technology. She offers incredible insight to anyone navigating the world of technology with an engineering background, especially those looking to manage and lead.
Camille was on the fast track to becoming a booming success in technology - she graduated from a prestigious university with a shiny master's degree and had experience working for a major company. But instead of looking for a cutting edge tech company, Camille chose to work for Goldman Sachs. Paradoxically, she attributes this decision to saving her career in tech.
After succeeding at Goldman Sachs, Camille joined a startup ‘Rent The Runway’ where she learned to manage and lead people. After wearing many hats in the organization, Camille became the CTO. But the startup life came with a cost, and Camille found herself overworked and drained.
Instead of jumping into another job, Camille took some time to reflect and eventually decided to write her first book ‘The Manager’s Path’. The book offers practical advice to technical managers solving problems in the real world. It was a success, and not only for managers, but also, somewhat surprisingly, for younger employees interested in management.
Camille currently works as the head of platform engineering at Two Sigma, a tech hedge-fund.
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In today’s episode we are joined by Liz Liddy, a professor and dean at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Liz recounts her journey through tech, academia and entrepreneurship as well as her fascination with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.
Liz began her career as an academic librarian but became increasingly frustrated with search engines and their inability to connect the user with what they were looking for. Liz’s curiosity for search led her back to school to get her PhD in linguistics. She soon founded her own search engine company, motivated in part by her entrepreneurial brothers who teased her for being the most educated but the poorest!
The startup Liz founded improved search and connected users with sources not only by specific keywords, but also by overall meaning. Her company operated within the university and grew to over 50 people, serving clients such as the US Patent Office and various governmental intelligence agencies. But Liz soon got bored coming out with ‘new versions of the same product’ and decided instead to open a NLP research center.
Liz became dean of Syracuse’s iSchool in 2008 where her impact has been monumental in inspiring others and increasing overall enrollment. She believes online learning is the future of education and projects that popularity will continue to grow, especially in graduate schools.
This episode cements one of our common themes in the Develomentor podcast: the need for mentorship and support to perform at your best in any career! Liz found important mentors in her lecturers Jeff Katzer and Raymond VonDran. She says that these critical relationships helped her develop ideas and were essential in shaping her career.
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Renee Saint-Louis is a major inspiration for the Develomentor podcast, and she also happens to be Grant's sister. She currently works as a product manager at a small K-12 publishing firm, but has worked across a variety of other industries including banking and retail both as a product manager and as a business analyst.
Renee studied social work all through college but after interning decided to switch her major to family and consumer science. She got her first career opportunity when her manager at Nordstrom spotted her skill and advised her to apply for a job in a different department as a business analyst.
According to Renee, the roles of product managers and business analysts can overlap. Both roles help a business understand what its needs are and then work on bringing those needs to life, usually in the form of either process improvement or new technology. But no one is perfect and even the most experienced product managers fail sometimes.
In this episode you will also hear1. How the business analyst and product manager role overlap
2. Common challenges faced by product managers
3. The importance of a mentor for your career
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Welcome to the first episode of our brand new podcast Develomentor. We are a career based podcast about technology and we interview people working all sorts of jobs in tech, not just software engineers! Each interview will focus on helping you learn more about the role, what’s required to be successful in it and how that role is changing. More importantly, we hope you’ll see that there are a lot of different paths to be successful in your own career. If you stick with us, you’ll meet IT product managers with social work degrees and heads of sales with engineering degrees. You’ll meet engineers who “got all the degrees” and others who did a six week coding bootcamp and are running the show. You’ll meet academics and practitioners across a wide range of industries. You might even meet a few artists. Most importantly, we hope you’ll meet your calling.
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