The Solo Coder Podcast: Recent Episodes

Aderson Oliveira

A podcast about career in coding where I (Aderson Oliveira) interview coders, programmers, developers about where they are in their careers and how they got there. If you are a coder and want to start, change or boost your career, this is the place you will learn from other fellow coders.

I spoke with Christos Matskas. Christos is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft working with the Identity Platform.

After 2015, Christos started to do a lot of community speaking, conferences, user groups, blogging, open source contributions which all lead him to become a Microsoft MVP (most valuable professional). In turn, all of that activity culminated on him being invited to work at Microsoft in the UK.

During our conversation we spoke about community building and how challenging it is to do it right. We discussed the importance of being willing to speak as a developer and what that can do for ones career.

We also talked about his recent experimenting with TikTok, teaching people how to use Git via quick videos. I had a look and he is good! You can get the link in the show notes to check it out. You will learn quite a few things about Git from Christos videos.

Oh, did I mention that he wants to be Microsoft's CEO? Watch out Satya!

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/100

I spoke with John Calderaio. John is as a technical writer currently working with Mosh Hamedani from Programming with Mosh.

If you haven't heard about Mosh, he is a great content and course creator. John writes for Mosh's website.

But John's story goes way beyond coding. As we discussed about his career, he revealed his troubled time from 12 to 20 years old when he dealt with drugs and alcohol, which lead to a car accident that got him in jail for 1 year. According to him, this was the worst time of his life.

Thankfully he got himself clean and he shared with me that after jail, he went back to University, got his bad grades removed and finished with a 3.9 GPA in Computer Science Engineering.

Unfortunately as a result of the car accident, he started suffering severe backpain which is still a constant in his life 24/7. Just to give you an idea of how bad the pain is, he was talking to me from his bed during the chat.

Nowadays, John is looking forward to a surgery that should fix the problems on his back. If all goes well, has plans to go to med school and combine technology with medicine.

I will leave you with the positive John Calderaio - technical writer and developer.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/99

I spoke with Rob Richardson. Rob is a veteran developer with over 18 years of experience in the field. Currently he works as a Developer Advocate for Cyral.

Originally coming from an Industrial Design graduation, he quickly moved on to a Masters in Computer Information Systems. Rob has worked with many technologies and has seen many patterns and cycles. For instance, he shared that one of the biggest adjustments within his career was to see and adapt to the client and server cycles. His fresh perspective on this topic was very insightful and easy to understand.

Rob shared with me that he always tries to bring the user's perspective to the center of the conversation. This is not very simple to do and most developers end up ignoring it and focusing way more in the technical details than what they should. To be a successful tech consultant, one must develop their empathy skills, otherwise they will not go too far.

As Rob said, it is not uncommon for people to believe they are the center of the universe and forget about other people's perspectives.

I will leave you with the eloquent Rob Rich, developer advocate, speaker and much more.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/98

I spoke with Garrick Crouch. Garrick is a Software Engineer working for Deka Solutions. Technology wise, his focus is React in the frontend and Laravel in the backend, which is a combination that he has been working with for a few years now.

But coding was not always on his radar. In his early career he was an electrician. He almost got a degree, but in his final semester he dropped out as a result of his substance abuse.

We have explored how he was able to move on with his life after 12 years of drug addiction.

During the time he was in recovery, he came in touch with web development and it was the starting point of a complete turn around in his life. Garrick attended a coding bootcamp and got himself in College studying for a Computer Programming degree.

So many lessons learned from Garrick's experiences. It shows that no matter what kinds of struggle we are going through, there is a light at the end of the tunnel as long as you are willing to move forward.

I will leave you with the inspiring story of recovery and persistency from Garrick Crouch, Software Engineer.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/97

I spoke with Jan. Jan is a Shopify ecommerce specialist based in Germany.

Originally graduated as a mechanical engineer, he started his career with robotics, developing automation robots for product manufacturing assembly lines.

However, after just a few month in the job, he quickly realized that this was not what he wanted. He wanted to code but not robots. That lead him to web development. He started then a freelancing career initially using WordPress, but moved on to Shopify as he was interested in helping clients with their ecommerce needs and in his opinion, Shopify is a better solution.

Now he is on a journey to help other developers and aspiring developers to start their freelancing careers focused on assisting clients with Shopify needs. Him and his partner launched a site called Freemote where you can learn how to build your freelancing business from the ground up. They have training content including videos and worksheets as well as a community to help each other.

For this episode I brought Ken Fowler. Ken is an ex student of mine and he was the one who recommended me to talk to Jan. So the other person asking questions is Ken.

I will leave you with Jan, Shopify and freelancing expert.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/96

I spoke with Ottawa based Ihab El-Waly. Ihab has a Computer Science background, but nowadays he works mostly with Digital Marketing.

Ihab caught my attention as he was the one who reached out to me to be part of the podcast. Usually I'm the one inviting guests and the proactive approach that Ihab took was an interesting surprise which made me want to talk to him even more.

I spoke with Ihab about his time as a Computer Science student and how he transitioned from University to becoming a freelancer website developer to then moving to digital marketing.

I have worked with many digital marketers in the past as my clients, but never had the opportunity to talk to one for the podcast and this looked like a good chance.

Ihab said that he was not cut out to be a super tech developer because of his business interests. He sees himself more as a middleman between technology and business. I think many of you listing to this might be in the same boat.

We also talked about the fact that Ihab's family and friends didn't support him much initially but now, after positive results, they are more convinced that this was a good career choice for him.

I will leave you with the soft-spoken digital marketer Ihab El-Waly.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/94

This was a different episode and we had a live audience asking questions. I think we will be doing this more and more over time and I would love to hear your opinion about this format. Do you like it? Don't like it? Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter - Links can be found @ SoloCoder.com.

We spoke with Cristian Florea. Cristian is a Frontend Developer working for Novartis, the big pharma company.

The format was a bit different from the traditional one and Cristian delivered a lot of valuable insights about the industry, getting experience as a frontend developer and many tips to help people landing their first job as a developer.

Aside from working at Novartis, about 2 years ago Cristian started helping aspiring developers by creating a coaching program to give them a hand on landing their first job.

Coming from a different background - Cristian studied Law - he has first-hand experience of how someone with non-traditional experience, can break into the industry.

We have also explored the fact that Cristian is a bit nomadic right now, going from country to country for only a few months at a time. Sounds like a dream come true to many people who love to travel.

From electronic music producer to barista to coder, you will take away a lot from this chat with Cristian Florea, coach for aspiring developers.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/93

I spoke with Chris Eidhof. Together with his business partner Florian Kugler, he runs objc.io where you can find books, courses, videos and resources in general about iOS and macOS development.

Nowadays it focus mostly on Swift, but at some point in the past before Swift it was all about Objective-C as their site name suggests.

We spoke about his origin story around Objective-C and the fact that he doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, making my life as I researched about him, a lot harder.

Burn out is a topic that I'm always curious about. Chris spoke openly about it and how he was able to get to the other side of that challenging time.

We spoke about objective-c.io and their approach to business which basically focus on creating great resources and letting the content do the rest of the work, instead of focusing too much on promoting the business. It seems to have worked really well for them.

In the end he mentioned that currently they plan to release some of their own apps so they can stay hands-on to be able to talk proficiently about all aspects of mobile development and not just focus on teaching.

Whether you are a mobile developer or not, Chris shared lessons and career tips in this episode that are applicable to all kinds of coders, no matter what their specific tech stack might be.

I will leave you with Chris Eidhof, iOS developer and educator.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/92

I spoke with the dual Matt Lawrence and Mike Karan. Together they run a web development agency in Hamilton, Canada called "Digital Dynasty Design".

Beyond that, they also run their own podcast show called "HTML All The Things" where they talk about web development, design and running a small business.

I was interested in speaking to them about how and why they started their own web development company. I wanted to shed some light into this as a career opportunity. They were very candid about it. They covered the feast and famine cycles that are so common when running a small business.

They also spoke about their focus on trying to create some sort of passive income stream that can help to minimize the ups and downs of the business.

Of course we also talked about their own podcast and how they are able to keep it going with so much consistency.

It was great to be able to talk such a good combination of business partners. They have so many complementing skills to add to each other. This is key when picking someone to go in business together.

I will leave you with Matt and Mike from Digital Dynasty Design.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/91

I spoke with Jerome Hardaway. I caught Jerome in a transition. He just started working at Microsoft about 2 months ago as a Software Engineer.

This is awesome on its own, but beyond that, Jerome is the founder of Vets Who Code, a non-profit organization that focus on teaching military veterans for free in the United States how to code so they can move to the tech industry after service.

Vets Who Code has helped over 250 veterans to learn to code and find jobs.

I spoke with Jerome about his own story as a veteran that got into coding himself. He shared the origin story of how Vets Who Code came about and how the organization operates.

He told me about the advantages that veterans bring to the table when they get into the tech industry. The discipline, the focus, the team work, the desire to build something bigger than themselves, just to mention a few.

In the end Jerome shared a few of potential next steps he may be taking with Vets Who Code and with his own career.

Stick around to hear the stories from Jerome Hardaway, veteran and coder.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/90

I spoke with David Jorjani. David is Director of Product at Ideal.com and Instructor at the University of Toronto.

Great to see a professional like David with a foot in Academia and another one in Startups.

At UofT, David wants to help students getting real life experience to be ready for the industry.

Then at Ideal.com, he needs to hire talent. Also, Ideal itself is a platform that helps companies with talent acquisition.

So David seems to be surround by talent. From one end he needs to hire and select them, from the other end he helps to build them!

We have explored what it means to be working for a start up and I asked him to help me sell the idea of being part of a start up to my students.

We also spoke about teaching and his experiential learning practices of having students working with real projects. These projects are brought by real companies with whom he forms partnerships.

I will leave you with David Jorjani, product builder and people developer.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/89

I have spoken with my good friend David Poindexter. David is the founder of nvisionative, a digital agency located in Mooresville, North Carolina.

I have know David for many years as part of my involvement in an open source community called DNN. I have always admired David for the combination of his business acumen and his technical skills.

David has been involved in many aspects of open source, from code contribution to conference organization and leading working groups. We spoke about being part of a community and how awesome it is to be in the flow with them.

I have questioned David about the return on investment of time and money that he puts into open source and if it helps his business somehow.

We have also spoken about his deep involvement within the music industry and how this experience helped him in the tech space.

David shared the growing pains of moving from a solo coder business to an agency, where he had to hire people to help him out.

This chat really felt to me like two buddies chatting over a beer, but there was no beer involved.

I hope you enjoy the chat as much as I did.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/88

I spoke with Andy Hunt. Andy is one of the 17 authors who wrote the Agile Manifesto back in 2001. 2 years earlier he wrote, together with Dave Thomas one of the most seminal programming books called "The Pragmatic Programmer". The book has been referenced many times here in the podcast by so many guest that said it has shaped their careers.

There were so many potential paths that I could have taken with this conversation. I decided to stick mostly to the present time to see what Andy does currently but we also went through some of the learnings from The Pragmatic Programmer, which I have the 20th anniversary edition hard cover with me.

Andy spoke about the challenges that new people coming to the tech industry must face, which is: where do I start? So many technologies. So many options. How do I narrow them down?

We also spoke about education and what is currently missing like teaching soft skills including communication and many more aspects.

We discussed about what is at the code of being a pragmatic programmer, which according to Andy is the thirst for knowledge and the curiosity.

We even talked about Andy's adventures in writing science fiction!

I will leave you with The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/87

I spoke with Juri Strumpflohner. Juri is a JavaScript Architect working for Narwhal Technologies.

Beyond that, Juri is a Google Developer Expert, title that he got as a result of his intense involvement with Angular.

Juri is also an Instructor at Egghead, having created multiple courses not only about Angular, his forte, but also React and Git. As I had quite a few Egghead instructors in the podcast I wanted to ask him why Egghead instructors seem to enjoy so much working with Egghead. We delve a bit into this.

Juri loves writing for his blog. He shared with me that at peak, his blog was getting 100K readers a month. Quite a feat!

We have also talked about his passion for martial arts and how it has affected his work as a developer.

Towards the end we discussed about his challenges with juggling multiple responsibilities and the strategy he uses to handle better prioritization.

I will leave you with the polyglot and martial arts teacher and student, Juri Strumpflohner.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/86

I spoke with Hemil Patel. Hemil is a Front-end Architect but the reason why I came across his name was because of his YouTube channel called Techsith. It focus on front-end technologies like Javascript, React, CSS and even job interview preparation for front-end type of positions.

Hemil has an interesting motto: "Make your weakness your strength" - And he lives by that. He is shy, but he says it made him want to be famous and in front of people.

Interesting enough, at some point he wanted to be a stand-up comedian. He even attended a comedy school in San Francisco and performed in front of a live audience.

He may have given up on comedy, but his desire to be famous is coming to fruition via his YouTube channel, now with over 120K subscribers!

We spoke about this longtime experience in tech which exposed him, on a quick count, to over 70 technologies through his career and he is not stopping!

Hemil said that in the long run he wants to transition to a more traditional teaching role. He finds it very fulfilling to be in class face to face with students.

I will leave you with Hemil Patel, a shy, but not so shy coder.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/85

I spoke with Taylor Desseyn. Taylor is a Sr. Recruiter at Vaco. He has been working specifically with software engineers and developers for the past 6 years.

First off, I want to apologise to Taylor for mispronouncing his name some many times. And I'm a sticker about pronouncing names correctly!

With that said, this was a different chat. We did it via Zoom and I decided to invite a group of developers to build a live audience where they could also ask questions directly. I think it went quite well but let me know what you think.

Taylor was very comprehensive with his answers about recruiting, job search, LinkedIn, the use of video and even TikTok when applying for jobs.

Taylor was also very open about the problems within the recruiting industry and why recruiters get a bad reputation.

This is a must listen episode if you are looking for a job and still a highly recommended one if you are not. Taylor will not leave you empty handed after listening to this chat.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/84

I spoke with Monarch Wadia. Monarch is the founder of Mintbean, an organization based here in Toronto. They focus on helping developers getting experience by taking part in Hackathons, Webinars and Workshops.

The idea behind Mintbean is very much aligned with my personal goal of helping dev students to get real life experience and to find jobs.

During our conversation we went deep into the weeds about hackathons as I was really curious about the ins and outs of putting one together. We spoke about how hackathons can be used to help coders learn new technologies and sharpen their skills.

Monarch said that hackathons are not just for advanced developers, but they can target any level of experience.

At this point in time, Mintbean business model is focused on partnering with companies using a sponsorship approach.

Monarch shared with me the challenges he is facing with Mintbean, but he is confident that 2021 will be a great year for the growth of the organization.

I will leave you with the visionary and enthusiastic Monarch Wadia!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/83

I spoke with Joe Eames. Joe is an educator with over 20 courses published on Pluralsight. When you look at his courses, you will quickly realize that Joe focus a lot on Test Driven Development and Angular.

He has also acquired Thinkster a few years back, which is a learning site with courses on front-end development.

Joe loves putting together tech events and he is one of the original ng-conf organizers. ng-conf is the most well-known Angular Conference and at the time there was no conference like that in the Angular space. We have explored a bit the challenges of putting together an event like that.

Joe also mentioned that nowadays he is a sales engineer as part of a new venture with a friend. They are helping clients with extended support for an older version of Angular called AngularJS.

All-in-all, I just had a great time talking to the super nice Joe Eames.

Listen to this conversation to understand why Joe says that the things that you don't get paid for are the ones most valuable to you.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/82

I spoke with Mariot Tsitoara. He is a Full Stack Developer focused on React and Python.

Mariot lives in Bordeaux, France but he is originally from Madagascar. I was very excited to be speaking with someone from Madagascar for the first time in my life.

Beyond that, Mariot is also a book author and speaker. I came across his name because I bought his book "Beginning Git and GitHub" which he got published by Apress. Very well put together and beginner friendly book about git.

The book was a result of a presentation he give. We spoke about the process of putting the book together and the strategies he used to get it done, which included the Pomodoro Technique, of which I'm a big fan myself.

He shared the story about a tough situation he found himself in. He was asked to create code to check people's productivity. Then he should come up with a list of employees that they should be fired!

Check it out how he handled this odd situation.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/81

I spoke with Preetam Nath and Sankalp Jonna. They are the founders of DelightChat, a platform helping Shopify businesses with their customer service needs.

I came across Preetam after reading his blog post about Micro-Saas. The concept grabbed my attention. Preetam wrote so eloquently that I said I had to talk to him.

Naturally with co-founders, Preetam is more in the business side and Sankalp in the technology.

We spoke about what is the first thing someone should look at before jumping to building their own Saas product. Saas means Software as a Service and we have discussed about it during the chat.

Preetam and Sankalp are not new to doing business together. Their first product was so successful that their competitors tried to bring down their site by launching a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack also called DDoS.

I found these guys to be very smart but also very humble. There is so much they can teach us and if you stick around you will also come to the same realization.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/80

Do you think that blogging is done? No longer relevant? Too many people already doing it?

My guest today started blogging a year ago and it has already helped her to land a job with PayPal.

I spoke with Victoria Lo. Victoria is a consistent blogger with over 100 post done during 2020. I admire her drive, focus and determination. Her background is in business and finances, but she no longer focus on them.

Her articles are mostly focused on web development topics ranging from front-end to backend and databases.

She is also a hackathon aficionado, and you will find out why.

We've covered a very wide range of subjects including a discussion about payment processing services and the fact that she speaks 5 languages.

If you think there is no point in blogging these days, think again and listen to this episode. It can change your career forever.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/79

I spoke with Barry Luijbregts. Barry is a Pluralsight author with over 20 courses ranging from Cloud Design and Azure to Blazor, .NET and Front-end Development.

Barry had various different phases of his career starting as part of a consulting company and working closely with many corporate clients to then starting his own freelancing consultancy.

Years later that led him to a burnout. He got out of that by taking care of his health and by finding a new career path as a content creator.

In 2020, Barry has released his first book: "200 Things Developers Should Know". They range from technical tips about programming, troubleshooting to career strategies, productivity, health and learning.

Barry and I have a common passion beyond code. "Developer Weekly" is the podcast that he has started in 2020 where he talks to developers and technologists that are interested not only in tech but also life-long learning.

Barry is super creative and full of ideas, but he is also determined. He goes from idea to focused execution, which is the key to high-achievers.

I will leave you with Barry Luijbregts - A Dutch coder and content creator.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/78

I spoke with Ido Shamun. Ido is the co-founder, CTO and, for now, the solo developer of daily.dev.

daily.dev is an aggregator about development news, built as a Google Chrome extension, which gets feeds from all major tech news outlets including Smashing Magazine, The New Stack, CSS-Tricks and many more.

daily.dev started as an internal initiative within Ido's previous company, The Elegant Monkeys, and eventually they decided to open it for anyone to use.

Him and the team of 3 people, started daily.dev just about 6 months ago, in August 2020 and they already have around 80 thousand weekly active users.

Unbelievable to see how much can be done these days with such a small team!

One aspect that surprised me was the fact they decided to make it open source, so if you want to look under the hood of daily.dev, you can!

As a coder, daily.dev can help you to get up to speed with what's going on in the coding space.

Have a listen to the stories of Ido Shamun, Israeli solo coder at daily.dev!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/77

I spoke with Eric Simons. Eric is the CEO of StackBlitz, an online browser based IDE where you can start coding on any front-end framework is seconds. I personally use it when I'm teaching full-stack development using Angular or React.

Eric is a super nice and talkative guy. We discussed about his previous company Thinkster, which was acquired a few years ago and how that company give origin to StackBlitz.

Eric shared with me his long term vision for StackBlitz and the kinds of hard problems they are trying to solve within his current team of about 10 people.

When asked which front-end framework he would pick from Angular, React and Vue, his answer and reasoning will surprise you!

Stick around to hear from the outspoken Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/76

I spoke with Kent C Dodds. After so many past guests of the podcast mentioning that they admire Kent, I decided to invite him and he readily accepted it.

Kent is a power house content creator with the personal mission of "improving the world with quality software".

He is the creator of TestingJavascript.com and EpicReact.com - Both have a blend of course and workshop flavor.

Kent has a big following on both YouTube and Twitter. We spoke a bit about why he has such large following.

He also does a lot of live streams including his "Office Hours" which is when his students are able to ask him anything.

Kent shared the bold strategy that he used to move from intern to full-time employee as he was just starting out in the industry. You can't miss that!

Admired by many and just a nice humble guy, I leave you with Kent C. Dodds, my first guest of 2021!

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/75

I spoke with Swizec Teller. Originally from Slovenia, he moved to the US in 2015.

Swizec is a software engineer, instructor, blogger, vlogger, conference speaker, and author as well. Yes, he has published a book on "Data Visualization with d3.js".

Swizec is one of the most interesting characters I came across in the podcast. If you check his YouTube videos, he is usually accompanied by a screaming bird in the background called "Kiwi" (I hope I got this right :). Unfortunately Kiwi was traveling in business and wasn't able to attend to our chat.

Our conversation took an unexpected turn when Swizec started to talk about career and being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He shared what it really means to be part of that environment, which for so many of us we only know a fraction of what goes on there.

From being an immigrant in the US, to tech trends like Micro Saas, we have covered a lot of topics.

Stick around to hear the stories from Swizec Teller, a geek with a hat.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/74

I spoke with Les Jackson - Les is a book author and Developer Advocate at Marketplacer in Australia.

About 3 months ago he has published his first book by Apress called "The Complete ASP.NET Core 3 API Tutorial".

Beyond writing books, Les has a passion for long form video content. His YouTube channel is full of 1 to 3 hours long training videos. When he goes into a topic, he goes really deep! Amazing to see that his longest video, which is over 3 hours long, is also the most watched in his channel.

In a way it goes against the general thought that shorter videos will do better than long ones on YouTube.

During our conversation, Les mentioned that one of the main reasons why he was hired as a Developer Advocate was because of his YouTube channel success.

Listen to Les's stories and maybe you will get inspired to start your own YouTube channel. You never know how that can benefit your career.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/73

I spoke with Niall Maher. Niall is a self-taught web developer with great expertise on JavaScript and React.

This year, 2020, he started to record and create content for YouTube. He does a lot of live streaming and that became a source of video content too.

He is also the organizer of a meetup called Codú, which is an extension of his own company. The meetup happens monthly and it has a workshop format, where either him or someone else in the community goes deep into a technical topic related to web development.

As of our recording, Niall's company has been acquired and he was about to become the CTO of the acquiring organization.

We even had a chance to talk about Ireland and why the country is so attractive to big tech companies.

From being broken 7 years ago to having his company acquired, let's hear the stories from Niall Maher, a web developer from Ireland.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/72

I spoke with Kevin Powell. Kevin is a teacher working for many years in an adult technical career centre in Montreal, Canada.

But recently things have changed for Kevin. In the last year or so, his YouTube channel picked up in subscribers and he decided to move from a full-time traditional teaching career to the online self-paced version of that.

Kevin creates videos and courses related to CSS and Front-end technologies. I found it very smart of him to focus much of his content on CSS. He does explore front-end technologies in general but CSS has been the hook of his content.

As of today, December 2020, Kevin's channel has 180K subscribers. Let's talk about how he got there and what is he doing next with all those students.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/71

I spoke with Erik Hanchett. Erik is a Senior Software Engineer working for Cerity.

Beyond that Erik has a YouTube channel with over 70K subscribers. Most of his content focus on front-end development and more specifically on Vue.js. For the ones that are not familiar, Vue.js is a JavaScript Framework that goes head to head against Angular and React.

Erik is also a book author with published books by Packt Publishing and Manning.

Erik is a big proponent of Vue.js and when asked which JavaScript Framework he would pick, guess what was his answer?

Did I mention that Erik has create a full online course on Vue.js?

Stick around to hear from Vue.js fanboy Erik Hanchett.

Enjoy!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/70

Imagine that as a teenager you had the life anyone could only dream of. You had everything you wanted. Your family was well-off. Money was not a problem.

But then, all of a sudden on your early 20s, the rug gets pulled from under your feet and the family business goes under. You and your loved ones loose everything you have.

I spoke with Chris Sean. Chris was able to turn his life around by learning how to code and this is how he did it.

Enjoy his amazing comeback story.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/69

Imagine that you want to prove a point to your teenage kids. You challenge them to come up with business ideas. After a few days, crickets, nothing, no ideas. Then as a parent you think about what they like to do most, and you see that they spend a lot of time on YouTube.

You challenge them to start a YouTube channel, but they don't. Then you decide to do it by yourself to prove your point. 2 months later and 10 videos in, you have 300 subscribers.

But you don't stop there. 1 year and 4 months later you got to 100K subscribers.

I have spoken with Jesse Hall. Jesse has a successful YouTube channel called codeSTACKr which has 108K subscribers as of November 2020.

Jesse is a very low profile individual. He said he has never imagined that he would be doing something like this in his 40's.

Jesse still keeps the fact that he has a YouTube channel very private from his full-time job, but he has the goal of leaving his job to become a full-time content creator in the next few months.

This is the story of how he did it.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/68

Imagine that you started to create some content on YouTube. You got some traction. You got subscribers. You start to enjoy the process.

Then a company comes in willing to hire you to create more videos for them as well!

I spoke with James Q Quick. James is a Developer Advocate at Auth0.

James has a growing audience on YouTube of over 23K subscribers. We spoke about one of his videos in particular that at the time of the chat recording it was at 60K views, but now, about a month later, it is already at 110K. What is the secret of a successful YouTube video like that?

He has created courses for Scrimba.com as well, on how to build apps using front-end technologies like React and plain JavaScript.

James is living the dream now. In his new job he gets paid to create more videos, more content and talk to people about technology. Isn't this awesome?

We spoke about his career, his video creation process and about the 5 advices he has for someone to becoming a successful web developer.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/67

I spoke with Kethmar Salumets. Kethmar is a software developer from Estonia. He has started his YouTube channel called "Developer Habits" just a few months ago, back in February 2020.

He says that the channel is focused on people interested in growth mindset, developer lifestyle and technical tutorials.

Besides that, Kethmar was working for Pipedrive, which is a cloud based sales software company. During the interview, Kethmar revealed that he was about to leave Pipedrive and, as of this publishing, he has already moved on. His new position involves working a lot with Python, which is new to him.

Kethmar spoke about a very common problem that professionals from all kinds of industries face at times: burnout. I had a lot to learn from his experience.

Have a listen to find out how Kethmar is handling burnout and getting better. This might be useful to you at different stages of your own career.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/66

What was your a-ha moment? The moment that you have discovered a possibility that didn't exist before to you. One of those things that you just don't know that you don't even know about it, but now you do know and it changes everything.

For James that was when he came across mobile development and he built his first mobile app. He knew that would be the next step for his career. That was a 180-degree change for him. From working with "exciting" printer software to developing mobile apps with Xamarin.

My guest for this episode is James Montemagno. James is a Principal Program Manager for Mobile Developer Tools at Microsoft. Beyond that, he runs 3 podcasts, he blogs, he's a speaker and loves cycling around Seattle.

James shared with me the challenge he took on this year which was to become a manager at Microsoft. Imagine a plate juggler. We discussed how he goes about balancing his individual contribution with his work as a manager and his personal life.

Stick around for an awesome conversation with James Montemagno.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/65

Have you ever heard about the term "pen name"? A pen name or a literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by some book authors in place of their real name.

There are many different reasons why someone would opt to have a pen name. Most often it comes from the need for privacy.

Greg Lim is our guest in this episode. He is an author and a very private person. He writes books about coding. But he didn't want his writing to interfere with his main professional activity. He is a full-time church pastor living in Singapore.

You can imply that Greg Lim is not his real name, and that is ok. It didn't stop us from having a very interesting conversation about, coding, career and a brief mention about religion.

What an interesting combination isn't it? Religion and Technology.

Greg is the author of 11 coding books. I have 2 of them with me related to Angular and Node.js.

He spoke about his faith and how he reconciles his tech work as a book author with his religious calling.

We also talked about how to get a book self-published within the Amazon ecosystem.

Have a listen and you may even get inspired to write your own book.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/64

Imagine that you are 30 years old and you have been working at a gas station for over 10 years. You have no college education, a young family and financial obligations starting to pile up.

The pressure to keep things as they are and not rock the boat is enormous. You are overworked with 80 plus hours a week. You ask yourself: "Is that it? Is this what life had in store for me?"

My guest in this episode asked this question and changed his life around within the time-span of 3 years.

I have no idea where all his energy comes from, but he his this eloquent way of talking. Very strong, very passionate, very inspiring. It is hard to describe. He reminds me of a pastor preaching at church to his congregation.

Have a listen and I would be curious to know your impression about him? Do you connect with his style? What do you think about his intensity? Is it real? Is it for show? You tell me. What do you think?

I will leaving you Danny Thompson, a very unique coder.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/63

Imagine that you are studying at college or university. You are broke. You have very little money, aside from a part-time job. Every month, at the end of your paycheck, there is no money left, but there is still 2 weeks left before your next payday. You have no more money for food. What would you do?

Well, in my case I would simply ask my parents for help. However our guest in this episode was too stubborn for that. She hated to be dependent on her parents. Call it however you want: pride, determination, honor.

So she came with a strategy: she would go to different meetups all week long to get food.

And that changed her life. From going to meetups because she was just hungry for food, to going because she was hungry for helping others to grow.

Stick around and listen to the many stories from Sandra Ahlgrimm, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft Berlin.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/62

I spoke with Adrienne Tacke. Adrienne is a Filipina Software Engineer working as a Developer Advocate at MongoDB. Yes, the no-sql database. The reason why I have mentioned "Filipina" e because this is how she likes to introduce herself. Too bad that I didn't ask her about this, but I assume she does that because she is very proud of her origins.

Beyond her job, Adrienne is a public speaker, a course creator for LinkedIn Learning and a book author. That is how I came across her name. I bought her book Coding for Kids - Python.

During our conversation Adrienne told the story that she quit her previous job because upper management didn't agree with her taking time off to speak at conferences. However she made clear that her direct team was very supportive.

From content creation to spreading the word about technology on social media, Adrienne does a bit of everything. Oh, did I mention that she streams gaming and coding on Twitch as well?

Content, content and more content. That is what Adrienne likes to do and there is no slowing down for her.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/61

I spoke with the flamboyant Cassidy Williams. Cassidy is a Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. From a technical stand point, she does a lot of work with React, but her reach goes way beyond that. As a public speaker, she talks about topics such as Women in Tech and STEM education.

As many of us, she was directly affected by covid as the company she used to work for, a react training company, had to layoff all their staff at the start of the pandemic but being connected as she is, she got a new position at Netlify right away.

Cassidy has her own very popular weekly newsletter called "rendezvous with cassidoo" where she talks about technology and coding. She is also a curator of "The Overflow" newsletter published weekly by Stack Overflow.

From her adventures as a public speaker to her passion for mechanical keyboards we spoke about everything.

Enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/60

What does a "Global Senior Vice President of Talent Transformation and Innovation" do? I have no clue! But I can tell you this: it has nothing to do with coding.

I spoke with Anthony Shaw. Anthony is a "Python Foundation Software Fellow". To become a Fellow, you need to contribute a lot to the Python ecosystem and be recognized by your peers to be nominated. Anthony contributes with various open source projects that can be found on his GitHub repository.

Anthony is an English expat living in the beautiful Avoca Beach in Australia.

I was curious about the connection between his job and coding. I found out that there is not much. But it didn't stop Anthony from being not only enthusiastic about coding but also being a great coder!

We spoke about his passion for Python and what motivated him to start contributing to open source.

Listen to this conversation to understand why Anthony says that if the thought of making a living as a developer doesn't excite you, but you like technology and programming, there are so many other options available to express yourself as a coder.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/59

Imagine that you learn how to code in an expensive bootcamp (or college). Not everyone can afford thousands of dollars to learn how to code. So you decide that there should be a better way to support people starting to code. You create an online community to help new coders and unexpectedly it becomes your business.

That is what my guest in this episode went through.

I spoke with Saron Yitbarek. Saron is the founder of CodeNewbie, which was acquired back in January 2020 by DEV.

Saron is a coder, a podcaster, a speaker, an entrepreneur. She is currently working on her next business called DISCO, which provides audio courses for people in tech. The first course is an introduction to Machine Learning.

During our conversation we went through details about Disco and producing educational content, which is an area that I am particularly super interested.

Saron is a very straight talker with a sharp mind. She goes right to the point without any extra fluffy. You will see this in the episode.

I'm really curious as to where she will be taking DISCO next.

Enjoy the conversation with the business minded coder, Saron Yitbarek.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/58

Moving to a new country. Looking for a new life. A new beginning. The difficulties with a new language. You cannot express yourself properly. You don't have friends and family close by anymore. So hard and at the same time so wonderful. So full of discoveries. Such an adventure!

That is what my guest in this episode went through.

I spoke with Veronika Kolesnikova. Veronika is a Software Engineer and a Microsoft MVP focusing on AI. MVP means Most Valuable Professional. She moved to Boston in the US in 2013 from Russia.

Even though she describes herself as an introvert, she does not shy away from opportunities to present and do public speaking on meetups and conferences.

"Challenge myself" that is a recurring line that Veronika kept mentioning during our conversation. The desire to improve herself via public speaking is how she got the Microsoft MVP award.

We spoke about career, cultural differences, community, dreams and how Aerial yoga helps her to be a better Software Engineer.

Check out in particular the lesson she got from her driving instructor back in Russia.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/57

You may have heard about open source. In simple terms, it's software, code, libraries, frameworks available for free to anyone who wants to use them.

But do you know that you can make money creating free software like that?? It sounds strange, doesn't it? "free" and "making money" in the same sentence?

Yes it is! That's why I'm speaking with Caleb Porzio in this episode. Caleb is a PHP and Laravel open source developer. He is making a full time income from his open source projects. Just to be precise, by full time income I mean over $100K a year and it's growing.

The strategy that Caleb is using is very unusual and I haven't heard about this approach at all before I came across his story.

Caleb is using GitHub Sponsor feature, which allows anyone to support a developer on GitHub with a monthly contribution which can range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month.

As of this recording on September 2020 Caleb has almost 700 GitHub sponsors. That is how he is making over $100K a year.

During our conversation we went through exactly how he is doing this. My hope is that out of the many lessons from his story, you will be able to apply some of them to your own journey.

I also want to give a shout-out to Julio Ordonez for suggesting Caleb to me.

Enjoy the chat with Caleb Porzio!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/56

I spoke with Jay Miller. Jay is a Python and JavaScript developer who has been running a podcast called Productivity in Tech for the past several years. He also helps clients producing their own podcasts.

Jay is a blunt guy. He will tell you what he thinks, but he is caring and kind too.

We discussed about him going homeless for a few weeks because he was just too hard headed to ask his parents for help.

We also talked about his time in the military and how it has helped him becoming the professional he is now.

I had the pleasure myself of being part of his podcast just a few days ago and we had a great time talking about coding and education.

By the way, since we spoke back in July 1, 2020, he got into a new position as a Developer Advocate at Elastic.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with the self-describing multipotentialite Jay Miller.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/55

I spoke with Yihua Zhang.

Yihua is a Software Developer. In beginning of 2019 he started to teach React online on Udemy and Zero to Mastery Academy. On Udemy he has over 45K students as of August 2020.

But Yihua has not been coding for a long time. He used to be in the Fitness industry until he developed mild sciatica which made him decide to move on from the athletic space.

That was when he stumbled upon coding and decided to learn by joining a bootcamp in 2015.

We spoke about a lot of things including the value of working for free and how to get hired by a big tech company like Apple, Google, Amazon or Facebook.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/54

I spoke with Josh Pollock. Josh is a community-trained PHP and Javascript developer. What does "community-trained" mean? It means that he didn't have a formal Computer Science degree and his knowledge came from his community engagement and participation.

Josh came out of the WordPress community where he has developed several plugins for the platform over the last few years.

CalderaWP was the company that he co-created and it was acquired in 2019 by their competitor, Saturday Drive. It is where Josh works now and he is still helping to create and mainlining amazing plugins for WordPress.

We spoke about his experience of selling his baby, I mean, his company. And now becoming for the first time in his life, a full-time software engineer.

We also spoke about the future of WordPress and why he said that he should have seek therapy earlier in his career.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/53

I spoke Aaron Smith. Aaron is a Scotland based Medical Doctor. Yes, you've heard me well! A Medical Doctor!

That is what caught my attention about Aaron. I came across his name as I was researching about a web-scraping Python library called Scrapy. Aaron had published several articles on the topic and after digging his profile I realized he is actually a Professor and Medical Doctor.

Wow! What is a medical doctor doing with Python coding? I had to figure it out. This question lead me to having a conversation with Aaron, where we have explored how his desire to helping his patients brought him to web-scraping and workflow automation.

You can say that coding became a sort of creative outlet for Aaron.

Come with me while we explore the intersection between coding and healthcare.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/52

I spoke with Frank Kane. Frank worked for Amazon and IMDb for 9 years. Today he is a very successful online instructor teaching topics around machine learning, big data, AI, and data science.

Why did I say successful? Because loving what he does, with half a million students and getting close to 2 million dollars in lifetime revenue, we should be safe to qualify Frank as a successful professional.

Udemy is the main educational platform he works with, but he has courses published on other platforms like LinkedIn Learning and his own website.

Beyond courses, Frank also writes books including topics on how to be successful with online teaching.

During this conversation he shared how it is overwhelming at times to touch so many students and having so many people wanting a little piece of his time.

I am so glad and lucky to be able to share with you today a little piece of Frank's time, experience and wisdom!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/51

I spoke with Josh Starmer. Josh has a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. But that was not how I came across him. When I was studying Machine Learning, I needed additional information about statistic topics and that was when I first saw Josh's videos on YouTube.

Josh makes on-line educational materials teaching data science, machine learning and statistics. His YouTube channel is called StatQuest and it has 300K subscribers. When we recorded this conversation 2 weeks about it had 290K. Not too shabby to get 10K new subscribers in just under 2 weeks!

Josh has this power of explaining complex topics related to statistics and machine learning in such a way that you can't help but just understand it.

Together with his music background and a great sense of humor, he creates these little jingles as the intro for each of his videos. It is just so unique!

We spoke about the different revenue sources he has including Google Ads, Study Guides and Monthly Webinars. He even sells his own StatQuest t-shirts.

Have a listen to find out how Josh is able to make Statistics fun and interesting!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/50

I have spoken with Erin Doyle. Erin is a full stack engineer with a passion for accessibility and making sure that everyone is able to use the products and application that she helps to create. So much so that she created a course on Egghead.io on how to Develop Accessible Web Apps with React.

Teaching is also another avenue for Erin to express herself and she has been working with Egghead not only on course creation but also on putting together live workshops.

A curiosity about Erin? She used to work for a space company providing services to NASA! We spoke about her near-space experiences and the fact that she was working next to where NASA scientists lunched their spacecrafts.

Have a listen and enjoy the flight!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/49

I spoke with James Zaki. James is based in Sydney, Australia. He is a freelance developer focused on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.

I have always found myself very confused whenever the topic was Blockchain. I could not wrap my mind around it but talking to James helped me to clarify a lot of misconceptions I had about the space.

I asked him what is the problem that Blockchain solves. He give me the example that if you have a group of people or companies that needs to write to a shared database and they don't trust each other, or they don't have a 3rd party to intermediate the process, then a blockchain application might be a good solution.

We also discussed about "Community Currencies", which are usually local alternatives to traditional money.

He says that trust is a major issue in the space and that you must be very careful about who you get involved with. On that note, he shared his own personal story where him and others almost left a work engagement without getting paid at all.

Have a listen so that your head will no longer be spinning around like mine was when it came to Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies,

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/48

I spoke with Lynn Langit. Lynn is a Cloud Architect and she runs her own consulting business. Lynn has created 30 courses for LinkedIn Learning and her courses have reached over 4 million students.

Lynn is a very resolute person. 4 years ago she decided to move into a new field for her called Bioinformatics. The move was motivated by the fact that one of her best friends was diagnosed with cancer.

Since then she has learned a lot about the new field. At the same time she has contributed to it by applying her knowledge about the Cloud to help teams of researchers across the globe speeding up their systems and processes. In one case she mentioned that a process used to take 500 hours and went down to 10 minutes as a result of her improvements. That is what I call improvement!

As you will soon find out, Lynn has very strong opinions about a lot of things including mentorship and how to best utilize her time. I really admire someone with such strong opinions backed up by solid arguments.

Check her recommendations about work and employment. She says that you should ask for what you are worth and compensation is not just your salary, it's also your time.

Side note: This chat was recorded mid April, 2020 - Back then we were still in the beginning of whole covid situation as you will hear us talking about her first-hand experience with that.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/47

I spoke with Andy Sterkowitz. Andy is a self-taught coder. He started to code back in 2014 when he was 28, leaving behind a job as a car salesman and not having much contact with coding at all before that.

Nowadays Andy has a YouTube channel with just over 180K subscribers focusing on teaching people how to become a software developer.

Andy runs a mentorship program to help and coach developers getting on the right track within our industry. He says that most people need a road-map to help them get to where they want to go and his mastermind group make them accountable.

Andy says that the number one problem that people face when starting to code is getting lost in all the information available. In summary: Information Overload.

Aside from being a very talented and smart dude, he was a delight to speak with. Very kind, easygoing and really generous with all information he shared with me. I actually had a hard time putting a stop to our conversation because I wanted to keep going.

Whether you are starting in the industry or you are a seasoned developer, there will be something for everyone to take away from this conversation.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/46

I spoke with Laurence Bradford. Laurence had a very unique start into coding. She decided to leave her career behind around 2014. Back then she just googled "High paying jobs, no college needed". Guess what came up? Web development!

She then started to teach herself how to code via courses and free resources on the web. To help her stay accountable to the learning process, she started to blog. Soon after that, she was able to start freelancing and even got a part-time job.

Then her blog started to resonate with people that were also in the same journey: trying to learn how to code. She started to test different revenue models and today her business orbits around her site - Learn To Code With Me where she has sponsorships, promotes products via affiliate marketing and she sells product bundles too.

Laurence is laser focused. She has a very good understanding of the troubles that a beginner coder has to go through and she has decided to keep helping them.

Listen to this conversation to see how you can start to build a name for yourself, by just sharing what you are learning, as Laurance did.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/45

I spoke with Jen Looper. Jen is a cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. But she is not a very traditional tech professional. She has a PhD in French Language and Literature. During our chat we have explored how her language background helped on her tech career.

Jen is also a public speaker having delivered many keynotes including one done virtually this past March 2020 during Microsoft Developer Virtual Conference.

She founded in 2018 an initiative called Front-End Foxes which used to be called Vue Vixens, but changed it names since we have recorded this chat. Front-End Foxes creates and hosts workshops to teach front-end technologies to people who identify themselves as women with many chapters throughout the globe.

Among many things, we have discussed about her extensive experience working with a network of outside expert developers giving them a platform to communicate, interact and help to shape the products the company that she was working for at the time was improving and creating.

In the end, I even got to know a new term to add to my dictionary: "Individual Contributor". Do you know what that is? Check it out!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/44

I spoke with Dan Becker. Dan is a Data Scientist that worked for Kaggle from 2017 to 2020.

Kaggle is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners that is a subsidiary of Google.

During his time at Kaggle, Dan has created a free data science training platform that grew from 3K to 30K monthly active users in its first year.

I am one of those users of Kaggle myself, having taken Dan's course. I highly recommend it if you want to get started with ML without getting overwhelmed.

Dan has started his own business called Decision.ai in the beginning of 2020.

During this conversation, Dan talked about his approach to getting started with Machine Learning which might be counterintuitive to the way most people approach ML initially. Dan described two extreme personas of professionals that work with data science and how they get started in the field. Short Term Sally and Long Term Lee.

Listen to this conversation to know how to differentiate yourself as a professional and what is the yellow scarf technique.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/43

Welcome to Season 3 of the Solo Coder Podcast. This is the intro episode where I talk about what you should expect for Season 3 of the show. I already have 5 chats recorded for the new season with great guests.

Have a great 2020 Summer, take care of yourself and loved ones during these times of covid and thank you for taking this journey with me!

https://SoloCoder.com

I spoke with Charles Max Wood.

Charles is a podcaster who codes or a coder who podcasts. Regardless which way you define him, he runs a successful podcast network called Devchat.tv which focus on creating developer centric shows on topics like .NET, DevOps, Vue, Angular, Ruby, JavaScript and more. As of the recording of this episode in May, 2020 his network has 18 shows currently running.

Talking to someone that runs a podcasting network for many years got me self-conscious again, but I think I was able to handle the pressure and move on with the flow.

Charles has started Devchat.tv back in 2011. During this conversation we have explored what worked for him. What didn't work that well and how he transitioned from his own software consulting business to becoming a full-time podcaster. We also spoke about podcasting in these times of Covid and what he sees as the future of the podcast medium.

Whatever is your coding flavor, Charles has a podcast show for you on Devchat.tv

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/42

I spoke with Scott Hanselman.

I must admit, I felt I was not in my best. I was nervous, self-conscious, and excited all at the same time during our conversation and that made me ramble more than usual. All my rambling was removed during the editing of this episode.

If you code with Microsoft technologies, you should have come across his name before. If not, here is an intro:

Scott works at Microsoft. He manages outreach and community for .NET, ASP.NET, IIS, Azure, and Visual Studio.

I have known Scott from afar for over a decade. He is a reference to me. He has a very popular weekly podcast with over 700 episodes called Hanselminutes. How can I not be self-conscious?

He is a sought-after keynote speaker. I have seen in-person keynotes delivered by him over the years. He can really engage a live audience, and I think he would have a shot in standup comedy.

He has been blogging since 2002 at least twice a week on various topics technology related.

Scott was very generous and patient with me during our chat, giving me a lot of feedback and suggestions as we went through. I have removed them from the final cut to make sure the episode was short and to the point.

I hope I was able to extract some of the habits and processes that Scott has so that you can decided if you want to apply them yourself.

I want to thank Luca Gobbi for providing one of the questions I asked Scott.

After the longest intro so far and without further ado, enjoy the chat!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/41

I spoke with Yuri Diogenes. Yuri has been working at Microsoft since 2006. He is currently working as a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Cybersecurity Engineering. Yuri is also a professor at EC-Council University Master of Security Science Program and he has authored over a dozen books around the subject of Cybersecurity.

But Aderson, this is a podcast about developers! I know and that is why I asked Yuri to talk about the coding side of cybersecurity and he brought a term that I haven't heard before: "Security Development Lifecycle" or SDL - If you are a developer and you want to differentiate yourself, you may want to get to know what SDL is and how it can benefit your career.

Beyond the technical side of Yuri, we also spoke about his personal transformation story from being out-of-shape and obese to losing 100 lbs and becoming a bodybuilder.

Very inspiring story! Have a listen and I'm sure you will enjoy this conversation, because it got me thinking a lot about my own habits!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/40

I spoke with Luca Gobbi. Luca is VP of Software Engineering for a startup called Medchart in Toronto. He doesn't like talking a lot about himself, but I'm thankful he made an exception for us.

I was looking forward to exploring Luca's community involvement with tech meetups. He is part of the organizing team for 2 meetup groups in Toronto. Both of them, Microsoft .NET related.

We have talked about his motivations for being involved with these meetups, how he got started, and why people like you and me should consider joining a tech meet up. He shared the store about an organizer who was stepping down and he didn't think twice before volunteering to becoming the new organizer without even realizing what kind of work was involved.

We also discussed the work he does for Medchart and the challenges of being a team leader in time of remote work and COVID-19.

And if you are interested in working for a tech startup, Luca shared a great strategy to get yourself noticed by them.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/39

I spoke with Shahin Sheidaei. Shahin has worked with 3 out of the 5 big banks in Canada as an Agile Coach. He has his own Agile consulting business.

Beyond that, he is a public speaker, blogger and one of the organizers of the "Lean Agile Network" meetup in Toronto.

I started our conversation mistakenly assuming that Shahin was not a coder but he is, which made our conversation even more relevant.

I asked Shahin why coders should consider getting more involved with Agile. That was when he talked about different career goals, for instance, if you want to become a product manager, Agile would aggregate a lot of value to you.

Listen to this chat to find out if Agile can be another tool for you to add to your coder's tool-belt.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/38

I spoke with Shaun Walker. Shaun is the original creator of the most popular open source CMS in the Microsoft stack called DNN, originally DotNetNuke.

I was looking forward to having this particular conversation with him for many years and it was never the right time. But now it was.

Why is this so important to me? Because DNN has been the tool that I have made a living since 2007. I was able to build my business around it and I am where I am today mostly because of DNN and all that I have done as a result of being part of that community. For that I'm so grateful to him and in this conversation we not only spoke about his DNN story but the new chapter of his professional life with yet another open source initiative called Oqtane.

We discussed about his passion for open source software, his experience in raising capital for his previous company DNN Corp and his willingness to bet on Blazor, which is a new technology that is promising but still in its infancy.

During the conversation Shaun was very honest and candid about everything, including ups and downs and moments that he wished he would have done things in a different way.

Have a listen to find out why Shaun says that "There is a lot more to being successful than just the code itself."

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/37

I spoke with Amelia Wattenberger. She is a Journalist and Engineer working for The Pudding, which is a digital publication that explains ideas via visual articles with beautifully designed dynamic data graphs. And that is what Amelia does.

Amelia combines the technical skills of a coder focused on data visualization with the story telling chops of a Journalist. Such an unusual combination that I really found fascinating.

Just recently, Amelia wrote a 600 pages long book on D3.js and Data Visualization. During our conversation she described her very smart and iterative approach to writing the book and how she did it in just a few months.

If you are interested in presenting information in very creative ways, you should listen to Amelia's stories and recommendations.

You will also find out what's Amelia's pet peeve with pie charts.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/36

I spoke with Will Strohl. Will is the Founder & CEO of Upendo Ventures. But before and beyond that, he is a community builder. I have known Will as an user group and meetup organizer for at least 10 years. From a very outspoken fatty guy (in his own words) back then (around 2011) to a super fit business leader, Will has so much passion for community that it becomes contagious.

Will has organized numerous tech conferences, he has engaged on-line and off-line to move groups of people towards achieving common goals, mostly within open-source initiatives.

As mentioned during this episode, Will is a reference to me when it comes to community building. I have reached out to him many times over the years for advice in the many community related endeavors I have undertaken.

Enjoy this conservation with a sharp guy that is not shy about his convictions.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/35

I spoke with Michael Jolley. He is a Developer Advocate at Vonage and as he describes, he spends his days focused on helping others to succeed.

Beyond his work duties, he live stream coding 3 times a week for about 3 to 4 hour each time. It is a lot of commitment!

This is not going on for a long time. Just about 2 years, starting back in 2018.

We discussed how this has helped him landing his current job. We also went through his process on how to put a live stream together, how to build community from it, what motivates him to do this and a lot more.

If you are a parent, check our how Michael is engaging his daughters with his initiatives too.

In the end Michael talks about the need for all of us to be more open and kind to each other.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/34

I spoke with Rob Napier. Rob is an iOS Developer at Jaybird and an independent consultant.

Beyond his work commitments he is a super contributor at Stack Overflow. He is in the top 0.04% of contributors on Stack Overflow. Put it on a different way, he hanks around top 250 overall users of Stack Overflow. That is a big big deal considering that the site has millions of users! And if you look specifically into the "swift" tag, he ranks #11!

One thing that is curious about Rob: He has a background on acting and drama. Most likely this is why he feels so comfortable presenting on stage. If you check his presentation recordings on YouTube, you will see that his is a natural speaker.

Check out this conversation and listen to the tips from Rob on how you too can get started contributing on Stack Overflow regardless your experience level.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/33

I spoke with Margaryta Ostapchuk. She used to be a Technical Evangelist working for Microsoft in Ukraine and then she moved to Canada in 2018 while still working for Microsoft but now as a Software Engineer.

I came across Margaryta during an AI Bootcamp back in December 2019, where she was talking about Language Understanding (LUIS) which is one of the Cognitive Services provided by Microsoft.

Margaryta talked about how she uses public speaking as an opportunity to help developing both her technical and communication skills. She mentioned about the fact that she used to think everyone in the audience knew more about the subject than her, but she realized that everyone has something to contribute that is valuable to others.

Listen to this episode to hear what Margaryta has to say to female coders that is also applicable to everyone of us.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/32

I spoke with Julie Lerman. Julie is involved with so many different things. She is the true incarnation of what it means to go beyond the code.

She wrote very popular technical books. She has created online courses on Pluralsight. She helps organizing code camps. She is a keynote speaker. She is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional). She is also an independent coach and trainer of software teams.

But wait, there is more. She was a delight to speak with. I really enjoyed our conversation and I had a hard time cutting things out cause I wanted to keep everything.

One odd fact about Julie: She doesn't have a LinkedIn profile!

If you want to find out why, have a listen to our conversation and BTW, "praise publicly criticize privately" - That is what Julie recommends.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/31

I spoke with Paul Hudson. Paul is well-known within the Apple ecosystem as he teaches Swift via his talks, books, videos, articles and courses. Swift is the programming language created by Apple back in 2014 which can be used to create apps.

Paul is a very down to earth, low-key Englishman. He made himself readily available for the podcast. I invited him on a Friday and we were recording on Monday!

But don't fool yourself. Paul has accomplished so much in his career already. If you search on Google for "swift book" or "learn swift" his site, "Hacking With Swift", comes up within the top 5 results.

Oh, and did I tell you his site has 2 million visitors a month?

Have a listen and find out what "two straws" means to Paul and what's his pet peeve with the word "Accessibility".

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/30

I spoke with Clint Patterson. Currently he works at Simpplr as a Senior Solutions Consultant, but I know him from the DNN community.

As a side note: DNN is an Open Source, Content Management System which I worked with for over a decade. I used to be a very active member of the DNN community. The technology and community are still going strong but I decided to shift gears in 2019 to focus on new projects.

With that said, I brought Clint to talk about community building as he used to be the DNN Ecosystem Manager and Product Evangelist. One of his jobs was to be a liaison between the open source community and the company behind DNN.

Clint is a passionate guy, very charismatic and he has this innate drive to connect and motivate people. As discussed in the chat, this is most likely a result of being a football player first and a coder later in his life. He sees community as a team sport where camaraderie and sportsmanship is at the center of it.

I hope you enjoy Clint, his stories and his southern accent.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/29

I have spoken with Frank Boucher. He is a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I have watched his in-person presentation just a few weeks ago during Microsoft Ignite Tour stop in Toronto.

Frank has a large smile and a great sense of humor. We spoke about the different things that he does beyond the code like videos, blogs, and public speaking.

During our conversation, I discovered that he does live stream coding as well. This is when you code real time and people watch you doing it on the web. That was a surprise to me and I decided to pursue this topic a bit further even though he is just getting started.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Frank and maybe get you interested, if not on live stream coding yourself, but at least checking some live stream coders out there.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/28

I have spoken with Max Pekarsky. He is a full-stack developer working at Bonusly. But he does more than that. He is a writer and that is how I came about his name. I was reading "The Overflow", which is the monthly newsletter from Stack Overflow and he was the author of one of the articles.

As the theme of our second season of the podcast is about going beyond the code, he was a prime example of that and I wanted to find out how he got the opportunity to write for the extremely popular Stack Overflow website.

So here it is. Enjoy this conversation which covers Max's career and how he became a self-taught full-stack developer, blogger and tech writer.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/27

I have spoken with Tanmay Bakshi. He is a 16 year old Canadian prodigy coder who had an app published to the app store at the age of 9.

This is fascinating on its own, but on top of that he is a book author (of many books), a public speaker, a YouTuber and a Developer Advocate for IBM.

Not a lot of people have done this much in his or her entire life, can you imagine having done this by the age of 16!

I won't be preaching here that we become like Tanmay, as he is a true outlier, but despite his young age, he has a lot of experience and wisdom that we can all benefit from regardless of our age. Check it out. Have a listen!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/26

I have spoken with Shayne Boyer. He is a Cloud Advocate working for Microsoft.

We had a chance to chat face-to-face for the podcast while he was presenting during Microsoft Ignite Tour which had a stop in Toronto this month - January 2020.

We spoke about his career and the many things he does going beyond the code like public speaking, blogging, teaching and mentoring.

My mic was not that well setup, so my audio was not that good, but Shayne's audio was great and that is what's important!

Have a listed to the first face-to-face episode to hear how to get past the fear of being ridiculed when you want to put your content out for other to see.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/25

On part one, we left off when John was talking about the stories he had to tell himself to keep going through the daily grind of posting 2 videos every single day.

On part two he will finish this story and talk about failures he had in the past, fitness for coders, how he manages his time and how he prioritizes what to do next.

Listen to the wrap up of our conversation to understand why John says that people that avoid failures are the ones who never progress in life.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/24

I have spoken with John Sonmez. He does quite a lot of things beyond coding. He is a book author. He teaches courses at Pluralsight. He blogs. He is a speaker. He is a real state investor. But all of that came originally from his passion for coding.

During this conversation we looked back at how everything got started about 10 years ago and how would all of that translate to 2020.

There are so many nuggets of wisdom and experience that John distills that I had to listen to this conversation a few time so I could internalize them.

The conversation went a bit too long but I didn't want to cut it down too much so I split it in 2 parts.

Listen to part one so that you understand why John says that there are 2 reasons why we fail in life: One is because we lack knowledge and the second is because we lack discipline.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/23

Welcome to Season 2 of the Solo Coder Podcast. This is the intro episode where I talk about what you should expect for season 2 of the show. I already have 3 conversations recorded for season 2 with amazing guests, if I may say so myself :)

Happy 2020 and looking forward to sharing interesting coder's stories with you!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/22

I have spoken with Ali Hirji, he is the Project Manager at the AI Hub on Durham College. His work at the AI Hub is connecting Industry clients that have AI needs with Faculty and students to conduct applied research on AI and help companies to draw tangible benefits from it.

Ali is very charismatic and warming. It was a delight to have this conversation with him about his career and the opportunities around AI.

He shared the story of when he came to Canada and why he had to sleep in the lecture hall of the University he was going to attend back then.

Listen to this conversation to find out what you have to do to get started on AI.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/21

I spoke with Mahdi Raza, Co-Founder & CEO of siberX. siberX provides training and events in the cybersecurity field.

Mahdi is not a coder himself but I wanted to hear his perspective on the opportunities around cybersecurity, which is currently a booming field.

Mahdi talked about the industries looking for cybersecurity professionals, how much they are making, what kinds of training are available and what are the traits of a successful cybersecurity specialist.

Have a listen and if you fit the bill, you may want to explore opportunities around cybersecurity, but be careful not to get yourself hacked.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/20

I spoke with Robert Maissan. He is a Senior Development Manager at RBC Capital Markets.

Robert manages a team of 8 developers working with Java and .NET.

He is a self-taught coder who never went to College. The way he got into coding professionally was by automating his own job and by doing so, he proved himself to be a coder.

Listen to this conversation to find out how Robert uses his family to develop his professional communication skills and how you can do that as well.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/19

I spoke with Roy Kim, an Azure Cloud consultant based in Toronto Canada.

Roy is a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional). He is very active in the Microsoft Community and a frequent speaker at our local Metro Toronto .NET User Group.

He is also an avid blogger and he just came out with a new series of blog posts about Azure Sentinel and Azure App Gateway to Investigate Web Attacks.

He also shared plans to start creating video content on YouTube.

Have a listen to this conversation to find out why Roy recommends to just cast your fears away and do what you want to do as long as it brings value.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/18

I spoke with Scott Duffy. Scott is an online instructor focusing on selling his courses on Udemy.com - He primarily teaches about Azure and a certification called TOGAF.

In this conversation Scott tells me about how online training has changed his life for the better. Scott has reached 200 thousand students and he has the life time goal of reaching 1 million students. With his focus and determination, I have no doubts he's going to get there.

Scott also spoke about his career and the many opportunities he sees within Azure and Microsoft.

Have a listen to get to know how he did it and who knows, maybe you consider a career as an online instructor too.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/17

I spoke with Lucas Radaelli, he is a developer that works at Google focusing on Accessibility.

Accessibility refers to the design of products, devices, services, and environments so as to be usable by people with impairments like vision, hearing and mobility.

Lucas himself is visually impaired. He cannot see. But it didn't stop him from becoming a coder. Interesting enough he is part of the users who benefit from his own work at Google with the Accessibility team, which gives him a very unique perspective.

Lucas is a big advocate in the accessibility space. He has spoken at many conference on the subject and recently he has moved from Brazil to the US to become part of the accessibility team at Google.

Listen to this conversation to get inspired by Lucas story and to find out how you too can accomplish anything you want no matter what obstacles come in your way.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/16

I spoke with Adam McLellan, a software architect by day and an indie game developer by night from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

During this conversation we focused on his game development endeavors and his passion for sound and music production, which goes hand in hand with games.

He discussed about the similarities and different between software and game development. He shared about his future plans of going into game development as a full-time activity and what he is doing now in order to get there.

Have a listen to get inspired with the origin story of a game developer and how you can become one too.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/15

I spoke with Dan Gerlanc. He is a data scientist who runs his own boutique big data firm called Enplus Advisors in New York. He provides services to clients in many industries from financial, to education, IoT. You name it!

During this conversation, we spoke about what he saw first hand during the financial crises right after 2008. During that time, he was working in the financial industry and he witnessed the layoff of most employees from the company he was working for. In a way this has fulled his desire to pursue his own consulting business.

Today he is a speaker at conferences, a trainer and he is very involved with the Data Science community.

Have a listen as Dan shares that one of the biggest challenges in Data Science is that you are often not solving a problem you have solved before.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/14

This is part 2 of the conversation I had with James Knight. This time around we have covered James career after Google where he got bored and decided to move on.

James talked about going in business with a partner, then departing from the partnership and getting inspired to create his own product studio, Sane Digital, where he helps non-technical founders build and launch their technical products.

We have also discussed about his new initiative of writing a book and how he is in the path of establishing himself as an expert in his field.

Listen to this conversation to find out why James says to always be honest with yourself and pursue things that you are truly interest in.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/13

This is part 1 of a conversation I had with James Knight. James runs an agency called Sane Digital but during the first part of our chat we focused mostly on his time at Google.

We discussed how he got the job. How was the interview process. The frustration he went through after being initially rejected and how things worked out in the end.

James mentioned that Google really wants people to apply to work there and that they are very welcoming. I got the impression that there are opportunities for all kinds of developers at Google but you have to demonstrate what have you done before that it's interesting and noteworthy.

Listen to this conversation to figure out how you too can work at Google!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/12

I spoke with Luis Nishimura. He is a Software Developer working with C#, Angular and MVC.

But this is not what is interesting about him.

Luis has an amazing story. Originally from Peru, he worked as the manager of a Furniture Factory. Then he moved to Japan and eventually migrated to Canada where he started pursuing his coding career.

But it wasn't easy. He went back to college at the age of 35. After that he had a bumpy start in the technology industry. His lack of experience was the main problem. He almost give up, but he didn't.

By listening to his story you will realize that it is never later too late to shift gears and change careers if you put your mind to it!

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/11

I spoke with my good friend and software developer Scott Wilkinson from Chicago. He was my partner in crime for 5 years (between 2014 and 2019) when we run together a community podcast called "The DNN Monthly Chat".

We spoke about his corporate career at Sears and why he decided to move on. We also talked about his brief freelancing experience and his current work at a Digital Agency called Blue Bolt where he is no longer a small cog in a big machine.

He shared with me a story about a hard time he had when he was getting started as a developer and what lessons we can drawn from it, like it is ok to admit you need help.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/10

I spoke with Roy Alda, he is a technical project manager at Ontario Power Generation. At OPG he brings new software to nuclear heavy construction projects.

But Roy also run his own company on the side where he explorers new technologies like machine learning and block-chain.

We spoke about how the manages a full-time job and a business on the side. How he got his job. How he gets clients and much more.

He has also revealed how someone stole his idea, got credit for it and how he was able to learn from this experience and use it to push him even further to achieve his goals.

We also spoke about IIoT (Industrial IoT).

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/9

I spoke with Hani Mourra, a Softwarepreneur based in Toronto Canada, creator of Repurpose.io, a SaaS automation platform that helps content creators maximize their exposure by publishing their podcasts, live streams, and videos to multiple platforms.

We spoke about Hani's career as a plug-in developer for WordPress and how that evolved to become Repurpose.

Do you think that he quit his job to work on Repurpose?? No! All of this is getting done as a side business as he still works 4 days/week on his regular job.

Check out this conversation to find out how you too can start and grow a business on the side while maintaining a full-time gig that pays the bills.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/8

I spoke with Andrew Hoefling, a mobile developer focused on Xamarin, an app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#. He used to be a full-time independent consultant and developer but this year he transitioned to a full-time employment position.

The conversation had an unexpected turn when he revealed that his coding blog has 10,000 unique visitors a month! I went deeper into a conversation about blogging and how life-changing that has been to him.

Have a listen to understand how blogging continues to be very relevant. It can help you organize your thoughts, create a knowledge base outside of your own head and it can help establishing you as a reference in your space.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/7

I spoke with Mike Smeltzer, a developer and an independent consultant based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He helps companies build their IT systems based on a Microsoft platform called DNN (DotNetNuke) - Mike works in various capacities, from development, deployment to project management and solution architecture.

During this conversation he spoke about how he transitioned from full-time employment to running his own consultancy business. The challenges he faced and how he set himself up to succeed as an independent consultant.

As he explains, the next challenge he took up himself is how to take his years of consulting experience and turn that into a product. He is now in a new transition: building premium IT products for small to medium size businesses.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/6

I spoke with Jana Simashkevich. She is an associate director at RBC, which is one of the big banking institutions in Canada. She manages a team of developers and QA analysts supporting a trading platform in the bank.

Jana focused her career a lot around data and database development. We discussed how she became a team manager and what you should do if you want to progress on your career.

She also has experience with hiring, so we got quite a few tips on how to nail an interview. Have a listen to this conversation to understand why you first you work for your name, then your name works for you.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/5

Thadeus Makukutu is a self-taught .NET developer and consultant from Brisbane, Australia. I have known Ted since 2010. He is a very close friend of mine and the one with whom I have never had the pleasure to shake the hand.

Ted runs his own consulting business mainly focused on attending to manufacturing clients. His background is accounting and business but in 2011 he decided to shift and become a coder.

During this conversation he talked about how he transitioned and why he went on his own as opposed to a regular job, but he will also warn you that being a coder and having a software business are two different things. Full show notes and links: https://solocoder.com/4

I spoke with Atley Hunter. Atley is an indie mobile developer. He has created an impressive number of mobile apps: 1100!

As a mobile developer he has build a good business for himself and we have discussed how he came up with ideas for so many different apps.

Being an indie developer these days is not easy and Atley shared quite a bit of his experience with us during this conversation including how he is in the process of converting 500 of his apps to Android.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/3

I spoke with Prof. Reza Dibaj. He is college professor and a colleague of mine. He teaches API Engineering, Cloud Computing, Web Application Development.

He is a true coder at heart, but more than that, he is a believer in education and the privilege we have to help shaping our students.

Teaching can be an exciting career for a coder and when you see someone as passion as Reza talking, you may get inspired to check the intersection of coding and teaching as a potential career path.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/2

In this episode I go through the ins and outs of what The SoloCoder Podcast is and what's in it for you.

Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/1