Frontier Podcast by Gun.io: Recent Episodes
Gun.io
The Frontier Podcast by Gun.io explores innovation in software engineering. We chat with smart, forward-looking industry leaders and developers to discover the latest trends happening now and what might be coming next. If you manage or hire developers, are solving business problems with technology, or write code yourself - welcome to The Frontier.
Gun.io is the top service in the US to find and hire elite freelance developers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us at Gun.io
This week, Teja sits down with Matt Genovese, CEO and Founder of Planorama, a company that designs UX/UI flows for products with complete enablement for software teams. They discuss the intricacies of living abroad, the importance of incorporating design, and how de-risking early on in the life of a new product can make it more successful in the long run.
https://planorama.design/matt
https://aiproducthive.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's episode, Teja sits down with Brian Pontarelli, Founder and CEO of both FusionAuth and Cleanspeak. They discuss the complexities of growing two businesses at the same time, making progress without using AI, and the subtle clues in an interview process that let you know someone's a great culture fit.
https://fusionauth.io/
https://cleanspeak.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja talks with Sabber Ahamed, Founder of Xoolooloo and Data Scientist at Bridgestone. They discuss the proliferation of data science, the joys of working on your own projects outside of the 9-5, and the different things career goals of a computational geophysicist can really shake up.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja talks with Harpreet Singh, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Launchable, a company that's on a mission to make software testing faster and smarter. They discuss the DACI framework and the importance of intentionality in decision-making, what it's like to bring a behemoth like Jenkins to life, and the power of slowing down to meditate.
https://www.launchableinc.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this week's episode, Teja talks with Brian Douglas, CEO and Founder at OpeSauced. They talk about how a good open source portfolio is more than just getting your name on big projects, the natural progression from developer advocacy to building an open source marketplace, and the trials and tribulations of learning to lead as you grow.
opensauced.pizza
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Joining Teja on this week's episode is Ian Villa, COO and Co-founder of Whisper Aero, a company that is developing cleaner, quieter, and more efficient propulsion solutions. They discuss the pros and cons of a campus with on-site housing, the burgeoning Nashville tech scene, and how a 5 am trip to Kinko's can, in hindsight, be a lesson in entrepreneurship.
whisper.aero
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja sits down for round two with Kate O'Neil, who has moved into the CEO position at Teaming since the last time they talked. They discuss the differences that come with the transition to becoming a CEO, the importance of incorporating movement into your life, and why getting the best sleep comes down to the perfect sheets.
teaming.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
After a brief holiday hiatus, Teja is back this week with Jeremy Snyder, the Founder and CEO of FireTail, an API security platform that provides application layer visibility, real-time, inline inspection, and blocking of malicious API calls. They talk about being a less technical founder, how being a polyglot helps you understand more than language, and the importance of taking the time to find your own adventure.
https://www.firetail.io/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Teja sits down with Stefan Avram, Head of Growth and Co-founder at WunderGraph, an open-source GraphQL federation. They discuss how injuries can change your life trajectory, the complexities of working with distributed teams, and how sometimes getting fired can be the best thing that's ever happened to you.
www.wundergraph.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja welcomes Marc Taverner, the CEO and Co-founder at XEROF, a Swiss financial institution that specializes in turning cryptoassets into fiat forms of money that can be used worldwide. They discuss the wild ride crypto has been on, financial regulations in emerging markets, and the importance of ensuring those millions in Bitcoin aren't hanging out in the ether.
www.xerof.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja talks with David Khourshid, Co-founder and CEO at Stately. This AI tool serves as a visual source of truth for creating, deploying, and analyzing any type of logic. They discuss the importance of considering the customer at the outset, the ways metrics can skew your path, and how you know when it's the right time to turn that side hustle into a full-time business.
stately.ai
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, on Founder to Founder, Teja talks with Brandon Bayer, CEO and Co-founder of Flightcontrol. This developer-first AWS infrastructure allows teams to deploy on AWS without the overhead of hiring a DevOps team. They discuss running a lean team, building better experiences for software teams, and how the best leaders are the ones that treat people with kindness above all else.
flightcontrol.dev
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Asher Weiss, CEO and Co-founder at Tixologi, started his first company at the age of eight, he had no way of knowing he'd be a lifelong entrepreneur. This week, he sits down with Teja to talk about working for the Orlando Magic, getting poached by the Warriors, and why event ticketing needs a new system.
https://tixologi.com/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this week's episode, Teja talks with Shane Sniteman, Chief Product Officer and Founder at Strumn, an app that connects musicians and venues to book gigs. What started as a final project for a software boot camp program and sat dormant for years has now become a thriving marketplace for live music bookings. They talk about taking a chance on on making a career change, the music scene in Nashville, and how sometimes picking up an old project is the best business bet you can make.
www.strumn.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Teja talks with Evan Kirkham, CEO and Co-Founder at Outlier, a sports betting platform, this week. They discuss playing sports, changing gears on your business plan when you're already successful, and the importance of surrounding yourself with entrepreneurs who will push your boundaries and get you to think bigger.
www.outlier.bet
https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-kirkham-581b1220/
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Jerome Hardaway was hired at the Department of Defense, it wasn't because of the skills he learned in the military; it was the ones he taught himself after leaving the Air Force. This week on Founder to Founder, he talks with Teja about the life-changing world of software, working to help Vets channel their military skills into successful tech careers, and a sprinkling of martial arts and anime.
www.vetswhocode.io
www.linkedin.com/in/jeromehardaway
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja sits down with Kent Kiersey, the CEO and Founder of Invoke AI, an open-source generative AI product designed to give creators more control over the images they develop. They talk about the importance of building with an OS community, having a solid foundation in product, and why Discord is still (and probably always will be) the place you can learn the most about your product.
www.invoke.ai
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
After a short hiatus, we're back in the saddle with another episode of Founder to Founder. This week, Teja talks with Yaron Ben Nun, CTO and Founder of Nostromo Energy, about building a company from a good solution, the best way to learn how to negotiate, and how sometimes the best ideas are the ones that can take you down.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
These days, barely a second thought is given to sending off some manner or another of virtual correspondence. But back in the infancy of computer-typed messaging, Miss Manners had quite a few things to say about how inappropriate its use was, as Abbey and Victoria talk about on This Week in Tech History.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What kind of role models did you have growing up? For DeVaris Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Meroxa, it was seeing the innovative ways his family started on their own entrepreneurial journeys that led him to a life in tech. This week on Founder to Founder, he sits down with Teja to talk about the difference between being a CEO and a CTO, learning on the go, and why being "always on" can leave you hungry.
https://meroxa.com/
When it comes to programs asking if you want to use them as a default, nobody did it better than Internet Explorer. On This Week in Tech History, Chris and Abbey talk about the company's decision to include the browser in the release of Windows 95, and the implications it had for internet access, bloatware of the future, and when exactly Hotmail addresses will me making a comeback.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, on Founder to Founder, Teja sits down with Vinay Patankar, CEO and Founder at Process Street, an AI-powered process creator that helps companies achieve operational efficiency. They talk about growing up in tech, gaming, hitting the grind when building a business, and the importance of slowing down and seeing the world every once in a while.
https://www.process.st/
@ProcessStreet
@VinayP10
Today, we take for granted that an email can be sent with the quick flick of the wrist from a computer you keep in your pocket. But when the first email was sent from space in 1991, it marked an occasion that would change communication forever. On This Week in Tech History, Grey and Abbey chat about the crew, their odes to pop culture, and how we'll be communicating from space in the near future.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja sits down with Max Howell, the brain behind Homebrew, about his latest venture, tea. They talk about the growth of the industry, the challenge in paying open source developers, and an unthinkable time in history when being a software developer really wasn't all that cool.
https://tea.xyz/
https://twitter.com/mxcl
Despite four previous ill-fated attempts by a man named Cyrus West Field, he persevered and on the fifth attempt, succeeded in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. On This Week in Tech, Abbey and Tyler talk about the troubles the project faced, the various methods attempted before and since, and how, despite lasting only three weeks, this single cable changed the way we communicate globally.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week on Founder to Founder, Teja sits down with Massi Genta, CEO and Founder of Metabob. They talk about the process of building companies. the difference between using LLMs and GNNs to help with code reviews, and why adding context and a human element to your tech can help build a successful business.
https://metabob.com/
https://github.com/MetabobProject/metabob-vscode
We're pretty much exactly in the middle of the 2023 Formula 1 season, so it's perfect timing that on This Week in Tech History Abbey and Chris get down to business and talk about the very first Model A to roll off the lot. While other Ford models were perhaps more influential for the things they ultimately contributed to the automotive industry, this was the car that started it all with a whopping 8 horsepower and a top speed of 30MPH. We'd love to see Verstappen and Hamilton duke it out around the course in these bad boys.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
After a stint in politics, Cullen Schwarz, CEO and Founder of DoneGood, realized that the best way regular people could influence policy was through spending. This led him to start DoneGood, the online marketplace that features companies dedicated to social good. On this week's episode, he sits down with Teja to discuss the business, growing a good team of people, and everything in between.
www.startengine.com/offering/donegood
www.donegood.co
What started as a product aimed at educators became the catalyst for the remote work we have the ability to do today. On This Week in Tech, Abbey and Garish talk about Apple's iBook: the first mass-produced, consumer-focused, WiFi-compatible laptop to ever hit the market. They discuss how it revolutionized the personal computer market, normalized WiFi connection, and contributed to the juggernaut Apple is today.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week on Founder to Founder, Teja talks with Adit Jain, CEO and Founder of Leena.ai, a tool designed to improve onboarding and internal communications with their advanced virtual assistants. They talk about the ins and outs of growing a global workplace culture, the future of AI, and empowering employees to do their very bet work.
leena.ai
If you only know of Code Red because it's a Mountain Dew flavor, it's time to gain some knowledge about the notorious computer virus that wormed its way across the internet in July of 2001. On This Week in Tech History, David and Abbey talk about the history of computer worms, virus protection, and (obviously) Mountain Dew flavors.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A lot of companies talk global connectivity, but Trevor Francis, CEO and Founder at 46 Labs, has put his boots on the ground to build networks around the world. In this week's Founder to Founder episode, he talks to Teja for about building an infrastructure business, the similarities between flying a plane and running a company, and why it's easier to send a connection through a brick wall than a clump of trees.
www.46labs.com
Has there been a modern invention that has had a more profound effect on humanity than the internet? This week, Chris steps in as guest host and talks with Victoria about the birth of the internet, its growth through the teenage years, and all the ways we continue to use it well into its adulthood.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's Founder to Founder episode, Teja sits down with Devon Wright, CEO and founder of Lumo, a smart irrigation system that is helping growers save water, monitor usage, and tackle the water shortage problems that plague the American West. They talk about building to scale, how to stay sane in Silicon Valley, and the importance of actually doing the work you're building a product for.
https://lumo.ag/
The way smartphones changed our interactions with technology is hard to understate. When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, we had no way of knowing how reliant we would be on them in the very near future. On This Week in Tech History, Abbey and Haley discuss the wait, the features, and how it could take 1,000 people almost three years to deliver something so game-changing.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week Teja talks with Andrew from SF AppWorks. From their origins in a music creation startup, they've always been a force for positive change through technology. Andrew's story is one of resilience, innovation, and a relentless commitment to improving lives. They also get into what your first year of Jiu-Jitsu looks like, anime deep cuts, and Teja's post-new-wave post-workout recovery routine. #bjj #founder #anime
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The world would be hard-pressed to find a historical figure who was more influential to modern computing than Alan Turing. On This Week in Tech History, Abbey and Deividi dive into the work he did, the lives he saved, and ponder how many more advances he could have made had his life not been cut tragically short.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Teja talks with Eran Mizrahi, CEO and Co-founder of ingredient brothers, for our Founder to Founder series. They discuss the need to be hungry and communicative if you want to be an effective leader, the importance of hiring the best if you want the best, and how many parallels there are between sourcing great talent and sourcing some of the world's finest ingredients.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ingredient-brothers/
https://ingredientbrothers.com/
As the first educational toy to utilize speech that wasn't pre-recorded to a tape or phonograph, the Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell was groundbreaking, along with its brethren, Speak & Read and Speak & Math. In This Week in Tech History, Abbey and Tyler talk about the implications it had for future toys, its importance to the educational tech movement, and why Tyler's Speak & Spell seemed to be stuck at Speak.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What happens when a hipster, a hustler, and a hacker come together to build a better way to process and serve up geospatial data? Ellipsis Drive has the answer, as we learn in this week's Founder to Founder episode. Teja sits down with Rosalie van der Maas, CEO and Co-founder of the company, to talk about building a business, working around the globe, and how sometimes you need to take a bad idea and iterate enough to find the good in it.
https://ellipsis-drive.com
For a movie that only featured dinosaurs for 15 minutes, Jurassic Park had an outsized impact on the way CGI was used in film. On This Week in Tech History, Abbey and Regis talk about the graphics, the puppetry, and how movies today are almost too real to be real.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oh this week's Founder to Founder episode, Teja sits down with Daphna Nissenbaum, CEO and Co-founder of TIPA, a company that produces compostable, eco-friendly packaging. They talk about the complexities of creating a brand new product, how to grow across four continents, and how she bridged the gap between software and packaging to create something that is used by beloved brands around the world.
https://tipa-corp.com
While it may seem like the International Space Station has been around since the beginnings of space exploration, it was actually just a little over 24 years ago that it was built. And on This Week in Tech history, Abbey and Chris talk about the Space Shuttle Discovery's trip to the ISS, making it the first shuttle to dock there on May 29, 1999.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's Founder to Founder episode, Teja sits down with Akshita Iyer, CEO and Co-founder of Ome Kitchen. They discuss her path from neurosurgery to kitchen hardware, the winding road to building and funding an amazing idea, and how an appearance on Shark Tank helped to build the brand to where it is today, despite not taking an offer.
www.omekitchen.com
What began as one man's dream after seeing a pizza with a slice missing out of it grew into nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. On This Week in Tech History, Abbey and Grey talk about Pac-Man's introduction to the world, their favorite arcade games, and how Pac-Man changed the landscape of video games for all eternity.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 4's Founder to Founder series kicks off this week with an insightful, engaging, and incredibly entertaining conversation between Gun.io's CEO and Co-founder, Teja Yenamandra, and Sleuth's CEO and Co-founder, Dylan Etkin. After years spent honing his skills as the Jira architect for Atlassian, Dylan saw plenty of opportunities to improve the efficiency of engineering teams. This led him to start Sleuth, which provides teams with actionable and extremely accurate DORA metrics, helping to improve deployment speeds and reduce errors.
sleuth.io
The building that kicked off I.M. Pei's career as a building architect also featured prominently in the city where two current staffers went to college. The NCAR Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado is the subject of This Week in Tech History, where Faith and Chris talk about the importance of the building, the design, and I.M. Pei's career.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As we wind down Season 3 of the Frontier Podcast, Faith takes a look back at some of the highlights from our incredible slate of guests.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Spam can mean quite a few things, only one of which is super tasty (spam musubi, if you're wondering), but when it comes to the dreaded emails and text messages, it all dates back to one guy flooding a message board with his marketing spiel. This Week in Tech History, Faith and Abbey discuss the sorted history of spam messaging.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you are building a product for developers, but aren't asking them for feedback via an open source option, you're missing out on some reliable data. It can help to not only improve what you're building, but also garner some goodwill among a community of people who are invested in what you're doing. This week, Faith talks to the CMO at Harness, Scott Sanchez, about how Open Source and AI have helped to deliver a better CI/CD delivery system.
https://www.harness.io/
Once upon a time, Microsoft tried its hardest to become a major player in the personal finance world by buying Intuit, the brand most well known for its QuickBooks software. The federal government thought Microsoft was up to no good with this move, and sued to block the sale, setting the stage for future mergers to come under scrutiny, as Haley and Faith discuss in This Week in Tech.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
There's an argument to be made that Julien Smith, Founder and CEO of Practice, was born to be a career coach. But beyond that, the New York Times best-selling author has also done the hard work of founding his own companies and sharing his knowledge with other founders. Today, Faith talks with him about his journey, his body of work, and what makes someone a great leader.
Books by Julien:
The Flinch
Trust Agents
practice.do
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you've ever used an IF statement (and if you're reading this, there's almost a 100% chance you have), you can thank FORTRAN. Of course, you can thank it for plenty more, as Girish and Faith discuss in This Week in Tech History, celebrating the first time researchers ran a FORTRAN program.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Jody Soldo joined the product team at Highnote, she was employee #13. Fast forward a couple of years, and company has grown to over 100 employees, while Jody has become the Director of Business Operations. This week, Faith talks to her about her career journey, the growth of the company, and how white label financial products can do more than just provide a credit card number.
https://highnote.com/
For the majority of us, streaming music is about the only way we listen to it. But when Napster hit the web in the late 90's, it was the first service to expand on that horizon, and not everyone was happy about it. This week, Faith and Victoria talk about Metallica suing Napster, and the effects it had on the industry, the platform, and the way we get music today.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
There's often a good deal of heart and soul poured into design, but for Creative Navy CEO Dennis Lenard, the data behind the design is even more important. This week, Faith talks with him about high-stakes user interfaces, building a team of people who want to learn, and why choosing bread types by thumbnail image is as hard as it sounds.
https://creative.navy/
How often would you replace your computer if the newest model wouldn't work with your monitor, keyboard, or mouse? This is the core of the issue IBM was trying to solve when they developed the 360 System, as Faith and Deividi discuss in This Week in Tech History. It was a huge risk that ultimately paid off, and introduced the idea of interchangeable computer components to the world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Breathalyzers have existed, in one form or another, for almost 100 years and have helped determine safe usage levels of a legal intoxicant. This week Ken Fichtler, CEO of Gaize, talks with Faith about the growth of legalized marijuana, and how its relative difficulty to test for in safety situations led to the creation of the company's AI testing system.
www.gaize.ai
ken@gaize.ai
A last-ditch effort to prove the Pixar Image Computer was a valuable tool for entertainment and not just scientific imaging proved to be the serendipitous beginning of a new genre in animation when Tin Toy won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989. Lucky for Faith, today's guest, Richie Clark, knows quite a bit about the Pixar film catalogue.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What if there was a way to understand how biased your news source is? That's the problem Seekr's CEO, Pat Condo, set out to solve. This week, Faith sits down with Pat to talk about how to promote truth in reporting, his rich history in working with the defense and intelligence community, and that time he helped to launch a space shuttle.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seekrscore
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seekrscore/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SeekrScore/
Pat's email: PCondo@Seekr.com
Today, we take Twitter for granted, even as other options vie for their time in the sun. This week in tech history, Jack Dorsey sent the very first Tweet, unknowingly setting in motion one of the world's most utilized and engaging social media platforms.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What started as an interest in "serious gaming" eventually led Sunny Atwal to Luminopia, where he serves as the Head of Engineering. Luminopia uses virtual reality tech to treat neural visual disorders in children, receiving their FDA approval in October of 2021. Today, he talks with Faith about the tech behind the treatment, the process of attaining FDA approval, and when AI will be smart enough to know which device your Bluetooth headphones should be using.
www.luminopia.com
Homogenous design didn't happen overnight; there's a long and storied history of operating systems looking the same. And today, Grey and Faith talk about the very first instance of Apple suing Microsoft over design copyrights. While the suit didn't go Apple's way, thanks to some missteps by their legal team, it did have ripple effects–like pointing and clicking with a mouse becoming a ubiquitous feature.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
ChatGPT can do a lot of incredible things, not the least of which is to help you make better hires and put yourself in contention for better jobs. This week, Faith sits down with our resident GhatGPT guru, VP of Product Grey Garner, to talk about how to make the most out of AI and ML in your hiring process.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Al Gore made his famously misquoted speech, he was the subject of ridicule for weeks. But was he really that far off? This week in tech history, Ashely and Faith talk about his "I invented the internet" speech, what he really did, and how instrumental he was in opening accessibility to the world wide web.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Big data rakes in big money, and the Cirus Foundation wants to make sure you're getting your cut. This week, Faith talks to Julia Guz, Head of Operations at Cirus Foundation, about how everyone deserves to control and profit off of their own information, ways to make that experience accessible to all, and ways to use Web3 for good.
https://cirusfoundation.com/wait-list/\
https://twitter.com/CirusFoundation
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaguz/
When the Homebrew Computer Club met up for the first time in Menlo Park, they had no idea they'd be so instrumental in spreading awareness and enthusiasm for personal computers. This week, Chris and Faith dive into the history of the club, the inventions that came out of it, and why, as New Yorkers, they think NYC would have been the OG tech hub if Silicon Valley hadn't come into play.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The web of digital advertising is wide-spread and many-threaded; when companies use ad tech to promote their products, they don't always know what their ads are supporting. This week Faith talks to Claire Atkin, co-founder of CheckMyAds, about how ad tech makes money, ways to tackle big advertising, and how we can all help fight the funding of hatred and misinformation.
https://checkmyads.org/
https://checkmyads.org/branded/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/check-my-ads-institute/
https://twitter.com/CheckMyAdsHQ
Long before we all knew how to use Incognito mode or clear a search history, someone had to be the first person to do something illegal on a computer. And in 1971, that first person was caught after the very first warrant for a computer search was executed. This week, Faith talks with Jessi Soler about this momentous occasion, what it means for internet privacy now, and why that art dealer thought using his son's iPad to search body disposal techniques was a good idea.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Understanding your users is the most important step you can take in building product that is used exactly how you want it to be used. In this episode, Faith talks with Product Management leader Fatima Karwandyar about the importance of user testing, getting whole-team buy-in, and iterating until you're ready to redefine your users again.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What did we do before email existed? Coincidentally, this episode answers exactly that question: we used Computer Bulletin Board Systems! In today's episode of This Week in Tech History, Regis and Faith talk about what brought CBBSs to fruition, the circumstances that led to its invention, and what kind of plans Regis has to break into the modern BBS world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Designing every button from scratch is probably fine if you've got three buttons and one designer, but what happens to all of that when you start to scale? This week, Faith sits down with Michael Carrick, the Chief Experience Officer at XDS, a Toronto-based company that builds and consults on design systems. They chat about why they're important to incorporate early, the difference between an out-of-the-box solution and a custom one, and how much snow constitutes "not that much" once you've relocated to the South.
https://xdsystems.co/
https://twitter.com/michaelcarrick
We take AI for granted these days, but once upon a time, there had to be a first human to be bested by tech, and that man was famed chess champion Garry Kasparov. On February 10th, 1996, Kasparov lost his first game to IBM's super computer, Deep Blue. Faith sits down with Tyler to talk about AI, chess, and how being the best human is still a pretty dope place to hold.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Darko Bozhinovsky went looking for a tech meetup in his hometown of Skopje, Macedonia, there wasn't much to see. So in 2019, he started his very own chapter of BeerJS, and had twice as many attendees at that first meeting than he had anticipated. This week Faith talks to him about his journey in building (and growing) a community during COVID, altering career paths, and growing hot peppers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Where would the world be without personal computers? On February 2, 1977, the TRS-80 was approved for production and sale at Radio Shack, setting off a digital revolution that could not have possibly been predicted 45 years later. On This Week in Tech History, Faith and Cameron talk about the birth of the personal computer, the boon of the digital age, and where the growth goes from here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
To kick of Season 3 of the Frontier Podcast, we have Jordan Ambra, CTO of Photoooth Supply Co. We talk about the challenges of building a product that involves both hardware and software, how technology can be used to help empower personal growth, and, of course, why having chickens in this time of rising egg costs isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.
https://photoboothsupplyco.com
https://www.linkedin.com/company/photoboothsupplyco/
https://www.instagram.com/photoboothsupplyco
With Season 2 in the rearview, it's time to get ready for a new set of conversations in Season 3. We will be talking to people and brands who are doing great things in and for the community, as well as looking back in history at the events that have shaped the world.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We had an idea, and we had a company, and we had recently secured our Series A funding, so why not re-start the podcast? When Faith and Abbey started down this path halfway through the year, they had no idea how may twists, turns, and teachable moments were in store for them. In the final episode of season 2, they sit down to talk about how it all went, and what they're looking forward to in the next season.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Breaking into product can be really difficult, even if what you've been doing your whole career is technically build products. In this week's "Meet the team" episode, hear how our newest recruit, Haley Harris, made the move, and what she's looking forward to helping us build now that she's here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
At the heart of what we do at Gun.io is our amazing community of developers. In this episode, Talent Growth Advocate, Victoria Stahr, shares how integral they are to our success, what we do to support them throughout their contracts, and how the support for our developers has grown with our team.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When Sales Development Representative, Greyson Wooten, wanted to make a career change, he did a full 180. Or did he? This week, Faith chats with him about moving from teaching to startups, being passionate about sports, and how if you can handle the wrath of an 8th grader, you'll excel in sales.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, Faith sits down with our Account Executive, Ashley Yearby, and Head of Strategic Accounts, Jessi Soler, to talk about how we streamline the hiring process and help companies find success. They also share what you can do if you can't use Gun.io, and pitch the next big business idea on how to find a reliable home contractor.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Before taking on a role here at Gun.io, Client Success Manager, Jeff Vedenoff, made his way up the ranks helping people with the biggest purchases of their lives: homes and vehicles. Hear what it takes to succeed and how to build a new department from the ground up.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
With a team that almost doubled in size, and our first foray into venture backing, 2022 has been quite the year at Gun.io. In this episode, Teja and Faith talk about the growth of the company, next year's goals, and how important it is to take a step back and bored every once in a while.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When you hear that someone like our Technical Talent Advocate, Girish Kumar, who casually started TWO companies while running a third, is the kind of talent who helps to vet our talent, it sends a clear signal that our team is up to snuff.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
From 7-month-olds to teenagers, our team is growing the next generation of dreamers and doers, one WFH day at a time. In this episode, you'll hear how they manage their time, find hidden spots of solitude, and embrace the walk to school. Shout to Bluey, y'all, because only her energy can match these kids'!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When your first sales job was hustling your classmates over Yu-Gi-Oh cards at six years old, your bound to be one of the best in the biz by the time you're a full-grown adult. Such is the case with Donovan Suggs, one of Gun.io's Sales Development Reps. And when he's not working for us? He's working on laying tracks as a talented musician.
In this episode, Faith, Teja, and Abbey sit down to talk about the changes Gun.io made prior to going remote, the numerous benefits of distributed and remote teams, and why it's totally okay to tell people you love your job. A few other tangents will keep you laughing through this one.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Senior Frontend Developer, Richie Clark, started his development career by promising great things, and he continues to deliver to this day. Hear more about his path from Play It Again Sports to Gun.io and why the logistics of the pork market are more complicated than you think.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
"Be militant about the things you can control so that you can be frivolous elsewhere." Sage advice from our Marketing Coordinator, Chris Johnson, and just one of the many great nuggets of advice he has about brand authenticity, and how people will always remember how you make them feel above all else.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It's ironic that our Talent Growth Advocate, Victoria Stahr, moved to Nashville knowing she wanted to leave her live of running music events behind, but great for us that her superb operational skills have made our talent onboarding program the success it is today. Hear what she has to say about how to make moves on this latest episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Faith sits down with our VP of Operations, Tyler Newkirk, to talk about how we've traditionally approached growth and promotion at Gun.io. It turns out our secret sauce is hiring talented people and giving them the space and tools to thrive.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We don't have health inspectors knocking on the door during dinner rush, but there are plenty of other parallels between tech and restaurants, as our Marketing Coordinator, Chris Johnson, talks about on this latest episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Free t-shirts only get you so far. So how do you market to a group of people with discerning tastes highly-attuned BS meters? Authenticity and expertise are our two best tools, as Content Lead, Abbey Charles, talks about in this episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We wanted to call this episode "Just get it done," because that's what our UI/UX Engineer-turned-one-man-Army, Regis Camimura, has applied to most situations in life. In this episode, he talks about his development journey, life challenges, and how unacceptable it is to not know when the World Cup is happening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Every brand goes through the evolution of its own identity, and Gun.io is no different. In this episode, the CEO and Co-founder of Gun.io, Teja Yenamandra, sits down to talk with Faith about Swiss timepieces, capsule wardrobes, and the various stages of our own personal branding throughout the years.
Want to get the visuals? Check out the pod on YouTube, or head over to our blog post on the updated and amazing Gun.io site.
When our Account Executive, Ashley Yearby, isn't busy leading world-class food tours or designing a dice game that takes the boredom out of your home bar, she's making sure our clients are getting matched with the kind of talent that fits their every need. Hear how she balances all the most badass things at once on this episode of the Frontier Podcast.
Buy The Adventurous Bartender here: https://www.theadventurousbartender.com/
A lot of things have changed at Gun.io since we first started, but no department more than sales. In this episode our Head of Strategic Accounts, Jessi Soler, and VP of Revenue, Ben Kettle, talk about what it has looked like to grow the sales department by 5 times its size.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It's not easy keeping all the balls in the air when it comes to matching multiple developers to multiple projects. Luckily, we have Cameron Holmes, one of our extremely talented and multi-faceted Client Experience Coordinators. Hear what he has to say about taking on a whole new kind of job and what it takes to keep it all together.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When you have a small team, deciding what gets built is always a balance of complexity and priorities. In this episode, our VP or Product, Grey Garner, talks to us about how he triages short-, medium-, and long-term goals with the daily bug squash.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
From higher education to educating herself in tech hiring, our Head of Strategic Accounts, Jessi Soler, has learned a thing or two about what it takes to build trust, talk tech like a pro, and create lasting relationships with our client base. She talks about all that and more on this episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When it comes to choosing the right tech stack to build your product with, there are a lot of considerations you need to take into account. While trying to say "it depends" as few times as possible, Director of DevRel, Deividi Silva and Director of Engineering, Wade Williams, give their insight into how to find what works best for you.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When our VP of Product, Grey Garner, started making band websites to support his music habits, there was no way of knowing how far it would take him into the land of tech. In this episode, we talk to him about his past, his product work, and how he's found himself on both the music and startup sides of our beautiful hometown.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Our use of developers to vet other developers is one of the most important things setting us apart from the competition. In this episode, we talk to our Director of DevRel, Deividi Silva, about our hiring and vetting process, and how getting our clients top talent takes top talent from within.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When you're more or less a manager to thousands of people, being able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat seems like an incredibly useful skill. Hear how our director of Developer Relations, Deividi Silva, does all this and more on this week's "Meet the team" episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Growth marketing is so much more than just customer acquisition. In this episode, we talk with our Director of Growth Marketing, Faith Benson, about how she helped Gun.io grow out of our bootstraps and into the big(ger) leagues.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sure, you have someone at the helm of your engineering department. But do you have someone that used to be a professional waterskier? Probably not, and we promise that's just one of the amazing things you'll learn about our Director of Engineering and sometimes janitor, Wade Williams, in this episode.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When we started, there wasn't even an official payroll. With budgets and ideas in balance, we take a look at how Gun.io thinks about profitability. In this episode, we sit down with the VP of Operations, Tyler Newkirk, to hear how we made sustainable growth a priority and what it takes to stay above water for nearly a decade.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Have you ever wondered who puts the words to the page when it comes to tech sites? This week, we introduce our Content Lead, Abbey Charles, in the first team member interview of the new season. She's been a copywriter, a front end dev, and million other things, and today we're finding out how they all got mixed up to make a marketing unicorn.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sometimes being a part of a sales team can feel akin to being in the desert on a broken bike six miles from the trailhead when it's 115 degrees out, trying not to panic. And how do you hire for that kind of heat? This week we sit down with our VP of Revenue, Ben Kettle, to talk about what it takes to assemble a team of people that can put out any fire.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What startup says "no" to funding for almost an entire decade? One that's either totally crazy or incredibly astute. Maybe we're a little of both? Hot off the heels of our Series A raise, we talked to our CEO, Teja Yenamandra, and COO, Tyler Newkirk, about the decision to bootstrap for so long, and how, with a little patience, they found the right investors.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What happens when an idea to hook your friends up with jobs becomes a multi-million dollar talent agency operating on a global scale? In the opener to season 2 of the Frontier Podcast, you'll learn from Gun.io's founder and CEO, Teja Yenamandra, exactly how he made it happen.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Cal sits down this week with a Nashville local, Dave Delaney, to chat about networking on and offline, how to make an impression, and the best way to keep track of who's who when business cards are flying like there's a blackjack dealer in town.
Future Forth: futureforth.com
Nice Podcast: nicepodcast.co
Our Developer Relations team, or as we call them, our Technical Talent Advocates, share their do's and don'ts of the job hunt.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Moving into engineering management roles can feel like the obvious next step for some senior devs. But what happens when that next step turns out to be one you want to take back? In this week's episode, Cal talks with Jip Moors for Yoast about how he managed both transitions and why he's loving engineering all over again.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week, Cal Evans talks with Wolf Donat about Commodores (not the band), fisheries, and woodworking.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Cal sits down with renowned API architect James Higginbotham to discuss building APIs, what makes a good one, and what to include, even though you're sure your API won't need scalability.
Check out James's book with Keith Casey, A Practical Approach to API Design and his latest solo work, Principles of Web API Design, which came out this month.
This week, Cal Evans talks with William Rodriguez about accidentally becoming a dev, modernizing 100-year-old tech, and jamming out at the end of a long day.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Every interview invites a few nerves along with it. Sometimes it's great to get back to the basics and remember the easiest things: come prepared, come interested, and please, for the love of Boba Fett, move that dirty laundry pile out of the background.
In this week's Frontier Podcast, Cal Evans talks with our very own Jessi Soler, the Engagements Manager for Gun.io. She works closely with clients to get our talent hired and has a few things to say about how to nail your next interview.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week, Cal Evans talks with Jon North about his path to software, that one time they each did UX, and what Jon has cooking up next.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Samantha John, Co-Founder and CEO of Hopscotch, about the amazing things kids can create when they have access to software tools, why coding isn't just for boys, and what landing an investment deal on Shark Tank is really like.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Kate O'Neil, Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at Teaming, about key identifiers for a strong team, where most leaders get it wrong, and how Teaming is helping leaders improve engagement, communication, goal setting, and psychological safety for their team members.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Nick Gavronsky, CEO and Co-founder of Welcome, about the power of appreciating people in your product, the need for more transparency around compensation for employees, and how his team at Welcome is improving pay equity and equality across the board for the companies on their platform.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Bo Boroski, Founder and Managing Director of RefQuest, about the best decisions he's made as a founder, the importance of hustled mistakes, and how to build a support system both inside and outside of the business.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Gabe Batstone, co-founder and CEO of Contextere, about doing good and making money at the same time, why raising money is a goal, not a victory, and how personal relationships pay off more than your technology.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Rachel Van Nortwick, CEO and Founder of Vinylly, talks about the compatibility solution Vinylly has solved in the dating application space, the lessons she learned as a non-technical founder, and her experience hiring freelance technical talent with Gun.io
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Sam Lessin, co-founder and co-CEO of Fin, about his journey from the VP of Product Management at Facebook to coding boot camp, his "human in the loop" approach at Fin, and the dirty secret about all CEO's.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Eoghan McCabe, Chairman and Co-founder of Intercom about making your own space in the SaaS market, transitioning to a new leadership position after 10 years, and the excitement of wearing a lab coat. Eoghan provides strategic leadership to Intercom and previously held the role of CEO. Before he co-founded Intercom he founded Contrast, a software design consultancy, and Exceptional, a developer tool company acquired by Rackspace.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by Scott Roe-Meschke, Director of Engineering at Blinker. Scott discusses the importance of cultivating trust and transparency for your team in an engineering leadership role.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by Vinay Mahadik, CEO and Co-Founder of Securly. Vinay discusses how his experience as a father and in enterprise security formed the company that is securing the safety of children online.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by Madison May, Machine Learning Architect and Co-Founder of Indico. He shares insights into sitting in both leadership seats and building custom models for custom problems.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by Lisa Reeves, SVP of product at Zenefits. Lisa shares how her years of experience as an operator, investor, and entrepreneur has been a guide in her uncapped success in the industry.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by David Yakobovitch, Principal Data Scientist for Galvanize, and the host of HumAin, an AI podcast. David shares his insights from his extensive experience in AI, and enterprise data science to help any company from Fortune 500s to start-ups.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we are joined by John Callaway, Clayton Hunt, & Jon Ash of the 6 Figure Developer podcast.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, we speak to Derek Lin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Exabeam.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode Ledge is joined by Joseph Feiman & Setu Kulkarni of White Hat Security to share with us how they enable enterprises to secure their digital businesses.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode Ledge chats with Scott Parker, Director of Product Marketing at Sinequa.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode Ledge is joined by Adam Garrett-Harris, Host of the podcasts Web of Tomorrow and BookBytes.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge is joined by Brody Dorland, Co-founder at DivvyHQ, to talk about DivvyHQ is building the #1 content planning and workflow automation engine to help teams conquer content chaos.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We are joined by Vinay Patankar, CEO of Process Street, in this episode of the pod to discuss how Process Street is building a platform that manages recurring processes for teams and turns businesses into automated, self growing machines.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge is joined by Ryan Cousins, CEO at krtkl inc, to give his insights into an entrepreneurial mindset and how their project snickerdoodle is changing the way development is done through hardware.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Mitch Stewart joins the pod to discus how GURU is building a platform to unify companies' internal knowledge, verifies its accuracy, and empower your revenue teams.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Shauni Deshmukh, CTO at Tettra, joins the pod to share her insights on transparency, building your team, and her knowledge gained throughout her career working in both the software engineering seat and CTO seat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with Matt Zimmermann and Christian Wirth of Beast Code to talk about how Beast Code is transcending the traditional defense solution paradigm with a unique approach to naval technology.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge is joined on this episode of the podcast by Alex Hertel, co-founder and CEO of Xperiel. At Xperiel he has helped to create the world's most user-friendly programming language called 'Pebbles', and its goal is to democratize AR and IoT programming in order to push the Internet out into the physical world.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Matt Stone is an accomplished Customer Experience professional with a broad scope of industry knowledge ranging from Fortune 100 to leading SaaS private vendors, and he joins Ledge in this episode to shares his insights on growing companies in the CX leadership seat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge is joined by Ian McGaw, Vice President of Technology and Innovation at ENGworks, to talk about how they are using cutting edge tech to design and build better projects by saving construction costs and time through implementing the full potential of Building Informational Modeling.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Marco Palladino, co-founder and CTO of Kong, joins Ledge on this episode of the pod to talk about the history of Kong and how they built the most widely adopted open source API platform.
John Dubois is the co-founder of Oculus360, joins Ledge on this episode of the pod to discuss the AI space, and how Oculus 360 is using AI to change the game on generating consumer insights for brands.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with Jason Burns, CEO and founder of Kortivity, about his journey to starting Kortivity after being frustrated with the lack of transparency and accountability in the recruiting industry.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Mike Duensing, the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering at Skuid, joins Ledge to discuss how Skuid is building a no-code cloud platform for powerful custom web and mobile applications with a killer UX, up to 90% faster.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with Christopher Furlin, Content Development at Tempered Networks, to talk about journey from stock broker to technical writer, and the importance of customer empathy.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
David Shewfelt, Director of Integration Services at Vidado, joins Ledge in this episode to discuss the intelligent automation tech in capturing human handwriting.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with John Collier, Chief Technology Officer at VieMed, to talk about his technical career path across many different industries spanning speech analytics to medical, and his current work implementing his tech innovation into the healthcare industry.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Teja is joined in this episode of the podcast by Andrew Glover, Director, Delivery Engineering at Netflix to discuss his entry into programming, navigating his way through a career spanning big and small companies, and finding value in stepping towards management.
In this episode, Ledge chats with Brandon Smith, Director of Engineering at eVestment, about scaling high-growth engineering teams and delivering cloud-native financial technology solutions.
Ledge sits down with Randy Layman, the Vice President of Software Engineering at AVOXI, to talk about how they are helping companies around the globe effectively and efficiently communicate with their customers.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jason Nochlin is the CTO & Co-Founder at GaggleAMP who are helping their clients increase the impact of your social media marketing efforts. Jason joins Ledge in this episode to talk about jumping into the leadership, the balance of management and coding, hiring the right pieces to grow your organization.
Ledge sits down with Craig Bryant, the founder and CEO of KinHR.com and WeAreMammoth.com, as well as the former co-founder of DoneDone.com about his mission to make happy and healthy workplaces.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge talks to Chris Siefken, Head of Technology at Xenial, about how they are making the technology that runs smart enterprise restaurants around the world, and how they employing blockchain technologies in order to track all of the moving parts of the restaurant business.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Tom Young is the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Syncurity and joins Ledge in this episode to talk about how they are helping enterprises cut through the noise of increased alert volume, staff shortages, and lack of integrated security point security solutions in order to protect their clients' businesses.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Teja sits down with Kristie D'Ambrosio-Correll, VP Engineering at MIRROR in this episode of the pod to talk about how MIRROR is revolutionizing the home workout market with their uniuqe approach to fitness tech.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode of the Pod, Teja is joined by Andrew Phillips to talk about his journey from software engineer, team lead, infrastructure builder, community evangelist and now his work on product management for Google Cloud.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with Kevin Wang, VP of Product at Braze, to share how they are leading the way in helping brands such as Microsoft, Citi, Postmates,and KFC to build rich relationships with their customers.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Teja is joined in this episode of the pod by Isaac Mosquera, CTO at Armory about staying fulfilled in your career and about his approach to technical management and building a world-class engineering team at Armory.
Donnie Goins joins the pod to share his story about how an MBA project to redefine outsourcing by tapping into Central and Eastern Europe became a successful business venture.
Jason Kiesel joins the pod to discuss how his company, CitySourced, worked with local governments to develop mobile solutions to keep their citizens engaged. This is a must listen for anyone interested in GovTech.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Bruce Brien, Chief Strategy Officer at Hive9, joins the pod to share his insights on career development, and how to build a relationship with your customer.
Karan Zaveri joins the pod to discuss the balance of engineering vs entrepreneurship, and shares the learnings and failures he learned along the way in his tech journey.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sits down with Eric Rodwell, VP Worldwide Solutions Engineering at Conga, to discuss the importance of self awareness when starting the journey of professional development. He shares helpful tips on putting yourself in the shoes of your customer to keep quality high and deliver an exceptional experience.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Glenn Thimmes joins Ledge on the podcast to discuss his technical experience. From working for Microsoft becoming an expert in .NET, to becoming CTO for Centeva developing agile solutions for the federal government.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Eric Hunter, Managing Director for futurist consultancy firm Spherical Models, LLC and CTO of Bradford & Barthel, LLP, about how having a stroke sparked his interest in how we process information and the intersectionality between future technology and human behavior.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Mike Kritzman, CEO at SkillNet, joins the podcast to discuss how Skillnet is helping companies to do better with their HR by upskilling and reskilling to retain talent.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ledge sat down with James Graham, Founder of Community Phone, to talk about how Community Phone is reinventing the way we look at telephone companies by helping millions reduce the cost of their monthly phone plan, safeguarding their online privacy, and providing competent help from individuals in their local community immediately.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jason Hintersteiner is the CTO at Imperial Network Solutions and is an expert on all things WiFi and joins the podcast talk about this technology that we use everyday and how to think about security holistically when it comes to Wifi networks.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Andrew Plato, CEO, President, and Founder of Initian to chat about accidentally discovering the SQL attack, and through that experience gaining an appreciation for security which led him start his own security firm.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode Ledge sits down with Michael Weissman, 10-time entrepreneur, career high tech executive, and consultant to such tech allstars as Apple, Amazon, Adobe, and more.
Michael’s current adventure is Synchy, an advanced adtech product that delivers product advertising right alongside the product purchase experience, following on the success of Amazon’s ad network, and building a next generation enhancement to the concept.
Michael asks the compelling question, “Why is the best advertising OFF of the retailer’s website?” And furthermore, “Why is the worst advertising ON baked into the retail experience?”
When it comes to culture, Michael doesn’t hold back. He and his team have a strict code of constructive disagreement they use not in order to be right, but in order to get better. It’s made them a strong, effective unit for more than 6 years.
Technology co-founder Matthew McDonald is no stranger to rapid change. He joined a Startup Weekend event, met some contractors there with an idea to change construction equipment rental industry, and built a prototype -- booking their first validation client the same weekend.
When a friend suggested they apply to Ycom, Matthew admits he blew off the idea at first. After deciding to go through with it, his co-founders and he were shocked to be accepted, and moved together to California after having only known each other for 6 weeks.
Fast forward to present day and EquipmentShare is 300+ employees strong, having built a powerful online and offline business. Matthew’s personal story is compelling -- he had the personal awareness and fortitude to work with a mentor after having grown the team to 11 as the founding CTO, and admitting he just didn’t like the leadership seat. He stepped down and continues to make critical contributions as Principal Engineer. The story of that process is inspiring on many levels, and will be instructive to any engineer who questions the standard leadership path.
Electrical engineer, Fabrizio Filippini, has always had a strong passion for web, IoT, and sports. That got him into wearables, which led him to join as a co-founder of FitBark.
Wearables for animals? No one thinks innately about health monitors for pets like they do for humans, with our Apples Watches, FitBits, and more. It turns out this is an important area of development because pets don’t communicate their conditions through their behaviors the same way humans do. Dogs especially communicate happiness when they see their owners, even when they might be struggling with a serious health issue.
Fabrizio and Ledge talk UX, data, IoT, and more in this novel look at the wearables you might never have thought about.
Dan Tienes, CTO of Corporate Cost Control, has unique perspectives on cybersecurity, particularly having taken a personal interest in the well-known Equifax breach, having spent time working at the company for 9 years after an acquisition.
With a deep insight into the Equifax corporate culture, born of his time at the company, Dan has thoughtful perspectives on both failures of technology and failures of process, that likely led to the famous breach.
It’s a complicated story with no clear answers. What we can learn is complexity of the modern systems upon which we all rely is SO great that it’s inevitable that challenges will arise. The key is in our preparedness.
Tim Anderson is the Vice President of Technical Operations of Kasasa, a community financial institution fintech company. Kasasa offers a suite of checking account products for which Tim runs the implementation and support team -- making sure customer data is onboarded properly.
When you serve a conservative customer base, the day to day isn’t necessarily a cutting edge revolution in technology -- it’s not about the fintech disruptive hype cycle in an industry that’s by nature conservative. What’s more, disruption doesn’t have to feel like something different. It has to feel like something familiar.
Consumers compare mobile app experiences to Uber and Lyft. More staid industries need to be ‘cutting edge,’ but relative to something the customer already uses and understands. Consumers want friendly, personalized service, across channels, that’s convenient, personalized, and consistent. Modern technology helps us get there.
Video connections are critical in a remote business environment. If we’re going to embrace remote work, we need video calls. That’s what Ledge talks about with Bobby Beckman, CTO of Lifesize, a formidable competitor in the video calling sector.
The major challenges of video call handling cover a range of technical challenges. Furthermore, the user experience challenges like making videos easier to join, require a huge rethinking of telecommunication norms and habits.
How do we make connecting by video easier than a phone call? How do we solve video call connection and discovery? It’s useful if we look back to the challenges we’ve already solved with phone number and email address discovery.
Returning from the meta-topics, Ledge and Bobby discuss paying off our technical debt - and how Lifesize replaced every line of code and every server -- in 2 years.
Three-time CTO, Rich Brown, put in his Fortune 500 time across the enterprise sector at Bank of American, SAP, and others.
Ledge and Rich discuss the trade-offs of native and hybrid, cloud and local, and the true experience end users are looking for.
We talk about the evolution of Microsoft and the company’s re-evolution in the developer ethos with the acceptance of .Net Core.
Damian Schenkelman is the Director of Engineering at Auth0. Ledge reached him at his remote office in Brazil.
Auth0 provides SDKs and APIs for identification and login. Auth0 is the Stripe of logging into websites and apps.
As an engineering director, Damian’s number one objective is scaling engineering teams: making sure the right people are in the right seats with the right training and support to do their job. In this wide ranging interview he discusses remote culture, distributed teams, team building, trust, and more.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Nav Bhachech, who boasts an impressive CV having worked at both Microsoft and Amazon, to talk about his work with various SV-area startups.
Nav goes into detail about his work with developing Microsoft Office apps, utilizing add-on and API functionality in standard Office applications. He discusses the issues with developing systems that aren’t considered ‘cool’, but are highly valued by those that use them.
Nav also reflects on his career, particularly what he’s learned with regard to scalability. ‘Scale has a zillion different dimensions’, he says, while going on to discuss the difficulting to scaling the recruitment process - In summation, ‘we need a consistent culture - one that values excellence in engineering’.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Nav Bhachech, who boasts an impressive CV having worked at both Microsoft and Amazon, to talk about his work with various SV-area startups.
Nav goes into detail about his work with developing Microsoft Office apps, utilizing add-on and API functionality in standard Office applications. He discusses the issues with developing systems that aren’t considered ‘cool’, but are highly valued by those that use them.
Nav also reflects on his career, particularly what he’s learned with regard to scalability. ‘Scale has a zillion different dimensions’, he says, while going on to discuss the difficulting to scaling the recruitment process - In summation, ‘we need a consistent culture - one that values excellence in engineering’.
Do we take software demos for granted? Should we be investing more energy and attention into demo UX? CEO and founder of Omedym, Greg Dickinson, believes so. Omedym’s solution helps companies craft interactive software demo experiences, intelligently delivering answers to would-be buyers’ questions in real time.
As Internet culture wreaks havoc on our attentions spans, would-be customers ashew the traditional solution evaluation process. Customers demand instant understanding, and rapid results. Omedym achieves this by using analytics to dissect customer data and unpack the intent of buyers with instant fractional demos that answer objections on the fly.
If you want to understand the buyer’s journey, and the best way to connect with customers, this episode is a great place to start.
ason Zubrick has enjoyed a trailblazing career in retail finance, helping small-scale outlets revolutionize their technology approach, as the CTO at defi SOLUTIONS. defi’s loan origination solution provides banks, credit unions, and auto lenders with a flexible technology platform that enables modern lending programs.
Innovation and accuracy underpin performance in this industry and Jason emphasizes testing as central to ensuring defi remains ahead of the curve in a demanding market.
With 15 years in retail, including at video game retailer GameStop, Jason has a unique take on SaaS, retail, and trends in tech, as well as fascinating insights into what’s next in the field.
Mobile app security expert Domingo Guerra is an authority in a field that’s growing at a frenetic pace. As the founder of Appthority, Domingo witnessed first-hand how businesses require increasing levels of assistance to properly secure critical business data and protect consumers on mobile platforms.
When Appthority was acquired by Symantec, Domingo continued his work at the cutting-edge of mobile threat defense. In this episode, he shares his belief in the preeminence of device security in a culture where personal mobile devices often form the backbone of company operations.
Leon Fayer began his prolific software engineering career some 25 years ago in government contracting, and has since shifted gears to focus on the private sector. His multi-sector gives him unique insight into the ways technology has come to define every discipline of commerce.
After years of founding and running successful start-ups, Leon now works in consultancy with high-traffic sites, such as Wikipedia and National Geographic. His varied work has enabled him to observe the shift in mentality that is now dominating the commercial sphere. Every company is becoming a technology company by necessity.
In this episode, Leon joins Ledge to bring his extensive expertise and insight on what’s now, and what’s next.
Entrepreneur Michael Dash had it all -- a multi-million dollar business, cars, real estate, you name it. He also had a compulsive and addictive personality that led him to gambling, drugs, and a destructive path that brought it all down. In his new book, “Chasing the High,” Michael lays out his path to redemption in a raw, honest, framework that he’s turned into a program called “F.A.T.E” -- From Addict to Entrepreneur.
Ledge and Michael talk about addiction, the positives and negatives of the entrepreneurial drive, and most importantly about life balance and the critical habits he’s discovered to keep himself happy and effective after missing the mark for many years. Every listener will see something of themselves in this story, this episode, and Michael’s book.
AI pioneer, Sandra Carrico, joins Ledge in this fascinating episode where she recounts the early days of AI, the early 80s AI winter, and the dawn of computational linguistics.
Now the VP of Engineering and Chief Data Scientist at Glynt.ai, she works daily with the company’s ML systems to refine the patented algorithms she invented to extract data from documents such as utility bills, insurance claims and medical records with better-than-human accuracy.
Sandra delivers fascinating insights into how she turns problems into solutions with a mix of mathematical know-how, coding experience and management skills.
Caleb Ontiveros, who left the University of Notre Dame’s PhD program in philosophy to pursue a career in tech, is often asked by people studying philosophy how he transitioned to software engineering and programming.
Caleb created the Facebook group, Philosophers in Software Engineering to help others like him. The group’s members collect and share advice for philosophers interested in learning how to program or in careers in software engineering.
In this episode, Caleb chats with Ledge about philosophical thinking in software, and how software can enhance philosophical thinking.
Software may be written on machines, but it's written by and for human beings.
That’s according to Ledge’s guest, April Wensel founder, of Compassionate Coding, a company offering advice and workshops to engineering teams on how to bring a more human touch to the workplace.
“We weren’t caring enough about human beings in the engineering process,” notes April, who used her background in software engineering to tailor her company’s interactive workshops so the content deeply aligns with her technical audience.
In this episode, we get to hear April’s perspective on the importance of emotional intelligence in the coding process, and how to promote psychological safety, diversity, and organizational effectiveness.
Eric Hauser has spent his entire career working in software engineering. Beginning with stack development and ending up in management, Eric is currently working for Drone Deploy, a San Francisco based startup that develops drone technology.
Ledge and Eric sat down to discuss Drone Deploy’s business model, and how the company focuses on developing drone software as opposed to drone hardware. With commercial drones becoming increasingly affordable, the focus has shifted to developing more advanced software for data collection purposes.
Eric also offers his perspective on remote working, noting how he’s glad it’s brought ‘cognitive diversity’ to his team. With a geographically diverse workforce comes an array of perspectives that ultimately leads to products that work great for a diverse user base.
A 20-year veteran of software engineering, Oren Boiman’s Bay Area-based Magisto has reached 100 million users over the last decade. Oren has been a visionary in his field, understanding the importance of AI well ahead of the curve. Magisto is a pioneering video editing app, which employs AI to assist with the editing process.
This fascinating chat with Ledge covers the future direction of AI and user interfaces, and the importance of the younger generation ‘needing to know’ everything!
If you want to harness AI in order to better understand customers then this podcast is a great place to start.
With over 50 years of existence, email is one of those things we just take for granted. But it is by no means solved: there is an ongoing conflict between security, control, and user experience. Who hasn’t struggled to organize all the information scattered through emails ahead of an important call?
Alexis Panagides is the CEO of mxHero, which specializes in improving the email experience for businesses and end users through easier access, better control, and enhanced safety.
Alexis shares his vast experience around email, from his beginnings in Brazil to his ongoing challenges as an innovator in this space. He and Ledge also talk about the benefits of remote teams. Alexis shares his favorite tools and tips for working with distributed teams and his thoughts on why right now is the best time to become an entrepreneur.
ideo ads for B2C are all the ra ge in 2019: we expect our favorite brands to reach out to us through engaging, high quality video content. But what about B2B? Can video help move your customers through your funnel faster?
Graeme McLaughlin is the Head of Strategy at Explainify, where he helps B2B companies communicate better with their audience to drive sales.
In this podcast, Graeme and Ledge talk about marketing strategy and how sales and marketing can work together to bring in more revenue. Graeme shares some ideas to help you avoid paralysis by (data) analysis and instead focus on asking the questions that truly matter.
Ryan Yockey has accrued an enviable résumé, after over 15 years of working with a wide variety of cutting-edge companies.
A self-taught dev, Ryan founded his own art business, DNA Imprints, in 2006, and currently works as Director of Engineering at FabFitfun; an innovative firm that dispatches boxes packed with health-related goodies to mostly female clients.
Ryan has always been at the epicenter of commerce, sales and connecting with customers throughout his career, and he shares with Ledge his ideas on how this works in the contemporary climate. Don’t miss this inside view into the subscription box business with a healthy dose of tech.
John Feland attempts to measure the impossible! In a world in which the consumer market is increasingly defined by data, John Feland assists companies with enhancing their social capital; the trust that consumers place in their brand. Over a diverse and impressive career, beginning with research posts at Stanford, Feland has continually refined his understanding of data, how to intelligently identify the important data, and how to gain insight from it.
Today, Argus Insights, which he founded in 2009, leverages agile analytics to deliver powerful social influencing. And Feland is also active in teaching at The Nueva School, providing students with insight into a diverse range of technology, data, and commerce-related topics, as well as the intersection between them. Ledge sat down with John for this fascinating chat with a data expert who has the very heart of modern business at his fingertips.
For our special 100th episode, Ledge sat down with Gun.io’s founder and CEO, Teja Yenamadra for a first-time telling of the history of the company going all the way back to the dorm room days and tracing a winding road of pivots and relationships to today’s premium developer and client experiences.
You can also watch this interview on our youtube channel by searching The Frontier: Gun.io.
Thanks to Cosair Distillery for sponsoring and hosting a whiskey tasting to make this one go down smooth.
Lee Warrick wasn’t satisfied with the standard storyline regarding junior developers. A career-changing bootcamp graduate himself, Lee heard the same tired explanations over and over again about how hiring juniors was rife with expense, risks, and headaches that from his experience just weren’t true.
He started the Tech Jr podcast to support junior devs, along with a series of meetups where juniors could get together and share advice and approaches for their careers. Along the way Lee developed a compelling framework to help employers understand how to get high ROI out of recruiting, employing, and retaining junior developers. In this episode he sits down with Ledge to share the highlights.
CEO and President Becky Oh started her career as an Apple chip designer and quickly realized she wanted a bigger view of how her products played into the broader business. She took a role in Field Application Engineering and thus began her journey into business development, which she continued to advance until joining PNI Corporation when the now-global sensor company was in its startup phase.
PNI has advanced it’s position under Becky’s leadership into a global player in the smart edge and IoT sectors. Becky and Ledge discuss the path new network technologies take to adoption, when your competitors are your friends, and how to form fruitful alliances that create a rising tide for all companies in the space.
Tech conference veterans Sarah Withee and Colin Dean joined Ledge in this episode to talk about their combined dozen years of organizing tech conferences, what they personally get out of it, and the value the events provide when done well. We talked through all the stakeholder groups, how to take good care of them, and how to think about budgeting, speakers, and more.
Colin and Sarah are two members of the Abstractions.io conference team in Pittsburgh coming up in August 2019 where over 2000 software pros of all types will convene for learning, community, and more. Tickets are still available so don’t miss it. And don’t miss this episode for evergreen advice on running great conferences when you get the itch to start your own.
Kirk Gray relishes his role as VP at McGraw-Hill Education. In this episode, Ledge talks to Kirk about his fascinating perspective on technology and education.
An EdTech veteran of 18 years, Gray has worked for a variety of startups before moving into engineering leadership. Having experienced the dawn of EdTech, Gray goes into detail about the early years and how the industry has evolved.
We hear how the rise of empathy-based technology promotes teachers getting the best out of their students, working with educators instead of against them. Kirk also talks through some of the difficulties of working in EdTech, specifically the ethical barriers surrounding data collection.
As CTO of ONIS Solutions, David Ramsey is at the forefront of the big data movement. With a passion for technology and nuanced view on the subject given his work in Africa, in this episode David shares how he expects data to change our lives in the future.
Citing industry examples such as food and transportation, David’s optimistic vision of the future imagines how data collection creates jobs and enables high net creativity.
Despite the hype surrounding virtual assistants like Alexa or Google Home, a fully digital home isn’t a reality quite yet. But can we prepare our homes for the future, to avoid tearing down walls later? How can we invest in home technology without worrying it will be obsolete in two years?
Ben Wiliams, Technical Director at SAV Digital Environments sat with Ledge to chat about the challenges of building future-resistant control systems and keeping them up and running under any circumstances.
Ben also talks about the next big thing in the software side of custom integration and smart buildings, as well as lessons learned from managing hardware engineering teams.
Software engineer or engineering leader? What’s the difference and where do you fit?
Corey Nichols began his career in the tech industry as a software engineer.
He anticipated working on “hands-on technical aspects of software engineering,” but instead, coordinated different teams and encouraged his developers to continue learning and improve the “quality of code” they wrote.
Nichols transitioned from being a software engineer to a Director of Engineering at SonoSim, helping grow the company from 20 to 50 employees.
Ledge sat down with Corey to find out what’s involved in a leadership of engineering role that differentiates it from the software engineering seat.
When Kent Dickson founded Yonomi just over five years ago, smart devices were still an obscure concept. But the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant helped change that, and now Yonomi is playing a major role in crafting cloud-based solutions for the smart homes of the future.
Yonomi's vision was to help make life in the new smart home environment more convenient for everyday people, who are not necessarily tech-oriented. Under Dickson’s guidance, Yonomi is helping to marry together all smart devices in a home, creating a coherent infrastructure, rather than a confusing mess!
This intriguing chat with Dickson sheds a lot of light on the challenges of the smart home niche, and provides real insight into what our homes may look like in the very near future.
As data science becomes increasingly important for business, hybrid science and engineering teams are a necessity, but managing these distinct types of experts for maximum collaboration is a compelling challenge. How can mixed teams maximize performance?
In this episode Ledge sits down with Wickus Martin, Director of Machine Learning Engine ering and Data Science at Dstillery, a custom audience solutions company that uses AI to find and target ideal customers.
Wickus discusses how sometimes organization shy away from conflict -- but it’s really effective if we put the time into the productive contention. Wickus also shares his personal experience moving from in-office management to fully remote.
Oliver Friedmann is the CTO and Co-founder of Ziggeo, an API for video recording and playback, that’s essentially like Stripe or Twilio for video. The service abstracts all of the work for developers to allow apps and websites to take advantage of video streaming and capture.
Ledge and Oliver chat about the engineering challenges he and his team overcame, both client side (think old browsers) and server side (think millions of users recording concurrently), as they developed their solution.
On the organizational, Oliver has made amazing use of a worldwide distributed team, largely sourced through online marketplaces. Oliver’s tips for remote, distributed team management provide excellent tactical guidance for work isolation and around-the-clock productivity.
Amir Rubin co-founded Paracosm in 2013 with a mission to “3Dify the world.”
Since then he’s led the company through a total conversion from fun, visionary consumer product to critical B2B enterprise solution. What started as an idea to 3D map the world for experiential AR turned into a technology and approach that saves enterprise customers weeks of work every day.
Ledge sits down with Amir to see what it was like emotionally to transition from a visionary 3D world mapper to getting measurements inside buildings for industrial purposes and how to grow in the CEO function when you come from an engineering background.
“We need to be able to talk to people. Talking to the computer is the easy part.” That’s Java developer advocate Trisha Gee at JetBrains.
Trisha speaks worldwide about career development for programmers, including soft skills, communication skills, and what it means to really progress your career as a developer.
In this inspiring episode, Ledge talks with Trisha about listening; asking questions; sharing information, and how those activities are what make us a senior developer, a VPE, or a CTO.
In this July 4th bonus episode, we at Gun.io would like to celebrate the spirit of independence shared by our professional freelancers with this short audio essay from our host, Ledge. Enjoy, and happy Independence Day to you and your loved ones.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Keith Nothacker, Founder and CEO of BACtrack, even in college knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. When he was looking for something -- anything -- to sell online, he decided it was crazy that the police could test anyone for their blood alcohol level, but consumers couldn’t test themselves. So he decided to solve that problem.
BACtrack pioneered the consumer market for breathalyzers, positioning the product as an affordable, consumer-friendly safety device. In 2004, BACtrack became the first company ever to receive U.S. Food & Drug Administration clearance to legally sell the devices to consumers for personal use.
Ledge sat down with Keith to share the story of his company, from design to prototypes, manufacturing to distribution, and into the age of the smartphone. As Keith says, “Hardware is hard,” but just like any other business you buckle down and make it happen.
Software and DevOps engineers spend a great deal of time in logs, analyzing what's happened, and trying to surmise why it's happened. APM software gets us part of the way there, but what about actually seeing what the user did to trigger that bug?
In this episode Ledge sits down with Doug Suvalle at Glassbox Digital to learn about their contributions to this solution set, and chat with him about how engineers can help enable the revenue functions who sit closest to business stakeholders.
How do you move 50TB per day to 15,000 global engineers? Eric Klinker knows.
He’s the Founder and CEO of Resilio, and former CEO of BitTorrent. Resilio is a vastly enhanced enterprise version of BitTorrent Sync - a completely P2P alternative to Dropbox.
As computing at the cloud is beginning to migrate back to the edge, some predictions say edge data growth is going to reach 50 times the current usage. Resilio is the technology designed to serve that market need.
Eric sits down with Ledge in this fascinating episode about the story of BitTorrent, which at one time accounted for 40% of all internet traffic. Now Resilio is advancing that story to enterprise data on the edge.
When you reach an executive position, you need to understand all of the functions of the business. That’s especially true when you grow out of a purely technical role. Your view needs to expand from the project context to the overall business context.
That’s been the experience of Cheada Lao, EVP of Operations at Allied Administrators, a leader in the benefits administration field. The firm’s primary objective is 5-star customer service, which from an operations standpoint touches internal and external software systems, data privacy, and even UX.
Cheada and Ledge discuss when and how to decide the work you should do in-house vs. using external partners, and how to attract and retain excellent staff when you don’t work in the latest and greatest startup.
If you’re shopping online for pretty much anything, there’s a very good chance the pages you’re looking at are being dynamically generated based on A/B testing and automation powered by RedPoint.
George Corugedo is the firm’s co-founder and CTO. In this episode George sits down with Ledge to discuss how his global engineering organization created industry leading decision engine performance of less than 50 milliseconds per decision and scales it using .Net Core and containers to more than 30 million real-time decisions per day.
Don’t miss George’s powerful lessons learned going from small company technical founder to global CTO.
If we’ve learned anything at the Frontier, it’s that interesting technology stories can be found anywhere… even in that parking ticket you got last month that you’re still cursing over. Ever wonder how they know where your car was parked and for how long? Ledge being a collector of parking tickets himself had to find out.
In this episode, Jim Suttles, IT Director at Republic Parking Systems shares some of the amazingly elegant software and hardware solutions they use to make sure you’re paying for parking. You’ll probably pay more attention to those signs after you listen to this episode.
Scaling an engineering organization is challenging enough when you’re colocated, and when your whole team is developers. What happens when you also introduce data science and 24/7 SRE? That’s three entirely different types of work. Now distribute those workers around the world and imagine the complexity.
Ledge sits down with Alex Newman, serial founder, engineer, and management thinker about how he and his co-founders at Intuition Machines think about and solve these problems. The key word? Evolution.
This episode is chock full of great value-driven techniques like blame-free process, accountability and autonomy, and ownership.
Communities are people who not only share common principles, but who also develop and share practices that help individuals in the group thrive. DevRel means building communities for technical audiences.
If you want to know about DevRel and community building, you need to know about Mary Thengvall and her host of curated, authored, and spoken content covering these critical topics.
Mary and Ledge talk authenticity, career paths, relationships, and much more in this deep dive episode.
APIs, microservices, connections to external systems, integration with legacy systems… the list of software complexities gets longer and longer.
In this episode Ledge is joined by global enterprise IT leader Dipanjan Choudhury. With almost 20 years of experience in software development, platform, and consulting leadership roles, we wanted to get his perspectives on risk mitigation so smaller companies can learn from the best practices of larger companies and prepare themselves for growth.
Dipanjan argues convincingly that as QA and Security shift left, so should Risk Management. Because the cost of addressing risks increases exponentially as you move right in the SDLC, pre-enterprise companies can benefit greatly by adopting this mindset, especially when they are capital-constrained.
When we recorded this interview Dipanjan was the Technical Director of CAST. Since that time he’s taken a role as Associate Director at ValueMomentum.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Greg Starling, a full stack e-commerce and mobility expert with broad experience in the CTO seat. Ledge and Greg talk through his advice for staying on the right side of Apple’s review processes, and how to stand out in the crowd to potentially earn yourself a mobility partnership spot, based on his experience at Monscierge.
We also discuss how to manage remote team members, going so far as to setup specific video terminals where each remote team member can join conversations with an always-on camera just like they are in the office. Because one of the hardest team configurations is hybrid, the mix of tools and management techniques is challenging to make it work.
At the time of recording, Greg was the CTO of Monscierge. He recently took a new role as Labs Lead for Tailwind.
John Isdell is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures. You may not know of Red Ventures by name, but you’re virtually guaranteed to have been on one of their sites like BankRate.com, Reviews.com, and CreditCards.com. They’re a digital portfolio company with a huge consumer web footprint, and with that footprint comes challenges of scale, legacy code, constant iteration, and evolving staffing needs.
Ledge chats with John about organizing large teams to tackle these challenges, how to hire to handle pretty much every technology, and how to prioritize your organization-wide backlog.
Most of us have engaged with, and even built, products and platforms that make heavy use of messaging. But how does anyone know if those messages convert into sales or other actionable metrics? In this episode I sit down with David Galante, SVP of Marketing and Product Management at Mobivity to talk about how their vast point of sale data system does just that, specifically after having acquired and integrated customer loyalty startup, Belly. Stick around for some solid advice from the product hot seat.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Management can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.
Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle tackles the challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams, to technical debt, all the way to succession planning. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.
In this episode Ledge sits down with the author to discuss key lessons from the book.
Ubiquitous platform technologies like Wordpress open up a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs in every conceivable sector, yet even user-friendly tools usually require implementation and customization by qualified developers. In this episode with talk with Gun.io client, Arian Mirzarafie Ahi, a biologist and e-learning entrepreneur, about the difficulties of finding a great developer as a non-technical founder. Arian talks through the challenges, and the approach he took to overcome them so he could focus on growing his content business.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Yoav Rubin is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI. Previous to that he was a Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM Research. He’s a published author and self described “software guy” with a lot of interesting perspectives on the state of the art in AI.
Yoav talks with Ledge about how AI, like other technologies, is being democratized through services like Azure AI such that any developer can take advantage of them. The Azure AI environment allows devs to design experiments, develop them, and move domain of AI from specialized experts to everyone.
Oksana Shmaliy, scientist turned technologist, currently leads IT Strategy and Architecture at Grange Insurance, where she led the DevOps transformation company-wide.
In this episode, Oksana and Ledge chat systems thinking, organizational scale, and how creative, multi-dimensional employees make the difference in high performance companies.
Oksana gets super-meta, showing us how fractal theory can help us understand complex human organization. Super-fun geeky stuff right here, and you do not want to miss out!
One of the most difficult transitions an organization can make is moving from “how much will that cost?” and “how long with that take?” to “how quickly can we deliver first value?”
That’s the essence of Agile transformation, so Ledge sat down with Jeff Despain, Sr. Director Engineering at CHG Healthcare to discuss the company’s relatively rapid and intensive transformation to Agile product teams -- a full 80-person org in just over 9 months.
Jeff shares lessons about change management, leadership, and customer-focused value.
Facebook and Google pioneered lookalike audience marketing for B2C. Serial entrepreneur, and engineer-turned AI marketer, Olin Hyde, started Leadcrunch to do the same for B2B marketers, a group of buyers who behave in totally different patterns than consumers.
Olin and Ledge discuss how engineers can learn about product-market fit for their ideas, and how SaaS subscription billing might not be the best fit for all businesses to unlock value-based billing. He makes a really convincing argument you won’t want to miss.
David “Gonzo” Gonzalez is the CEO and Co-founder of Ziff.ai, a deep learning as a service platform. Ziff’s goal: Reduce the complexity required to profit from AI in an enterprise setting.
In this episode, Gonzo and Ledge discuss how to answer the question, “How do I know as a business person if my business model can be enhanced as an AI?”
It comes down to prediction, forecasting, and two areas where the profits really lie: automation, and augmentation. In other words, find opportunities to help the “humans in the loop” be faster and more accurate, and you’ll win.
How do you make application changes when you have 120 million active monthly users? Ledge sat down for an amazingly useful chat with James Colgan, Microsoft’s Sr. Product Manager for Outlook Mobile to literally answer that question.
For the last few years he’s been working with the largest, most complicated, and most sophisticated organizations with one goal: super-happy users at super-massive scale.
You won’t want to miss how James walks Ledge through the exact process he and his team followed from zero to 120 million active users in just 4 years.
“How does your software development team measure performance?” -- that’s the question Dan Lines and Ori Keren set out to answer with Linear B. Ledge sits down to talk with the duo, each veteran software engineering leaders with global teams and several high profile exits.
While planning their solution, Dan and Ori reflected on their experiences working together, specifically targeting the incredible amount of time they spent pulling data and munging reports in order to measure and demonstrate the productivity of their teams.
They built their new company to tackle that problem head on, drawing together dozens of data sources into metrics designed to track three pillars: Quality and Value; Activity and Throughput; and Social and Teamwork -- the balance of which achieves a high performance team.
Liz Fong-Jones is a 15-year Site Reliability Engineer. She’s a former Google and current SRE and observability advocate for Honeycomb.io.
Liz evangelizes “Building Excellent Systems” that both look out for the people who use the system, and for the people who work on it.
In this fascinating episode, she talks with Ledge about wide ranging ethical issues in engineering, and about how it’s a business advantage to say you’re an ethical engineer.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Chris Overton is the VP of Cloud Engineering at open source leader, Elastic, a globally distributed company with engineers in more than 30 countries.
Chris and Ledge discuss how supporting remote work is an unparalleled competitive advantage that allows for hiring the very best people, regardless of location. When the entire world is your candidate pool, you’re going to be hard to beat, and commercially available technology now makes that easier than ever.
After a full career of remote work, Chris is a wealth of tactical tips including how precise and deliberate communication is job one, and how being a micro-manager is a death knell for your team. Bottom line: if you don’t want to empower and trust you’re going to fail.
Ravi Sahu is the founder and CEO of Strayos, a VC-backed computer vision and deep learning company that’s improving the mining industry by using 3D aerial intelligence to reduce costs, and to improve safety by providing highly accurate data.
In this episode Ledge and Ravi discuss the importance of creating a culture of customer empathy, and how that focus has allowed for better feedback and understanding from their clientele. Ravi also discusses how the Strayos internship program works to develop talented engineers, and shares a few specific tips on how to stay connected with your remote teams.
“Engineers want to win.” says Steve Prosser, VP of Software Development at Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the US, responsible for more than $20B in annual loan volume.
Ever worked at a company that tries to hide engineering from executives? Not this one.
Steve and Ledge discuss how their organization has gone all-in on engineer autonomy, where each and every dev manages their own communication needs all the way to direct executive team collaboration.
You’ll also be surprised to learn about the organization’s language choices, as well as their intense investment in learning and development to support them while building a robust recruiting pipeline.
Ever had to parse through an absolutely awful contract? How about a 60-page MSA from one of those big company procurement departments? One of the promises of AI is that the happy robots will start taking away the drudgery of tasks like parsing our 4-page IP transfer clause.
In this episode, Ledge sits down with Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer at LegalSifter. Spoiler alert: they already have AIs to do this! As a bonus Lars lays down one of the best machine learning analogies the I've heard.
How will Chinese companies like Huawei affect the future of cyber security? How does our relationship with China affect the open source community and the future of AI? These are big questions for big thinkers like Chris Short.
Chris runs the newsletter DevOpsish and is also a Principal Product Marketing Manager for Redhat. In this episode, Chris and Ledge discuss the fundamental differences between Chinese and US internet, the technological, legal, and contractual hoops companies jump through in order to tap into a Chinese market, and a breakdown on how Huawei could shape the tech landscape in years to come.
How can best practices from one industry change another industry? 25-year Technology Executive, Dave Ugan joins Ledge in the episode to deep dive into a real example: how he spent 6 years bringing UX, CX, and technology from the hospitality and attractions industry to the end-of-life (yes, funerals) industry.
Dave talks about the importance of iterating, of targeting open-minded customers early so you can turn them into evangelists, and how to take the critical feedback that helps your product leap forward. He also walks us through the critical pricing determinations that helped fuel growth.
Unplanned work blows up estimates, kills team morale, and drives down productivity, which makes it no surprise that the best agile engineering leaders target operations improvements as a core value. Today’s guest Shawn Kuenzler takes that mission even deeper.
Scaling engineering teams is what Shawn does, and he joins Ledge to discuss balancing efficiency with empathy for customers and team members, a concept and goal state he blends into what he calls "Frictionless Development.”
When we recorded this episode, Shawn was the Director of Engineering at Zen Planner. He’s since gone on to co-found Manatee, where he serves as the company’s CTO.
You’re one of the largest exercise brands in the world. How do you get your DevOps in shape? Ledge sits down with Bob Chen, Senior Director of Technical Operations at Beachbody to chat DevOps, deployment, working with multiple distributed teams, and knocking off technical debt.
See it turns out software teams often want to do their own thing… until they don’t. A good Ops team knows how to serve them, support them, and also give them room to set their own standards when needed. As Bob reminds us, “There’s always room for improvement!”
Software quality is like integrity - it’s doing the right thing even if no one is watching. That’s according to Merlin Quintin, Director QA Engineering at Redbox.
Merlin joins Ledge in this episode to discuss her unique approaches to engineering leadership as a veteran team member at a disruptive media company. Merlin says engineering is about who you are as a person, working together with other people, to make a difference.
This approach to leadership has guided Merlin Quintin through her time at RedBox and beyond. In this episode Ledge and Merlin discuss approaching leadership as an art, how to maintain emotional intelligence under times of stress, and how her emphasis on integrity and quality has shaped her career as an engineering leader.
Is recruiting engineering talent similar to courting professional athletes? That’s been our experience at Gun.io, and Steve Bayette agrees.
After traveling the world as a digital nomad, and successfully navigating two big-name exits, Steve now advises startups on how to hire world-class engineers and build industry-leading products. He’s also an investor in early stage technology and product companies.
In this episode, Ledge and Steve talk about how to make yourself indispensable in your company, and how to make sure you’re solving the problem you were really hired to solve. Hint: it’s probably not about the code.
No stranger to screens big (very big) and small, David Shapendonk was the Direct of Technical Ops for IMAX before flexing his entrepreneurial muscles.
He's now the CTO of Maestro Games, a startup helping to build technologies that incorporate music therapy with VR gaming to help people with anxiety, PTSD, autism, and other stress-related ailments.
In this episode, David and Ledge chat about the differences in scaling between small and large organizations, having a F.A.I.L. mindset (first attempt in learning), and utilizing a “trust and verify” approach to technical hiring.
You'll hear a lot of stories on The Frontier about starting, growing, and enhancing engineering teams. In this episode, Philipp Svehla, helps us explore the other side of the coin: bringing a team to a close.
At the time of recording, his company had been acquired by a larger firm that decided to wind down the engineering office he oversaw while consolidating overseas. Philipp had to shepherd the difficult work of rallying a product team to deliver their final project before being let go. It's a story heavy in human empathy, honest change management, and encouragement during times of adversity.
Philipp is now an engineering manager at Workday and recently reported to Ledge that most of his previous team has successfully landed in new and exciting roles.
As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, sometimes the number of new questions can seem to grow more quickly than the number of answers. In this episode Ledge talks to Leon Thomas, CEO of Jelecos, about their AWS services practice, using it as a lens into the changing world of cloud, secops, compliance, and more.
One interesting question: does it make sense to focus on one public cloud provider? Or is it more prudent to spread your business around? Doing so might trade one type of risk -- vendor lock-in -- for another -- overhead and complexity in staffing.
Multi-cloud or not, the choice of tools continues to grow, with all the cultural and people implications you'd expect. Leon helps us separate the signal from the noise.
What exactly is "technical evangelism?" At Gitlab, it's sharing opinions on what's going on in the community as technologists -- helping each other to collectively move forward to build better, ship better, and operationalize better so software is more responsive to customer needs. That's according to Ledge's guest, Priyanka Sharma.
The great thing about evangelists? They have opinions, and they can give us the historical context necessary to make sense of the rapid pace of change in our industry.
In this episode, Priyanka shares her thoughts on overtooling, how to handle the operations burdens of cloud and microservices efforts, and how to adjust process components for scale. Then she jumps into how to deal with media overload when you have a job that requires you to be up to date on tech trends.
You might have heard of the "Iron Triangle" of software development: Cost, Quality, and Speed. You can only choose two. How about the "Iron Triangle" of engineering leadership?
No, it's not a new Game of Thrones episode, but it is an extremely useful tool for implementing leadership across your organization. In this version you choose amongst "Do, Lead, and Strategize".
In this episode Ledge talks with Engineering Director Colin Henry about how to prioritize those roles for your team members and yourself so you can together build a stronger operation. Ledge and Colin also talk about the the importance of KPIs to measure what is truly valuable to your team and what's in store for the future of remote work.
What if digital and marketing teams could really launch amazing web apps without needing developers? That's the promise of low-code and no-code platforms. The interesting paradox is the extensive engineering required to create and maintain them. That's what makes this work so interesting: freeing developers to work on challenging problems while enabling others to achieve more powerful results.
Alex Howard is the lead engineer behind that process at Brandcast, and in this episode Ledge and Alex discuss the engineering challenges of simplifying (and democratizing) web development, balancing your workflow as engineer, and not painting yourself into a technical debt corner with features when you're building really complex, and innovative tools.
Embracing technology to make the world a better place; that's a common theme with this podcast. Kevon Saber’s story continues to weave that fabric.
Kevon started his tech career developing mobile games, later making a personal pivot to focus more on the cross-section of business and people.
After completing his MBA at Stanford, he went on to start multiple companies, ultimately landing as the CEO of GoCheck Kids, a mobile app that helps to detect early vision disease in children.
In this episode, Kevon and Ledge discuss the importance of a people-first mentality, how to grow faster by learning faster, and how he instilled an effective Agile stragey across the entire company to take GoCheck Kids to the next level.
It only takes a few minutes of talking to Ravi Lachhmann before you realize, "This dude seriously loves engineering." That personality serves him well as a Technical Evangelist at Cisco company AppDynamics. Ravi's perspectives on production outages, operating what you build, and "Netflixian" organizational design all come back to one root idea: keep learning, and keep growing. In this episode Ravi and Ledge talk engineering flavors, purpose-built tools, customer empathy, and much more.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Imagine this: you get a call for a CTO job. The company has never had a CTO. It's a global company with boots on the ground in every country and all 50 states. It gathers scientific data in droves that very well might save the planet. What would you do next? Sherry Hammons knows the answer. She's the CTO for The Nature Conservancy and that's her story. In this episode Ledge talks to Sherri about technology leadership, coming to terms with managing and leading when you like being an engineer, and how to keep your team emotionally safe so they perform better under pressure. Sherri's career path has taken her from professional musician, to solo coder, through multiple M&As, to trailblazing global CTO. Her insights and and experience will leave you energize and inspired.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Tyler Foster is the Vice President of Engineering for Sentient Technologies. As both a senior individual contributor and executive, Tyler has spent more than 18 years delivering technical solutions to the worlds hardest problems.
Tyler’s past-experience includes leading firmware and control system development for subglacial lake exploration ROVs deployed in Antarctica with the MSLED / Wissard project, front-end platform architecture and service design at Apollo Group, one of the world’s largest private education companies, and distributed systems deployed by many Fortune 500 companies to solve their most complex data problems at Cloudera. Most recently Tyler led a cloud infrastructure startup with operations in the US, UK, and Asia.
Dan Morgan is a lifelong Chicagoan, with nearly 20 years of experience as a developer and manager. He’s worked across multiple industries including entertainment, paper products, transportation logistics, and health care. Technology is Dan's passion: he worked for five years on research data science with the University of Chicago, and currently serves as VP of Software Engineering & Development at Unitas Global where his team works to simplify the management of hybrid cloud environments. In his spare time, Dan is an active volunteer and board member with Ravenswood Community Services which helps secure food for families and individuals in northern Chicago.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Ledge chats with Ryan Burgess, Software Engineering Manager at Netflix, about leading their Acquisition UI team optimizing the signup and login processes for one of highest usage apps on the planet. They discuss the challenges of coordinating among engineering teams at massive scale, working on technologies that span a multitude of different platforms, and how Netflix incorporates A/B testing at the core of everything they do while delivering your weekend video binge.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ahmad Nassri is a force in the open source world. Any given day you can find him leading advisory groups at the Node.js Foundation, kicking off OSS conferences, or masterminding technology communities like TechMasters.
You might be surprised to know he's also an architectural lead at one of the world's largest telco companies. Wait...How does love of open source fit into the legacy corporate world? Ahmad and Ledge tackle the grey areas between software engineeing skills, the people factors of hiring, and open source as a place to grow and professionally develop whether or not your day job contributes to the space.
Burke Holland is a Nashville-based Developer Advocate for Microsoft. He's one of the rare people who's had a developer advocate position since way back in 2011, so I asked him about his path to what we now have started calling Dev Rel.
In this episode Burke answers questions like what is a developer advocate? What does a developer advocate do? And even how to become one. We also talked about finding your own authentic writing voice and how to grow your advocacy platform through writing.
Finally, I asked Burke to run me through some of the most exciting features of Microsoft Azure that every developer should be aware of including the VS Code IDE, Azure Cognitive Services, and Cosmos DB.
I spoke to Tyler Shambora in late 2018. At the time of this recording he was the Directory of Technology at BVA. He recently founder Pack Digital, an e-commerce agency focused on innovation and conversion.
Tyler's role at BVA ecompassed a mixed bag of workflow, devops, standards, and automation. While attempting personal study in those areas, he realized that virtually no one talks about how to scale devops, delivery, and standards for high-growth agencies. "How we scaled" articles seem to always talk about product companies, but what about agencies, professional services, and dev shops who do the same thing day in and day out but for different emphemeral clients?
How in the world do you scale build and deploy pipelines in that scenario? Tyler and I chat onboarding, training, and just how far technical leaders can take the plug-and-play concept with devs when the only thing team members have in common is that they're all in the same building working on different client projects.
Nick Lumsden, COO of Online Tech, joined me in late 2018 to chat "digital transformation" or as I put it, "Hey, what's exciting between legacy and bleeding edge?" It turns out companies can make a pretty big mess when they throw all of their workloads on the cloud without a decent plan. The technology is the easy part. Remember when we cared so much about our servers that we named them? Those days are gone. In the CI/CD world we face a totally different paradigm. What used to be build, deploy, maintain is now build, deploy, destroy. The secret sauce of digital transformation is the total plan to bring along not just the bleeding edge, but also the legacy tribal knowledge that came before.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The fourth book in the Architecture of Open Source Applications series is called "500 Lines or Less." The book focuses on the design decisions that developers make in the small when they are building something new. Marina Samuel, Staff Software Engineer at Mozilla, is one of the authors featured in the book, for which she wrote a 500-line simple neural network for OCR. I spoke with Marina about her early career at Mozilla, her work on the Firefox Browser, notably on privacy initiatives, and about how to get involved as a first time contributor to open source.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jason Lengstorf runs developer relations at Gatsby, a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps.
By addressing the problem of app launch from the perspective of progressive disclosure of complexity, Gatsby's entire ethos is designed around shipping fast React components generated from and requiring the lowest possible config overhead - in other words, dig deep into the config if you like, but only if and when you want to.
Jason and I talk about keeping the open source community first and foremost in their mission, and the critical seat that's being filled by the dev rel community as the role and monetization of open source software heats up.
"Manager Voltron" Lara Hogan knows some things about high performing engineering teams.
Following roles as Engineering Director at Etsy and VPE at Kickstarter, she founded Wherewithall to run workshops, trainings, and coaching on delivering great feedback, setting clear expectations, and balancing mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring -- all critical skills for anyone rising through the engineering ranks
In this episode I talk with Lara about the suprisingly human emotions that crop up during management practice, and how to know if you really want that promotion from developer to manager.
Innovative shopping experiences drive e-commerce revenues by turning shoppers into buyers. In this episode I talk with Andrew Guldman, VP of Product Engineering and R&D at Fluid. Andrew and his team have innovated the Fluid Configure product all the way from Flash and Flex to React and Node. Their metadata and decision engine tackles the most complex of product configurators for the likes of Oakley, Fender, and Louis Vuitton. Andrew walks me through the importance of T-shaped skills and avoiding the hero pattern while growing an international team.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
CTO of Labdoor, Helton Souza, has stories to tell. Stories about moving to America to learn English, about selling pigs (yes, pigs) online, about pitching for Startup America, and ending up in Silicon Valley. He's also got insights about taking scientific lab data and making it consumer-readable, about saving 46% on infrastructure costs with smart cloud moves, and about countless hours around a kitchen table coding like mad men in an Airbnb in Milan. At the end of this episode I could see the movie reel in my head. I think you will, too, as we discuss love of project, freedom of technology choice, and the human behavioral hacking required to motivate a team.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
You might not recognize the name Kevin Nether, but chances are you've watched at least one video by Kevin The Tech Ninja. If you haven't, fire up your YouTube app.
A self-described "guy who's just always loved technology," Kevin's videos have won acclaim and following for his creative, down-to-earth unboxings, product reviews, and the occasional rant. In this episode I talk to Kevin about being a creator, letting go in order to scale yourself, and the hard work of creating content you can be proud of in any discipline.
David Feinman is the CEO of Viral Ideas Marketing. We met him in his role as one of the Community Managers of Online Geniuses, a huge internet marketing community known for their industry leader AMAs.
In this episode David and I compare notes about customer experience and UX as leads become trials and users become evangelists. Marketing, technology, and product SMEs speak different languages, but what we do is all part of the same continuum.
Emotionally engaging channels like video drive the first visits and uses. That's where product UX picks up to anchor adoption and retention. A comprehensive view of the customer experience from start to finish is critical for B2C and B2B software companies alike.
Boston Code Viking, Steff Kelsey started as engineer #3 at Notarize. This episode was recorded while he was their VP of Engineering, leading a team of 40. He's now the VPE of Appcues.
Scaling an engineering org is challenging enough on it's own, but what about doing that in a totally new market segment?
That's what Notarize did as it moved the Notary Public process to a video-driven SaaS interaction; nobody even new that was a thing until they did it.
Steff and I talk tooling, automation, ownership, and more with a special dive into building a culture where learning and problem ownership is a managerial right of passage.
A veteran of Microsoft, Groupon, and now Mode Analytics, Engineering Leader, Ushashi Chakraborty has gotten used to hearing the most abnormal feedback: "I love coming to your meetings!"
She realized after some reflection that her extensive improv experience through Chicago's famed Second City Conservatory, had instilled in her skills and habits that were just as useful for running engineering meetings as they were on stage.
In this episode she recaps a presentation she made at the 2018 NY Nasdaq CTO Summit, entitled "Running Engineering Meetings Using Improv Skills."
Practitioners turned tech founders give us a unique view into the customer discovery process because they usually start their companies in order to solve a problem they've experienced themselves. Such is the case for attorney turned startup founder Alex Nordholm, CEO of DealWIP, a legal tech startup whose product is a SaaS due diligence project management and workflow tool for corporate attorneys, investment bankers, accountants, and other transaction advisors. In this episode I speak with Alex about how he and his team fully integrate engineering into the product development cycle, bringing in engineers early, sharing the "Why" behind feature requests, and not surprisingly getting much better product market fit as a result.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Google Staff Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower is tech community famous for his down-to-earth and refreshingly funny keynotes. In this episode we talk about putting people first and tools second on the path to engaging and authentic engineering practice.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Sina Golshany is the Director of Technology at Fabricated Extrusion Company. He previously spent 8 years at Boeing in various aerospace engineering roles.
Sina established and manages the computational engineering function responsible for supporting the custom extrusion business and product design needs of customers in various industries including, heavy machinery, aerospace, automotive, medical devices and more.
Over the course of his career, he's developed a unique framework for innovation. In this episode I invited him to share the four pillars of his system.
In it's purest form, the microservices architectural pattern tells us to "dream small" while designing services, which is all well and good, but how small is still useful?
Pragmatic microservice design helps draw some useful boundaries, and keeps our eyes on shipping product.
In this episode we talk to Director of Engineering Daniel Knight about breaking down business problems into known objectives in the business and technical domain, and taking the focus off trying to solve problems we don't yet understand.
In that way, product teams can focus on the WHAT while engineering teams can focus on the HOW. It's all about balance.
Business and technology leaders face consistent pressure to bring products to market faster. Never in the last quarter century has the pace of change, the quantity of available tools, and the raw compute power been greater. In this episode, slashBlue CEO Tom Dodds joins me to talk about how to build technology that's aligned with the people, process, and purpose of the organization. Does it help people do their jobs better? Is it impacting the company positively? Is it helping the company with their lasting purpose? The answers to these questions contribute to a holistic view of technology implementation.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When we talk about the software development lifecycle, we often focus on the product and engineering functions, potentially leaving out a critical team: Sales, and specifically Sales Engineers. To add a little color to this role, we invited Chris Goodman, Director of Integrations and Alliances from SentinelOne. Chris gives a different look at customer empathy - one that's directly tasked with helping customers figure out the problems they really have, and how to solve them. At the end of the episode he shares a succint and powerful approach to help engineers stand out and secure coveted roles.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) is a global leader in the B2B Travel Management space. The Hotels division within CWT was rebranded as RoomIt in the summer of 2017. My guest in this episode, Alex Behrens, was brought in as Director of Engineering to lead that effort.
It's no small feat to build an entirely new tech startup inside of a legacy IT organization, and I talk in detail with Alex about introducing Agile, building internal partnerships, and helping teams across the enterprise innovate faster while still honoring the original thinking that served the company well for many years before this effort.
There's a difference between working for a startup, founding a startup, working freelance, and working as a consultant for a company on payroll. It all comes down to the risk profile you are willing and able to tolerate, and that is itself a function of the stage of life you're in and other variables. In this episode I sit down with Mong Truong who has worn all of those hats. We talk about the differences, and his current role consulting for large corporate clients as Technical Director of Primitive Logic where he tackles large projects, legacy code, and change management, just to name a few.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When you hear "mainframe" I bet you think "old school," or "dinosaur," or at the very least "legacy." After this episode with Compuware's Tim Ceradsky, you might change your mind. With hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL driving the vast majority of transaction processing in the US economy, mainframes aren't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, with COBOL programmers retiring en masse over the next decade, colleges and codes schools are picking up on the massive demand. And get this -- Compuware's tools allow the use of modern CI/CD tools, IDEs, and code visualizations that make a good case to banish the green screen monochrome horror stories you might imagine. Stick around for the fascinating tale of the COBOL Renaissance.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When it comes to Quality Assurance, the hot buzz words are "automation" and "moving left." It's true that automated testing beats manual, but throwing a bunch of automated tests on your UI just to increase your test coverage isn't productive.
A holistic QA approach means everyone from product to engineering to business stakeholders is on board.
In this episode we speak to QA leader David Morgan about building a quality-focused organization from scratch, changing process and culture, and implementing behavior-driven development that empowers stakeholders to speak and share a common language of software quality.
There comes a time in almost every engineer's career where they may need to communicate with a customer, train a teammate, pitch a project, or prove they are credible to a potential client.
Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer of Mint.com where she launched v1 of the ubiquitous personal finance platform. She went on to Found Femgineer, an education firm that trains technologists on presentation, public speaking, and communication skills.
In this episode I sit down with Poornima to hear tips and tricks that make her students successful.
https://femgineer.com/present-book/
https://femgineer.com/confident-communicator-course/
Alan Spadoni is the Director of Engineering at Buildout. He's was an engineering leader at Groupon for six years prior to his current post. Alan shares some awesome insights on making your engineering culture attractive from a recruiting perspective in a highly constrained hiring environment, especially when you're recruiting for talent on technologies that are no longer at the peak of their hype cycle. Two key areas: make sure candidates have a great experience and make sure your interview process is highly focused on problems that are relevant to the work.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
One of most promising areas for artificial intelligence research rests at the intersection of biology and medicine. That's where we found Robert Fratila, CTO and Co-founder of Aifred Health. He and his team won an XPRIZE at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. He's worked on brain-state classifiers, computer vision packages for autonomous underwater vehicles, and predictive models for cancer patients, just to name a few. In this episode we dig into deep learning, neural networks, and hype-busting truths about the current limits of AI.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Mike Talbot is the CTO of Veracity Consulting where he leads their data and emerging technologies practices.
He writes and advises on distributed ledger technology for government and business clients and he's the author of "A Brief Description of Blockchain," which aims to break this hot topic into layman's terms for business decision makers.
In this episode we delve into finance, smart contracts, risk, regulation, asset tracking, supply chain, and more.
Rusty Wilson started his career as a signals intelligence analyst in the US Army where, while deployed in Korea, he cut his algorithmic teeth on Perl scripts that ended up slicing days of processing time from his intelligence data processing before "Big Data" was even a catch phrase.
Rusty is a Certified Ethical Hacker, and a Hacking Forensic Investigator, among 10 other professional certifications. He's carried the titles CIO, CTO, and VP of Technology.
All the while he pursued his passion for providing strategic career development coaching for IT and engineering professionals, wisdom he shares with us in this episode.
Simon Reggiani is a multi-platform native and hybrid mobile developer with over a decade of experience launching apps on iOS and Android using Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, Swift, and React Native. Simon shares his opinions and insights based on his experience at Slack and other high-growth startups. He talks about when businesses should go native vs. hybrid, and how developers can make the leap from web app to mobile app development.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Jim Nasr is Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Synchrogenix where he spearheads strategy and implementation of emerging technologies such as large scale blockchain and machine learning in healthcare and the life sciences. He previously served as Chief Software Architect for the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In this episode Jim walks us through the critical requirements of data interoperability and how designing for machine to machine data transfer is the most critical of architectural decisions.
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Steve Peak is the founder and CEO of Asyncy, an ambitious foray into the brave new world of DevOps automation, orchestration, and choreography. An accomplished software engineer himself, Steve's contributions to the development toolchain includes other efforts like Codecov.io, which he founded in 2015. The future of application choreography in the cloud era requires new ways of thinking about abstraction, and Asyncy's passionate founder and team are charting new paths in this exciting field.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Travis Scheponik is a Master Software Engineer, currently with Capital One. His previous decade of experience has included work in finance, government, education, and a series of multi-industry startups. His areas of expertise include legacy system conversion, cybersecurity, and application performance, as well as recent projects in service discovery, a topic we delve into in detail in this episode.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
As blockchain technologies proliferate, one of the most challenging aspects for business users and developers alike is accessibility and user experience. In this episode, Ledge chats with Joel Neidig, CEO and Co-founder of SIMBA Chain, a robust developer framework and API. Originally developed through a DARPA grant, SIMBA Chain enables anyone to quickly create blockchain distributed applications for iOS, Android, and the web.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Ledge sits down with Laurel Farrer, a remote work strategist and consultant, to chat about what it takes to strengthen virtual communication, streamline digital processes, and develop long-distance management strategies necessary for remote teams to work.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Roland Cooper is a 10-year technical operations and infrastructure expert with broad experience in fintech, e-commerce, and B2C. In this interview Roland talks to us about the tensions between on-prem and cloud deployment. On the bleeding edge of software development we often forget the vast majority of technical infrastructure still resides on-prem and in private data centers. Roland walks us through the current thinking around PCI compliance regulations, guidelines, and interpretations of critical importance to any companies collecting and processing payment card transactions.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Our guest this episode is Chris Venturini. Chris is a healthcare technologist in the venture technology space with broad expertise in platform development and domain-driven design. In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into Chris's perspectives on disruptive healthcare technologies and then dial in on risk mitigation through domain-driven design in the full software development lifecycle.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Ledge sits down with Rahul Garg, SVP Engineering & Product Management at Pypestream, to share tricks of the trade when it comes to orienting engineers around a product vision, teaching risk management, and the art of diplomacy between product and engineering teams.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Today we're joined by Zach Dexter, CTO of LedgerX, to chat about Bitcoin, First Principles Thinking, and throwing away everything you know about a market in order to disrupt it.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
We talk with Christine Spang of Nylas about building a business with engineers, for engineers, using a modern API platform.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
We talk with Josh Hendler of Purpose about the unique challenges of building technology for organizations and campaigns in modern election cycles.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
We talk with Kelly Stevens of OneSpace about the importance of data-driven decision-making, especially in today's modern architectures.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
Expert discussion and advice with Debbie Madden (CEO | Stride Consulting) and Jason Ables (Team Coach and Creative Scientist | Ethode) on the important considerations in dealing with legacy code, refactoring, re-writing or removing old code completely.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.
John Fitch from Animal Ventures talks with us about how Blockchain is driving innovation in categories well beyond cryptocurrency.
If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here. We promise to make you laugh at least once.
Gun.io is only freelancing service that engineers actually use to hire other engineers. Interested in getting in touch? Meet us here.