From humble beginnings working on a spreadsheet application to grappling with the rapid transformations in the developer industry, Lilly Chen's journey through the software realm has been nothing short of fascinating. With experiences ranging from the challenges of being a first-time manager to the profound influence of mentors who "lifted as they climbed," Lilly offers a unique perspective on growth, resilience, and paving the way for others. Lilly placed the start of her journey...
Sep 05, 2023•49 min•Season 6Ep. 36
Stepping into the tech world is one thing, but embracing it with a passion for teaching and enhancing the way technology is learned represents a calling of a different order. Felienne Hermans' life has been a vibrant blend of software development, advocating for better ways of teaching coding and recognizing the importance of guiding the young generation into the programming world. Her journey from receiving her first computer and experiencing unique educational opportunities to her innovat...
Aug 29, 2023•52 min•Season 6Ep. 35
In the ever-evolving realm of software development and testing, it's rare to encounter someone with as vast and varied an experience as Steve Upton. From his early foray into quality assurance to his insights on teamwork and agile methodologies, Steve's journey offers a lens into the nuanced world of development from a quality-first perspective. Steve placed the start of his journey coding in YABASIC on a PS2 and creating the infamous program "Insultor." Fast forward a few ye...
Aug 22, 2023•49 min•Season 6Ep. 34
The realm of software development is as vast as it is intricate. For Cory O'Daniel, it's been a journey marked by coding and understanding the deeper nuances of being a software developer. Cory took a detour, discovering that there's more to the world of tech than just writing code – there's a profound beauty in problem-solving, connecting with peers, and carving out personal space in a rapidly evolving remote work landscape. Cory placed the start of his journey in high schoo...
Aug 15, 2023•50 min•Season 6Ep. 33
Unfolding the story of a truly diverse career trajectory, Mirjam Aulbach joins us to share her captivating journey from pursuing an accounting career and dog training to evolving into a full-fledged software developer. Mirjam's tale isn't just about career changes; it's about her lifelong passion for coding and how she kept it alive while juggling multiple roles in different domains, highlighting the power of persistence and dedication in shaping one's career. In this episode...
Aug 08, 2023•48 min•Season 6Ep. 32
Nnenna Ndukwe is a seasoned software developer who profoundly understands the essence of community and its value in shaping one's career journey. In a world often dictated by individual prowess, Nnenna's story is a testament to the power of shared wisdom and the transformative capacity of communal learning in the tech industry. With a passion for continuous growth and a heart to impact others, her story reverberates the truth that one's journey can indeed inspire the journeys of m...
Aug 01, 2023•51 min•Season 6Ep. 31
Phil Alves, founder of DevSquad and LiveStats, is a software entrepreneur driven by building impactful solutions. From his humble beginnings, coding at age 12, to becoming a leader of development teams, his path has been marked by curiosity, determination, and a desire to improve developers' lives. Phil placed the start of his journey with Flash and ActionScript and then with PHP, with which he created his first business at the age of 16. We then discussed learning in the open, growing and ...
Jul 25, 2023•47 min•Season 6Ep. 30
Join us in this enlightening conversation with Chris Zimmerman, the co-founder of Sucker Punch Productions, the powerhouse behind globally successful games like Infamous and Ghost of Tsushima. Chris started his journey as a software developer and evolved into a trailblazer in the gaming industry, showing the same resilience and innovation in his career as the characters in his games do. Chris placed the start of his journey in the mid-70s, programming games for an Apple II computer. During child...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 29
Chelsea Troy, an inquisitive software engineer, data scientist, and respected educator, passionately shares her story, from the impactful challenges she faced in the nascent stage of her journey to her growth into a successful developer and teacher. Chelsea found her love for software development and data science in a winding path full of determination and resilience. Her inspiring story is a testament to her belief in the importance of accessible education and the potential that can be unleashe...
Jul 11, 2023•55 min•Season 6Ep. 28
Sev placed the start of her journey back in China as a child passionate about maths and logic. She then described how she struggled to find her way through education after losing her hearing. She talked about how she could go to the USA and study Information Technology at Gallaudet University. She then spoke about the Microsoft Explorer Program, which allowed her to dip her toes into software development and realize she was unprepared for more. We discussed how she enrolled in a Computer Science...
Jul 04, 2023•56 min•Season 6Ep. 26
Larysa placed the start of her journey in the country she was born in, the Soviet Union, with her discovery of those books filled with 0s and 1s that she could not understand. Fast forward a few years, and she is hooked by Maths and Computer Science and doesn't want to do anything else. After her Master's degree in Odessa, she moved to Germany and studied again. From then on, we talked about how she pursued a Ph.D., pivoted on the problem she was tackling, and discovered a new field ML...
Jun 27, 2023•50 min•Season 6Ep. 26
From a trainee reconversion program in the early 80s, Lisa took us on a fantastic testing journey. From discovering Agile before its time, living through highly collaborative Waterfall projects, to embracing XP and being one of the first to challenge the absence of "Testers" in the first installments of the method. Lisa spoke of how she came to write her first book, working with legends of our industry and kept being fascinated by quality. Here are the links from the show https://www.t...
Jun 20, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 25
Emmanuel placed the start his journey in the 80s in a computer club. He described how he learned GW-BASIC and became hooked. He told about his love for music and how his parents encouraged him to pursue "real studies." He explained how he went to the USA to study Computer Science, music, and Japanese... and became a theater composer. He discussed his first job as a programmer and being bored (and bad at it) until he discovered eXtremeProgramming. He talked about learning TDD, exploring...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 24
Krisztina placed the start of her journey by writing a few lines of PHP on a website and being hooked. But then we rolled back to hear about her life behind the iron curtain in her home country of Romania. We discussed her first career as a mechanical engineer and how this led her to write her first BASIC lines of code, move to Germany, and start from scratch. We talked about her reconversion and not finding jobs. We spoke about the job she finally found and how this opened her to a world of pos...
Jun 06, 2023•52 min•Season 6Ep. 23
Tomas placed the start of his journey in high school, where he was part of a group of friends interested in computers. His interest in "understanding what's under the hood" ignited there. He explained how working in the open, publishing small open-source components got him to "professional development" alongside his university studies. Then we talked about how his interest in transpiling C# to Javascript (before transpiling to JS was cool) led him to F#, which led him to...
May 30, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 22
Marjorie placed the start of her journey during her work as an agronomist when she wrote her first R lines of code. She explained how her childhood in southern France brought her to study plants, create a hydroponic startup, work on risk and project management, and slowly become interested in web development. We spoke of her Bootcamp and how she found her first job. We discussed eXtreme-Programming and Mob-Programming, and what it's like to be a newbie in a teaching environment. Here are th...
May 23, 2023•46 min•Season 6Ep. 21
Mathias placed the start of his journey with both hands on a TRS-80 computer and no other games to play than a compiler and the BASIC language. But fast forward a few years, we spoke about his music studies, his work creating music for ads and movies, and how programming came back as a hobby, which finally took precedence. We then jumped with both feet into languages and modeling. We spent the rest of the interview talking about interactions and how models serve us programmers and help our domai...
May 16, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 20
Diana placed the start of her journey with her grandmother and maths, and having the feeling that she loved the wrong things. We discussed how she discovered computers but didn't embrace them for a long time. Diana explained how she wanted to become a writer, moved to Montana, and opened a bookshop. We talked about isolation and rediscovering programming, online gaming, and communities and how she finally went all-in, moved to Austin, TX, and said "YES" to everything. We saw how s...
May 09, 2023•53 min•Season 6Ep. 19
Aida wanted to place the start of her journey three years ago when she started being a developer at ThoughtWorks. But then she went back more than a decade and started talking about her programming classes at university and how her first job was a manual QA Engineer job. Ensued a learning journey, trying to get into QA automation, thinking about going "back" to software development, and finding new problems to solve instead, like being the only engineer at a startup, building a QA team...
May 02, 2023•49 min•Season 6Ep. 18
Bobbi placed the start of her journey with the absence of a gaming console and the presence of a family computer instead. She spoke about exploring and solving minor problems. But also about how music was her world as a teenager, she talked about ADHD/ADD and how her love for music brought her to a rabbi school in Israel. She explained how she learned to learn out loud, hacked her disability, and used this to her advantage. We finally spoke about the accident, which cost her a hand and designing...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 17
Claude placed the start of his journey in the early days of the internet, learning HTML for the sake of Beanie Babies. He then described how this triggered his curiosity and ignited a never-ending passion. We talked about his first job and how his coworkers helped him navigate his unknown unknowns. How communities and relationships helped him evolve and grow. We then jumped into management and how he first dipped his toes into it for the wrong reasons, became a leader, and finally got the positi...
Apr 18, 2023•51 min•Season 6Ep. 16
Limor placed the start of her journey in her early childhood, doing a lot of maths and playing with computers. As a brilliant student during high school, she could enroll in enrichment classes and dip her does into computer science, which took us to do her military service in the IDF's Intelligence Corps Technological Unit 81. We talked about her experience as a QA engineer there and how she discovered this field first-hand. We then discussed how she returned to university to study computer...
Apr 11, 2023•50 min•Season 6Ep. 15
Brandon placed the start of his journey with his grandmother in computer expos in the 90s. But before coming to programming, his tale took a long detour, made of a search for purpose, social recognition, and his identity. We spoke of a pattern interrupt in the form of a year teaching English at the other end of the planet and how Brandon finally came to enroll in a Bootcamp. We finished this great discussion on learning, teaching, and communities. Here are the links from the show https://www.twi...
Apr 04, 2023•49 min•Season 6Ep. 14
Bekah started with a poignant story of how the birth of her 4th child was a traumatic event that threw her into depression, PTSD, and questioning her place in the world. We then talked about her discovery of the FreeCodeCamp, and how she ended up saying, "I'm done" with her first career. We then discussed the role of communities in finding her first job and how COVID led to the creation of Virtual Coffee. We spoke extensively about Virtual Coffee and what makes it the inclusive pl...
Mar 28, 2023•50 min•Season 6Ep. 13
Matthew placed the start of his journey as a kid, introduced to the world of Nerds by his brother-in-law. Fast forward a few years, Matt spent the better time of his homeschooling on IRC, building stuff. But when the time came to go to college, he avoided anything tech related. He described a few pivotal points that led him to finally embrace software development and have the blast of his life. We talked about his first jobs and how he entered the world of Video and never left. We finished talki...
Mar 21, 2023•54 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Meshi placed the start her journey after high school when she did her mandatory military service in unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Forces. She described how she learned cyber systems and cyber-analysis, became an officer and learned leadership early on. We then discussed how she wanted to explore, become a programmer and enroll in a part-time CS curriculum. We discussed becoming a team lead and what she took from the army. We talked about bringing the different aspects of her career together i...
Mar 14, 2023•46 min•Season 6Ep. 11
Nikhil placed the start of his journey in high school, where a teacher managed to light the programming flame in his heart. A few years later, Nikhil graduated with a CS degree and joined a startup. He learned the value of thinking about the problem, embracing the whole system, and not just the solution. This set him up to create his own company. We talked about why the first one failed and then about AppSmith. We finally talked about how he leads the company in embracing the problem by dog-feed...
Mar 07, 2023•45 min•Season 6Ep. 10
Dean placed the start of his journey in 6th grade, reading science fiction and dreaming of building robots. From there on, in the late 70s, the virus never left him. The rest of the interview was a history lesson about software engineering. Dean spoke of the first company he created in high school and funded by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. He talked about his time working for Xerox Parc and then on project Xanadu, e.g., Hypertext. Beyond this history of the Silicon Valley, we spoke about "...
Feb 28, 2023•51 min•Season 6Ep. 9
Danny placed the start of his journey in high school when his astronomy class closed, and he had to take computer science instead. We then talked about the German concept of Berufsakademie and how he alternated between internships at Alcatel and a technical university for the next four years. We followed his journey from C++ to Java and Kotlin, creating drivers, discovering Blackberry development, and finally, Android. We talked about interviewing, having an impact, and interviewing again for th...
Feb 21, 2023•45 min•Season 6Ep. 8
Chris placed the start of his journey during his first career as an HR professional. We first talked about how blogging put software development on his radar and how "interesting" HR experiences slowly but indeed pushed him to transition toward web development. We explored how he gamed the recruiter systems, applied, and failed his first job interviews. We brushed over communities and how he found his first job. We talked about ADHD and how he transformed his side activities into his f...
Feb 14, 2023•49 min•Season 6Ep. 7
