This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Shelley McHardy, a former chemistry teacher turned front end developer at Rightpoint , and talked about the early career developer's journey. She gave insight into what her seven-month interview process looked like, forcing interviewers to interview you, the importance of finding "your people", and being picky in your job search. Links: edX Collab Lab PLCs- Professional learning communities ------ About Shelley Shelley is a former chemistry teacher turned fr...
Oct 05, 2022•51 min•Season 6Ep. 8
In today's episode, Bekah and Dan talk to Ryan Kahn, a developer experience and productivity consultant from New York City, about his work as a consultant helping companies to build better software teams. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing that teams are made up of individuals who have different needs and approaches. He also breaks down the difference between quality, technical, knowledge, and innovation debt and the need to identify which most impacts teams as they seek better communic...
Sep 29, 2022•52 min•Season 6Ep. 7
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Julia Seidman, a technical marketing consultant and developer in the Seattle area, and talked about her work writing about different technologies, learning by teaching, and embracing the careen over the career. She talks about her career journey from studying anthropology to financial analysis to teaching high school English, ESL and Debate, before landing her current role as a technical writer. Links Krugerrand Gold Doubloons Rhodium Flutter Developer Marke...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 6Ep. 6
In today's episode, Bekah and Dan talk to Chad Stewart, a Software Engineer from Kingston, Jamaica, about his journey into contributing to Open Source projects like Open Sauced and how to find your way to your first contribution. He shares the inspiration behind his #TechIsHiring project , which helps to identify tech jobs and resources, but more importantly, to connect people in the wider tech community. Links My Side of the Mountain Brian Douglas, aka Bdougie Open Sauced Tech Interview Handboo...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 5
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Sadie a frontend developer for a federal agency, to chat about her experience navigating the interview process and how she found success after giving tech a second shot. She shares tips on how to avoid burnout both during the interview process and while you're working in tech. Links: 18f Skill Crush Leet Code Challenge Jennifer's List of Interview Questions Technical Test Preparation Advice post by Sadie Words of Mouth job email US Web Design Standards Jekyl...
Aug 30, 2022•52 min•Season 6Ep. 4
For the 50th episode of the podcast, Dan and Bekah are live at the Kansas City Developer Conference 2022 answering listener questions and practicing their accents. Check out the video version on YouTube! Listener questions: What time do you go to sleep? (2:19) How does a computer get drunk? (12:42) What's the hardest part of community? (22:20) Ayu would like to hear the history of how Virtual Coffee was founded. (31:57) What does community mean to you? (38:01) At in-person events, what are some ...
Aug 12, 2022•55 min•Season 6Ep. 999
In today's episode, Dan and Bekah talk with Seth Hall about the importance of intimate collaboration, advocating for yourself, and transferable skills as part of his job as a Technical Product Owner at Uniform . He shares how his background as a creative producer informs how he guides demo initiatives, creates roadmaps, and collaborates with other departments. About Seth Seth is a Technical Product Owner at Uniform Website: sethhall.dev Dev.to: dev.to/sethburtonhall Polywork: polywork.com/sethha...
Aug 09, 2022•55 min•Season 6Ep. 3
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Bogdan Covrig, a Software Engineer in the Netherlands who's into Typescript, React and Node, about navigating different learning and career paths in tech before landing a job that fulfills his interests to see the changes he's making and provides a dynamic work environment. He also drops his tips on the most important things you can do if you're starting your journey into tech. Links p5.js Arduino Twitch TypeScript Tuesdays Nick and Bekah's Lunch & Learn...
Jul 28, 2022•56 min•Season 6Ep. 2
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with David Alpert, Director of Engineering at Northfield IT, about taking a personalized approach to helping others as they ask coding questions and navigate career paths. David shares the importance of bringing empathy to every situation and gives tips on how to handle challenging situations. Links: Logo (the programming turtle) Virtual Coffee Co-Working Room The Agile Manifesto Typescript Tuesdays --- About David David Alpert is a collaborative leader and agile...
Jul 20, 2022•52 min•Season 6Ep. 1
In this episode of the podcast, Bekah, Kirk, and Dan discuss the decision to pause new membership and what the maintainers are doing to progress towards opening the community up again. We share what we think makes our community special, how we're working to preserve that, and some of the challenges we're figuring out as we take steps towards reopening membership. What goes into the long-term strategy of making Virtual Coffee an intimate group of devs, optimized for you ? You'll find out in this ...
Jun 01, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 9
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Matt McInnis a former Math Professor, and current data scientist, full-stack engineer, and founder, about his journey through tech as a self-taught engineer. He shares his insight into building personal projects and creating value in the projects you work on, even if those projects are just for you. Links Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point Kidstreet Hacker Paradise Star Wars Force Trainer --- About Matt McInnis Matt is a full-stack developer (Rails+React) at T...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 8
In today's episode, Bekah and Dan talk to Meg Gutshall, a Ruby on Rails Developer, and community volunteer at Virtual Coffee. She shared all things Philly and some memorable stories of how she's supported others--including Bekah--in their journeys into tech. Meg talks about her Accountabilibuddies group at Virtual Coffee and how she chose Ruby after graduating from a full stack bootcamp. Links Gritty freeCodeCamp Penn medicine jawn Meg's blog post on code and Spanish: The Little Things Matter Ru...
May 13, 2022•58 min•Season 5Ep. 7
In today's episode, Dan and Bekah talk to Andrew Bush, a Mobile Engineer Specializing in React Native. One of the updates we've made to our site is to have tags on our members page to indicate what volunteer roles they have. Andrew is one of our Monthly Challenge team leads, and he shared with us his experiences helping to facilitate the challenges, keeping our community motivated, and the processes we go through. We also go into what it's like to be a mobile developer, and the learning path he'...
May 05, 2022•54 min•Season 5Ep. 6
A special live episode of the Virtual Coffee Podcast - Bekah and Dan meet for the first time in real life, and get to hang out with Kirk on Kirk Day! Also Dan fires Bekah (for the first time). Watch the stream on YouTube! Sponsor Virtual Coffee! Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community. Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can even sponsor an episode of the podcast! Virtual ...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 999
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Roger Gentry, who has spent a lot of his career managing security and compliance for clients across the United States, about his passion for problem-solving and what to do when you get stuck. We're all going to run into frustrations during our tech journeys, but knowing how to navigate through them is one of the key skills you'll need. About Roger Roger has managed the security and compliance for clients across the United States. Providing CTO/CSO level cons...
Apr 21, 2022•50 min•Season 5Ep. 5
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Yolanda Haynes, a career changer who went from working as a certified occupational therapy assistant to a Software Engineer, about the importance of finding community during your learning journey, and remembering that you shouldn’t judge your journey based on anyone else’s; focus on the learning journey, absorbing what you can, and preparing yourself for your future. Links: 100devs The Collab Lab About Yolanda: A career changer from working in healthcare as ...
Apr 13, 2022•54 min•Season 5Ep. 4
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Helen Griffin, a full-stack developer and founder, about how the tech industry changed during the time she was a founder, how what she’s learned as a founder has helped her to have a broader perspective about the tech industry, and what she’s doing with her companies Jovial and State of Developers to support developers in their career journeys. Links The State of Developers Jovial About Helen Helen started her career as a web developer. Now, as a full-stack ...
Apr 07, 2022•59 min•Season 5Ep. 3
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Amy Shackles, a Senior Software Engineer at MURAL, about how she made her way from being a Psychology and Anthropology double major to being a Senior Software Engineer. She shares what’s made her experience at MURAL a great one and the importance of openness in communication. Links amyshackles.com Amy's regular expression parser MDN article on regular expressions About Amy Amy is a Senior Software Engineer currently working at MURAL . She loves information, ...
Mar 31, 2022•56 min•Season 5Ep. 2
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Brian Rinaldi, a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years of experience as a developer for the web, about how Developer Relationships has changed over the years and why need not just remote community experiences but also in-person opportunities. We talk about the value of different types of communities and how each is necessary to support developers. Links LaunchDarkly CFE.dev TheJam.dev The Jamstack Book Episode Sponsor Attend and ho...
Mar 22, 2022•51 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Kirk, Dan, and Bekah are back again to wrap up Season 4 of the podcast. We talk about Hacktoberfest and how proud we are of what our community did over the month of Hacktoberfest: 100 members signed up, 66 members merged at least 1 pr, 336 collectively we merged 336 PRs were merged by these members across 129 repos. On the virtualcoffee.io site: 81 PRs merged, 50 were new member profiles, 31 others. We talk about the monthly challenges, including already surpassing the monthly goal for blogging ...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 9
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Dr. Maeling Murphy, a software engineer who recently transitioned into tech. Maeling shared the importance of connecting with potential employers to see if they would fit her values, how contributing to open source projects can help prepare you for your first job, and the value of developing the connection to community and being able to grow alongside others. Oh, and did we mention we talked a lot about Notion? She takes us through her notetaking journey and...
Nov 23, 2021•52 min•Season 4Ep. 8
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Jessica Wilkins, a self-taught developer and a staff author for the freeCodeCamp News publication. Jessica talks about how to get started with tech writing, how to differentiate between constructive criticism and negative feedback, and how to avoid gatekeeping by eliminating assumptions from your writing, avoiding terms and phrases like "it's so easy!", and sometimes adding prerequisites to your posts. About Jessica Wilkins Jessica Wilkins is a self taught d...
Nov 17, 2021•55 min•Season 4Ep. 7
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Bryan Healey, an entrepreneur, tech leader, data scientist / ML engineer, and biz developer. Bryan talks about gaining experience as an entrepreneur, how to get started in the start-up life, and how the entrepreneurial spirit has always been in his blood. About Bryan Healey Bryan Healey is an entrepreneur, tech leader, data scientist / ML engineer, and biz developer. He's helped create or grow several start-ups, raised money, and built/managed teams of varyi...
Nov 10, 2021•57 min•Season 4Ep. 6
This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Suze Shardlow. Suze is an award winning community manager, coder, tech writer and tech event MC and she currently leads the developer community at Redis . We had a really interesting conversation with Suze! She's done a million different things throughout her life and her career and she shared with us how her experiences have informed her time as a software developer and a community leader. Links 30-second-coding On being a published author redislabs on Twit...
Nov 04, 2021•58 min•Season 4Ep. 5
This week we welcome Mark Noonan to the show to talk about how becoming a part of Civic Tech initiatives can help career changers to grow and help existing developers create opportunities for mentorship, support, and connection for those coming into tech. Mark talks about his experience with FreeCodeCamp as well as Code for Atlanta , and the $40,000 Hackathon his group won and donated to charity! He brings his experience as a career transitioner to the conversation and we look at how participati...
Oct 27, 2021•57 min•Season 4Ep. 4
This week we welcome Jennifer Konikowski to the show to talk about being a woman in tech and building community for women in tech! Jennifer brings her experience creating communities like Py Ladies Boston and Boston Ruby Women to the podcast, and talks about the value of learning to code even if you don't want to be a developer. She also talks about getting through toxic work environments, moving forward, and her hot takes on community and being a woman in tech. About Jennifer Jennifer has 10 ye...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 3
We're welcoming Todd Libby to give us an intro to accessibility and what it means to make the web equal. Todd, a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years, provides a plethora of resources that can help everyone to get started and talks about how to advocate for accessibility and equality on projects. Show Notes: toddl.dev @toddlibby on Twitter Things/People mentioned in the episode: Making A Strong Case for Accessibility by Todd Libby Front Page Express Desig...
Oct 12, 2021•53 min•Season 4Ep. 2
We welcome Jessi Shakarian to the show today to talk about her journey into UX/UI! Jessi Shakarian got her start in tech as a developer, but also she loved everything that happened before it was time to build a website. She is currently a UX designer at DIA Design Guild in Los Angeles and a python developer interested in machine learning. Jessi talks about how passion can be your motivation, and how valuable it is to be able to share what you're excited about: you aren't your tech stack. Sometim...
Oct 06, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Community Maintainer Kirk joins us (again) for our Season 3 wrap up! We review what Virtual Coffee did last year for Hacktoberfest, and talk about a lot of the exciting things we have coming up this year! We also shared some fun things from the last year at Virtual Coffee, like our Virtual Coffee Co-Working Room! Links: Classic Sudoku Cracking the Cryptic @MarieAntons Tatiana Mac - selfdefined Quarto by Dominic Duffin Bekah's postpartum wellness app Virtual Coffee's GitHub Org Hacktoberfest on D...
Sep 01, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 9
In this episode, Dan and Bekah talk to Aurelie Verrot, a Software Engineer from the San Francisco Bay Area, who's originally from France, about the importance of relationships in team-building--whether as part of the learning process or in a work environment--and the benefits of being able to work from home. She talks about the importance of clear communication, creating boundaries, and maintaining flexibility as key habits to build. Aurelie Verrot Aurelie Verrot is a software engineer from the ...
Aug 24, 2021•57 min•Season 3Ep. 8
