Author

About the Author
Michaela is passionate about making the life of developers and engineers better. She hosts the SE Unlocked podcasts and also researches and helps to make software engineering processes and tools better. She writes about her work on https://www.michaelagreiler.com.

Episode 12: Starting a Profitable Business in Six Weeks with Courtland Allen

February 18, 2020 michaela Startup 00:48:35

In this episode, I talk to Courtland Allen, the founder, and chief-indie hacker of the Indie Hacker community. After many years of trial and error, Courtland launched the widely successful indie hacker community and the indie hacker podcast.

We talk about:

  • how he managed to build a lively community from the scratch
  • his tips for first-time founders
  • why he wanted to code as little as possible, and still coded as much as possible
  • his four-phase success plan for kick-starting a profitable community-based business.
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Episode 11: Making Gatsby easy to understand with Laurie Barth

February 4, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source, Women in Tech 00:47:24

In this episode, I talk to Laurie Barth, a staff software engineer at Gatsby. Laurie is also a vivid conference speaker, tech blogger, and egghead instructor.

We talk about:

  • how she got this awesome position at Gatsby
  • her work as an open-source maintainer
  • code reviews and making sure to give valuable feedback
  • and growing a Twitter following.
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Episode 10: Done playing Microsoft’s corporate game with Suz Hinton

January 21, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source, Women in Tech 00:57:36

In this episode, I talk to Suz Hinton, about her transition from Microsoft to Stripe, mentoring and advancing one’s career and live coding.

We talk about:

  • her role and responsibilities at Stripe, 
  • how to understand what customers and users want,
  • why she left Microsoft,
  • how she now ensures the job and company culture matches her personality,
  • and about her style of mentoring junior developers.
  • Finally, Suz tells me all there is to know about live coding. 
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Episode 9: From Consultancy To Product Company Charlie Gerard

January 7, 2020 michaela Company Culture, DevOps, Hiring, Women in Tech 00:53:22

Charlie Gerard is a career changer, that recently started working at Atlassian after working at ThoughWorks as a software consultant. In this episode, she talks with me about her hiring experience, the software engineering practices at this large tech company, and brain-controlled interfaces.

Episode 8: Parent Driven Development at Github with Allison McMillan

December 3, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Remote Work, Women in Tech 00:56:36

In this episode, Allison McMillan, a software engineering manager at Github joins me to talk about

  • how she broke into tech from a non-traditional background,
  • how she overcame obstacles and problems as a new mother in tech and
  • how she builds herself a striving career.

As always, we also talk about software development methodologies such as code reviews and testing at Github. And surely, I pick her brain about remote work and her strategies to stay focused and happy in a remote setting.

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Episode 7: Troubleshooting systems through Observability with Charity Majors

November 19, 2019 michaela DevOps, Hiring, Monitoring, Startup, Women in Tech 00:42:19

In this episode, I talk to Charity Majors, founder, and CTO of honeycomb. Honeycomb is a tool for introspecting and interrogating your production systems. It represents the new generation of monitoring systems that can handle highly distributed and complex systems. Charity shares with me what observability means and how we can make systems more reliable and maintainable.

We talk about:

  • the new generation of DevOps,
  • how and why we should assess systems in production,
  • the flaws of staging areas,
  • what it takes to make on-call a good experience,
  • how to assess engineering excellence,
  • and how and why she founded honeycomb.
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Episode 6: Making Git faster with Derrick Stolee

November 4, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Open Source 00:51:42

In this episode, I talk to Derrick Stolee, a principal software engineer at Microsoft who makes sure the Git version control system is lightning fast.

We talk about:

  • his career switch from being a professor to become a software engineer at Microsoft, 
  • what it means to contribute to open-source during your worktime for Microsoft,
  • how he improves the speed and performance of such a widely-used and mature software system as Git,
  • how to do code reviews via mailing lists,
  • and what it takes to become an open-source maintainer. 
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Episode 5: Being the first engineer at a startup with Alper Kemal Koç

October 22, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Startup 00:45:58

In this episode, I talk to Alper Kemal Koç, who was the first engineer building a low code platform called Kuika, that helps users develop mobile applications. Alper shares with me how he build this startup from idea to serving over 15 customers, and which cultural differences he observed when building software in Turkey, the Netherlands and the rest of the world.

We talk about:

  • why and how he joined this startup, 
  • how he decided on the right tech stack,
  • how customer feedback influenced their direction,
  • which engineering practices he values at this startup,
  • and which relationship they have with their investors.
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Episode 4: Getting a remote job at Auttomatic with Leif Singer

October 8, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source, Remote Work 00:47:41

In this episode, I talk to Leif Singer, an engineer at the fully remote company Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress, a famous and powerful content management system with an estimated 75 Million user base. 

We talk about:

  • why he switched from academia to industry,
  • how he got hired without knowing the company’s tech stack,
  • why he worked for several months at Automattic before being hired,
  • how the Automattic creed, influences, and guides company values and mindset,
  • Automattic’s software engineering practices,
  • and how they fight technical debt during quarterly scheduled clean-up weeks.
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Episode 3: Building a developer community with Sandeep Panda

September 23, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Remote Work, Startup 00:51:42

In this episode, I talk to Sandeep Panda, CEO and Founder of Hashnode, a friendly and inclusive developer community. Sandeep shares with me his entrepreneurial journey and all the lessons he learned along his way.

We talk about:

  • building a developer community from scratch, 
  • getting investors to fund your projects,
  • the ups and downs of entrepreneurship,
  • transitioning to remote work,
  • and software engineering practices in a startup,
  • code reviews, testing, deployment, and keeping technical debt at bay. 
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