Hiring

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 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 2: Getting a remote position at Microsoft with Scott Hanselman

September 10, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Productivity, Remote Work 0:36:19

In this episode, I talk to Scott Hanselman, a partner product manager at Microsoft. Since years, Scott is one of the most successful tech bloggers, he has three podcasts and actively works on making tech a more diverse place.

We talk about:

  • how it is to work remotely for Microsoft,
  • how to get such a remote position at Microsoft,
  • making tech a more diverse place,
  • starting with open source,
  • and productivity.
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Teaser – Software engineering unlocked

July 13, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Women in Tech 00:01:19

Hello and Welcome to the software engineering unlocked podcast. I’m your host Doctor McKayla and I open you the doors to software companies such as Microsoft, Google or Facebook. But also to smaller startups such as Hashnode, Bitmov or Automatic.

I talk to experienced developers from different companies about how they develop software.

How did they come to where they are today?
How is it to be working at their company?
Which software engineering processes and best practices do they follow?
Do they do code reviews?
Do they have automated tests?
And how do they assess the productivity of the team or an individual developer?

My guests share with you their personal stories and their believes and values when it comes to software engineering. We talk about the companies tech stack, processes, and tools but also about mindset and culture.

Finally, we dig deep to really understand the recipes for success.

How do those teams and companies manage to build maintainable, scalable and reliable software people love?

Find out together with me in the software engineering unlocked podcast.
Subscribe today. We launch soon!