Open Source

Episode 37: Underrepresented, Underpaid & Undervalued – Having to change jobs to advance your career

March 16, 2021 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source, Tech, Women in Tech 00:51:40

In this episode, I talk to Jenn Creighton. Jenn is a Senior Staff Engineer at Apollo. Jenn specialized in frontend-end development is currently working on the open-source work for  Apollo GraphQL.
She also is a frequent conference speaker, an authoritative voice in tech, and recently started her own podcast called single-threaded

We talk about:

  • what a senior staff engineer does, and which responsibilities this title entail, 
  • why she needed to frequently change her job in order to advance her career,
  • how gaslighting, bias, and being underrepresented, underpaid, undervalued is part of her decades long experience as a developer
  • and how she makes sure she is helping others to enter tech and have a better experience.
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Episode 30: How I got into FAANG companies without a CS degree

November 10, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source 00:53:33

In this episode, I talk to Ben Lesh. Ben is a Senior Software engineer at Citadel Securities. Before that, Ben worked amongst other companies, at Google and Netflix. Ben is also the Project Lead for RxJS. RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences.

We talk about:

  • how he got into several FAANG companies without a CS degree, 
  • the importance of building relationships, and an online brand,
  • the benefits of being helpful and kind to others,
  • the differences in engineering practices at Google, Netflix, and Citadel Securities, and
  • what RX.js is and why you might need it. 
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Episode 29: No mocks allowed – A testing discussion with Kent C. Dodds

October 27, 2020 michaela Open Source, Testing 00:53:38

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library.

Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React.

We talk about:

  • Why you should not mock your software system during testing,
  • how “testing library” helps create more meaningful and maintainable tests,
  • if and how manual testing is still needed to increase your confidence in the software system.
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Episode 26: Software success through community building

September 15, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Entrepreneurship, Open Source, Startup 00:48:02

In this episode, I talk to Chris Biscardi, an independent software consultant about how he became successful through open source and community building.

We talk about

  •  how he niched down to only work with open source companies
  • how he build the Party Corgi community by showing up and leading by example
  • and what he thinks it takes to start your own successful software business in 2020.
 

Links:

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Episode 24: Why you should double down on integration tests with Kent C. Dodds

August 18, 2020 michaela DevOps, Open Source, Testing 00:58:00

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library.

Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React.

We talk about:

  • best practices in testing modern software systems, 
  • the testing pyramid and it’s “successor” the testing trophy,
  • why integration tests might be more beneficial than unit tests,
  • how you should avoid testing implementation details,
  • and how testing sentiments have changed over the last 10 years. 
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Episode 22: Becoming a Machine Learning Engineer at Twitter

July 15, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Open Source, Women in Tech 00:41:53

In this episode, I talk to Jigyasa Grover, a machine learning engineer at Twitter. Jigyasa is my first data engineer, and so it’s great to learn from her about what her day to day work entails. But in addition, she is also very ambitious and tells me about her successful career path through internships and research projects.

We talk about:

  • what a machine learning engineer does, 
  • how to get started as a machine learning engineer,
  • open source and Google’s summer of code projects,
  • and her role at Facebook combing data and software engineering. 
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Episode 20: Fundamentally Changing How We Develop Software

June 9, 2020 michaela DevOps, Entrepreneurship, Monitoring, Open Source, Productivity, Startup 00:45:04

In this episode, I talk to Tudor Gîrba, CEO and co-founder of Feenk, a software consultancy. Over the last 10 years, Tudor researched new ways to develop software – called moldable development. In this interview, I did deep to understand what that exactly means, and how he started to work on a novel IDE that enables moldable developments. 

We talk about:

  • how reading code slows down software productivity,
  • building developer tools,
  • starting your own software company,
  • transitioning from consultancy to product company,
  • and applied research.
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Episode 15: How to Succeed in Building Developer Tooling with Peter Pezaris

March 31, 2020 michaela Company Culture, DevOps, Open Source, Productivity, Remote Work 00:57:47

In this episode, I talk to Peter Pezaris. Peter is the CEO and co-founder of a start-up called CodeStream. What’s interesting about Peter’s story is that CodeStream isn’t his first startup. CodeStream is one of the many companies Peter built. So, in this interview, we talk about his 25 years-long journey building tech startups and what he has learned along the way.

We talk about:

  • how he started his journey as a founder,
  • which technology changes he went through throughout the different tech start-ups,
  • the tech stack and architecture of the developer collaboration software CodeStream,
  • how he was able to build a team that stuck with him through four different startups,
  • and his advice for first-time founders. 
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Episode 13: Bad Tests Are Worse Than Product Issues with Dan Abramov

March 3, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Open Source 01:04:16

In this episode, I talk to Dan Abramov. Dan is a developer at Facebook, working on the popular JavaScript framework React. Dan is also one of the most well-known person in the whole front-end developer scene and recently started working on his new side-project JustJavaScript.

We talk about:

  • how he got a job at Facebook,
  • his interview tips for getting into Facebook
  • the development mentality and the development practices at Facebook,
  • and his new project JustJavaScript that helps intermediate developers to become JavaScript experts. 
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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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