Startup

Episode 16: Running A Successful Dev Shop with Martin Gratzer

April 14, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Entrepreneurship, Remote Work, Startup 00:56:55

In this episode, I talk to Martin Gratzer, CEO, and founder of Topmind. Topmind is a successful boutique dev shop in the heart of Carinthia in Austria. Martin shares with me, how he managed to build a striving development agency far way from Silicon Valey and other tech hot spots.

We talk about:

  • why he decided to start his own company, 
  • what helped him get started on his entrepreneurial journey,
  • how he managed to be successful by focusing on a niche,
  • what he advises others that want to freelance or build up the dev shop,
  • and behind the scenes info on what it means to develop software as an agency. 
Continue reading

Episode 14: What developers should know about security with Troy Hunt

March 17, 2020 michaela DevOps, Entrepreneurship, Startup 00:58:14

In this episode, I talk to Troy Hunt, a leading security expert. Troy is a successful Pluralsight author and runs security workshops all around the world. He also is person behind the popular web haveIbeenPwned, which allows everybody to check whether their data has been exposed in a data breach.

In this episode, we talk about:

  • how to prevent data breaches,
  • what software engineers have to know about the security and software vulnerabilities,
  • how to take your career in your own hands and
  • how he started to teach security to millions of developers worldwide.
Continue reading

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.
Continue reading

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.
Continue reading

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.
Continue reading

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. 
Continue reading