Women in Tech

Episode 19: Checking the Disability Box at Apple Changed My Life

May 26, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Remote Work, Women in Tech 00:58:28

This episode is part 2 of my interview with Cher. In this part, we deep-dive into her interview experience at Apple and how she worked her way up to a Staff engineering position.

We talk about:

  • the hiring process at Apple
  • the tasks and responsibilities of a Staff engineer
  • mental health, and bipolar disorder
  • and how the “disability” box can be a life-changer when it comes to getting accommodations for your special needs.
 
Check-out also part 1 of this interview, in which Cher talks about how she overcame poverty and hardship. 
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Episode 18: From Hardship to a Staff Engineering Position at Apple

May 12, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Women in Tech 00:27:17

In this special episode, I talk to Cher. Cher shares her inspirational story about she overcame hardship and poverty, and worked her way up to now be a staff engineer at Apple. 

Cher has incredible strength in her, and bravely shares her struggles dealing with mental health issues publicly. 

She also regularly reminds people that they belong in tech independent of their education or background. 

I am impressed by how she openly shares her vulnerabilities and encourages and lifts up others. 

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Episode 17 Why we hate to read code Trisha Gee

April 28, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Remote Work, Women in Tech 00:48:41

In this episode, I talk to Trisha Gee, who is the Lead of the Java Developer Advocacy Team at JetBrain. She is an expert for Java high-performance systems, and developed software for a variety of industries, such as finance or manufacturing.

We talk about:

  • how she got started in tech, 
  • why it’s harder to read than write code,
  • how it is to work at JetBrains,
  • her hiring experiences,
  • and how she overcame imposter syndrome and started to feel confident with her competences.
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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 1: Finding fulfillment through humor in tech with Cassidy Williams

August 28, 2019 michaela Company Culture, Remote Work, Women in Tech 00:59:09

In this episode, I talk with Cassidy Williams, a senior software engineer that works for the fully-remote company CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. You can find  Cassidy on Twitter or visit her website.

We talk about

  • working remote for a small startup
  • how to find fulfillment in your career and through side projects
  • how to port an application from one technology to another
  • how humor can make tech a more welcoming place
  • and how she interviewed for CodePen
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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!