Today, we speak with Ravi Lachman, a technical evangelist for application monitoring platform provider AppDynamics, as part of The New Stack podcast series featuring developers and engineers who share their down-in-the-trenches stories during this renaissance era in computing.

Lachman’s professional life began when he got his foot in the door over 10 years ago at IBM. There, he was paid to take part in its software engineer co-op program while completing his undergraduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“I was able to do the testing the high-paid engineers wouldn’t mind doing but they were like ‘just let the intern do it,’” Lachman said. “It was stellar…it was more than beer money.”