Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

When asked what he does for fun, Gavin Mendel-Gleason likes to program for fun. He builds stuff in his spare time, as tech dominates his life. Outside of tech though, he has 2 daughters, and his family enjoys spending time outdoors, specifically in the alps.

At Trinity College in Dublin, Gavin and his teammates were working on a project that required the storage and relation between loads of complex datasets. During this project, they decided to create a better kind of database, to help solve with these sorts of problems.

This is the creation story of TerminusDB.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://terminusdb.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinmendelgleason/

Jennifer Smith had an abnormal path to tech. She was born in upstate New York, and was not exposed to tech or startups or building companies during her early years. Post school, she interned at Lehman Brothers but didn't enjoy the feel of the money obsessed tribe. She went into management consulting for 7 years, which eventually led her into business school. Post that, she decided to stay in Silicon Valley and eventually went into Venture. Outside of tech, she just recently had a baby and is in the throws of early parenting.

As a management consultant, Jennifer did a lot of work, observing the tricks and tribal knowledge contained in the workers themselves. After frequently documenting these practices, she thought there had to be a way to just capture their knowledge work instantly with a tool.

This is the creation story of Scribe.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://scribehow.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmith/

Liam Gerada comes from an eCommerce background, building websites, stores, etc. He is passionate about providing people ways to find cheaper products through online commerce. Liam loves to solve problems, and finds it is hard to find a replacement hobby, now that his hobby has become his full time gig. He and his brother have worked together for years, as they do now on their current venture. They grew up in Malta, which is an amazing gem in the Mediterranean.

Liam and his brother were merchants, building their own eCommerce store around 5-6 years ago. From that perspective, they saw very early on that there was a movement towards a headless platform. They weren't developers at the time, which most merchants aren't, and they struggled - and felt there must be a better way.

This is the creation story of Krepling.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.krepling.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-j-e-gerada-28043a122/

Today's episode is sponsored by Microsoft!

Guests: Girish Bablani and Junior Diarrassouba, two Microsoft employees at different stages in their career. One seasoned veteran at the company, and one up-and-coming engineer, who share how Microsoft has expanded their career horizons and provided many different opportunities for growth and experience.

Questions:

• Junior, how long have you been working at Microsoft? How did you find out about the opportunity?
• What were your expectations coming out of school, regarding projects you would work on?
• What are you actually working on today? Are you already working with customers to solve real world problems?
• Girish, you've been a Microsoft for quite some time - but how did things start for you?
• You are overseeing teams across Computer, Networking and Storage - but have you always been in this group?
• What other groups did you work in? Was it hard to switch, or did you receive push back?
• Both of you - how has Microsoft's opportunities opened your career horizons?
• What have you learned that you didn't know about prior to joining the company?
• What is the future for you at MS? What would you say to someone considering joining the team?

Addison Higham is a father of 2 kids, and has been married for 12 years. His family is of the utmost importance to him, and he has been happy to be able to balance his career and personal life along his journey. As he puts it - he has been a nerd since day 1, building, fixing and playing with computers from a young age. Along with his CS interests, his family was very entrepreneurial growing up. During schooling, he joined some startups to learn the ropes of building solutions. Outside of tech, he loves to ski and be outdoors.

The makers of Apache Pulsar, an open source project, decided to build a cloud-native event streaming platform. Early on in the venture, Addison joined his team as a Chief Architect, in order to enable enterprises to easily access data as real-time event streams.

This is the creation story of StreamNative.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://streamnative.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/addisonj/

Tutelage of Treehouse, sponsored by Treehouse!

Guest: Graham Morby is a Senior Software Engineer who works as a dev for hire. He has developed applications in Python, PHP, JS, Vue, and even coded BASIC in the 90's, hacking games for his Commodore 64. He's been doing computers since before they were cool.

Questions:

• Tell me more about the book you are working on.
• How did you get into programming? You've been into computers for a long time, but at some point you stepped into programming - tell me about that journey.
• Now that we know how you got started, tell me about your journey within development. How do you sift through the myriad of content out there and staying sharp in your field?
• You mentioned that you found Treehouse, you liked it and you stayed - tell me more about that.
• What is your perspective on how the coding/tech careers really are?

Links

https://teamtreehouse.com/

Irina Bednova started programming when she was a kid, starting out with a smash the cockroach game written in Delphi (which is object oriented pascal). She obtained her Computer Science degree in Russia, and moved to the UK to work in a few startups, including Monzo a popular fintech product. Outside of tech, she cycles her hobbies from time to time, and has landed on gardening at the moment, along with interior design. She's mentioned she is going back to woodworking when the weather changes.

Irina and her co-founder led teams at Monzo, specifically in operations. What they noticed was the proliferation of chat tools for customer service - but, that telephony was largely ignored. Once they validated the problem, they set out to build a product in this space.

This is the creation story of Cordless.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://cordless.systems/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jafrog/

Andre Ferraz was influenced heavily by his parents, as they were both computer scientists. When he was 10 years old, his first science project was themed around computer hacking, which got a lot of surprise at the science fair. Outside of tech, he enjoys to surf on a short board several times a week and spends time with his family.

Twelve years ago, Andre had the amazing idea to create a unique identity for end users, based on their location data. The market wasn't in need of this solution at the time, but after academically exploring the solution, they recognized that GPS alone would not be enough.

This is the creation story of Icognia.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.incognia.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreferraz/

Ever since he was a little kid, Robert Cooke always had a fascination with computers. Even when he was super young, when he didn't know much about them, he was still intrigued by this magic box. At the same time, he loved legos - but found it very expensive to expand his lego set. To contrast that, he could build as big as he wanted within a computer - and he was hooked. He built video games, explored databases, and even an accounting system in his teens.

As he started validating a new idea, Robert visited a number of top tier banks and looked for consistency in the problem they were facing. He found a starting point to build out a data platform, to enable his three pillars of data delivery.

This is the creation story of 3Forge.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.3forge.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-cooke-a7835b69/

Tutelage of Treehouse, sponsored by Treehouse!

Guest: Daniel McElroy is the Founder of the West Virgina Coding Club. He has been helping young people thrive for a number of years, in many different facets, and has started a number of businesses. 

Questions:

• What is the West Virgina Coding Club? 
• In supporting the kids learning how to code, what sort of tooling do you use to help them thrive in learning?
• What makes Treehouse stand out from the other solutions out there?
• What sort of feedback have you gotten from your members about Treehouse?
• What does the future look like for, for the WV Coding Club / Treehouse partnership?

Links

https://teamtreehouse.com/

https://wvcoding.org/