Episode 015 – Mental health in tech Part 2 of 2 – The tech industry is known for its long hours and a challenging work environment. Yet in this arena one thing hardly ever talked about is mental health. In today’s part two of our two-part series on mental health in tech we want to start an open and honest dialog about the challenges and impact mental health has on people working in tech.

This episode we talk about alcoholism and autism or as and its impact on tech.

expands on an issue that Sara Vieira talked about on episode 010 of our podcast. Sara recently wrote about her experience with depression in tech in an article on Medium. This article allowed others in tech to start talking openly about their experience with depression.

We will cover the topics of alcoholism and autism. We talk about what it is, what causes it and how to address it. If you have first-hand experience with mental health then you will want to hear our podcast. If not, you might have a fellow co-worker that has it and we will share how you can have empathy and support them.

DISCLAIMER: We are not mental health professionals. We are developers seeking to be better coworkers, and help others, but we are not doctors. If you are in crisis, please seek help immediately.

Mentioned in this episode

10 Signs and Symptoms of a High-Functioning Alcoholic – article about alcoholism

Alcohol Facts and Statistics – article from National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

How to find help treating alcoholism in your area

Tips for working with adults on the autism spectrum

Watch Your Language When Talking About Autism

Episode 014 – Daneez Owais – Daneez moved to the US from Pakistan in 1999 to study Journalism. After graduation she worked as a Business Analyst at a software company. While there she started to do QA as well as technical writing. This chance encounter led to her switching careers into QA.

Daneez is keen on sharing her love for QA with others in tech. In fact she is teaching a full-day QA Bootcamp. The workshop is being held by Women Who Code Atlanta. Links for the workshop are below.

Daneez Owais

Daneez Owais is a Senior QA at Mailchimp. She is a frequent speaker at tech conferences.

Mentioned in this episode

QA Bootcamp – a full day workshop to learn more about what QA means and dive deep into different kinds of testing, various tools and best practices on how to approach creating quality software. She is teaching the class with Terri Chu who is featured in episode 006.

Networking and Attending Conferences – Attending conferences as well as networking will open doors for you in your career. If you want to succeed in you career then networking is essential.

Episode 013 – Ele Munjeli

Ele Munjeli is a software engineer working in the emerging field of DevOps. Originally a painter, she came to engineering via audio engineering and interactive art. Today, she codes automation, public cloud infrastructure, and ops tooling as a contractor and consultant for some of the biggest and best-known companies in the world. Her open source organization Devopracy is focused on contributing code, speaking, and consulting around digital infrastructure for elections systems and online deliberation.

Ele works in the section known as meta automation. Most people are familiar with automation systems that they use in development and deployments. There has to be automated systems to automate these automation system. This process is called meta automation. She mainly does development writing command level scripts. She specializes in automation.

Mentioned in this episode

Devopracy – infrastructure code for virtual democracies.

Pluralsight – provides training courses on a wide range of subjects and has assessment tests.

Automation – Always take time each week to automate all your processes. This could be farming out the cooking, clearning and other chores if they are not the best use of your time.

Ele Munjeli

Ele Munjeli is a software engineer working in the emerging field of DevOps. Originally a painter, she came to engineering via audio engineering and interactive art. Today, she codes automation, public cloud infrastructure, and ops tooling as a contractor and consultant for some of the biggest and best known companies in the world. Her open source organization Devopracy is focused on contributing code, speaking, and consulting around digital infrastructure for elections systems and online deliberation.

Episode 012 – Mental health in tech Part 1 of 2 – The tech industry is known for its long hours and a challenging work environment. Yet in this arena one thing hardly ever talked about is mental health. In today’s part one of our two-part series on mental health in tech we want to start an open and honest dialog about the challenges and impact mental health has on people working in tech.

This episode expands on an issue that Sara Vieira talked about on episode 010 of our podcast. Sara recently wrote about her experience with depression in tech in an article on Medium. This article allowed others in tech to start talking openly about their experience with depression.

We will cover the topics of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. We talk about what it is, what causes it and how to address it. If you have first-hand experience with mental health then you will want to hear our podcast. If not, you might have a fellow co-worker that has it and we will share how you can have empathy and support them.

DISCLAIMER: We are not mental health professionals. We are developers seeking to be better coworkers, and help others, but we are not doctors. If you are in crisis, please seek help immediately.

Mentioned in this episode

Re: Mental Health – article about Sara Vieira’s experience with depression

Sara Vieira – Podcast episode #10

Working With Trauma – Valarie’s experience working in tech with CPTSD

National Network of Depression Centers

Helpful Depression Resources

PTSD Online Resources

Episode 011 – Jen Looper – is a Senior Developer Advocate for Progress Software. She is the founder of Vue Vixens. She was an adjunct teacher teaching French at Wesley College. She realized that the salary for College Instructors was not going to be enough to pay the bills so she started looking at other alternatives to teaching. She was always interested in computers growing up so she made the transition into tech from being a French teacher.

Today, Jen is a developer advocate. As a Senior Developer Advocate, she spends lots of her time speaking at tech conferences. When she is not speaking she is writing technical articles about her company’s products as well as creating code that developers can use.

She was a developer using Angular and then found Vue as it started gaining traction. She decided to create a group similar to ngGirls which uses workshops to train women on Angular. Based on that format, she founded Vue Vixens. Her company Progress Software has turned it into a non-profit foundation. Today Vue Vixens has chapters worldwide.

Jen Looper

Jen is a Senior Developer Advocate and Founder of Vue Vixens.

Mentioned in this episode

Vue Vixens – Vue Vixens are foxy people who identify as women and who want to learn Vue.js to make websites and mobile apps

ngGirls – aims to introduce women to the world of technology and increase the diversity.

Instant Pot – makes your day easier by making cooking quicker and easier

Fit of Your Pants – during a job interview you will be whiteboarding with your back to the interviewers so make sure you are comfortable with the fit of your pants

Cracking the Coding Interview – shows you how to answer the most common questions you get during a coding interview

Episode 010 – Sara Vieira – is a developer advocate for yld.io. Her main objective as a developer advocate is to teach customers about her company’s services. For her, a developer advocate is part developer and part marketing.

Sara recently wrote about her experience with depression in tech in an article on Medium. This article allowed others in tech to start talking openly about their experience with depression.

She is also a frequent conference speaker as well as a writer. One year she spoke in about 50 conferences or meetups in one year.

Sara Vieira

Sara is a developer advocate for YLD.io. She is also a frequent conference speaker as well as writer.

Mentioned in this episode

Re: Mental Health – article about her experience with depression

Traveling – don’t ever check a bag when traveling.

Getting Started in Programming – start building something using APIs like a movie list. It is better to learn by creating than any other method of learning.

Episode 009 – Angeleen Wilson

Angeleen is a blockchain developer and company founder creating decentralized applications and distributed solutions for the children’s education space.

Her professional background and current occupation includes Radio, Television, audience delivery liability reporting and data visual application development. In addition to her day job and blockchain business, she hosts the Women of Blockchain in Atlanta to help encourage women interested in blockchain to participate in this fascinating new industry. She also co-hosts a light-hearted podcast called CryptoRitas geared toward delivering emerging news and events on blockchain and associated emerging technologies.

She has helped organize and is working with various state legislators, leaders, enterprise businesses and communities building the Georgia Blockchain Coalition.

Angeleen Wilson

Angeleen is a mom, dapp dev nerd, CEO & Founder of Dignyfy, Co-founder of Cryptoritas, CryptoVeggies and Georgia Blockchain Coalition.

Episode 007 – Diana Rodriguez started coding at the age of 12. She started doing side projects growing up to handle networks. Today she is a DevOps specialist focusing on infrastructure and security. She focuses on deployment and keeping intruders away from the sensitive information. She is also a Google Developers Expert.

She recently decided to branch out to the frontend which led to her learning VueJS. Learning Vue led her to learn about a new initiative called Vue Vixens. She became the worldwide Community Manager for Vue Vixens.

In this episode Diana talks about how she started programming and how she started working with DevOps. She talks about her work with Vue Vixens and how the cloud is impacting DevOps today.

Diana Rodriguez

Diana Rodriguez is the Worldwide Community Manager for Vue Vixens. She is a Google Developers Expert. She is a DevOps specialist.

Mentioned in this episode

Diana recommends sports as a way to level yourself to help you break from technology.

When it comes to interviewing not everyone responds well to whiteboarding and get overwhelmed. So if you face this then turn the interview upside down and instead focus on explaining processes instead.

Vue Vixens – teaching people worldwide who identify as female the Vuejs frontend framework.

Google Developer Experts

Episode 006 – Terri Chu

Terri Chu is a software engineer working at Airbus Aerial in Atlanta, GA. She began her career as a Performance Tester working with LoadRunner and specialized in software performance testing methodologies. Terri is a natural problem solver and held many roles including Consultant and Director of Performance Testing before realizing that she was ready to take a new path in her career.

In 2015, she took the plunge into programming after attending The Iron Yard for back end development. Her current coding interests include Android, Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails, and SQL. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking foods from around the world with her husband, traveling, drawing, and occasionally sneaking watermelon to her bull terrier Allie.

Terri Chu

I’m a developer with a passion for testing – I adore problem solving. I spend my days working on back end development (Java/Spring Boot/Node) with a sprinkling of DevOps (GCP/Kubernetes/Docker). I spend time outside of my day job making Android apps. My motto: always keep learning!

My strengths include strong analytical skills, the ability to understand applications built on a variety of architectures, and solid communication skills from years of work as a consultant (remote and onsite).

Mentioned in this episode

Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals – Great book on goal setting

Pramp – Interview Prep

Episode 005 – If you are in tech the best skill you can develop is learning. Whether it is learning a new programming language. Learning how to use a database. Learning how to improve your existing code. Basically learning. Everybody learns differently.

There are many different theories on learning. There are 4 basic ways people learn – visual, hearing, reading/writing, and kinesthetic. If you don’t know how you learn then you can be wasting your time trying to study. In this episode, we talk about the different ways of learning and what you should do to greatly improve how you learn.

Mentioned in this episode

The Secret to Strategic Learning – by Tony Robbins.

The Four Different Types of Learners