Data & Dev with Jon and Mel

Rocco started his career in the game industry. He shares the good, and the bad, of that area of tech, his experience as an entrepreneur, and how he ended up at Meta.  In this episode we cover:

Started in gaming

Connect with Rocco via LinkedIn or his personal website

Brenda has taken a circuitous route into Software Engineering.  She served her country in the Air Force before leaving active duty to be at home with her children. She eventually chose to re-enter the workforce via Software and opted to pursue a Master's degree to that end. Brenda's story is a great one.  Tune in to hear:

- ROTC route into the Air Force.

- Life as a Space Operations Officer in the air force

- Leaving active duty and going reserves to raise children

- Recruiting role with Air Force Academy and ROTC

- Funding undergraduate studies with ROTC

- Re-entering the workforce - thought process and plan

- Deciding where to gain a software education

- Penn MCIT program

- Strengths and weaknesses of the MCIT program

- Resources for military folks to get into tech

- MSSA program

- The job hunt

- Life as a new Microsoft engineer

- Onboarding

- Imposter syndrome

Connect with Brenda via LinkedIn

Learn about the MSSA program Brenda talked about.

And find a Vets In Tech group near you!

We chat with Gatsby recruiter, Trish Do, and gain some insider info on the tech recruiting process.

You can connect with Trish on LinkedIn

Show Highlights:

If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review or share with a friend!

This was a great conversation with Vic Vijayakumar. We covered MANY topics, including:

You can find Vic on his own webpage as well as on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Take a listen to Vic's podcast here.

We talked about finding salary data at Levels.fyi

And "trying out" programming, which you can do at Codecademy.

Prety early into Tim's professional career, he opted to change directions. He enrolled in a Master's program and ended up in Data Science.

In this episode we talk about:

You can follow Tim on LinkedIn 

Check out the programs Tim mentioned:

Master of Science in Analytics @ Georgia Tech

MCIT @ UPenn

This was another great conversation. I know I say that every time, but it seems to always be true.

Emily and I (Melissa) crossed paths 5 years ago at Flatiron School.  Our careers have taken different trajectory paths since then and this conversation was a chance to both catch up as well as to get her full story of going from English Professor to Frontend Engineer.

We cover:

Two great places to "try it out" are:

Codecademy

LaunchSchool

To follow Emily's GoodReads recommendations, head here.

Connect with Emily on LinkedIn

This was a great conversation with a former Geological Engineer turned Software Developer. Mat is a Canadian who recently took advantage of the shift to remote work.  He's enjoying the good life with a slower pace of life, outside of the city.  Mat talks about his background in his former career.  The impetus to make a switch. Going back to school for Data Science before landing on Software. Mat found his niche in the Scala community and makes his living writing mostly functional code.  

You can connect with Mat on Twitter at @mat4nier

Here's the article Mat references: The Rent Versus Buy of Career Growth

Mat' was featured in "Real" Engineering vs. Software Development

We're back for Season 2. Here is what's coming...

We covered quite a bit in Season 1.  For some "Go Deeper" resource suggestions for each topic, check the notes below.

Episode 1: How email travels

Episode 2: OSI model. Internet

Episode 3 & 4;  Interview with Marwan Fayed (Cloudflare)

Episode 5: TCP/IP

Episodes 6 & 7: Interview with Aaron Blum and Raphael Poss (Cockroach Labs)

Show Notes

Security is about tradeoffs

Security is a business decision

Product and Security persons need to understand each other. The correct solution depends on understanding how a user is interacting with your platform

New risks in cloud databases

Traffic to databases is now over the internet

Users care about confidentiality and predictability

New role: database programmers now need to build security controls.

Reliability concerns are security concerns

Any potential malfunction is a security concern

Support engineers: new dimensions. How much access do they need to provide the needed support vs. how much access is a customer comfortable providing to receive that support

Entryways into security route

* If not already working in security domain: find anything security adjacent

* exploit exercises

Step out of your comfort zone

Software engineers are not coming with a security background.  The way to bridge this gap is from an analysis mentality. 

Ask ‘what if…’

Program defensively. Expect errors and program to handle those errors

Records of truth vs. support systems. Technologies that are used on their own vs support other technologies

Location of data concerns

Sharding

Location agnostic: Serverless

Raphael on how to develop, find and create opportunities to a security path

Learn more about our guests.

Cockroach Labs: 

Aaron Blum:

Previous interview: Database Security Capabilities of CockroachDB

LinkedIn

Raphael Poss

LinkedIn 

Writings

Personal webpage

Capture the flag:

CTF 101

AT&T Capture the flag

Books: 

No Starch Press