Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Chidamber Kulkarni.

Chidamber has been working on various aspects of FPGA technology for 16+ years now. In the last 5-6 years his primary focus has been acceleration of database and related technologies. Chidamber is a founder & CTO of Reniac Inc, a company that specializes in database acceleration with FPGAs. 

Prior to Reniac, Chidamber was at Xilinx for 9 years as design engineer. 

Chidamber has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke, a research university in Belgium. 

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Episode Summary

“We are getting larger and larger chips. But the power density is something that has been almost constant for the last 5 or 7 years. That has been a limitation, and that's why they started scaling the number of cores in one chip. GPUs did that almost 10 years before the processors and the reason they had to do it is because they discovered parallelism in rendering. So they already had  64 cores and 128 cores by the time the uni-core became the dual core."

"So there's literally 100 X that you can get with FPGAs. But the effort required to realize that implementation today is still quite high. The challenge for FPGA vendors is how to make that programming easier."

"Skill is very important, but I think skill can be learned. What cannot be transplanted easily is aptitude and motivation."

—Chidamber Kulkarni

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. Why did Chidamber leave academia for the FPGA space?
2. What is the difference between CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs?
3. When did Chidamber start rENIAC? Why did he choose to dive into accelerating open source databases?

Additional Resources

Learn more about field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

Learn more about Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

Ep. 4 Goldman Sachs Saved My Tech Career, with Camille Fournier

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Chidamber Kulkarni
Twitter: @chidamber
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chidamber/

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Twitter: @gsingers
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jeff Meyerson.

Jeffrey Meyerson is the creator and host of the podcast Software Engineering Daily (@software_daily). He is also the founder of FindCollabs, a platform to find collaborators for ventures.

Jeff definitely took a non-traditional path to software engineering. Before getting his degree he played poker professionally for 3 years and then became a poker coach!

Post-college, he worked at a number of software companies including Amazon and eBay as an engineer. Pretty quickly, Jeff realized that he prefers to work for himself. These days he is a podcaster, founder, and investor. 

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. Why did Jeff start his tech podcast, Software Engineering Daily? How does it make money?
2. What should you do if you feel out of place in tech? Is it worth it getting a remote job so that you can have more flexibility?
3. Where is the podcast space headed? Is it saturated or is there still room to grow?

Additional Resources

Software Engineering Radio - Podcast by Robert Blumen. 

https://www.indiehackers.com - A good place to learn how to start a small business

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-software-engineering-daily - Interview with Jeff Meyerson about podcasting!

Charles Max Wood – From Programmer to Full-Time Podcast Wiz - Episode 31 of Develomentor

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Jeff Meyerson
Twitter: @the_prion
Follow Software Engineering Daily @software_daily
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeff-meyerson-05275716/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Geoffrey Harcourt.

Geoff Harcourt is the CTO at CommonLit, a non-profit that provides reading curriculum services in English and Spanish to students and teachers around the world. CommonLit currently serves over 15 million students between the 3rd and 12th grades. 

Before joining CommonLit he was a product engineering consultant at thoughtbot, where he worked with high-growth startups to help them tackle process and scaling problems. 

He previously worked as CTO of Cortex Building Intelligence, a startup whose product helps commercial real estate operators reduce their utility use. Geoff began his career working in several product-side roles and transitioned to engineering after learning how to code on nights and weekends. He majored in history in college.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers


Episode Summary

“I want to work with people that are relentlessly curious. They don’t have to be a total expert at Ruby or Rails or PostgreSQL or the core technologies we use at CommonLit. But if I feel 6 months from now, their skillset will be even bigger than it was before, I think they can be a really good fit working with us.“

“I was a consultant sort of acting like a fill-in technical cofounder for startups that didn’t have a technical cofounder.“

“For me to learn a technical concept, I have to use it in a project I care about the results of.“

—Geoff Harcourt

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. What is it like working for an education nonprofit, CommonLit? What does Geoff look for when building his team as CTO?
2. What did Geoff do after graduating with a history degree from Harvard?
3. Why project-based learning is so important for Geoff in acquiring new skills?
4. How Geoff got introduced to coding by running a website for his fantasy baseball league?

Check out Geoffrey's startup Cortexintel - https://get.cortexintel.com/

Learn more about CommonLit - https://www.commonlit.org/unsupported_browser.html

Learn more about thoughtbot - https://thoughtbot.com/


You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Geoff Harcourt
Twitter: @geoffharcourt
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/geoffharcourt/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Twitter: @gsingers
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jennifer Creighton. 

Jenn Creighton is a frontend architect and conference speaker. She lives in New York with her two cats and maintains a Home for Abandoned Succulents, Mismanaged Plants and Otherwise Ailing Flora. You can find her online @gurlcode.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

Episode Summary

“Doing a major in English is very technically heavy, and so I think a lot of that transfers into engineering. You pay attention to composition a lot. You are working in specific languages, and so you’re getting used to what they look like, how they’re composed and what are the best practices with them.”

—Jennifer Creighton

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. Why Jenn chose not to get a formal degree in software engineering
2. How is it that so many English majors become front end engineers?
3. The differences between junior engineers, senior engineers, and software architects?

Key Milestones

[1:52] – Jennifer got a degree in English. She fell into the role of a content manager for several companies including The National Academy of Sciences. To manage websites, Jenn had to relearn HTML and CSS. This led her to become more and more technical.
[3:45] – Jenn built a website when she was 14 years old and learned HTML and CSS.
[6:20] – How did Jenn accidentally use Javascript when she was 14 and didn’t know it?
[8:20] – Jenn describes lucking into her first technical role at Ralph Lauren. For a while, she was convinced she needed a formal degree in computer science but then chose the self-taught route.
[13:40]- As she decided to leave Ralph Lauren, Jenn spent her nights and weekends preparing for legitimate technical interview. She had a few subpar interviews that served as early learning experiences.
[16:05] – Jenn recalls finding her first mentor at Lover.ly, a startup she worked at.
[20:02] – The differences between junior engineers, senior engineers, and software architects. How did Jenn’s expertise with React get her promoted quickly at ClassPass?
[24:20] – Why do so many English majors get into front end software engineering?
[28:20] – Jenn’s first speaking engagement was at the conference, Women Who Code 2018. But it was attending Write, Speak, Code that really put her in that position. In 2018, Jenn spoke at 10 conferences! 
[31:10] – How has speaking at conferences taken Jenn’s confidence and career to a whole new level? Why does Jenn monitor her pulse?

To learn more about Write Speak Code Conference, click here

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Jennifer Creighton
Twitter: @gurlcode
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jennifercreighton/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Twitter: @gsingers
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Olivia Liddell.

Olivia Liddell is a Technical Curriculum Developer at Amazon Web Services. Over the course of her career, she has created innovative teaching and technical training solutions for learners from diverse backgrounds and skill levels.

A Certified Ethical Hacker, Olivia frequently speaks on topics such as social engineering and security awareness. In her spare time, she enjoys distance running, studying linguistic anthropology, and developing web applications for Arabic language learners.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

Episode Summary

“If I gave kids a worksheet and said ‘do this’ they would feel bored. After playing this computer game, not only were they saying ‘Ms. Liddell, I want to learn more about this’, but they were also competing with each other. They said ‘Arabic was fun!’“

—Olivia Liddell

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. What is social engineering?
2. Mischievous activities Olivia did to get her family kicked off AOL
3. What is the day to day of a curriculum developer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
4. How sharing your ideas on Twitter will help you speak at conferences

Key Milestones

[2:19 ] – In college, Olivia studied anthropology and middle eastern studies. After taking on jobs assisting higher education, Olivia decided to become a teacher through The Academy of Urban School Leadership. This was a big move for her. 
[4:49] – Olivia taught Arabic in middle schools. She had to work hard to engage her students, After some time, she started to incorporate her love for technology into teaching. 

[7:05] – There weren’t many language computer games out there. Yet there were plenty of games for math and science. This is when Olivia decided to take a shot at creating content and developing games. 
[10:30] – Olivia recalls talking to a mentor who inspired her to develop educational games.

[14:30]- Olivia started writing content and games on AOL. She also recalls first encountering the ‘view source’ button and how it changed her life!
[17:27] – Olivia talks about how she keeps up with new technology. She has cultivated an inspiring twitter feed. She often prefers learning in tidbits as opposed to taking formal online classes. 

[19:24] – How did Olivia get into speaking at conferences? Listen to one of her speeches here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFiSHyUmCk
[21:50] – Practical tips to improve your communication skills: Think about literally where is this person coming from? What was their morning like? 

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Olivia Liddell
Twitter: @OliRavi
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/olivialiddell/
Website: https://www.olivialiddell.com/

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Twitter: @gsingers
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jody Mulkey.

Prior to GoodRx, Jody Mulkey (@jodymulkey) was the Chief Product Officer at Aspiration. An accomplished technologist and inspirational engineering leader, Jody is known for building high-performance systems and teams.

Prior to Aspiration, Jody spent 5 years as CTO of Ticketmaster leading the global product and technology transformation. Prior to Ticketmaster Jody spent over 14 years at Shopzilla, now Connexity, a leading source for connecting buyers and online sellers that reaches a global audience of over 40 million shoppers monthly. Jody was the CIO of Shopzilla and part of the inaugural team building the company’s data platform, analytics, and infrastructure.

Born in Texas, Jody attended military school and got his degree in shenanigans before moving to California. Jody studied Business Administration at USC with dual emphases in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems.

Outside of work, Jody is an active startup investor, Laker fan, Trojan fan, and tennis enthusiast. Jody lives in Westwood, CA with his saint of a wife, 2 amazing children, and 2 obstinate yet adorable pugs.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

Episode Summary

“With good leadership, good people on your team, clear expectations and clear systems for accountability in a really beautiful, positive way that solves most of the management problem.”

—Jody Mulkey

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. How Jody ran a consulting business from his fraternity house in college
2. What it’s like working for Ticketmaster, Aspiration, and GoodRx
3. Why Jody quit his job at Sony Pictures after just 23 days

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Jody Mulkey
Twitter: @jodymulkey
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jodymulkey/

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Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Aline Lerner.

Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical recruiting platform where companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Quora have hired great software engineers. Before that, she was a software engineer for 5 years, ran hiring at Udacity, and wrote a lot of stuff about hiring on the internet.

Aline’s data-driven posts about how typos matter more than pedigree, how resumes are a low-signal filtering tool, and how technical interviews aren’t deterministic have been read by millions of people. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and Fast Company.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

Interview.io Special Discount for Develomentor Listeners!

Episode Summary

“We now hire for a ton of great companies including Goldman Sachs, twitter, uber and a bunch of others. But about 40 percent of our top performers and by extension about 40 percent of the hires we’ve made to date are people that frankly don’t look that good on paper!”

—Aline Lerner

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. What did Aline learn from working long hours in the kitchen?
2. How important is spelling and grammar on a professional resume? (Hint: it’s very important!)
3. Is technical recruiting more tech or sales?
4. How Interview.io helps candidates that don’t look great on paper?

You can find more resources in the show notes
To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/
To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Additional Resources

Read Aline’s articles on Quora
Read Aline’s articles on Medium

Books Mentioned:

Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach – by Dandridge M. Malone
The Hard Thing About Hard Things – by Ben Horowitz
The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training For Climbers – by Arno Ilgner

Follow Aline Lerner
Twitter: @alinelernerLLC
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alinelerner/


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LinkedIn: linked

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Gary Flake. 

Dr. Gary William Flake is an independent scientist, author, and inventor, that currently advises over a dozen startups, public companies, universities, and non-profits.

Gary was previously the CTO of Search and Data Science at salesforce.comwhere he managed salesforce’s entire search business unit. Prior to that, Gary was CEO of Clipboard Inc., which was acquired by salesforce.com in May of 2013. Before founding Clipboard, Gary was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft (2005-2010), where he was responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN, and for helping set the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. In this capacity, he founded and directed Live Labs, Microsoft’s greatest investment in applied research focused on the Internet, which was responsible for groundbreaking technologies such as Seadragon, Photosynth, Deepfish, Listas, Volta, and Pivot.

Gary has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 20 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and complex systems. Gary has also appeared in leading national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Nature Science, CNET News, Computer World, Fast Company, TechCrunch and Mashable, and has presented at leadership events such as the TED Conference.

Gary earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, has served on numerous academic committees and university advisory boards, and wrote the award-winning book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide. Gary was also the 2010 winner of the World Technology Award in the category of individual achievement in software, and was named one of the “Creativity 50” in 2009.

“The type of work I do is all over the map. I mentor a lot of CTOs. I work with other companies on their core strategies. I often serve as a sort of domain expert for certain things around machine learning and data science. So i get into the technical weeds for some of them. That’s a way of keeping me relevant and making sure I don’t lose track of whats going on in the rest of the world.”
-Gary Flake

Watch Gary's keynote speech about his startup, Clipboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5dJVfipkhY

Watch Gary's Ted Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration

Gary's Book:
Computational Beauty of Nature


You can find more resources in the show notes

To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/

To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Gary Flake
Twitter: @flakenstein
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garyflake/


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Twitter: @develomentor

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Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linked

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Gary Flake. 

Dr. Gary William Flake is an independent scientist, author, and inventor, that currently advises over a dozen startups, public companies, universities, and non-profits.

Gary was previously the CTO of Search and Data Science at salesforce.com where he managed salesforce’s entire search business unit. Prior to that, Gary was CEO of Clipboard Inc., which was acquired by salesforce.com in May of 2013. Before founding Clipboard, Gary was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft (2005-2010), where he was responsible for bridging Microsoft Research and MSN, and for helping set the technology vision and future direction of the MSN portal, web search, desktop search and commercial search efforts. In this capacity, he founded and directed Live Labs, Microsoft’s greatest investment in applied research focused on the Internet, which was responsible for groundbreaking technologies such as Seadragon, Photosynth, Deepfish, Listas, Volta, and Pivot.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Gary founded Yahoo! Research Labs, ran Yahoo!s corporate R&D activities and company-wide innovation effort, and was Overture’s Chief Science Officer. Before joining Overture, Gary was a research scientist at NEC Research Institute and the leader of its Web data-mining program.

Gary has filed over 150 patents and has numerous publications spanning over 20 years which have focused on machine learning, data mining, and complex systems. Gary has also appeared in leading national publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Nature Science, CNET News, Computer World, Fast Company, TechCrunch and Mashable, and has presented at leadership events such as the TED Conference.

Gary earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, has served on numerous academic committees and university advisory boards, and wrote the award-winning book, The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is used in college courses worldwide. Gary was also the 2010 winner of the World Technology Award in the category of individual achievement in software, and was named one of the “Creativity 50” in 2009.

"Your work can only go so far if you can’t communicate it. Your ability to communicate the importance of it can really make a difference between it having an impact that is tremendous versus nothing at all."
-Gary

Watch Gary's Ted Talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration

Gary's Book:
Computational Beauty of Nature

Learn more about Gary Flake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_William_Flake


You can find more resources in the show notes

To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/

To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Gary Flake
Twitter: @flakenstein
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/garyflake/


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Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linked

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mark Imbriaco. 

Mark Imbriaco has done everything from scaling and systems operations to starting his own company. His focus has been on an emerging part of technology: DevOps and site reliability engineering.  

Mark often leads scaling (for sites and applications) and builds teams that manage those sites. Mark has held positions at AOL, Bank of America, Github, Basecamp, Heroku, DigitalOcean and now Epic Games.


Episode Summary

“DevOps is all about how do we take the code that gets developed, and the code that lives in production, and bring them closer to being the same thing.”

“There’s a balance between following your passions and paying your bills. Finding that balance in between has been an ongoing back and forth struggle.”

—Mark Imbriaco

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. What exactly is DevOps and site reliability engineering
2. How Mark dropped out of college after 2 years to start a hosting company back in 1994
3. The story behind 37Signals, now Basecamp, and how Mark got a job as a system administrator for them
4. How Mark got connected with Epic Games after reading a blog post

Key Milestones

[2:05] – Mark dropped out of college to start a company with his friends. But after a few years, he joined Bank of America and then AOL to support his family.
[3:05] – Imbriaco became a java developer for the heavy truck industry for 5 years. With time he increasingly became dissatisfied with what he was doing. He started going to conferences and getting introduced to new people and ideas. This is when he got exposed to Ruby on Rails.

[4:30] – The story behind 37Signals, now Basecamp, and how Mark got a job as a system administrator for them. He later left 37Signals for Heroku, later acquired by Salesforce

[6:30] – Why was leaving Heroku to join LivingSocial a mistake? After LivingSocial, Mark became part of GitHub. And later joined DigitalOcean
[9:30]- Mark goes into cofounding Operable, a startup on chat ops, with a friend. Although his ideas were good, Mark was subpar at implementing them. The company shut down 2 years later.

You can find more resources in the show notes

To learn more about our podcast go to https://develomentor.com/

To listen to previous episodes go to https://develomentor.com/blog/

Follow Mark Imbriaco
Twitter: @markimbriaco
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/imbriaco/

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Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

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