Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Abdel Tefridj.

Abdel is leading the product development at Data Bid Machine to optimize companies’ traffic acquisition. He is a technology and product executive with an extensive background in eCommerce, data science, and software development. Abel has also held roles as chief innovation officer. 

He is advising several growing companies in their digital transformation and scaling their data science initiatives. Strong background in the Search, NLP, deep learning, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, and Data Analytics spaces.

Led a +1000-person global product and engineering teams that build, innovate, and maintain B2B and B2C global platforms across several industries: Energy, Chemical, technology, finance, and retail. Experienced general manager with strong results in managing and growing digital and product revenue volumes ranging from $100 million to $5 Billion+. 

Abdel speaks regularly at conferences, is fluent in four languages, loves to travel and meet new people. To connect the dots you need to collect the dots.

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Quotes

“Leaders provide 2 things for their team: clarity and hope. I think if you can do those two effectively, people will follow you.”

“The MBA will give you validation that you understand the business. Plus it will give you a bigger network. For me, the biggest value was the big network.”

“I think the fastest way to learn is not by reading but by talking to people.”

“The biggest things I’ve learned over the years in product management is follow the money and prioritization.”

“Ask 5-10 customers what they’re willing to spend on. Just go check with the end user and buyer.”

“When I promote a new engineer leader they tend get fixated on people’s weakness. They try to just address weakness. I say ’no, no, no we all have weakness, how to we leverage everybody’s strengths?’”

—Abdel Tefridj

Additional Resources

Learn more about Southern Data Science Conference – https://www.southerndatascience.com/

More about Trey Grainger – https://www.treygrainger.com/about/

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/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Deepanshu Madan.

“Deepanshu is a full-stack software engineer, Product, and Business lead. He has recently co-founded ProcessLabs.ai, to help technology leaders optimize their engineering processes and ship high-quality software, faster.

Deepanshu has a Bachelors’s and Master’s in Computer science and has worked across a variety of technology development roles. He started his career as a Software engineer in Test, moved on to become a Senior Software engineer and led Android teams at companies like Expedia and OpenTable.

Most recently, he was a Product Manager on the Android team at Google, where he led multiple product areas for app development tools. Before this role, Deepanshu was a Product Strategy and Commercialization lead on the AdMob team, where he led product and business strategy for Google’s Mobile Ads product.”

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Quotes

“Most of the stuff I learned in the classroom isn’t really helping my career. But one thing I learned in college is how to learn.“

“I started looking up product manager roles just for fun. Funny enough I found all my jobs by just messaging people on LinkedIn.”

“For a product manager role, understand what your users want, execute, and get it out there.”

“It may look easy how I got the opportunity at Google. But I actually messaged hundreds of people on LinkedIn; hundreds of people even internally at Google too.”

“As a product manager, I had meetings all day and I basically never got time to work. You have to prioritize really well and you have to find out what’s really important at this second.”

“A key part of Process Labs is connecting engineering function to business value.”

—Deepanshu Madan

Key Milestones

1. What was Deepanshu’s career mindset in the early years of his career and how has it evolved?
2. How to send LinkedIn messages to get any tech job?
3. How much of Deepanshu’s early career was focused on mobile development.  What attracted you to that space?
4. Deepanshu left development to join Google to work as a product manager. What influenced him making that kind of switch?
5. How has being a product manager changed the view of development?
6. Deepanshu is the co-founder of Process Labs. What does the company do? What was the inspiration to start it?
7. How to send LinkedIn messages to get any tech job?
8. How does Deepanshu approach hiring?

Additional Resources

Cornelia’s book ‘Cloud Native Patterns’ – https://www.manning.com/books/cloud-native-patterns

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/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Cornelia Davis. 

As the Chief Technology Officer at Weaveworks, Cornelia Davis is responsible for the company’s technology strategy so as to aid enterprises who are transforming their business through the leverage of cloud computing platforms. 

Cornelia cut her teeth in the space of modern application platforms at Pivotal where she was on the teams that brought Pivotal Cloud Foundry (Pivotal’s PaaS), various data products and Pivotal Container Service (Pivotal’s Kubernetes service) to market.  She is the author of the book Cloud Native Patterns: Designing Change-tolerant Software.

An industry veteran with almost three decades of experience in image processing, scientific visualization, distributed systems and web application architectures, and cloud-native platforms, Cornelia holds the B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from California State University, Northridge and further studied theory of computing and programming languages at Indiana University.

When not doing those things you can find her on the yoga mat or in the kitchen.

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Quotes

“Those were the algorithms we were building in 1990 and are now running on this phone, this supercomputer you have in your pocket. We were building those algorithms when I started my career.”

“I’m a change junkie. I need change all the time. That is why it’s so brilliant that I landed in a career like I did. it’s always changing!”

“I would say 80% of my motivation of writing this book is just being able to take what I had been teaching to individual customers and be able to teach that to a broader set of people.”

“What I’m really talking about is redundancy of interaction because redundancy is a big part of what you do in the cloud. You have multiple instances of your running programs so if one of them goes down you still have another one and the load balancer will just shift over to that.”

—Cornelia Davis

Additional Resources

Cornelia’s book ‘Cloud Native Patterns’ – https://www.manning.com/books/cloud-native-patterns

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/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is David Glick.

David Glick is the CTO of the FLEXE fulfillment technology platform. 

Before FLEXE, he spent nearly 20 years at Amazon, including five years as the VP of Fulfillment Technology, where he oversaw the development and functionality of the technology within Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the technology for Amazon’s transportation

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A note from Grant

If you’ve ever wondered what the technology behind the scenes of some of today’s largest retailers looks like, you’re going to want to tune in as we catch up with Dave Glick, the CTO of Flexe, a warehousing and logistics company. 

After getting his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill (Go Heels) in physics — I think this is our 3rd physicist turned technologist — Dave spent 20 years at Amazon building out their fulfillment and transportation systems, amongst a variety of other roles throughout the company, before leaving to join Flexe as their Chief Technology Officer. 

When Dave is not making sure your order arrives on time, he holds down several advisory and humanitarian roles, including being a board member for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking. 

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

“I ended up having to deal with pricing errors. We went through the process of setting prices on promotions automatically and manually. And what we found was that every time a human was involved, defects were injected.”

“We were able to reduce pricing errors by 90 percent year over year.”

“Put the engineer close to the customer. Thats the number 1 piece of advice I’d have for an engineering leader.”

“You’re basically automating the walking. If you think about automating the robot arm that picks an item out of a bin, that is a super hard problem, and no one has ever cracked the code at scale for that. But if you think about picking up a 300 pound pod and bringing it to a human, that is super easy. Robots are really good at that.”

—David Glick

Additional Resources

Learn more about FLEXE – https://www.flexe.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/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dan Papandrea.

Dan “POP” Papandrea is the Field CTO for Sysdig, a cloud-native security and visibility platform. Dan became a tech sales engineer after starting his tech career in tech support and IT. 

POP spends his days learning and contributing to the orchestration and container ecosystem.  POP is the host of the hit podcast The POPCAST by Dan POP which explores the leaders and creators and stories behind the code. twitter: @popcastpop

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Quotes

“I moved over to Advent SS&C. I basically started there in tech support and I worked my way up to the director of IT of the east coast and Europe.”

“When I started we were at 5 hedge funds and then we grew out to 499 of the 500 largest hedge funds in the world.”

“There’s gotta be this love of humility and empathy for the people that you are selling a software or a service to. I never look at myself like I’m selling anything. It’s ‘what can I do to help the customer get to their goals easier’? What can I do to help them go see their children?”

—Dan Papandrea

Key Milestones

1. What inspired Dan Papandrea to get into tech?
2. While at SS&C Advent, Dan switched jobs to tech sales engineer. 
3. What does a sales engineer do on the day to day?
4. How does compensation work for a sales engineer?
5. These days Dan is a Field Chief Technologist. What does this role consist of?
6. How does one build a sales engineering team?
7. Dan also created the hit podcast – PopCast. What was the inspiration behind the show?

Additional Resources

5 Rules to be a Solution(ist) by Dan Papandrea on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-solutionists-salesfield-engineers-5-rules-thumb-dan-papandrea/

Listen to Dan’s podcast ‘Popcast’ on Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-popcast-with-dan-pop/id1503966242

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/

Connect with Dan Papandrea
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Boris Paskhaver

Boris Paskhaver is a New York City-based software engineer, author, and consultant. He’s also been an online educator on Udemy since 2016.

After graduating from New York University in 2013 with a degree in Business Economics and Marketing, Boris worked as a business analyst, systems administrator, and data analyst for a variety of companies including a digital marketing agency, a financial services firm, and an international tech powerhouse. At one of those roles, he was fortunate enough to be challenged to build several projects with Python and JavaScript. 

A small work interest quickly blossomed into a passionate weekend hobby. Eventually, Boris left his former role to complete App Academy, a rigorous full-stack web development bootcamp in NYC. The rest is history.

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Quotes

“A lot of times I would start with excel and think about something I would do typically in excel and try to replicate it in python and pandas“

“I wanted to go to the hardest bootcamp and I chose App Academy because it had the lowest admission rate. I wanted to invest fully.”

“App Academy took a percentage of the first year’s salary rather than charge a huge tuition fee up front. After 4 years in college and 200K in debt I was not eager to invest in educational experience again with that model. I wanted someone who was willing to invest in me.”

“Bootcamp was harder than being an engineer on a day to day basis”

“Pandas is excel on steroids. It allows you to do the same operations you do in excel. When you’re dealing with large datasets in excel your limit is about 1 million rows. And even when you have more than about 3000, it begins to slow down.“

—Boris Paskhaver

Key Milestones

1. Boris accidentally got into Python programming while at Indeed.com. 
2. Boris actually landed his first couple of jobs in tech before doing a bootcamp. 
3. Why did Boris decide to enroll in App Academy Bootcamp?
4. How did Boris get involved as an online educator on Udemy?
5. Boris also wrote a book – “Pandas in Action”, from Manning Publications

Additional Resources

Boris’s book “Pandas in Action” from Manning Publications – 

Data Analysis with Python by Wesley Kinney – https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/python-for-data/9781491957653/

Check out App Academy Bootcamp – https://www.appacademy.io/bootcamp-prep?location=san-francisco

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/

Connect with Boris Paskhaver
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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Atri Sharma!

As a database engineer and open source committer, Atri Sharma has built a career in tech deeply focused some of today’s most popular databases. Some of these include PostgreSQL, Lucene, Elasticsearch, Presto and HAWQ. 

After getting his bachelor’s from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Atri Sharma has held roles at Amazon, EnterpriseDB, Teradata, Barclays, Pivotal, Microsoft and Intuit.  

Along the way, he’s become a prolific contributor to several open source projects like Lucene, PostgreSQL and a handful of other Apache Software Foundation Projects. 

He’s also the author of the upcoming book “Practical Lucene 8”. Stay tuned as we take a deep dive with Atri Sharma into the world of databases and open source!

-Grant Ingersoll

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Quotes

“Google Summer of Code has been around for a while now. It is designed in a way to introduce college students and academics to the world of open source development.”

“One thing that open source really gives you is the people aspect. You build a network of smart and very accomplished people who can actually mentor and help you grow on the right path.”

“When I actually decided to commit myself to open source I always thought it would be in my spare time. I never actually anticipated having a job where I would be expected to contribute features back to open source projects.”

—Atri Sharma

Key Milestones

1. What is Google Summer of Code
2. How has Atri continually found jobs in open source
3. Atri has spent his career working on some of the hardest challenges in the database world like adding features, making them faster.  What’s it like working deep inside some of the world’s most heavily used data stores?
4. What are key skills necessary to work as a database engineer?
5. Atri has worked for many of the world’s largest tech companies. Why did he choose to work in big tech?
6. Atri’s book ‘Practical Lucene 8’

Additional Resources

Order Atri’s book ‘Practical Apache Lucene 8’ – https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Apache-Lucene-Capabilities-Application/dp/1484263448

Mike McCandless is one of Atri’s mentors; read his blog here – http://blog.mikemccandless.com/

Connect with Atri Sharma
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GitHub

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Veljko Krunic! 

Veljko Krunic is a data science consultant, has a computer science PhD, and is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Today’s topic – How To Align AI With Your Business?

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Quotes

“Almost any engineer has a privilege of creating something that was not there before and that was something very important for me.”

“It’s not enough to just make an engineering product. You need to figure out how to get the biggest amount of people possible to use it. Otherwise that product cannot make a difference in their life.”

If you’re facing a situation where you’re interested in something really far away, I believe that is what academia is for. If you are working on something that is immediately commercially viable, I believe you should start a company. 

—Veljko Krunic

Key Milestones

1. Veljko started his career in the former Yugoslavia. Why did he decide to move to the states?
2. You’ve gotten, as I like to say, “all the degrees”. What motivated him to pursue higher education?
3. Veljko had a series of shorter term roles, a year or two here and there before landing on your own and making a go as an independent consultant. How did those roles lead to him becoming a constant?
4. “Succeeding with AI”. What’s it about and who’s it for?
5. How to align AI with your business

Like several of our recent guests, Veljko is a Manning Publications author And just like those guests, we are going to do a give away! The first 5 people who retweet or reshare this episode on Twitter or LinkedIn and tag the Develomentor handle or me will receive a code good for one free ebook of “Succeeding with AI” by Veljko. 

Additional Resources

Buy Veljko’s book “Succedding With AI” by Manning Publications – https://www.manning.com/books/succeeding-with-ai

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/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Hayden Simmons

Hayden has been working in emerging market fintech for most of his career. He graduated from Colorado College in 2007, with an Economic Development major and Spanish minor, having written his thesis on the impact of collectivized remittances in rural Mexico. He spent the early part of his career on the non-profit side, connecting venture-backed remittance startups with immigrant communities for product-market fit testing.

Hayden later spent 4 years at Juvo, managing strategic partnerships across LatAm, Africa and Southeast Asia. He then helped Migo expand from Nigeria into Latin America. 

Currently, Hayden is working on a variety of strategy and BD projects supporting Facebook’s global blockchain-powered mobile money project (Libra).

He is actively advising a number of early-stage African fintechs, is a fledgling angel investor, and recently joined Lateral Capital as a Venture Partner. In his spare time, he enjoys rock climbing, guitar and tending to his agave farm.

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Quotes

“The people you are trying to serve might have a smart phone, but maybe it has no balance. And they may be a dozen miles from the nearest ATM. That backdrop gets people that are interested in emerging markets very excited. How do you piece together all of these challenges to bring financial services to the last mile of consumers?“

“When you’re young and have the time, seek out adventures and take risks and have as many interesting experiences as possible because its all going to be valuable.”

“For emerging markets there’s nothing that can replace on the ground experience and understanding people and the products and the landscape. Just studying in your MBA is a fraction of the value you get from spending a month on the ground.”

—Hayden Simmons

Additional Resources

Learn more about Libra, Facebook’s blockchain powered digital currency – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libra_(digital_currency)

Learn more about One Million Advisors – https://nextbillion.net/

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/

Connect with Hayden Simmons
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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Ken Youens-Clark.

Biography

Ken Youens-Clark is a senior-level programmer with 24 years of experience developing software in industry and research environments (scientific programmer). He is the author of Tiny Python Projects published by Manning Publications.

Ken has deep knowledge of the entire software life-cycle experience, from design, execution, testing, release, and iteration. Ken is a creative thinker and innovator, constantly looking for ways to improve upon systems and interfaces. Ken enjoys mentoring younger developers through code reviews, book reviews, and teaching.

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Quotes

“I didn’t know I would be a programmer. And I didn’t understand what that would mean as a career, but playing with computers seemed interesting to me.”

“I’ve always dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome at every single level. You go into a place with pretty cool people who have CS degrees, some of whom were from MIT. These people were clearly better prepared for what we were doing, but I think I brought a different way of problem solving.”

“I didn’t really understand maybe how languages were put together, but I could still use them very effectively.”

“I’m not qualified on my own to go off and do research. But I can create the software that other people can use for that.”

“You need to learn how to write 1 or 2 lines of code and then run your program. You don’t write 50 lines of code and get your program to work.”

“Your own personal happiness should come first. That means at home too with your relationships and your health and your mental well being. All of these things need to be in line for you to grow in any sort of way whether it is professionally or personally.”

—Ken Youens-Clark

Additional Resources

The first five people who email the show at [email protected] will receive a code good for one free ebook copy of “Tiny Python Projects”. 

For those who don’t want to send an email, you can get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including “Tiny Python Projects” by using the discount code poddevmen20.

Click here to buy “Tiny Python Projects” by Manning Publications

Ken’s YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/kyclark

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/

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Website
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