Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Naomi Ceder.

Biography

Naomi Ceder earned a Ph.D in Classics several decades ago. She switched from ancient human languages to computer languages sometime in the last century. Since 2001, she has been learning, teaching, writing about, and using Python.

An elected fellow of the Python Software Foundation, Naomi currently serves as chair of its board of directors. She also speaks internationally about the Python community, and on inclusion and diversity in technology in general.

By day she leads a team of Python programmers for Dick Blick Art Materials, and in her spare time she enjoys sketching, knitting, and deep philosophical conversations with her dog.

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We are doing a Manning Publications give away!!
The first five people who email the show at [email protected] will receive a code good for one free ebook. You can also get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including The Quick Python Book by using the discount code poddevmen20.
  

Quotes

“When there are events going on I find it more rewarding to be a part of the event than to be a spectator”

“If you’re sincerely out there trying to help other people, I think that is the best way you can find contacts and build a network.”

“Over the years our more important purpose has been growing and fostering a global python community.”

(Trans*code) “There were lots of events going on in tech like hackathons and hack days. But there was never anything focused around trans folk.”

—Naomi Ceder

Additional Resources

Find out more about trans*code – https://www.trans.tech/

Check out Naomi’s book The Quick Python Book from Manning Publications

Follow Trans*Code on Twitter – @trans_code

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 Naomi Ceder
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Twitter
Twitch
https://naomiceder.tech/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Stephen Wolfram.

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Stephen is shaping the future of computing every day.

Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking. He has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

(https://www.stephenwolfram.com)

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Quotes

“Most of science is incremental. But there are these rare moments when fields of science have this explosion of activity and there’s tons of low hanging fruit to be picked.”

“We’re trying to raise the level of how computation can be used by a much broader range of people and its working!”

“The idea that space and time are the same kind of thing is basically wrong. It was a sort of mathematical gloss on top of Einsteins theory of relativity. The mathematics works on nicely, but on the conceptual level it’s the wrong way to go.”

—Stephen Wolfram

Additional Resources

Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine and an incredible tool – https://www.wolframalpha.com/

Listen to Guy Kawasaki interview Stephen Wolfram – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/guy-kawasakis-remarkable-people/id1483081827?i=1000459949118

Stephen’s writings about his personal infrastructure –https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/

Check out Stephen’s book – A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics – https://www.wolfram-media.com/products/a-project-to-find-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics.html

Stephen Wolfram’s TED talk about Wolfram Alpha and the future of computing

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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https://www.stephenwolfram.com/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Ryan Rosario!

Dr. Ryan Rosario is currently a Data Scientist at Google, in the Search area, and Lecturer for the UCLA Department of Computer Science. Prior to Google, Ryan has worked at both Facebook and Amazon. Ryan has split his time between industry and academia. 

His research, academic and work interests include Machine Learning, Text Mining and Natural Language Processing. 

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Quotes

“It wasn’t until I was in the middle of my undergraduate career when I realized how much computer science and statistics went together.”

“For me, security is most important. Although I’ve worked at startups and really enjoyed them, I personally like the bigger company culture better.”

“99 percent of the time as a data scientist is spent with data management. I actually enjoy this! It should actually be a passion for people to enjoy data management.”

“You have to find your own projects on your own using data that’s in your interest area. If you’re interested in the problem being solved you’ll be able to develop the intuition to solve the problem.”

—Ryan Rosario

Key Milestones

1. Many of our listeners are often wonder about pursuing graduate studies after college. Ryan did two master’s and a PhD.  What inspired him to go so deep?
2. Ryan has managed to keep one foot in both academia and industry. How has he been able to organize this kind of balance?
3. Ryan got dual master’s degrees in statistics and computer science. 
4. What is a quantitative engineer?
5. Ryan explains how to develop data intuition. 
6. Text and natural language processing
7. What are some key skills that will help you be successful in data science?

Additional Resources

Guide to learning R for data science – https://www.dataquest.io/blog/learn-r-for-data-science/

Check out Ryan’s blog – http://www.bytemining.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/

Connect with Dr. Ryan Rosario
LinkedIn
Twitter
Blog

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Michael Hartl

Michael is an education entrepreneur and the founder of Learn Enough. 

Michael is the author of over ten books, including the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, one of the leading introductions to web development, and received a Ruby Hero Award for his contributions to the Ruby community. He is also the author of the influential mathematical essay The Tau Manifesto and founded the internationally celebrated math holiday Tau Day in 2010. 

Previously, Michael taught the core physics curriculum at Caltech, where he was a popular instructor with the students and received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator entrepreneur program.

Apart from his interests in education and entrepreneurship, Michael enjoys choral singing, studying languages, and reading old books. He is also an advanced student of Krav Maga, holding a Level 5 rank (a “black belt in self-defense”).

(https://www.learnenough.com/about)

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Quotes

“It took me a while to figure out as an entrepreneur that what should I be doing is taking the teaching and writing skill sets that I learned in grad school and applying them to product creation.”

“Don’t all move to Silicon Valley. Realize that Silicon Valley is on the web and you can find it with a web browser.”

—Michael Hartl

Key Milestones

1. What inspired Michael to start companies and to be in tech?
2. Michael recalls some of his early failures as an entrepreneur.
3. Insoshi was a Y Combinator backed social network that Michael founded. What was it like working with Y Combinator in the early days?
4. Michael shares his path for becoming an education entrepreneur
5. How was Michael able to write a book on coding without having the a computer science background?
6. What is some background on Michael’s tech education company Learn Enough? 
7. What does Michael you have against the number Pi? 
8. The Tau manifesto

Additional Resources

click here for full episode show notes

Essays by Paul Graham (one of the founders of Y Combinator) – http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Ruby on Rails Tutorial – tech book written by Michael Hartl

Learn Python the Hard Way: by Zed Shaw 

The Tau Manifesto – Michael explains that Pi isn’t all its made out it be – https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto

Connect with Michael Hartl
LinkedIn
Twitter
https://www.learnenough.com/
https://www.railstutorial.org/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest are Emily Robinson and Jacqueline Nolis, authors of the book 'Build Your Career in Data Science'.

Emily Robinson works at Warby Parker as a senior data scientist on a centralized team tackling some of the company’s biggest projects. Previously, she was at DataCamp, where she built and ran their experimentation analytics system, and at Etsy, where she worked with their search team to design, implement, and analyze experiments. I regularly give talks on A/B testing, R programming, and data science career advice at conferences and meetups (see all talks here) (www.hookedondata.org/about)

Jacqueline Nolis is a data scientist in Seattle with over a decade of experience helping business solve problems with data. Today she works at Brightloom as a principal data scientist where she builds tools to help companies use data to improve customer experience.

Jacqueline has aided companies and led teams at places from DSW and Union Bank to Microsoft and Airbnb. She bas spent years consulting both independently and with consulting firms. 

Jacqueline earned a PhD in industrial engineering from Arizona State University. Her academic research covered optimizing road networks for electric vehicles.

Jacqueline coauthored the book Build Your Career in Data Science with the excellent Emily Robinson. This book is a great resource for people wanting to become data scientists or grow in the role. (www.jnolis.com)

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Additional Resources

Emily learned data science from Metis bootcamp – find out more about Metis here

A/B Testing in the Wild – talk by Emily https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-ryGgLOgQ

Josh Willis, former director of data engineering at slack, on Develomentor – click here for full episode and show notes

Connect with Emily Robinson
LinkedIn
Twitter
Hookedondata.org
Datascicareer.com (promo for book)

Connect with Jacqueline Nolis
LinkedIn
Twitter
Jnollis.com
bestbook.cool (promo for book)

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
LinkedIn
Twitter

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is James Schaffer.

James Schaffer is a founder, strategist, product designer, and currently a freelance software engineer. He has over a decade of experience managing small organizations including a social justice advocacy firm.

James is skilled in entrepreneurship, planning, curriculum design & development, data ETL and financial modeling. James is committed to leveraging excellent product design and data engineering for social equity and progressive policy.

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Episode Summary

“The core thing was providing training and tools for community organizations and social justice groups to be more powerful in their lobbying work.”

“I loved what I was doing but I wanted to be closer to the code. Software engineers would say ‘this is hard to do for X, Y, Z reason’. And its not that I didn’t believe them, but I just didn’t understand why.”

“Flatiron bootcamp is a bit different than university computer science. I think its way more applied and way less theoretical. We did basically no algorithm work.”

“10 hours of email coaching has been more impactful than years of psychotherapy.”

“Try not to write emails that are longer than 5 sentences.”

—James Schaffer

Key Milestones

1. Why fascinated James about Classical Latin? What did it teach him about himself and his learning style?
2. James has had at least 3 different inflection points in his career so far: bookkeeping, social justice advocacy, and now programming. 
3. How did James decide to go to a boot camp? Why did he pick Flatiron?
4. What was the Flatiron bootcamp experience like?
5. After graduating from a bootcamp, James started freelancing. How does he find clients?
6. Why is email coaching and inbox zero? And how has it been a game changer for James?

Additional Resources

James learned to code at the Flatiron Bootcamp – https://flatironschool.com/

Geoff Harcourt on Develomentor – CTO of Literacy Non-profit, CommonLit #48

What is inbox zero? – https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/inbox-zero

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 James Schaffer
LinkedIn
https://www.thisjames.com/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Twitter

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Simon Willison.

Simon Willison is a JSK Journalism Fellow. When selected as a fellow he was an engineering director at Eventbrite. He originally joined Eventbrite through its acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator-funded company he co-founded in 2010. Simon has made huge leaps in data journalism. 

Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework. He has also been blogging about web development, programming and data journalism since 2002 at simonwillison.net.

Simon is the creator of Datasette, a new tool for publishing structured data as a web API. Datasette is based on Simon’s experiences working as a data journalist at the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. One of Simon’s projects included the Guardian’s crowdsourcing application for analyzing expense claims by members of Parliament.

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Quotes

These days python is used for data science. None of that tooling existed back then. The website of python was very nascent. People were still figuring out ‘whats the best way to build things with python‘?

You can use software engineering skills to help tell stories and to help break the news. 

“My wife and I got married in 2010 and we decided that we’d quit our jobs and go off traveling as long as we could. We’d take laptops and see if there were freelancing clients we could work with.”  

—Simon Willison

Additional Resources

What is a content management system (CMS)? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8MkRr9gu0

One of Simon’s side projects Owls Near Me – https://www.owlsnearme.com/

Learn more about the Django Project – https://www.djangoproject.com/

The Pendulum Approach – by Charity Majors – https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/

Charity Majors on Develomentor – https://develomentor.com/2020/06/18/charity-majors-systems-engineer-cofounder-of-honeycomb-io-66/

Check out Simon’s newest side project Datasette – https://github.com/simonw/datasette

The Manager’s path – https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

Ask a manager blog – https://www.askamanager.org/

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 Simon Willison
LinkedIn
GitHub
https://simonwillison.net/

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Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Caitlyn Greffly.

Caitlyn Greffly is a software engineer who recently transitioned from beer sales into tech via Thinkful bootcamp. She also tries to advocate for others who are making the career switch, and enjoys talking about tech with anyone who will listen.

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Episode Summary

“I spent a good chunk of time working in the beer industry. And I just got sick of the travel. There was a lot of mandatory drinking events and I was just burning out. So I decided to make a career shift and joined the Thinkful coding bootcamp. Its a remote boot camp. After 6 months I got hired and became an associate software engineer.

“I still can’t believe how generous people are in the tech industry with their time. There were so many people who didn’t know me and would just offer me their time to help me or to just talk to me.”

“As a junior (developer) its easy to feel like you know nothing and everybody else knows everything.”

—Caitlyn Greffly

Key Milestones

1. Before we talk tech, Caitlyn spends a moment digging into that psychology degree and those early years working in the beer industry
2. Caitlyn studied to become a beer cicerone – it required 6 months!
3. Caitlyn was able to hold a full time job and attend data analytics bootcamp. What was that experience like?
4. Why did Caitlyn choose the Thinkful bootcamp for data analytics?
5. Caitlyn’s networking tips coming out of bootcamps involve meetups, LinkedIn talking, and much more. 
6. Most junior devs don’t jump right in to speaking and writing. Caitlyn wanted to share her experience coming into tech. 
7. Caitlyn’s first junior developer role had great on-boarding. Unfortunately this isn’t the case at all companies. What can senior engineers do to help support junior developers?

Additional Resources

Learn more about Thinkful Bootcamps – https://www.thinkful.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/

Connect with Caitlyn Greffly
LinkedIn
Twitter

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Leon Mallett

Leon Mallett accepted a job in digital marketing when real estate investing became too risky. Before he knew it, digital marketing became his passion! Leon is currently the chief operating officer (COO) of IAM Cloud (IAM Technology Group Ltd). 

Leon Mallett is a biology major turned digital marketer and tech executive who I first met on Twitter on a thread on careers and jobs people have held.  Turns out we were both paper boys growing up and are now in the C-Suite at tech firms. 

Along his career path, Leon has worked in real estate and customer service. He has also worked in digital marketing for a number of companies including Tesco and the University of Sheffield.  I’ll have to check the archives, but I believe Leon is also the first COO of a tech company we’ve had on the show, so I’m eager to dig into what that means

–Grant Ingersoll

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Episode Summary

“The idea of a marketer is you have to be a generalist. There is a broad set of skills and its really important that you have a breadth of skills across good copy writing, technical skills, as well as an understanding of social platforms.“

“What I learned from my MBA, weirdly, is not so much a load of facts. instead I learned that it does not matter if you don’t know everything because you can work things out. That mindset shift was the real game changer for me.”

“For me, when hiring someone, personality is 90%, skills are 10%.”

—Leon Mallett

Key Milestones

1. What inspired Leon to transition into digital marketing?
2. While marketing is as old as time, digital marketing is still a fairly young field and it covers a lot of ground, especially these days with all the tools available. What is the scope of digital marketing?
3. What are some of the key skills needed to be in marketing?
4. Major differences between working in industry and university 
5. What does a COO at a tech company focus on? 
6. Why does Leon prefer hiring people who have either owned a business or worked as a contractor?

Additional Resources

Geoff Harcourt – CTO of Literacy Non-profit, CommonLit #48

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 Leon Mallett
LinkedIn
Website
Twitter

Follow Develomentor
Twitter: @develomentor

Connect with Grant Ingersoll
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