Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen

Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen is the CEO & founder of AuCoDe, an AI-based FinTech startup that detects online and social media controversy. (Controversy Detection).

She has fifteen years of academic and industry experience, including Google and Facebook. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc. (cum laude) at the University of Haifa in Israel and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she researched computational models of controversy. 

Dr. Dori-Hacohen is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2011 Google Lime Scholarship and first place at the 2016 UMass Amherst’s Innovation Challenge. She is married with two kids; identifies as a person with disabilities; and has taken an active leadership role in broadening participation in Computer Science on a local and global scale.

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Episode Summary

“I could go to Israel and get my entire undergraduate (degree) for the cost of 1 year at a public school in the states.”

“Part of what was fun for me in opening a startup was this steep learning curve of all the stuff about business that I didn’t know anything about and then bringing that together with my technical experience.” 

“I’m also the technical co-founder. So I definitely get my hands dirty with the technical work. But my main role is to raise money so that everyone else in the company can get their job done.”

—Dr. Shiri Dori-Hacohen

Key Milestones

1. Shiri went to school in both America and Israel. What was it like having academic parents?
2. Why did Shiri decide to get her undergraduate degree in Israel instead of sticking around in the US?
3. Shiri was working in industry after getting her master’s degree, Why did she end up pursuing a PhD?
4. When did tech become dominated by men? 
5. What is AuCode and what inspired Shiri to start her own company?

Additional Resources

Do you have many passions and don’t just want to pick one? Check out Renaissance Souls – http://renaissancesouls.com/

Learn more about automated controversy detection and Shiri’s company – http://controversies.info/

Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: How to Turn Your Fear and Indecision into Confidence and Action – By Susan Jeffers

The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup – by Noam Wasserman

Check out Ramit Sethi’s online courses on business – https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Diane Burley..

Diane Burley is a storyteller. She helps executives in all industries understand technology’s role in solving many of the challenges they face today. What is tech content marketing? How does it differ from marketing in other industries?

Diane is a former journalist and multi-media executive. She put the first daily newspapers on the web in 1995. Diane is fully aware of the complexities of integrating vast amounts of data, facing political hurdles, and changing up processes to support the technologies-all while facing that “existential threat.” 

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Episode Summary

“My thrust is never to look for a technology for technology’s sake. It is to solve a business problem, and look to match the technology to the problem. From a storytelling standpoint it helps resonate with your audience. They have the pain. They have the problem.”

“You don’t want a wandering generality. You want meaningful specific – something that is meaningful and specific to truly answer a person’s needs.”

“When you’re talking about enterprise technology and enterprise sales there’s so many different audience members. And I think one of the biggest mistakes most companies make is say ‘oh this is technical, and the technical person is going to understand all of this’.”

“I’ve worked in networking companies, cybersecurity companies, development companies, database companies. I can tell you that the top engineers in each of those places wouldn’t have a clue about what a technology is that another company is offering. So you really need to break it down to those basic levels. You don’t have to do it in a condescending way, you do it with metaphors.”

—Diane Burley

Key Milestones

1. Diane got degrees from SUNY Oswego and Rutgers in Communications and information systems. What did these degrees teach her?
2. What were newspapers like in 1995 and how did they go from print to digital? 
3. How does Diane approach tech content marketing and storytelling?
4. What are some practical skills and tips for content producers to improve their SEO?

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Vicki Boykis.

Vicki Boykis is currently a machine learning engineer at Automattic as well as a published writer on topics in the data science space. 

Vicki received a Bachelors degree in Economics from Penn State and her MBA from Temple. That’s right, she didn’t study computer science in university! She became curious in software engineering at her job at Comcast. She decided to learn on her own with a little help from her peers. Oh, and she took a few online courses from a community college!

Vicki has 10+ years’ experience in helping companies across a broad range of industries make their data actionable. Most recently, she has built machine learning data products in Python but she has also worked with R, Tableau, Spark (Scala and Python), and Hadoop. 

In her spare time, she enjoys reading, running, and mentoring people new to the tech industry.

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Episode Summary

“Moving into the data science space was almost like a stroke of luck because I had no idea that it even existed.”

“I knew that if I did a Coursera course I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it because I wouldn’t feel like there was enough at stake. But the community college program was for actual credits and you get an actual certificate. It felt a little more structured and a little more real to me.”

“For my MBA program what really helped me was taking accounting and finance classes. I started to understand that the people who manage companies and the people who are responsible for budgets think in terms of revenue and costs of projects and opportunity costs.”

—Vicki Boykis

Key Milestones

1. How did Vicki get into economics and financial analysis?
2. Vicki worked at Comcast in a business intelligence role. How did this role allow her to move into data science?
3. In 2016, Vicki went to community college to take some computer science courses. What was it like going back to school after working for more than a few years?
4. Data science engineer vs machine learning engineer
5. How has having an Econ and MBA degree helped Vicki in her career?
6. These days, Vicki is a manager of data science and engineering. Why did she choose to move into management?
7. How does Vicki approach team building in data science?
8. Vicki is also a writer an an author. In what ways has this helped her career?

Additional Resources

Vicki suggests anyone getting into tech should read Hacker News! – https://thehackernews.com/

Mike Gualtieri – Tech Analyst at Forrester (#38) – Previous episode mentioned 

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Adam Cheyer.

Adam Cheyer is an inventor, entrepreneur, engineering executive, and a pioneer in AI and computer human interfaces.

Adam has been a co-founder or founding member of four successful startups, including 

1. Siri (sold to Apple, where he led server-side engineering and AI for the Siri assistant). 
2. Change.org (the world’s largest petition platform), 
3. Viv Labs (sold to Samsung, where as VP R&D, Adam leads product engineering and developer relations for Samsung’s voice assistant), 
4. Sentient (massively distributed machine learning).

Previously, Adam was VP Engineering at Verticalnet (enterprise software) and Dejima (mobile software). Adam also spent more than a decade at SRI International, where his most recent role was as Chief Architect of CALO/PAL, the US government’s largest funded AI project.

Adam has authored more than 60 publications and 37 patents. He graduated with highest honors from Brandeis University and received the “Outstanding Masters Student” award from UCLA’s School of Engineering.

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Episode Summary

“I started 3 companies at the same time. Siri was my day job. I started a company called Sentient, that was my night job. And change.org was my side side project.”

“After 2 years, Apple saw Siri. Steve Jobs called our office, unannounced, after we launched a free app in the app store.”

“Timing is super important. I was doing Siri – like systems since 1993. Literally exactly half my life. If I tried to launch it as a company any sooner or later, it would not have had the success that it did.”

“I thought that social networking would take off. And that led directly to our work at Change.org.”

—Adam Cheyer

Key Milestones

1. What was it like studying computer science in the early 1980’s? 
2. Adam was told he couldn’t join his school’s computer club. This made him him angry and curious. 
3. How does Adam predict which technologies will be important in the future? He created a model called trends and triggers that he uses to organize his own thinking. 
4. Siri was partially created to give other phone manufacturers a shot at taking down Apple. How did Apple end up acquiring Siri? What was it like receiving a phone call from Steve Jobs unannounced?
5. Change.org is a massively influential petition platform. Yet, Adam views it as a side project. Why is this?

Additional Resources

Bixby Developers is a conversational assistant marketplace. Its part of Samsung. Learn more about it – https://bixbydevelopers.com/

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Charity Majors

Charity Majors is a former systems engineer and manager at Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab. She is also the co-author of Database Reliability Engineering. 

Charity is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, a company dedicated to building production engineering and observability products

“With distributed systems, you don’t care about the health of the system, you care about the health of the event or the slice.”

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Episode Summary

“Our [systems engineers] expertise is around everything from performance and optimization to capacity, projections and provisioning.”

“Ops teams have a dark sense of humor. In my experience, they also tend to have the most cohesive teams out of all engineering teams. And i think its because they walk through the fire together.”

“I think that new managers need to commit to it [management] for about 2 years. That’s about how long it takes for your brain to rewire itself and learn how to build that inner voice that you can trust that tells you if you’re doing well or not.”

“I wanted to write go code for 2 years straight. That’s all I wanted to do after Facebook. Just heads down, write software!”

“Looking at the way we build software now its so painful and its so inefficient and it doesn’t have to be. The biggest obstacle I see between us as an industry and a better way is that we’ve come to believe that this is just how it is.”

—Charity Majors

“Basically in a large site with tens of thousands of servers, every day something is breaking.”

—Grant Ingersoll

Additional Resources

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

What is observability and cardinality? https://thenewstack.io/observability-a-3-year-retrospective/

Learn more about honeycomb.io – https://www.honeycomb.io/

Check out honeycomb.io blog – https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/

Read Charity’s blog – charity.wtf

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson.

Erik Bernhardsson is the CTO of Better. Better is on a mission to change the enormous and hopelessly broken mortgage industry. Erik runs the technology team, which consists of roughly 50 engineers.

Before Better, Erik spent six years at Spotify, mostly building the core of the music recommendation system. He started out writing recommendation algorithms and eventually built a team of 20 people to help out with this.

In his spare time, Erik enjoy building open source software, for instance Annoy (6k stars on Github) and Luigi. Erik also co-organizes the NYC Machine Learning meetup, and writes a tech blog which has a few hundred thousand visitors per year.

Earlier in his life Erik used to do a lot of algorithm competitions. He won an IOI gold medal in 2003 and won the Nordic programming competition five times.

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Episode Summary

“The most impact a CTO can have in many ways is recruiting.”

“At Spotify, for the first year, no one told me who my manager was. No one told me a single thing about what to do. I just did things I thought would be valuable to the business."

“You’re going to want to find vectors of who wants to listen to what track. Using these vectors you can do all of these recommendation operations.”

—Erik Bernhardsson

Key Milestones

1. What is it about physics and math that makes them such fertile ground for preparing programmers?
2. Erik helped build recommendation algorithms and systems for Spotify as a developer and a manager. How do these recommendation systems work and what impact can they have?
3. Erik made the leap from a successful company to joining a startup as the CTO. How did he know the time was right for such a transition?
4. What are some of the things Erik looksRange: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World for when hiring people for his team?
5. What are some concrete interviewing tips?

Additional Resources

Check out Erik’s website/blog – https://erikbern.com/

Develomentor Ep. 17 Jake Mannix – Self-Professed Math Nerd Physicist turned AI Engineer

Develomentor Ep. #44 Aline Lerner – Pro Chef Starts Tech Recruiting Firm, Interviewing.io 

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World – by David Epstein

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

Michael Tuso is currently Director of Revenue Performance at Chili Piper. 

He has held a variety of sales roles both inside of and outside of technology.  Over the years, he’s sold for Citrix, SnackNation and now Chili Piper. He’s also done a different category of “sales” work as a campaign manager. 

To make his story even more colorful, Michael built much of his early sales experience working from South and Central America in places like Costa Rica and Bolivia. So, if you’ve always wondered what it’s like to do technical sales, stay tuned!

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Episode Summary

“There’s a lot of parallels I’ve been able to draw between selling a candidate and selling an actual tech product.”

“When you use too many words it portrays you aren’t confident in what you’re saying.”

“Outside of school, I spent most of my time coaching and training people in various forms of martial arts. I always try to find ways to make my interests mutually reinforce each other and I still do that today.”

—Michael Tuso

Key Milestones

1. Michael was working in politics but decided to move to La Paz, Bolivia to work at Citrix. What influenced this decision?
2. The early years of sales + living and working in a new country
3. The key skills required to be successful in tech sales
4. Product knowledge alone does not equate to success in sales
5. The difference between a sales engineer and a sales architect
6. How do you build an effective tech sales team?
7. What kind of people are cut out for sales? What makes them succeed at it?

Additional Resources

Michael Tuso on ‘future stating’ in the sales process – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYLIwbQLqeU

Learn more about sales enablement? – https://www.hubspot.com/sales-enablement

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Dr. Roman Yampolskiy.

Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas of interest are behavioral biometrics, digital forensics, pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial super-intelligence and games. 

Dr. Yampolskiy is an author of over 100 publications including multiple journal articles and books. His research has been cited by numerous scientists and profiled in popular magazines both American and foreign (New Scientist, Poker Magazine, Science World Magazine), dozens of websites (BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo! News) and on radio (German National Radio, Alex Jones Show). 

Reports about his work have attracted international attention and have been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Spanish.

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Episode Summary

“My interest is artificial intelligence. Specifically I’m trying to understand how to control it and how to make sure it’s beneficial for everyone.“

“You’re not going to find some perfect role model. Take something good from a dozen people.”

“Whatever the product is, people will find ridiculous ways to abuse it. You need to see this ahead of time and get ready for it.“

“If a system is smarter than you, you cannot predict what its actually going to do. By definition. If you could, you’d be just as smart.” 

—Roman Yampolskiy

Key Milestones

1. Dr. Yampolskiy was able to bypass getting a bachelor’s degree and go straight to getting his Master’s and PhD. How did he do this? And how was he able to save money on education?
2. What is Dr Yampolskiy’s approach to deep work? How is he able to juggle teaching and his own research?
3. Computing is advancing at an increasing pace, what are Dr Yamposlkiy’s thoughts on artificial super-intelligence? 
4. Why is Dr. Yampolsky working on finding failure models for systems that don’t even exist today?
5. How has Dr. Yampolskiy been able to have multiple mentors and take away bits and pieces from each one of them?

Additional Resources

Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach – by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy

Ep. 6 of Develomentor Freedom – From Side Hustle to a Scalable Business, with Fred Stutzman

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Sona Maniyan.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to change careers into the tech industry after a long time as a stay at home parent, stay tuned!

Sona Maniyan received both her bachelor’s and master’s in accounting and finance. Subsequently, she landed roles ranging from consultant to customer service supervisor and financial analyst. 

But Sona’s career path took a turn after a few years as a stay-at-home Mom. She decided to go back to school to become a software engineer. In this second phase of her career, Sona has held roles for the likes of Symantec, Target and General Mills. 

In addition, Sona is also the leader for the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and the cofounder of the Social Data Science meetup in Minneapolis. 

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Episode Summary

“I wouldn’t say relaunching my career was just me alone. It took a whole village. Everybody has in some way contributed to help me get to where I am.“

“I didn’t care so much about grades. I cared more about what I was learning. So I would do the harder projects.“

“Data science is becoming more of a consultant role where we work very closely with the business. Communication skills and understanding business requirements are becoming a lot more important.”

—Sona Maniyan

Key Milestones

1. What attracted Sona to finance and accounting at the start?
2. What was it like living in Kuwait during the Gulf War of the 1990s?
3. Why did Sona choose software engineering and tech? Why not go back into finance and accounting?
4. While colleges have certainly gotten better at supporting working adults, they aren’t exactly optimized for it. What was it like going back to school a bit later in life?
5. One of the things we see often on the show is how different backgrounds help people become better more rounded developers, managers and colleagues. How have Sona’s experiences in customer service, finance and consulting shaped her career as a developer and data scientist?

Additional Resources

Learn more about AnitaB and how it is helping women in technology – https://anitab.org/ 

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything – by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner – https://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338

Develomentor Ep. 20 JP Sherman – US Army PsyOps turned SEO Expert

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Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is John Carnell.

John Carnell is currently the team lead at Genesys.

He comes to us with 20+ years of experience working across a variety of technical development roles including consultant, tech architect, developer and team lead. 

He has a background in both computer science and criminology and has also gone on to get an MBA. Along his path he’s written a book and taken on a number of speaking engagements.

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Episode Summary

“When you look at a problem, you got to look at the process. Its not always a technical problem you’re solving. What are the human elements in a problem that are driving a certain outcome?”

“I’ve always followed tension between an open internet and regulations. I find that a lot of times I go back to ‘where does it balance out in the constitution?’.”

“A lot of the elements and methodologies that are now mainstream in software development had borrowed heavily from that background that earlier business people had drawn upon.”

—John Carnell

Key Milestones

1. John tells us about his criminology background and how that area of knowledge has helped shape his career
2. Why did John decide to get his MBA
3. How was John able to point out problems in companies without complaining?
4. Cloud Engineer vs Software Engineer
5. When did John decide he wanted to go into tech management and leadership?
6. What is lean 6 sigma program and how is it used to improve process inefficiencies. 
7. What are some similarities between tech architect and software engineer?
8. John’s book, Spring Microservices in Action

Additional Resources

What is lean six sigma? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma

Spring Microservices in Action – John’s book published by Manning Publications

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