Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Peter Bell

Peter Bell has a long history of building tech companies and holding down roles like CEO and CTO. After studying electronics and communications systems engineering, Peter promptly went into private practice as a psychotherapist. He then returned to tech to add a long string of founder titles to his resume.  

Over the years, Peter has built web design companies, digital agencies, and sales and tech training companies. He’s worked for the likes of Github and General Assembly, as well as a variety of smaller firms. Peter is also an active community builder, public speaker and a fellow podcaster. 

If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!

Episode Summary

“I was doing fine with this degree thing, but I didn’t want to work for a company that was dumb enough not to hire me without a piece of paper.”

“I wanted to be the next Tony Robbins and start a psychotherapy practice. Then I figured out that sales and psychotherapy are fundamentally the same practice just with different payment mechanisms.”

“There is a lot more commonality between being a VP of engineering and an individual contributor. Being a manager is almost something totally different.”

—Peter Bell

Key Milestones

1. Before we dive into the tech Peter tells us more about his private practice as a psychotherapist
2. When did Peter first recognize you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
3. Going the founder route is often a roller coaster of a ride. Peter recalls some of the key inflection points that helped define him as a founder?
4. What was the inspiration for CTO School, CTO Summit and the CTO Connection and who is the target audience?
5. What are some of the key lessons Peter has learned about being in the CTO role over all these years?

Additional Resources

Introduction to domain specific languages – https://www.codemag.com/article/0607051/Introducing-Domain-Specific-Languages

Learn more about CTO connection – https://www.ctoconnection.com/

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

The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change – by Camille Fournier

FOLLOW CTO SUMMIT
@CTOSummit

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 PETER BELL
LinkedIn

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Jonathan Cutrell

Jonathan Cutrell is a communications and media studies graduate who started his early career as a writer and editor before entering the world of development. 

He’s held a variety of roles including software engineer, director and CTO. These days, he’s an engineering manager and fellow podcaster who started the Spec.fm podcast network. Spec.fm currently hosts 12 different podcasts and sees an average of 100,000 downloads a week

If you are enjoying our content, click here to support us!

Episode Summary

“What a lot of people get out of journaling I get out of making podcasts.”

“I think the best way to think about Developer Tea, and incidentally to think about almost anything, is in the smallest possible chunk you can consume.”

“Frankly, I think Developer Tea is as much of a me talking to myself as me talking to the people that listen to it.”

—Jonathan Cutrell

Key Milestones

1. How did Jonathan get into tech and how was he able to get into early leadership roles like Director of Technology
2. How was Jonathan able to hold so many management roles? What drew him to management?
3. Jonathan hosts the podcast called Developer Tea. What was the inspiration for starting the show?
4. Spec.fm consists of 11 different podcasts focused on developers and technology. How did Jonathan create this platform?
5. As a manager and a podcaster, Jonathan focused much of your career on helping developers succeed. How did Jonathan find this niche?
6. What does Jonathan look for when hiring and building teams?

Additional Resources

Check out our previous interview with Podcaster Charles Max Wood – Charles Max Wood – From Programmer to Full-Time Podcast Wiz

Follow Jonathan’s podcast Developer Tea – @DeveloperTea

Visit the spec.fm podcast network – https://spec.fm/

Follow Specfm – @specfm

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 JONATHAN CUTRELL
LinkedIn
Website
Twitter

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Arun Ganesan

Arun Ganesan is an Embedded Systems Engineer at Ford Motor Company. 

Arun obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona. He then started working at Ford Motor Co. as an Analytical Programmer due to his knowledge in Matlab programming. 

Arun started writing Matlab scripts for durability analysis which then expanded to systems level analysis. At that point he jumped to being Systems Engineer. Arun continued with Matlab programming as well as C# programming – this is where he got exposed to Embedded Systems. 

Are you enjoying our content at Develomentor? Support us here

Episode Summary

“When I was small, I would always tinker around with electronics and take things apart and put them back until I got yelled at for doing things like that. That was my interest. When I was 17, My dad and I had a talk and he said, Why not electric engineering?”

“Digital design is designing the logic within a CPU. You’re always working on the same framework. The same set of rules apply. In analog design, its more real-world based. You’re using circuits to solve real world problems.”

“The code goes with the hardware. C# is just for the application on windows. The actual code that goes on the transmission or on the chip is C.”

—Arun Ganesan

Key Milestones

1. What exactly is electrical engineering and what attracted Arun to pursuing a career in it? 
2. Who is an embedded systems engineer and what are some of the key skills necessary?  
3. Understanding how to code lean is essential for embedded systems! 
4. What type of tools does Arun use? What is the day to day of an embedded systems engineer
5. How has Arun’s electrical engineering background served him in his role?

Additional Resources

Ep. 18 Kavita Ganesan – Software Engineer turned NLP Data Scientist

Introductory online course to embedded systems: https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-embedded-systems?

This course is a 3-part course offered by UT Austin

1. https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-woroller-i ld-microcontr
2. https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-world-multi-threaded-in
3. https://www.edx.org/course/real-time-bluetooth-networks-shape-the-world

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 ARUN GANESAN
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/arun-ganesan-677b7729/

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Drew Lazzeri

Biography

Drew Lazzeri is a former lumberjack who then went on to get a degree in math and theater from Santa Clara University. From college, he has gone on to be a freelance web developer and full stack engineer. 

Interviewing.io Referral Code for Develomentor Listeners!

While he currently works for another guest of the show, Aline Lerner at interviewing.io, he’s about to take a sabbatical from tech to go to music school in Hungary for a few months.

Episode Summary

“The rare and valuable skills that enable a lot of people to be successful in either tech or other parts of knowledge work come out of relationships you have with mentors. Mentors who were able to hand down those skills.”

“I think its useful to just think about the users. What change you could make for them? It’s always interesting how you could make changes all over the stack that can help with loading time or make a feature easier or harder to implement.”

“Hearing the stories and the paths people have taken through in their career is so vital. It leads to success in bringing people in and having good mentorship and all sorts of the relationships that this industry is founded on.”

—Drew Lazzeri

Key Milestones

1. Drew began to teach himself tech at age 12. He also spent some time as a lumberjack! In college although he started down the path of computer science, he decided to switch majors to abstract math and theatre. 
2. ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond had a huge influence on Drew.
3. How does Drew approach the role of being a full stack developer? What are some of the key skills to be successful in this role?
4. How has theater played a part of in Drew’s career?
5. Who were Drew’s mentors throughout his career?
6. Why did Drew decide to take a break from tech to go study music? 

Additional Resources

Read the article ‘How to become a hacker’ by Eric Raymond – http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Free online book to learn Python, ‘ How to Think like a Computer Scientist’ – http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/

Mike Gamson – CEO of Relativity, Former VP of Sales at LinkedIn (#53)

Ep. 14 Duretti Hirpa – Secrets from a Self Taught Software Developer

Aline Lerner – Pro Chef Starts Tech Recruiting Firm, Interviewing.io (#44)

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 DREW LAZERRI
LinkedIn

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guests are Chris Love and Jay Vyas.

The first five people who email the show at [email protected] will receive a code good for one free ebook. For those who don’t want to send an email, you can get a 40% discount ON ALL Manning books, including Core Kubernetes by using the discount code poddevmen20. 

Get 40% off on Core Kubernetes or anything from Manning Publications using this link!!

Biography

Chris Love is a 20-year veteran consultant who started his career early by leaving school and then running the engineering and radio production departments at his first company. After this, he started his own consulting firm, which he has been successfully running for 20+ years now.  

His partner in crime on the book is Jay Vyas. Jay sits in contrast to Chris in that he did an undergrad in math, a master’s in comp sci, and a PhD in bioinformatics. Post education, he went on to work in a variety of software engineering roles at companies like UConn Health, Red Hat, Synopsys, and VMWare.

Episode Summary

"If you understand Kubernetes as a developer as an engineer, then you understand how any cloud works, it's just gonna be the common currency for how people talk about cloud computing moving forward."

"I don't know if I would go get a PhD in 2020. I might though and there is one reason why. You really get to think about problems very deeply for a very long period of time when you're getting a PhD, and I think that's a lot of fun."

"Don't stay stagnant. If you wanna work on a software project, get into some open source. If you wanna get in the product development, start an open source or closed source project and look at starting a company."

—Chris Love and Jay Vyas

Additional Resources

Buy Core Kubernetes or anything from Manning Publications for 40% off! – http://bit.ly/core-kubernetes

Kubernetes in Action – by Manning Publications

How to Win Friends & Influence People – by Dale Carnegie

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 CHRIS LOVE
LinkedIn
Twitter
GitHub
Personal Website

CONNECT WITH JAY VYAS
LinkedIn
GitHub
Twitter

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

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

Biography

Michael started his career in academia as a PhD academic researcher. 

These days, Michael is a Developer Advocate at AWS. He is part of the container service team, focusing on container security. Michael shares his experience around cloud-native infrastructure and apps through demos, blog posts, books, and public speaking engagements as well as contributes to open-source software. 

Before AWS, Michael worked at Red Hat, Mesosphere,
MapR and in two research institutions in Ireland and Austria.

Episode Summary

“I found that industry overall is way less stressful than academic research. If it’s weekend or if I’m on PTO or whatever, I’m offline.“

“I’m a developer advocate. Basically, it's kind of like a guinea pig. We’re the first ones who get to play around with software and give feedback. It’s like, the UX here is great or here the UX sucks. So we are guinea pigs representing for the customer.”

“I just love to be on-site with customers discussing things, trying things. The greatest part is being with actual users of the software that you’re producing and going over that in 400 level details.”

—Michael Hausenblas

Key Milestones

1. What led Michael into academia and academic research at the start of his career?
2. After about 4 years doing research focused work, Michael left for a startup and took a role doing pre-sales work.  That’s a pretty far cry from doing research.  What led to that change and what went into his decision process?
3.  What does a sales engineer do?
4. Now Michael is in a dev advocate role, how does that compare with being a sales engineer?
5. What attracted Michael to more public-facing roles like developer advocacy?
6. Who is Ted Dunning? And why was he such a big influence for Michael?

Additional Resources

Connect with Ted Dunning on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddunning/

Support Us at Develomentor – https://develomentor.com/support-us/

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 Michael Hausenblas
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mhausenblas/
Twitter: @mhausenblas

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Nadeem Chaudhry. 

Nadeem Chaudhry is the proverbial college dropout who left school early to get started on his software career. After leaving college before his junior year, he worked his way up from software engineering and architecture into engineering management and leadership. These days, he’s the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Jobot, a startup focused on using artificial intelligence to transform the career recruiting space. 

Nadeem has worked in a variety of industries including ecommerce, recruiting, and customer relationship management. All along the way, he has always been building products. 

Episode Summary

"When I was in college, I really got my hands dirty and started building very early on. So by my second year, I had already completed an entire platform for students to buy and sell books, goods, other things with each other on campus"

"You want the people that you're mentoring to continuously grow, and that may mean that they outgrow what you can offer."

—Nadeem Chaudhry

Key Milestones

1. Why didn't college work out for Nadeem?
2. Nadeem's first title out of college was “Lead Software Developer”.  How does one land a lead role straight out of dropping out of college?
3. Many engineers struggle with deciding whether to code or go into management. What was Nadeem's thought process in making those choices?
4. Who were Nadeem's mentors throughout his career?
5. Key traits Nadeem looks for when hiring and how does he think about team building?
6. What are some tips for a developer getting better at the business side?
7. What are a few quick tips you can enact to make you stand out to recruiters (and the bots who are filtering resumes and profiles)?

Additional Resources

Start with Why - by Simon Sinek

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - by John Doerr

Develomentor Ep. 5 Design Thinking and Your Career, with Drew Farris

Ep. 12 How to Shift Your Career from Engineering to Product, with Nick Caldwell

Ep. 10 From a Bachelor’s in Psychology to CTO, with Stephen Carvelli

The Hacker News - find out what's trending in technology


Learn more about Jobot - https://jobot.com/

Follow Jobot on twitter - @JobotJobs

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 Nadeem Chaudhry
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nadeem-chaudhry/

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Mike Gamson. 

Mike first joined the Relativity team in 2017 as a member of the advisory board. He got the unique opportunity to get to know the company’s business and team extremely well before stepping up to the role of CEO in 2019. Mike brings over 20 years of recruitment, sales, and product marketing experience to Relativity. 

In his former role at LinkedIn, Mike oversaw LinkedIn’s Global Solutions Organization (GSO) for its more than 30 offices worldwide, focusing on servicing corporate customers in three primary areas—talent solutions, marketing solutions, and sales solutions. 

Before LinkedIn, Mike was director of product marketing at Advent Software, a provider of enterprise software for investment managers, where he led the trading and order management business. Mike received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.

Episode Summary

“We ran out of money in Costa Rica. It was from that necessity of finding a way to perpetuate our ability to stay in Costa Rica, that we ended up starting a business, and the business was a restaurant at first.”

“I had a lot of insecurity around how my choice of study, religion, and fine arts, would be viewed by the business community. So I did ultimately think that spending some time in a bank would be helpful. And it was helpful both in what it taught me and what it reinforced in me that I did not want to do for a living.”

“I found myself in a sales role without any real sales management experience. I had managed a very small team of salespeople for a year, but now I was VP of sales at a company that we thought we had something special, but we didn’t know exactly how big. We didn’t know that it was going be the killer app at LinkedIn that turned into a multi-billion dollar revenue line for the company.”

—Mike Gamson

Additional Resources

Learn more about Relativity, focused on e-discovery https://www.relativity.com/

Escape Velocity – by Geoffrey A. Moore https://amzn.to/2FPwUPi (learn about rapid business growth and scaling)

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 Mike Gamson
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mikegamson/

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Liz Phillips. 

Liz Phillips is a full-stack software engineer in New York City. She has a strong background in design from her previous career working in theater and film. Every week you can tune into her educational Twitch stream where she’s creating a welcoming community for coders of all skill levels to meet other coders, ask questions, and learn by working on a real open source projects and answering questions. 

Liz is a proud member of the The Live Coders Twitch stream team. Liz believes in using coding powers to help others. If you’re on the streets of New York you might see her skate by.

Episode Summary

"With coding. You have an input and you have an output and like all the stuff in between is kind of artistic."

"In the boot camp you were going through HTML, CSS jQuery, React all the way up through building the whole stack. In three months."

"Try some free resources. Try code academy. Try free code camp. See if you like it. If you can afford it, take a boot camp prep class, see if you like it. And if you do those things and you're like, 'Wow, I really enjoyed this', you can totally do it for a living."

"I feel like if I wanted to, I could go a lot of different places and thats something I just never had with theater, which is really nice. Also, I now have this skill set that opens a lot of doors for different things that I want to do, whether that's trying to teach other people things or making an app that might make me money or doing the twitch streaming."

—Liz Phillips

Additional Resources

Tune into Liz's Twitch Channel - Illuminated Space - https://www.twitch.tv/illuminatedspace

Liz is also a part of the the group Live Coders - Learn about coding by watching coders! - https://livecoders.dev/

Learn more about Grace Hopper Bootcamp - https://www.gracehopper.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 Liz Phillips
Twitter: @lizcodes
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lizkristinaphillips/

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Josh Wills. 

Josh Wills is a former engineer on Slack's Search, Learning, and Intelligence Team helping to build the company's production search and machine learning infrastructure. He's a recovering manager, having most recently built and led Slack's data engineering team and before that the data science and engineering teams at Cloudera and Google. 

Josh is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, the founder of the Apache Crunch project, and a co-author of O'Reilly's Advanced Analytics with Spark. In May of 2012, he tweeted a pithy definition of a data scientist as someone who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician, and his Twitter mentions have never been the same.

Click Here –> For more information about tech careers

Episode Summary

“Statistics in school, at least when I was there, was very much focused on the problem. 'How do we extract as much information as we can from a relatively small subset of data.' Statistics at Google and Facebook was much more concerned with ‘we are drowning in data, we have an overwhelming amount of data. How do we not delude ourselves?'"

"If you want to be a mentee, there's no work that you're too good to do. The best learning opportunities of my life came from situations where I was more than willing to roll up my sleeves and do things that are not sexy and are not cool."

“I didn’t go back to engineering. I never stopped engineering. I was always engineering while I was doing this management stuff on the side. Recruiting and hiring, I enjoy. And I very much enjoy mentoring people. But I do not personally care about or tolerate sitting through a sprint review or doing a budget planning meeting or, god help me, sitting through a promotion process.”

—Josh Wills

In this episode we’ll cover:

1. What are the differences in studying statistics in school versus working as a statistician at Google or Facebook?
2. Why Josh chose to be a high-level individual contributor (IC) over management.
3. How Josh worked a full-time job at IBM while getting his master's degree.

Additional Resources

The Manager's Path - by Camille Fournier
Software 2.0 by Andrej Karpathy - https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
How to Take Smart Notes - by Sönke Ahrens
Josh's talk how to play well with others about mistakes he has made during his career

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 Josh Wills
Twitter: @josh_wills
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/josh-wills-13882b/

Follow Develomentor:
Twitter: @develomentor

Follow Grant Ingersoll
Twitter: @gsingers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantingersoll

Support the show