Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

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Keith Nothacker, Founder and CEO of BACtrack, even in college knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. When he was looking for something -- anything -- to sell online, he decided it was crazy that the police could test anyone for their blood alcohol level, but consumers couldn’t test themselves. So he decided to solve that problem. 

BACtrack pioneered the consumer market for breathalyzers, positioning the product as an affordable, consumer-friendly safety device. In 2004, BACtrack became the first company ever to receive U.S. Food & Drug Administration clearance to legally sell the devices to consumers for personal use.

Ledge sat down with Keith to share the story of his company, from design to prototypes, manufacturing to distribution, and into the age of the smartphone. As Keith says, “Hardware is hard,” but just like any other business you buckle down and make it happen.

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Software and DevOps engineers spend a great deal of time in logs, analyzing what's happened, and trying to surmise why it's happened. APM software gets us part of the way there, but what about actually seeing what the user did to trigger that bug? 

In this episode Ledge sits down with Doug Suvalle at Glassbox Digital to learn about their contributions to this solution set, and chat with him about how engineers can help enable the revenue functions who sit closest to business stakeholders.

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How do you move 50TB per day to 15,000 global engineers? Eric Klinker knows.

He’s the Founder and CEO of Resilio, and former CEO of BitTorrent. Resilio is a vastly enhanced enterprise version of BitTorrent Sync - a completely P2P alternative to Dropbox.

As computing at the cloud is beginning to migrate back to the edge, some predictions say edge data growth is going to reach 50 times the current usage. Resilio is the technology designed to serve that market need.

Eric sits down with Ledge in this fascinating episode about the story of BitTorrent, which at one time accounted for 40% of all internet traffic. Now Resilio is advancing that story to enterprise data on the edge.

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When you reach an executive position, you need to understand all of the functions of the business. That’s especially true when you grow out of a purely technical role. Your view needs to expand from the project context to the overall business context.

That’s been the experience of Cheada Lao, EVP of Operations at Allied Administrators, a leader in the benefits administration field. The firm’s primary objective is 5-star customer service, which from an operations standpoint touches internal and external software systems, data privacy, and even UX.

Cheada and Ledge discuss when and how to decide the work you should do in-house vs. using external partners, and how to attract and retain excellent staff when you don’t work in the latest and greatest startup.

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If you’re shopping online for pretty much anything, there’s a very good chance the pages you’re looking at are being dynamically generated based on A/B testing and automation powered by RedPoint.

George Corugedo is the firm’s co-founder and CTO. In this episode George sits down with Ledge to discuss how his global engineering organization created industry leading decision engine performance of less than 50 milliseconds per decision and scales it using .Net Core and containers to more than 30 million real-time decisions per day.

Don’t miss George’s powerful lessons learned going from small company technical founder to global CTO.

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If we’ve learned anything at the Frontier, it’s that interesting technology stories can be found anywhere… even in that parking ticket you got last month that you’re still cursing over. Ever wonder how they know where your car was parked and for how long? Ledge being a collector of parking tickets himself had to find out.

In this episode, Jim Suttles, IT Director at Republic Parking Systems shares some of the amazingly elegant software and hardware solutions they use to make sure you’re paying for parking. You’ll probably pay more attention to those signs after you listen to this episode.

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Scaling an engineering organization is challenging enough when you’re colocated, and when your whole team is developers. What happens when you also introduce data science and 24/7 SRE? That’s three entirely different types of work. Now distribute those workers around the world and imagine the complexity.

Ledge sits down with Alex Newman, serial founder, engineer, and management thinker about how he and his co-founders at Intuition Machines think about and solve these problems. The key word? Evolution.

This episode is chock full of great value-driven techniques like blame-free process, accountability and autonomy, and ownership.

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Communities are people who not only share common principles, but who also develop and share practices that help individuals in the group thrive. DevRel means building communities for technical audiences.

If you want to know about DevRel and community building, you need to know about Mary Thengvall and her host of curated, authored, and spoken content covering these critical topics.

Mary and Ledge talk authenticity, career paths, relationships, and much more in this deep dive episode.

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APIs, microservices, connections to external systems, integration with legacy systems… the list of software complexities gets longer and longer.

In this episode Ledge is joined by global enterprise IT leader Dipanjan Choudhury. With almost 20 years of experience in software development, platform, and consulting leadership roles, we wanted to get his perspectives on risk mitigation so smaller companies can learn from the best practices of larger companies and prepare themselves for growth.

Dipanjan argues convincingly that as QA and Security shift left, so should Risk Management. Because the cost of addressing risks increases exponentially as you move right in the SDLC,  pre-enterprise companies can benefit greatly by adopting this mindset, especially when they are capital-constrained.

When we recorded this interview Dipanjan was the Technical Director of CAST. Since that time he’s taken a role as Associate Director at ValueMomentum.

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