hexdevs

Linda Peng is a frontend developer and a musician. She graduated in Economics and Public Policy (Social Sciences), and she was always interested in social work. She worked at a non-profit for a couple of years, where she had the opportunity to switch to a web developer job in 2013.

Now she is a front-end developer and is the creator and maintainer of CodeBuddies.org. Inspired by the idea of remote meetups, she created CodeBuddies to help everyone learn to code together no matter where they are. 100% open-source, people used CodeBuddies to organize more than 1289 hangouts sessions.

We also talked about her musical background. In October her Kickstarter campaign was baked and she launched her first album, called "Violin.play() - Code-inspired violin music". Linda generously shared a secret code for our listeners so they can listen to the entire album, so make sure to listen to this episode and share it with your developer friends. 

To give you a taste, some of the songs included are "A walk through the binary tree forest",  "What is this", "Callback Hell", "Superclass" and more.

We discussed how putting your side projects out there helps you meet new people and achieve unexpected results.

If you enjoyed this episode and Linda's album, make sure to let her know, we're sure she would love to hear your feedback! :)

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

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Linda's twitter
Linda's Youtube channel
CodeBuddies
Violin.play() - don't forget to get the secret code during the episode :)

Linda's Kickstarter

Originally from Panama, Andrea Bernal is a Computer Systems Engineer with a Master's in Supply Chain Management. She lived and worked in the US after winning a Fulbright Scholarship, and has extensive experience with Portfolio Management and Finance. Nowadays, she lives in Vancouver and works as a Project Manager for Telus.

Andrea is on her way to financial independence, making extra money on the side from doing nutritional consulting work. She is a minimalist and a member of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence/Retire Early).

She worked as an Assistant Producer to the Netflix documentary "What The Health", and runs a very popular Youtube channel called "Plantae Revolution" about plant-based nutrition.

In this episode, Andrea shared with us some effective ideas on how to take care of your money and your health, and how to be more productive and intentional about your life. We talked about investments, Financial Independence and Early Retirement, ETFs, and Minimalism. She plans to become financially independent in the next 10 years.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

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Andrea's Linkedin
Plantae Revolution: Andrea's Youtube channel
Questrade
WealthBar
Stephanie and Celestian's Blog
Game Changers
What the Health
Cowspiracy
Dominion

Keith Bingman is a Principal Engineer at Unbounce, where he leads frontend development. He learned javascript by himself 15 years ago when he was working as a photographer. He is originally from the US, lived in Germany, and now lives in Vancouver, Canada.

We talked about being self-taught and how to improve yourself as a developer by building personal projects.

He also talked about his experience of doing "big software rewrites" in the past and the present, moving a project from other technologies to React. We also talked about Elm, Rust and the future of frontend development.

According to him, you need to be very persistent when you want to introduce good practices to an established team and you need to lead by example. That helped him unlock the potential of the engineering team by introducing testing, pair-programming and mentoring. He has been a mentor for a very long time and is very passionate about it:

"Pair programming is mentoring just by itself. I always learn something new by pair-programming, it doesn't matter how experienced they are".

As a Principal Engineer, he tries to make sure he helps the team to unblock themselves and that everyone is mentoring others from the get-go.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

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Keith's Linkedin

Jenny Chan is a digital nomad, and a Full Stack Developer. She runs a very successful community for female developers called Women in Web Dev.

In this episode, she gave some tips for those who are planning to do a bootcamp, how she got her first job after finishing it, the importance of putting yourself out there and making connections, and how she got her first remote job as a developer.

Jenny shared some tips on how to find a job as a junior developer and how her community helps women start their careers as web developers, how to get a remote job and how to be productive while working remotely.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack. VanHack helps tech talent get jobs abroad.

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Jenny's Women in Web Dev community
Indie Hacker Vancouver Meetup

Antoine Ponsard is a Software Developer with a Master's in Computer Science and is a specialist in Human-Computer Interaction. We talked about his experience of moving from France to Vancouver to pursue his Master's Degree at UBC. He currently works with front-end development at Asana, a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.

If you've been thinking about studying abroad, listen to our conversation because Antoine shared some interesting advice on how to get a scholarship.

Asana is also hiring, so make sure you check out their job openings.

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Asana Jobs

We talked with Ulisses about migrating Ruby projects to Elixir while he was working at Plataformatec alongside the creator of the Elixir language, the process of writing his book and why you should learn Functional Programming, and how he moved to Estonia in Northern Europe.

Enjoy it!

PS: only Brazilians listeners will get the reference @ 16:20 ;)

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Buy Ulisses book!
Ulisses website
Ulisses Twitter
Erlang discussion with Brian
Elixir jobs
Coingaming Careers

VanHack has helped more than 700 developers get a visa-sponsored job in Canada and Europe.

In this episode, Ilya Brotzky, the founder and CEO of VanHack talks about the challenges of running a remote global company, how he learned from his mistakes and built a very successful business, and what are the goals for VanHack in the next few months.

He also gives more details about some great companies that are hiring international talent, and how you too can get a job abroad through VanHack.

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Sign up for VanHack
VanHack Events page
Justin Jackson's post about the ice cream analogy

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, once said: "Erlang is 'write once, run forever'".

Grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea and listen to this amazing conversation with Brian St. Amand, an expert Erlang software engineer. Erlang is a powerful yet not so popular tool for building fault-tolerant distributed systems. We talked about how to start learning Erlang, how to build good and maintainable software, and some interesting philosophical discussion about the human side of software development or, as Brian said, "the liberal art of programming".

This episode is also a tribute to Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, who passed away a few months ago. Thank you, Joe.

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Learn You Some Erlang for great good
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Cowboy Open source project
Brian's Linkedin

Gleidy Mendoza is a Front-End and UX Developer originally from Venezuela. She started working with Java but when Ajax came out, she fell in love with the possibilities of working with UX to deliver a better product for her clients.

She first came to Vancouver to study English. After sending her resume to many companies here, one company offered her a job and a Work Permit. Since 2010, she's been working in Canada, and she's been working for Unbounce since January 2019.

On this episode, we talk about working on the frontend, the importance of mentoring and how adopting practices like Pair Programming in your company can help your team grow faster.

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Gleidy's Linkedin
Unbounce website

Links from this episode:

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Stella's website
Ruby Conf Colombia 2019
Unbounce