SELECT*: Your Resource for Innovative Tech & Developer Topics Hosted by HarperDB

This episode features Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup, for a discussion on how to excel in the tech industry, GraphQL, and much more. Questions covered include:

• Intro: background / journey in tech
• It looks like you focus a lot on helping folks in the tech industry excel in their careers or transition to where they want to be. What are some of your main tips around this, and some of the biggest mistakes you see people make?
• You are also a Linkedin Learning instructor, what does that mean?
• You recently spoke about GraphQL - which continues to gain popularity, what have you learned about implementing GraphQL in production?
• Tools / technologies / frameworks that you're really excited about right now or that you have on your list to keep an eye on?

Annyce is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Meetup. At Meetup, she helps create the future of real community where people show up, do things, and actually talk to each other. Shaping what “mobile-first” means for an established company is both challenging and rewarding.

Annyce has specifically been focused on Android applications for the past several years. She's also an Android Google Developer Expert. This means that she spends a lot of time developing videos, blog posts, and conference talks for the Developer Community.

This Select* podcast episode features Ben Matthews, Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, for a discussion on leading an engineering team and the future of software development.

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‍Questions covered include:

• Background / journey in tech, what are you working on now? ‍
• What's it like leading an engineering team at a large company, what are some of the biggest challenges? ‍
• How do you blend engineering and product visions to make sure everyone is working towards the same goal? What are some challenges around cross-team functionality in this sense? ‍
• Tips for devs wanting to climb the ladder or get to a similar role that you're in? Advice you would give your younger self? ‍
• What technology / framework / etc. are you super excited about right now or wanting to dig into? ‍
• Predictions for software development over the next few years?

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Ben Matthews is a Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow with nearly 20 years of experience in developing technology and building high-performance technical teams. He’s passionate about helping people grow in their roles and empowering people to build great things.

This episode features Kelsey Hightower for a discussion across numerous topics. In this special edition, Kelsey is interviewed by HarperDB's Co-Founder, Stephen Goldberg. Questions covered include:

• How did it feel to retire from Google this year, what’s next?
• You have, what some would consider, a non-traditional background when it comes to the software engineering world. How has that shaped your view on the industry? How do you think the industry performs at mentoring/cultivating young engineers, including those from non-CS degree backgrounds?
• What are your thoughts on where distributed vs. monolithic architecture is going? How is “Edge Computing” impacted by this?
• There has been a focus in the cloud provider space of bringing on new locations, trying to put infrastructure in hard to reach places. Eventually this will reach a saturation point, where do you think they will invest next?
• When thinking about building platforms and products, what is your advice on how to make a decision to internalize automation within your product vs. using a framework?
• What are your opinions on running a stateful application that must have data consistency across its replicas, such as a database, on Kubernetes? It comes with a bunch of problems to solve, like auto scaling, data redundancy and replication. It seems that the community is split on whether or not this is a good idea and how to implement it.
• What advice would you give yourself 20 years ago?

Kelsey Hightower is an American software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open-source software, and cloud computing.

This episode features Graham Haythornthwaite, VP Of Engineering at Wonde. Questions covered include:

• Tell us a bit about you, background, journey in tech, what do you work on in your current role?
• What do you like about leading an engineering team?
• What prompted your organization to shift to the 4 day work week and what has been the turnout? Pros and cons?
• Your dev team has recently doubled in size, how do you ensure success when scaling a dev team? Anything to avoid?

Graham is VP of Engineering at Wonde where he has helped double the size of the engineering team and successfully transition their practices to embrace a 4 day week. Prior to joining Wonde he created successful software product teams across multiple industries including Unified Communications for Finance and Emergency Services, Energy, Internal IT and EdTech.

This episode features Ghanshyam Bhatt, Software Engineering Manager at PayPal, for a discussion on SDK development. Questions covered include:

• Tell us a bit about you, background, journey in tech

• What is SDK development; what companies are building SDKs and who are the customers?

• How is SDK development different from App development?

• What are some good resources to follow if you're doing SDK development?

• What other tools / technologies are you excited about at the moment related to mobile app development, Android, and/or iOS? How is UI code changing?

Ghanshyam leads the Native Checkout SDK team at PayPal. With over a decade of experience building mobile apps, he has recently been involved in developing mobile SDKs. He is responsible for strategizing and delivering the SDKs by leveraging my mobile experience to compete with various products in the market. He started his career as an Android engineer and evolved his iOS programming skills to advocate for mobile-first experiences to delight users.

This episode features Sai Pragna Etikyala, Technical Lead at Twilio, for a discussion on event driven architectures and modern asynchronous applications. Questions covered include:

• Tell us a bit about you, background, journey in tech
• What do you work on in your role at Twilio?
• What do you like about being tech lead?
• Let's talk about how to build easier/better event driven architectures. Why is this important?
• What workflow orchestration tools can help?
• Are you involved in the tech community outside of work? Anywhere folks can connect with you?

Sai Pragna Etikyala is a Technical Lead at Twilio, currently leading the team responsible for A2P 10DLC compliance for messaging. Utilizing her extensive experience with asynchronous systems, she has efficiently re-architected Twilio's complex compliance systems, leading to notable improvements in manageability and operational efficiency. Before joining Twilio, she worked at Amazon Web Services, Yahoo, and Cerner. Throughout her tenure at these companies, she developed robust end-to-end solutions and successfully managed complex operations. This has enriched her expertise not only in asynchronous computing but also in software development, cloud computing, and healthcare IT solutions. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University. Her innovative and agile approach to software engineering and leadership distinguishes her as a significant contributor to the telecommunications realm and beyond.

In this episode, we chat with Ceora, Developer Advocate at Okta and StackOverflow Podcast Co-Host.

Ceora shares a bit about her journey in tech and how she got to where she is today, which includes building community, learning to code, getting into speaking, and following her passions. Ceora also touches on imposter syndrome, and how she has learned to make the most out of being new to something in tech. This was an awesome conversation!

Ceora is a developer advocate based in Philadelphia. Her career thus far has centered around creating educational content focused on making the tech industry more accessible to everyone. She currently works on the Okta Developer Relations team and is a cohost on the Stack Overflow Podcast. Outside of tech, she spends way too much time watching anime, listening to K-pop, and attempting to play the guitar.

This episode features an interview with Max Howell, creator of the open-source software package management system Homebrew, and CEO of Tea.xyz. Questions covered include:

• Share a bit about who you are, background and journey in tech

• How was Homebrew created and how far has it come?

• How are OSS developers exploited by the tech giants / pros and cons of open source?

• What is Tea, why did you build it / what problem are you aiming to solve?

Max Howell made a life of creating some of the most used and beloved open source software in the world. Formally trained in chemistry, he quickly left the lab to chase his lifelong passion of development, and fit into the open-source ecosystem with his spirit of altruism and creativity.

Max Howell created the open-source software package management system Homebrew, known as “brew,” which grew into the most contributed-to open source software program in the world. Homebrew has been used by tens of millions of developers worldwide and has served as the backbone for the largest technology corporations to build their products without directly contributing to - or paying for - its development. Besides Homebrew, Max has created many other open-source projects like PromiseKit, which is used by over 100k mobile applications. He is revered by developers around the world.Max’s current project is tea. tea.xyz is a feature-rich, delightful, and decentralized package manager that will revolutionize open source development by providing creators and maintainers value for previously unpaid labor.

This episode features a fun discussion with Iris Classon, software developer, speaker, and author. Questions covered include:

• Tell us a bit about who you are, your background / journey in tech.

• You wrote a comedic fiction about a software developer .. tell us about that.

• What's it like combining the technical side of things with the creative side of writing, how does everything intersect?

• Any tips for balancing work, writing, and dev community with family life / personal time?

Iris Classon is a software developer, appreciated speaker, author, Microsoft MVP, and self-proclaimed comedian.

Hobbies include: extreme sports such as deploying on a Friday and force push to master.

Famous last words: it works on my machine.

Here is a link to a sample chapter from her book, The Unlikely Success of a Copy Paste Developer. You can also find it on Goodreads and Amazon.

This episode features Shashi Lo, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, for a discussion on UX Engineering & Breaking Into Tech. Questions covered include:

• Tell us a bit about you / your background / journey in tech

• What are you focused on now?

• Why is UX engineering so important, and how can teams ensure they have an effective UX?

• Any tips for breaking into tech, pieces of advice that have helped you throughout your career?

• What other tools / technologies are you excited about right now or wanting to look into this year?

Shashi is a Senior Software Engineer, currently at Microsoft. He's passionate about UX Engineering and helping others level up their development skills. With the experience he's been through, he's been able to help others navigate their career to become better developers and give back to the development community.