Software People Stories

In this episode, Jutta Eckstein, an independent coach, consultant and trainer, based in Germany, shares 

• Her origin story of starting as a product engineer, with an interest in software development
• Started as a trained teacher and when the need for teachers dropped, went on to study product engineering and studying Pascal - and completely falling in love with software development
• Also getting trained as pollution control commissioner, when she could move from street protests to actually working to keep pollution under control
• Her early experience with Pascal and Assembler, and Smalltalk being her all time favorite
• Being part of the professional communities such as OOPSLA, and getting an orientation on the techniques and practices that got crystallized as Agile practices
• Her transition from an engineer to a coach : discovering her strength based on a trigger by her project manager
• Moving into areas of architecture and design and becoming a team coach
• The difference between a consultant and coach roles
• Studying business coaching and change management, to get a formal understanding and foundation
• How that enabled developing connections with people across various industries
• My task is not to create the right mindset, my task is coming with the right mindset myself
• The importance of listening, coming with experience, and working with experts
• Starting with a retrospective
• Starting with a few questions: clients having prior experience with change
• Why do you think it will be successful this time
• What hinders you from starting now
• If she discovered anything surprising in these initial explorations… her response of a pattern she sees.. In the next episode

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book entitled Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova). Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.

Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.

links: @JuttaEckstein | https://www.linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein/ | https://www.jeckstein.com/| https://www.agilebossanova.org | https://jeckstein.com/sustainability

In the previous episode, Scott Ford, the co-founder and CTO of Corgibytes, a company focused on modernizing legacy code, shared

• His interest in legacy code
• Patterns he has seen evolve in solution development over the years
• Using metaphors of archeology and home renovation in the context of understanding and breathing new life into old software
• And more

This is the second part of the conversation with Scott Ford, where he shares

• The origins of his company corgibytes, with a focus on helping companies take something that already exists and make it better
• This includes analyzing the structure of the code, test suites etc or the way the teams are structured and workflows, to help address a business need
• How his team focuses on the craft more than the urgency to ship something out quickly
• He talks of the mindsets for makers and menders in the software development space
• That it is no a binary, but more of a spectrum that one can and may need to move in
• Many makers may want to move on after 80%, when they may be bored; the menders can step in and help complete the remaining 20%
• Why he felt the need to have a co-founder and how he found the ideal partner, in business and life
• How he started with developing websites and small apps, and then pivoted to the current focus
• The process they have evolved over the years for the inspection and understanding existing code
• Using Cyclomatic complexity, duplication of code, coverage, churn etc, to identify hotspots
• His career tips

M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CTO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning and he is the host of the Legacy Code Rocks! Podcast.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mscottford/ 

In this conversation with Shiv, Scott Ford, the co-founder and CTO of Corgibytes, a company focused on modernizing legacy code, shared

• How he found his interest in legacy code after about 10 years of working in various roles and organizations
• Being given bugs to fix, in his early career - and after addressing them well, taking on more responsibilities
• Deriving joy in fixing code or refactoring more than just writing new features
• Having a trigger moment while watching a PBS show on home improvement ‘This old house’, that gave due credit to the earlier architects and designers and respect their decisions, rather than calling the old work as bad or stupid
• Wanted to add new functionality to something that may not have been thought of in the original design - and apply the same principles to modernizing old software
• How he navigates and understands documentation or lack of it - for the old code
• How documentation is best recorded after an experiment is concluded, when writing code experimentally and incrementally
• Likening modernization of code to an archeologist’s way of working
• When boredom might make the code more complex, to keep oneself challenged, even to solve simple problems
• Seeing flips back and forth between static and dynamically typed languages influencing styles of coding over the years
• Similarly, centralization and decentralization themes also keep switching from time to time over the years
• How he leverages his strength of being a polyglot - among computer languages, by actually working on real world problems using these languages

Scott’s experience and thoughts on being an entrepreneur will be covered in the next episode.

M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CTO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning and he is the host of the Legacy Code Rocks! Podcast.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mscottford/ 

This is part 2 of a repeat episode of one of my conversations, first published in 2019. Since then, we have crossed 200 episodes and the listenership has also grown.

Some of you have been asking how you can know more about some of the topics covered in recent episodes.

We felt that there could be related points shared by other guests in earlier episodes, but for new subscribers, it may not be easily discoverable.

So, we thought that we would bring you select past episodes from time to time, to discover more people and their stories.

Also, over time, the formats of the intro and show notes have also changed.

This conversation with Dorai Thodla is the second of two parts. The first part was published last week and Dorai spoke about his serial entrepreneurship experience and how he innovatively finds problems to solve etc. In this part he continues to share his thoughts and experience on:

• Helping students learn to code by starting with coding
• The joy of achievement when creating software that works
• And how reuse and other software engineering concepts may be introduced gradually to build larger solutions
• How a solution such as a bookstore can be used as an example to learn breaking the larger solution to smaller pieces that can be implemented incrementally
• Using the KWAC architecture - essentially, learning by watching someone - as an apprentice, where the instructor also shares the thought process behind what is being done
• Leveraging learning patterns among students, to learn in groups and each person guiding others
• About his experience from organizing hackathons and activating communities
• How he finds and manages time to do so many things and where he derives his energy and inspiration from

Dorai is the founder and CTO of Technology Strategies LLC, based in the United States. He is a mentor at KCG College of Technology Chennai. He is passionate about teaching students and mentors product startups. Dorai also gives talks on emerging technologies and their impact while consulting with companies on how to build tech communities. He believes in the paradigm of “building to learn” by encouraging teaching via “doing” so students see their learning transform into a product that extends around a complete stack.

Dorai lives in Chennai and spends time in the Bay Area and Seattle outside of India. He is currently involved with the following initiatives : 

Build2Learn ( http://www.build2learn.in/ )  and

InfoAssitants ( http://infoassistants.com/ ) – a set of tools for collecting and analyzing information.

Dorai can be reached via

[LinkedIn]( https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/ )

[@dorait]( https://twitter.com/dorait ) 

This is a repeat episode of one of my conversations, first published in 2019. Since then, we have crossed 200 episodes and the listenership has also grown. Some of you have been asking how you can know more about some of the topics covered in recent episodes.

I felt that there could be related points shared by other guests in earlier episodes, but for new subscribers, it may not be easily discoverable.

So, we thought that we would bring you select past episodes from time to time, to discover more people and their stories. Also, over time, the formats of the intro and show notes have also changed.

This conversation with Dorai Thodla will be published in two parts, to keep the episode length to around 30 minutes.

In this first part, Dorai shares

• His serial entrepreneurship journey
• His definition of a microproduct and how one can build very small things and still be very successful
• How he identifies problems to solve, by soaking in the problem space
• His experience of concepts associated with a lean startup - to validate ideas quickly
• A story of one of his products that has been innovatively repurposed by users to create a vertical applications to make their work easier, beyond what the product was originally intended to do
• How he builds in quality in horizontal products that may be used by various personas of users

The answer to this question and more stories from Dorai, do not miss the next episode.

In part 2 of my conversation with Dorai Thodla, he shares more details about his Build to Learn concept, to help students learn programming by doing. Do not miss next week.

Dorai is the founder and CTO of Technology Strategies LLC, based in the United States. He is a mentor at KCG College of Technology Chennai. He is passionate about teaching students and mentors product startups. Dorai also gives talks on emerging technologies and their impact while consulting with companies on how to build tech communities. He believes in the paradigm of “building to learn” by encouraging teaching via “doing” so students see their learning transform into a product that extends around a complete stack.

Dorai lives in Chennai and spends time in the Bay Area and Seattle outside of India. He is currently involved with the following initiatives :

• Build2Learn ( http://www.build2learn.in/ )
• InfoAssitants ( http://infoassistants.com/ )

a set of tools for collecting and analyzing information.

Dorai can be reached@

https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/

[@dorait] https://twitter.com/dorait

In part 2 of my conversation with, Yev Khessin, CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’,  continues to share his story and shares his thoughts and experiences related to

• How he decided to startup DIMO
• Finding a partner and picking a few use cases in the automotive space that need to be addressed
• The experience of launching a company as a team - and why that was needed to address a large problem space
• Getting together during Covid, taking up a couple of consulting assignments to validate their assumptions
• The role of a chief architect, particularly in a close team of founders
• How the founders defined their individual roles to ensure that there is little overlap, but address different parts of the roadmap
• His personal style of being a servant leader and the need for various teams to come together
• How he keeps track of evolving technologies and identify the right ones for DIMO
• The tech stack they are using
• Leaving things with the persons closest to the code or the customers
• How consistency of user experience is ensured, with multiple teams
• Leveraging the large community with testing, validation to help rapid iteration
• The implication of personal and shared data preferences in making a connected system effective
• And, how DIMO addresses this challenge, with fine grained options to the users
• The role of smart contracts in the DIMO ecosystem
• His views on Electric Vehicles or alternative fuel vehicles and the implication of complex software that may be energy guzzling
• The implication of recycling for battery powered vehicles
• His career tips related to entering the automotive solutions space

Yev is the CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’.

Yev has spent 10 years working in lead engineering and technical product with automotive manufacturers and suppliers on IoT connectivity, embedded software, self driving and electric vehicles. As a car lover through and through, he believes that we are at a crossroads similar to the moment when we went from horses to cars. Creating a better connected device protocol, governed by the people who use it, is the only sane way to advance how we get around. 

In this episode, Yev Khessin, CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’,  shares his thoughts and experiences related to

• Starting to code at a very young age and getting interested in cars
• Doing computer science in college and working in the automotive space
• Moving to Michigan and working across various departments - internal toolonigm product planning, handling recalls etc
• Moving to OnStar - in the connected vehicle space
• Starting a consulting company on autonomous cars
• Ford, VW, Mitsubishi - as clients
• From dumb cars to smart cars
• What it takes to programming an ecosystem and the thinking needed for thinking at that scale
• Moving at a high speed, being and staying connected and complying with local regulations
• Difference between earlier approaches of building vertically integrated systems to a flatter peer-connected model
• Ford, connected fleet: parking, user requesting and unlocking a car - in Miami; everything worked till we went to a different city
• Every city, parking lot having different APIs
• Role of open source products and specifications helping with security and making it a more level playing field
• Understanding the difference between centralized and decentralized systems, being born in Ukraine
• Where the human fits in, when we think of autonomous vehicles..
• DIMO is very generic; we started with a vehicle: second biggest purchase that most people make
• DIMO lets you own your vehicle and the data that comes from it
• Ability to record and maintain historical data that is personal and can help with safety
• The black box v2 as a neutral body on a car
• Battery health in the context of EVs
• Trust and experience depends on developers writing software for the platform; making DIMO an open platform
• Ability to retain the personal preferences and custom experiences across OEMs to make the experience much better for an individual
• Will continue the conversation on how Yev got into the startup mode and how the founding team at DIMO came together -- in the second part of our conversation - in the next episode.

Yev is the CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’.

Yev has spent 10 years working in lead engineering and technical product with automotive manufacturers and suppliers on IoT connectivity, embedded software, self driving and electric vehicles. As a car lover through and through, he believes that we are at a crossroads similar to the moment when we went from horses to cars. Creating a better connected device protocol, governed by the people who use it, is the only sane way to advance how we get around. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevgeny-khessin/

In this episode, Sam Fonoimoana, Founder and CEO of Datajoin – a B2B marketing analytics company, shares his thoughts and experiences related to

• Growing up in Hawaii and California and studying at BYU
• Choosing business as a career in joining his Father in law’s export business
• Getting into MBA to study Finance
• Starting with a role to plan budgets and review progress with various departments in a publishing company
• Learning to code, to get various reports to analyze data, as an analyst
• How he gets and associates context with data, to infer meaning
• His philosophy of following the money: get customers, retain customers
• His trigger to start his company, Datajoin, to connect data from the web and data that resides within an enterprise using context
• Experience of working with techies, after the export business
• His experience from being part of sports teams influencing the core values at Datajoin - that include Aloha! and ‘it takes a village to raise a child’
• Confidence he got from his mother - about being able to get anything he wanted to achieve
• His joy and frustrations with Information technology
• How he sees the impact of AI/ML techniques on data analytics
• His career advice, for people considering a career or aspiring to shift to Data techniques

Sam Fonoimoana started his career in Finance (FP&A) and transitioned into Marketing Analytics helping companies such as Adobe, DOMO and Ancestry.com. He also taught Marketing Analytics at BYU Hawaii in beautiful Laie, HI.Today, he is the Founder and CEO of Datajoin – a B2B marketing analytics company that is the go-to solution for connecting first-party data across the MarTech stack through their proprietary “Micro Integrations”. Their customers include Cisco, ARM, Adobe and Equifax.Sam is the first VC-backed tech Founder and CEO of Polynesian descent in Utah having closed a seed round led by Sepio Capital.Sam and his wife Sabrina never have a dull moment with their children. They have 3 beautiful daughters and 4 wonderful sons. All 4 of their sons have been diagnosed with autism. When Sam is not at his computer, he can be found with his family at the park, rec center, restaurant, or on a road trip!Sam received his MBA in Finance from Brigham Young University.

You can reach him at

Twitter.com/samfonoimoana

Linkedin.com/in/sam-fonoimoana

We continue our conversation with Ramesh Rajagopal, a coach at PM Power Consulting. In the first part he shared his origin story and also experiences of his childhood and career. In this episode, he continues to share more details about

• Leveraging his lean manufacturing experience to get into Agile approaches and becoming an Agile evangelist
• Working in a company wide transformation planning process
• Being summoned to the office one day,early morning - to be told that his position being made redundant, just a few months before a planned retirement
• The support he got from his wife
• Getting an opportunity to work in Malaysia
• Becoming a trainer and exploring certification opportunities - such as SPC when he was 63
• The transferable skills from his manufacturing career that he was able to use in IT as well
• Importance of communication and the need to relate to the people one interacts with.
• The importance of respecting dignity of every person and understanding their value systems
• Teamwork and giving credit wherever it is due
• Being a continuous learner
• Being a listener 90% of the time while interacting with others
• How to become a better influencer to ensure results, by maintaining a respectful relationship and not limit interactions to only transactions
• Understanding the aspirations and motivations of individuals first before helping
• His personal practices to develop empathy as a person based on
• The Sahaja Marg or heartfulness approach
• His career advice and tips for persons who want to get into IT from other domains

He started my career as an R&D engineer at the Engineering Research Centre at Tata Motors (TELCO) in 1981, then he joined L& T during 1984, initially as a Design Engineer for Earthmoving machines. Later, he moved into Manufacturing Planning. He joined GE India Technology Center during end 2000, as a Project Manager-Delivery and stayed with the organization as it later changed hands to become GXS and OpenText. He also worked as a consultant for the Agile Transformation group for 4 years at Standard Chartered Bank, Kuala Lumpur helping teams and teams of teams to adopt to the new ways of working – from Technology teams, Retail Teams to Data and Privacy teams.

With over four decades of experience which includes over 20+ years in software Product development, Delivery, Quality and several years in manufacturing domains of Automobile and Earth moving equipment, mow a Principal consultant at PM Power, part of Agile Transformation and DevOps Service lines.

This is part 1 of a 2 episode conversation. In this episode, Ramesh Rajagopal, a Coach at PM Power Consulting, shares his experience related to

• Growing up in Madurai, a major temple town 
• Learning Tamil, though his grandparents were from Karnataka
• His temple visits, on the way to school as well as on specific occasions
• Moving to Bangalore and seeing the changes over the decades
• Passing out as topper in his school for the SSLC grade
• Choosing to switch colleges to study with his cousin
• Developing a talent - in his own words  -of sleeping in moving buses, whether sitting or standing
• Learning the importance of extra curricular activities
• Applying to TELCO, based on a newspaper ad
• Asking for a role in R&D, though TELCO was a predominantly manufacturing organization and getting it
• Not being able to join as planned, due to his father’s health, but being able to make it a little later, when things got better
• Understanding that work culture varies from context to context and his interesting experience on the shop floor with his manager
• Importance of practical experience on the shop floor
• Taking interest in and learning computers
• Leveraging his engineering and manufacturing experience to help the software development teams in L&T
• Joining GE and diving deeper into software engineering
• With a focus on systems, getting an opportunity to lead the quality function
• Four stages in career development: learning, doing, guide others, shape people by laying the path
• Getting into Agile approaches

He started my career as an R&D engineer at the Engineering Research Centre at Tata Motors (TELCO) in 1981, then he joined L& T during 1984, initially as a Design Engineer for Earthmoving machines. Later, he moved into Manufacturing Planning. He joined GE India Technology Center during end 2000, as a Project Manager-Delivery and stayed with the organization as it later changed hands to become GXS and OpenText. He also worked as a consultant for the Agile Transformation group for 4 years at Standard Chartered Bank, Kuala Lumpur helping teams and teams of teams to adopt to the new ways of working – from Technology teams, Retail Teams to Data and Privacy teams.

With over four decades of experience which includes over 20+ years in software Product development, Delivery, Quality and several years in manufacturing domains of Automobile and Earth moving equipment, mow a Principal consultant at PM Power, part of Agile Transformation and DevOps Service lines.