Tech Journeys Podcast

Marc Mollins left school 10 years ago to start a software apprenticeship, and today he is a senior consultant, lead Java backend engineer and team lead at CGI. In this episode he explains why he believes anyone skipping an apprenticeship in tech starts four years behind: university teaches best practice, while a real project team teaches you how to get work done against a deadline. He shares the advice he gives apprentices as a QA apprenticeship ambassador, which is to say yes to everything, and how that led him into a stint as a scrum master. Marc also walks through how he uses Codex and ChatGPT every day, acting as a code reviewer instead of pasting in a Jira ticket and accepting the result. He closes with his plan to become an engineering manager within five years and what his mentor taught him about bringing value.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

To learn more connect with me on LinkedIn and message me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentuppelschoten/

Or download the Tech Consulting Business Operating System here:

Babatunde (Tunde) Adegbite is a senior software engineer at Constru, where he leads front-end architecture for AI-driven compliance and sustainability platforms. In this episode, Tunde talks through the project he's most proud of: a chat interface for an AI agent that drafts a plan, then stops and asks a person to approve it before going further, built for construction teams who are used to spreadsheets. He explains why simplicity matters more now that AI lets you build almost anything, and why judgment and fundamentals count for more than knowing the latest framework. He also gives a balanced view on AI-generated code: it has never been easier to ship, but shipping code you don't understand creates real risk when payments or personal data are involved. Tunde closes with his plans for EduPlanner, an education platform he co-founded to help Nigerian parents choose the right school for their children.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

To learn more connect with me on LinkedIn and message me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentuppelschoten/

Massimo "Max" Berta is a senior account solution architect at Automat-it and spent seven years at AWS, where he supported healthcare and life science companies. He talks through his work with Phytoform, a crop genetics company using machine learning to grow a tomato without the spiky top leaves, which made it easier to transport. He also explains why AI conversations with research companies centre on raw GPU capacity and cost, while retail and marketing clients care about model access and compliance. His core message is that every tech problem starts as a business problem. If your analytics already give you poor visibility, adding AI agents on top only adds complexity, so start with the simplest tools and add technology once the business need is clear.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

To learn more connect with me on LinkedIn and message me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentuppelschoten/

Or download the Tech Consulting Business Operating System here:

Shahid is a lead product owner for ServiceNow at a large multinational. His career started in broadband customer support and moved through service management, digital workplace technology and e-signature rollouts. In this episode he walks you through a six-month programme that moved 150,000 users from several tools and manual processes onto one ServiceNow platform, run entirely remotely as the pandemic hit, with the first release live in four months. His main lesson: a product is only as good as the process behind it, so fix broken workflows before you migrate them. He also explains why unlearning matters as much as learning in a tech career, and where he sees ServiceNow and AI taking his work next.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

Marcel Bindseil is a senior AI engineer at Microsoft in London, where he helps manufacturing and mobility customers build IoT solutions on cloud platforms. He grew up on the border between East and West Germany, planned to follow his father into engineering, and found programming hard at first before teaching himself the skills that took him to Berlin and then to Microsoft. In this episode he walks through his proudest work: remote control features for connected cars and elevators, and helping customers run lightweight Rust applications on edge devices with WebAssembly for lower latency and tighter security. He also explains how marathon running and competitive sport shaped his never-give-up approach, and why he sees the next challenge in AI as making it secure and usable for people outside tech.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

To learn more connect with me on LinkedIn and message me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentuppelschoten/

Or download the Tech Consulting Business Operating System here:

Chris Wilken spent close to 30 years in enterprise tech, including many years working with Avaya across South Africa, before a retrenchment letter pushed him to start his own business. He founded Ukuvela Group in October 2023 and grew it from four founders to nearly ten employees, doubling turnover every year by building a consultancy-led model backed by a wider network of partners. Chris talks about the identity shift from employee to business owner, why he believes customer experience comes down to treating people like people rather than running a script, and why investing in yourself matters more than waiting for a perfect plan. He also shares what he'd change if he started again: take a month to plan properly instead of launching the day after leaving his job.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

Or download the Tech Consulting Business Operating System here:

Mark Jones runs Radical Geek Technology Solutions, a business he built with his wife that helps organizations adopt AI. He started in IT infrastructure, moved into software development, and became an early adopter of microservices long before most companies caught on. That pattern repeated with AI: he built his own local infrastructure to avoid API costs and spent late 2025 building a memory system for AI agents called Ramba, using an unlikely research method: he put an agent on a platform called Malt Book and asked a million other agents what they wanted from a memory system. He shipped a working version in five weeks. Mark's biggest takeaway is that most businesses are far behind on AI adoption, and the advantage goes to whoever treats it as something to experiment with constantly rather than plan for years in advance.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

Pitambar Jha is a senior software engineer who moved from Nepal to London in 2021 and has just joined Vanguard after two and a half years at Item Group. In this episode, he talks about the project he's proudest of, a dynamic data grid plugin he built for Angular within a month of starting a new job, and the career lesson he'd give his younger self: stop trying to learn everything before you start building. Pitambar explains why he now treats every new project as a forcing function to learn on the job, using Kubernetes as an example of a skill he only picked up by needing it for something real. He also shares his long-term dream of building a community platform to help new developers avoid the mistakes he made, and the plan to eventually run a small book cafe once that platform takes off.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.

James Levine left AWS after three and a half years as a software engineer, where he worked on using AI to cut open source bug and ticket backlogs from four digits down to single digits. He's now building an AI-focused software agency and raising a seed round, while also doing fractional commercialization work on the side. In this episode, James argues that engineers who go deep on a subject, rather than skip formal training, are the ones who'll stand out as AI takes over the easier work. He also makes the case that software engineers need to diversify their income streams over the next year or two while the job market recalibrates.

Rob Dickens is a forward deployed AI engineer at Cloudera, where he spends four years moving from solution architect into a hands-on, customer-facing AI role. He talks about a recent project with a humanitarian aid organization, where his team built an AI workflow that cut research time for crisis analysts working with time-sensitive information. Rob traces his path from Java engineer to machine learning consultant to part-time master's student, and explains how nearly a year in a management role away from coding taught him that building things matters most to him. He shares practical advice on pushing through the discomfort of career growth and reflects on how AI code generation is reshaping what it means to be a skilled engineer today. The conversation closes with his current thinking on personal AI projects and what the next stage of his career might look like.

This show is sponsored by The Consulting Launch Method, where I help experienced tech professionals build their own consulting business without spending years figuring out the business side. We've helped clients go from first idea to first clients in 90 days, and 6 figures within a year.