The Virtual Coffee Podcast

This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Dr. Maeling Murphy, a software engineer who recently transitioned into tech. Maeling shared the importance of connecting with potential employers to see if they would fit her values, how contributing to open source projects can help prepare you for your first job, and the value of developing the connection to community and being able to grow alongside others. Oh, and did we mention we talked a lot about Notion? She takes us through her notetaking journey and answers all our questions about finding the right approach.

About Maeling

Dr. Maeling Murphy is a software engineer who recently transitioned into tech, coming from an 8+ year entrepreneurial journey as a digital content creator and as a Ph.D. research scientist in Materials Science & Engineering.

Maeling identifies as a multi-passionate creative soul, finding expression through gardening, programming, brush-lettering and other mediums that cross her path.

She lets her love for exploration, learning and sharing with others lead her in all aspects of life and is enjoying this journey with her husband and son.

• maelingmurphy on GitHub
• @maelingcodes on Twitter
• @maeling-murphy on LinkedIn

Links from the show:

• Harvard's CS50
• 100 days of code
• Virtual Coffee Demo Monthly Challenge
• Homeschool journal
• Github
• Learning Path log
• Karen's Notion for job searches
• Karen's Job Application Details Spreadsheet
• Frank's Notetaking System
• KeyValues: Find engineering teams that share your values
• Dan's Pinboard bookmarks
• Forem - Open source project that Nick Taylor helps maintain

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can even

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Jessica Wilkins, a self-taught developer and a staff author for the freeCodeCamp News publication. Jessica talks about how to get started with tech writing, how to differentiate between constructive criticism and negative feedback, and how to avoid gatekeeping by eliminating assumptions from your writing, avoiding terms and phrases like "it's so easy!", and sometimes adding prerequisites to your posts.

About Jessica Wilkins

Jessica Wilkins is a self taught developer and technical writer from Los Angeles, California.

In her previous career, she was a professional oboist, educator and owner of JDW Sheet Music.

Jessica's interest in programming came during the pandemic when she wanted to build the Black Excellence Music Project which celebrates black artists from the jazz and classical fields.

She now works part-time as a junior developer for a small tech company and is a staff author for the freeCodeCamp News publication.

• Dev.to profile
• @codergirl1991 on Twitter
• @jessica-wilkins-developer on LinkedIn

Links from the Show:

• Eastman School of Music
• Jessica's Lunch & Learn: How to grow your tech career through writing
• Freecodecamp news
• Freecodecamp forum
• Quincy Larson
• George Floyd murder
• The Black Excellence Music Project
• Github for it
• Virtual Coffee November Monthly Challenge
• Gatsby
• Voices of Gatsby: Fighting Back Against Imposter Syndrome
• How to Use Repl.it: a beginner's guide
• How to Use Codepen: a beginner's guide
• NodeMailer

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please vis

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Bryan Healey, an entrepreneur, tech leader, data scientist / ML engineer, and biz developer. Bryan talks about gaining experience as an entrepreneur, how to get started in the start-up life, and how the entrepreneurial spirit has always been in his blood.

About Bryan Healey

Bryan Healey is an entrepreneur, tech leader, data scientist / ML engineer, and biz developer. He's helped create or grow several start-ups, raised money, and built/managed teams of varying sizes, small to large. Currently co-founder and CTO at Aiera.

• @Bryan_Healey on Twitter
• bryanhealey on LinkedIn

Links

• Aiera
• Jessi's VC Podcast episode

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

This week Bekah and Dan sat down with Suze Shardlow. Suze is an award winning community manager, coder, tech writer and tech event MC and she currently leads the developer community at Redis. We had a really interesting conversation with Suze! She's done a million different things throughout her life and her career and she shared with us how her experiences have informed her time as a software developer and a community leader.

Links

• 30-second-coding
• On being a published author
• redislabs on Twitch
• One of the top 100 women in tech in 2020
• Redis University
• Hacktoberfest
• Codeland
• global diversity CFP day

About Suze Shardlow

Suze Shardlow is a published tech author, developer community manager and event MC. Before retraining as a software engineer, she worked in marketing and management for 20 years in the engineering, technology, law enforcement, education and economic development sectors. Currently the head of developer community at Redis, Suze has won numerous awards including Rising Star In Tech 2021, TechWomen100 2020, Women In Software Power List 2020 and is a finalist in the Women In Tech Excellence Awards 2021.

• suze.dev
• @SuzeShardlow on Twitter
• @SuzeShardlow on GitHub
• SuzeShardlow on LinkedIn

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

This week we welcome Mark Noonan to the show to talk about how becoming a part of Civic Tech initiatives can help career changers to grow and help existing developers create opportunities for mentorship, support, and connection for those coming into tech.

Mark talks about his experience with FreeCodeCamp as well asCode for Atlanta, and the $40,000 Hackathon his group won and donated to charity! He brings his experience as a career transitioner to the conversation and we look at how participating in Civic Tech can help you develop skills to be a better communicator and programmer. And you might hear a little bit about how we prefer our breakfast foods too 🥞

Links

• FreeCodeCamp
• Code for Atlanta
• Code for America
• Marta Hackathon
• Code for America Brigades
• People Making Progress
• @marktnoonan on Twitter

---

About Mark

Mark is a senior engineer at Cypress.io and is a co-organizer at Code for Atlanta. He also works as a program developer for People Making Progress, an Atlanta-based nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities at home, work, and in the community.

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

This week we welcome Jennifer Konikowski to the show to talk about being a woman in tech and building community for women in tech!

Jennifer brings her experience creating communities like Py Ladies Boston andBoston Ruby Women to the podcast, and talks about the value of learning to code even if you don't want to be a developer. She also talks about getting through toxic work environments, moving forward, and her hot takes on community and being a woman in tech.

About Jennifer

Jennifer has 10 years of experience as a software engineer, working in Ruby and Rails, Go, Swift, Scala, Rust, PHP, Javascript, Java, Perl, and Python. She was the founder and organizer of PyLadies Boston and a founding member of Boston Ruby Women. She currently resides in Pittsburgh and works remotely at Splice. She also really loves Negronis.

• jenniferkonikowski.com
• @jenkoni on Twitter

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

We're welcoming Todd Libby to give us an intro to accessibility and what it means to make the web equal. Todd, a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years, provides a plethora of resources that can help everyone to get started and talks about how to advocate for accessibility and equality on projects.

Show Notes:

• toddl.dev
• @toddlibby on Twitter

Things/People mentioned in the episode:

• Making A Strong Case for Accessibility by Todd Libby
• Front Page Express
• Designing with Web Standards
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Cass Faris
• Chris DeMars

A11y Learning Resources:

• Introduction to Web Accessibility on edX
• WebAIM
• TPGi

Tools:

• WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
• axe accessibility toolkit
• pa11y command line
• Bookmarklets by Ian Loyyd and Paul J Adams
• Microsoft a11y insights
• Firefox a11y devtools
• Lighthouse automated testing
• Contrast Ratio tool by Lea Verou
• Colour Contrast Analyser

Todd's steps for manual testing:

1. Mouse only
2. Keyboard only
3. Squint test
4. Screen readers
5. Voice over in Safari
6. NVDA orJAWS in Windows
7. Orca on Linux

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

We welcome Jessi Shakarian to the show today to talk about her journey into UX/UI!

Jessi Shakarian got her start in tech as a developer, but also she loved everything that happened before it was time to build a website. She is currently a UX designer at DIA Design Guild in Los Angeles and a python developer interested in machine learning.

Jessi talks about how passion can be your motivation, and how valuable it is to be able to share what you're excited about: you aren't your tech stack. Sometimes finding that passion can lead you to new and interesting places like Jessi's change in focus from web dev to design.

• jessishakarian.com
• @jessishakarian on Twitter
• jessishakarian on PolyWork

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Community Maintainer Kirk joins us (again) for our Season 3 wrap up! We review what Virtual Coffee did last year for Hacktoberfest, and talk about a lot of the exciting things we have coming up this year! We also shared some fun things from the last year at Virtual Coffee, like our Virtual Coffee Co-Working Room!

Links:

• Classic Sudoku
• Cracking the Cryptic
• @MarieAntons
• Tatiana Mac - selfdefined
• Quarto by Dominic Duffin
• Bekah's postpartum wellness app
• Virtual Coffee's GitHub Org
• Hacktoberfest on Digital Ocean
• shoutout to our Monthly Challenge team: Adam, Andrew, Aurelie, Chris, Courtney, Dominic, Kevin, Luis, Vanessa, and Yolanda!

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor and episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

The Virtual Coffee Podcast is produced by Dan Ott and Bekah Hawrot Weigel and edited by Dan Ott.

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

In this episode, Dan and Bekah talk to Aurelie Verrot, a Software Engineer from the San Francisco Bay Area, who's originally from France, about the importance of relationships in team-building--whether as part of the learning process or in a work environment--and the benefits of being able to work from home. She talks about the importance of clear communication, creating boundaries, and maintaining flexibility as key habits to build.

Aurelie Verrot

Aurelie Verrot is a software engineer from the San Francisco Bay Area, originally from France. After moving to the US and taking care of her children for 4 years, she decided to make a career change in 2019 to work in tech. She started her first dev job in May as a Software Engineer working mostly with Ruby on Rails.

• Twitter: LiliVerrot
• GitHub: aurelieverrot
• LinkedIn: aurelieverrot

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott

Sponsor Virtual Coffee!

Your support is incredibly valuable to us. Direct financial support will help us to continue serving the Virtual Coffee community.

Please visit our sponsorship page on GitHub for more information - you can evensponsor an episode of the podcast!

Virtual Coffee:

• Virtual Coffee: virtualcoffee.io
• Podcast Contact: [email protected]
• Bekah: dev.to/bekahhw, Twitter:https://twitter.com/bekahhw, Instagram:bekahhw
• Dan: dtott.com, Twitter:@danieltott