This is the last episode for 2024. To make it special, it’s a supercut of all the unconventional advice from every single guest that was on the show this year - Kent C. Dodds, Jerod Santo, Rob Walling, Adrienne Tacke, David Khourshid, Saron Yitbarek, Rachel Andrew, Katie Fujihara, Lena Reinhard, Miriam Suzanne, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Craig Hewitt, Jennifer Wong, Jason Lengstorf, Michael Kennedy, and Asia Orangio.

This turned out so well, that I will be definitely re-visiting the format in the new year. I hope you have a successful and adventure-packed 2025, with plenty of room for career growth. See you next year!

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Asia Orangio, the brain behind DemandMaven, a growth agency dedicated to helping SaaS companies and their founders reach new heights. Asia’s unique approach blends data-driven strategies with deep empathy for customers, making her a sought-after expert - from bootstrapped businesses to some of the most established companies. Whether you’re a startup founder or a seasoned marketer, I promise you that her insights will challenge your thinking and inspire quite a few new ideas.

In this conversation, Asia shares her journey from marketer to founder, unraveling the lessons she’s learned while scaling SaaS companies and guiding others to do the same. We’ll explore her philosophy on growth, the common mistakes founders make when trying to identify their growth levers, and the power of understanding your audience on a deeper level. This really ended up being a masterclass in sustainable growth and customer-first business foundations.

You can find Asia on the following sites:

Asia also recommended the following folks to check out:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

If you are listening to this show, you have likely heard of a programming language called Python. And if you are a Python developer, you’ve likely heard of a podcast dedicated to this programming language - Talk Python To Me. It was started by none other than Michael Kennedy, a Python Software Foundation fellow who managed to turn his expertise into a viable bootstrapped business. In this show, we talk about ways to plan a training business from scratch, what tactics worked best to grow a podcast audience, and how to make sure that you have a viable idea before you quit your day job.

You can find Michael on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

If you’ve been immersed in the tech world for some time, you probably have heard one specific YouTube channel mentioned more than once - Learn With Jason. It’s a project started by Jason Lengstorf, a former VP of developer experience at a web tooling startup (he was a head of developer relations prior to that too), that is aimed at helping everyone navigate the always changing landscape of developer tools and frameworks. Which, by the way, according to Jason do not matter.

In this show, we dive deep in Jason’s career path and focus on the less known aspects of climbing the career ladder - things like amassing political capital by doing great work, building visibility by meaningful means that can help cement your reputation, and being able to address business problems as a mechanism to build trust in your own leadership abilities.

You can find Jason on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Jennifer Wong is a seasoned engineering manager who started her journey in civil engineering. The fast pace of the tech industry drew her in, and she stuck with it for years since making that call. In this episode, I chat with Jennifer about her transition from a non-traditional career path into software, reasons to take on management instead of being an individual contributor, and why taking the road less traveled in terms of career progression might just be the recipe for long-term growth and success.

You can find Jennifer on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Craig Hewitt, the founder of the podcasting platform Castos, comes from generations of entrepreneurs, and his own journey builds on the experience and stamina of those that came before him. In this show, we chat about best practices for hiring developers for your bootstrapped startup, finding the right approach to deliver hard news, and how to ensure that your relationships aren’t hurt as you embark on the entrepreneurship treadmill.

You can find Craig on the following sites:

And of course, make sure to check out Castos!

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

In episode 81, Den Delimarsky chats with Kirupa Chinnathambi, a product manager at Google who has built his own personal brand in what is now known as kirupa.com. Kirupa is a talented web developer, designer, writer, and packs so much knowledge in his blog that you can learn how to create great web-based experience on that content alone.

We discuss best ways to balance everything in one’s life and still have a successful career, finding the right angles to change a team culture, making your hobby your career, and how to increase your likelihood of building more luck in the day-to-day activities.

You can find Kirupa on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

One of the things that Miriam Suzanne realized early in her developer journey is that web development is a tool - she wanted to build a website for her theater company and ended up building a career and a company around it. And not just that, but she also joined the CSS Working Group - the official standards body that determines how the CSS stack evolves.

In this show, we talk about her early discovery of the power of the web, how she joins creativity with technical prowess, and how CSS is really like poetry written in the browser.

You can find Miriam on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

We often talk about promotions and growth, but the moment the conversation shifts towards paths to staff or executive positions, the advice goes blank. There is very little actionable information out there that can tell you how you can get to the highest echelons of leadership.

To get a clearer picture on this topic, I sat down with Lena Reinhard, a seasoned executive with an extensive track record at CircleCI, Travis CI, and more. Lena shares her insights on the best ways to accelerate career growth in the tech space, answer thorny questions, such as “Why are executives hired from the outside?” and provide some candid takes on why taking things slow sometimes can pay off in the end.

You can find Lena on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

One’s journey from their early career to working at startups in Silicon Valley can take many forms. Some folks take the more traditional route of joining a company right after college. Others get tired of their corporate life and decide to try something different. Katie Fujihara, an engineer and a technical program manager amalgam, decided that her journey to the heart of “startup land,” San Francisco, would be an impromptu one - she just packed up her bags and set out on an adventure.

I am delighted to share with you this recording, where I talk to Katie about her early starts in Hawai’i, how working in engineering was not the end goal for her career journey, and what the best practices are for overcoming impostor syndrome.

You can find Katie on the following sites:

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!