Underserved

If your team grows 4x in a year it can be hard to keep up! Ken Pickering talks about bracing for the influx, living with a Scala architecture, and working in consumer-facing companies. Hear how boxing competitively provides the necessary stress relief for the software industry (link below to sponsor Ken in this year's Haymakers for Hope charity tournament!)

• Hopper: https://www.hopper.com/ (and download the App!)
• Haymakers for Hope: https://haymakersforhope.org/event/boston/2020/rock-n-rumble-x/ken-pickering
• Harry Potter Programmable Wand: https://kano.me/us/store/products/coding-wand

Our guest Ben Szekely talks about pioneering semantic technologies at CSI for over a decade. As an SVP and Head of Field Operations, Ben has been applying graph technology to the human data model and other tough problems. In his spare time, he is also an avid skier (think jumping out of a perfectly good helicopter onto a mountain in Alaska) and kiteboarder. Hear about how the highest kiteboard jump in the world happened in Massachusetts Bay!

• Cambridge Semantics, https://www.cambridgesemantics.com/
• Video and whitepaper on Data Fabric https://www.cambridgesemantics.com/robust-agile-and-comprehensive-the-story-of-the-data-fabric/.
• Jobs @ Cambridge Semantics https://www.cambridgesemantics.com/about-us/careers/
• Heliskiing video from Alaska https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COKHFZd0ZNE
• WooSports kiteboard jump measurement https://woosports.com/

Vikas Singhvi went from the ultimate for-profit industry (financial services software) to a running IT for a non-profit. Hear his lessons learned, along with how to level up using online resources, and what DevSecOps is. We talk about continuous compliance and how to reconcile Agile methodologies with regulated industries. We also cover trying to retain culture and traditions from the old country when living in a new country.

• Vikas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikassinghvi/
• Software Composition Analysis https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/software-composition-security-analysis
• Continuous Compliance https://www.pulsant.com/knowledge-hub/blog/what-is-continuous-compliance/
• DevSecOps https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-is-devsecops
• SonarQube https://www.sonarqube.org/
• Snyk https://snyk.io/

Our guest in Episode 015 is John Newman, Senior Software Engineer (Java/Spring/Oracle). After growing up on a steady diet of BBSes, John went from the physical therapy program to the programming program. After his start in Ops he moved to Dev and has been coding ever since. John talks about developing for the fun of it, his early days on the dial-up bulletin board systems in Boston, and how coaching youth sports helps him with his job.

• What is a BBS - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
• Commodore 64 - https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/a-commodore-64-clone-with-a-working-retro-keyboard-will-1835836875/amp
• Umass Lowell CS Dept. - https://www.uml.edu/sciences/computer-science/
• BU Met CS - https://bumetprograms.bu.edu/computerscience/
• Spring Boot - https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot

In Episode 014 I talk to Tim Callaghan, VP of Technology at Crunchtime. Tim has some great stories from a previous job where they embraced open source, extended it, and competed with it on occasion. His story about attending a presentation that (surprise!) ended up being about his benchmarking code at a worldwide MongoDB conference is a must-listen! We also talk about inspiring the next generation of coders and cloud provider merits.

Tim on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/timcallaghan/ @tmcallaghan (twitter) acmebenchmarking.com (blog)

• The mongodb presentation - slide 7 was where it all started! https://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mythbusting-understanding-how-we-measure-performance-mongodb
• Tim's benchmark applications @ github https://github.com/tmcallaghan/sysbench-mongodb https://github.com/tmcallaghan/iibench-mongodb
• mongodb 3.0 bug hunt winners https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/announcing-mongodb-30-and-bug-hunt-winners
• mongodb 2.6 bug hunt winners https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/bug-hunt-winners-for-mongodb-26-rc0
• Tokutek's fork of Mongodb https://www.percona.com/blog/2013/06/19/announcing-tokumx-v1-0-tokumongo-you-can-have-it-all-2/
• Cloud provider usability http://www.acmebenchmarking.com/2015/12/cloud-provider-usability.html

We kick off Season Two with Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor, Inc. Steve made the long trek across the highway in Needham to talk to me about what initially excited him about computers, what he learned at each stage in TripAdvisor's growth, and what he would go back and tell himself if he had a time machine. We also talk about fencing, the TripAdvisor Charitable Foundation, and the anti-bureaucracy challenge. How does your outlook on acquisitions change from being a $50M company to being a $4B company? You won't want to miss the lessons learned and how to use the "mirror test" to determine what price to charge when you have no clue how to value something.

TripAdvisor Refugee relief : https://www.tripadvisor.com/vpages/refugee_relief.html Sabre fencing in MA: http://zetafencing.com/ Boston fencing club: https://www.bostonfencingclub.org/ The Pan-Mass Challenge: https://www.pmc.org/ Other ways to price services (besides the Mirror Test): https://www.inc.com/guides/price-your-services.html

It's almost time for the business world to hibernate for a couple of weeks, and Underserved is shipping some yuletide bits to enjoy during the break! We have taken some cuts we did not have room for in our regular episodes and packaged them here. This bonus episode is the end of Season One of Underserved. Season two is coming in early 2020, see you then!

Show notes:

• Buoyancy - Forbes article https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2016/12/19/10-good-reasons-to-change-jobs-every-3-5-years/#4d8f9cf2777b
• Why do Hackathons? https://www.thetechedvocate.org/benefits-participating-hackathon/
• Benefits of GITHUB https://apiumhub.com/tech-blog-barcelona/using-github/
• When to get an endorsement/reference https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-right-and-wrong-way-to-ask-someone-to-be-a-reference
• Advice about counter-offers: https://thehiredguns.com/should-you-accept-a-counteroffer/

How many people started their data science career at 16 years old? Then took a sabbatical to play with famous jazz musicians? And subsequently bootstrapped the US presence for a Norwegian data science firm? I know one! His name is Russ Wilcox. On this week's Underserved Russel explains how a Tesla sees the world (and how it can be fooled), how to teach an old AI new tricks, and we discuss the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. If you ever wondered how machine learning worked, or if the rise of SKYNET is imminent, this is the podcast for you.

• Russel's company, Sannsyn US Sannsyn.com/us
• Gradient Descent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent
• Convolutional neural networks: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/4824-imagenet-classification-with-deep-convolutional-neural-networks
• Anders Hanssen: https://www.mn.uio.no/math/personer/vit/anderch/
• Tensorflow: https://www.tensorflow.org/
• Keras: https://keras.io/
• Pytorch: https://pytorch.org/
• Comparison of TF, Keras, PT: https://dzone.com/articles/tensorflow-vs-pytorch-vs-keras-for-nlp
• Anthony Fung: https://www.anthonyfungmusic.com/
• George Garzone: http://www.georgegarzone.com/
• The Russ Wilcox Jazz Group : https://www.facebook.com/rwilcoxjazz/

Arvind Singh https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroh/ is a software developer that specializes in security and identity management. He has been a proponent of open source software for over two decades, particularly BSD derivatives of Unix. We talk about how open source is the unsung hero of the Internet, the proliferation of open source licensing models, coming up from the west coast of India to the East coast of the US, and where the best Indian food in Boston is (hint: JP). We also talk restoring bicycles and bike trails in the Boston area.

• A practical guide to open source license compliance https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html
• Binary GPL checker tool https://lwn.net/Articles/386280/
• Code together live in VS https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share
• Indian food: 1st place for Arvind is Bukhara https://www.bukharabistro.com/
• Indian food: Close second is Mela https://melainboston.com/
• The Minuteman Bikeway http://minutemanbikeway.org/
• Mass State biking advocacy https://www.massbike.org/
• BONUS: Sarson Ka Saag recipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZoqWWtagHY

Brian Adams got into QA by way of customer service, and has developed his testing skills, user empathy, and teamwork to become a top professional. We talk about best practices for performing quality assurance, QA in an agile lifecycle, and making the most out of distributed teams. Brian is also a veteran of multiple marathons (the running kind) so we talk about his rituals and routines.

• The combined BA/QA role: https://www.emids.com/defining-the-baqa-role/
• Microsoft OneDrive is taking over DropBox and GDrive: https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/
• Learning from your coworkers: https://idealistcareers.org/learn-from-coworkers/
• MapMyRun: https://www.mapmyrun.com/
• Bowling in Tewksbury: https://wamesitlanes.com/