Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Today's episode is sponsored by Microsoft!Guests: Girish Bablani and Junior Diarrassouba, two Microsoft employees at different stages in their career. One seasoned veteran at the company, and one up-and-coming engineer, who share how Microsoft has expanded their career horizons and provided many different opportunities for growth and experience.Questions:Junior, how long have you been working at Microsoft? How did you find out about the opportunity?What were your expectations coming out of school, regarding projects you would work on?What are you actually working on today? Are you already working with customers to solve real world problems?Girish, you've been a Microsoft for quite some time - but how did things start for you?You are overseeing teams across Computer, Networking and Storage - but have you always been in this group?What other groups did you work in? Was it hard to switch, or did you receive push back?Both of you - how has Microsoft's opportunities opened your career horizons?What have you learned that you didn't know about prior to joining the company?What is the future for you at MS? What would you say to someone considering joining the team?Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Addison Higham is a father of 2 kids, and has been married for 12 years. His family is of the utmost importance to him, and he has been happy to be able to balance his career and personal life along his journey. As he puts it - he has been a nerd since day 1, building, fixing and playing with computers from a young age. Along with his CS interests, his family was very entrepreneurial growing up. During schooling, he joined some startups to learn the ropes of building solutions. Outside of tech, he loves to ski and be outdoors.The makers of Apache Pulsar, an open source project, decided to build a cloud-native event streaming platform. Early on in the venture, Addison joined his team as a Chief Architect, in order to enable enterprises to easily access data as real-time event streams.This is the creation story of StreamNative.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://streamnative.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/addisonj/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tutelage of Treehouse, sponsored by Treehouse!Guest: Graham Morby is a Senior Software Engineer who works as a dev for hire. He has developed applications in Python, PHP, JS, Vue, and even coded BASIC in the 90's, hacking games for his Commodore 64. He's been doing computers since before they were cool.Questions:Tell me more about the book you are working on.How did you get into programming? You've been into computers for a long time, but at some point you stepped into programming - tell me about that journey.Now that we know how you got started, tell me about your journey within development. How do you sift through the myriad of content out there and staying sharp in your field?You mentioned that you found Treehouse, you liked it and you stayed - tell me more about that.What is your perspective on how the coding/tech careers really are?Linkshttps://teamtreehouse.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Irina Bednova started programming when she was a kid, starting out with a smash the cockroach game written in Delphi (which is object oriented pascal). She obtained her Computer Science degree in Russia, and moved to the UK to work in a few startups, including Monzo a popular fintech product. Outside of tech, she cycles her hobbies from time to time, and has landed on gardening at the moment, along with interior design. She's mentioned she is going back to woodworking when the weather changes.Irina and her co-founder led teams at Monzo, specifically in operations. What they noticed was the proliferation of chat tools for customer service - but, that telephony was largely ignored. Once they validated the problem, they set out to build a product in this space.This is the creation story of Cordless.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://cordless.systems/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jafrog/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Andre Ferraz was influenced heavily by his parents, as they were both computer scientists. When he was 10 years old, his first science project was themed around computer hacking, which got a lot of surprise at the science fair. Outside of tech, he enjoys to surf on a short board several times a week and spends time with his family.Twelve years ago, Andre had the amazing idea to create a unique identity for end users, based on their location data. The market wasn't in need of this solution at the time, but after academically exploring the solution, they recognized that GPS alone would not be enough.This is the creation story of Icognia.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.incognia.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreferraz/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ever since he was a little kid, Robert Cooke always had a fascination with computers. Even when he was super young, when he didn't know much about them, he was still intrigued by this magic box. At the same time, he loved legos - but found it very expensive to expand his lego set. To contrast that, he could build as big as he wanted within a computer - and he was hooked. He built video games, explored databases, and even an accounting system in his teens.As he started validating a new idea, Robert visited a number of top tier banks and looked for consistency in the problem they were facing. He found a starting point to build out a data platform, to enable his three pillars of data delivery.This is the creation story of 3Forge.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.3forge.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-cooke-a7835b69/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tutelage of Treehouse, sponsored by Treehouse!Guest: Daniel McElroy is the Founder of the West Virgina Coding Club. He has been helping young people thrive for a number of years, in many different facets, and has started a number of businesses. Questions:What is the West Virgina Coding Club? In supporting the kids learning how to code, what sort of tooling do you use to help them thrive in learning?What makes Treehouse stand out from the other solutions out there?What sort of feedback have you gotten from your members about Treehouse?What does the future look like for, for the WV Coding Club / Treehouse partnership?Linkshttps://teamtreehouse.com/https://wvcoding.org/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tyson Kunosvsky was born in South Africa, and travelled a lot as a kid. When he was a kid, he was majorly influenced by his parents, who ran the Gottman Institute. It was his parents job to take the content that the Gottmans created, and deliver their research to the world, and Tyson helped them do that by building the first version of their learning management system. Outside of tech, he loves to ride motorcycles and do rock climbing.In 2015, Tyson started a company who focused on migrating enterprise workloads to the cloud. After being acquired, he realized they kept doing the same thing over and over again at the larger company. At 18,000 feet in the air while climbing a mountain, he made the decision to quit his job and build a solution to help people go to cloud.This is the creation story of Autocloud.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.autocloud.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkunovsky/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Saksham Sharda likes to make short films, or anything that is related to videos. In fact, he has narrowed that down to creating trailers, which he attributes to being in the right role in marketing. He's always active in making social media clips, and is always recording everything (even the most boring moments, in his words).The founders of Saksham's current venture started out building an estimator for what it would take to build an app. This estimator became very popular, and they figured they should build a platform to enable others to make their own.This is the creation story of Outgrow.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://outgrow.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saksham-sharda-outgrowco/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mike Cruz grew up in Guam, near Japan. He spent 18 years before moving to the US for college. He has always been in tech - everywhere from the Discovery Channel to startups like Trunk Club, and always in building tech products. He has a young family with 2 boys, and his oldest is getting into programming from the lens of gaming. He reflects on how far games have come these days, as they were much simpler and easier to code in the past.In 2011, Mike & his co-founder has witnessed the proliferation of bootcamps for practical entry and exposure into the tech industry. Given their own backgrounds in struggling to plug into the music and startup scenes, they thought they could replicate this type of model and help people be discovered.This is the creation story of Protégé.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.protege.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdcruz/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy