Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Ben Dowling lives in Seattle, and loves it there. He is married, and a father of three kids - ages 11, 8 and 5 - so he's a busy dude. He loves to hike, and recently took his family on a weekend trip to Mount Rainer. He loves to snowboard, and get away from the screen - though he admits, that tech is also his hobby... building side projects, apps, websites, etc.Ben was working on a bunch of different side projects in 2013. The process to get IP Info was manual, tedious, and filled with headaches across projects. After he felt this pain point multiple times, he decided to build a solution to solve it... not knowing that he would quickly start getting millions of requests in a short time.This is the creation story of IPInfo.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://ipinfo.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bendowling/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

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-write-technical-documentationHey guys, we are narrowing in on the Christmas holiday's in the states. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New year! For today, I'm sharing yet another fantastic episode of the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat. As a reminder Compiler is a show hosted by tech veterans, discussing tech topics - big, strange and small.On this particular episode - which is episode 10 - the topic of burnout is chatted on. This was a great discussion, full of really good tidbits. What I really liked was how Angela, Brent and Johan break down the ingredients for burnout. In order, these are:An unending amount of workNot having healthy boundaries on your workGuilt, obligation, and never doing enoughCriticism amplifying 1-3The hosts primarily interviewed folks, and come up with this recipe from the standpoint of open source maintainers. Interestingly enough, I find that these apply to software engineers as well. I think criticism can be interchanged with pressure as well, which probably has some criticism implicit in it.However, I also find that lack of team or company direction can lead to burnout as well as an absence of mentorship. When people don't feel like they are growing, work can become stale. Perhaps its a little bit of burnout mixed with boredom, but at any rate, it leads them to not want to work there anymore.At any rate, I really enjoyed this episode, and think you will too. Enjoy!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

Max Stoiber was born and raised in a small town, just outside of Vienna, Austria. From a young age, his biggest influence was his mother, who left her job to start her own business as a medical expert in the courts. It has been inspiring for Max to watch her find her place in the world, and to box through everything life threw at her. He still finds great inspiration from that today. And, very early on, he was focused on doing something on his own.When he's not staring at his computer screens, he likes to get outside and boulder with this friends. He got into the sport through other fellow geeks, and he feels that bouldering in Vienna is pretty much a nerd sport. He's also a trained skiing instructor, and really into coffee, as a certified barista.Prior to his current venture, Max has had some great success in the open source world, and building a chat tool called Spectrum - which was a platform for community chat. Eventually, Github acquired the product, and opened a whole new set of problems around architecting a large scale, real time system. Through a difficult period of learning and service outages, he learned and figured out a better way to reduce traffic up to 95% with edge caching.This is the creation story of GraphCDN.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://graphcdn.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxstbr/The Mom TestSupport 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

Darshan Mehta has a degree in marketing and finance, and has typically served those disciplines. However, he has been accused of having the extra tech gene, since he was born in India. He enjoys out door activities, and is scuba diving certified. He really likes to do activities around what he is passionate about. For example, he is launching a hackathon in Bangkok called Big Mango, to help teams achieve product market fit and incubate early stage startups. And, he teaches at universities around the world, in particular around how to give presentations. He believes deeply in communicating effectively and having engaging conversations.He is also an author, and just recently released his book called "Getting to Aha". The tagline harps on the belief that today's insights become tomorrow's facts. One of the things Darshan found throughout his career was that most people want to figure out why people buy your products. Most people are comfortable with surveys, but its difficult to get to the "why" that way, and focus groups help with that. Traditionally, doing a focus group has been difficult, expensive, and concentrated to geo areas. Darshan set out to build a tool to change this for the market.This is the creation story of iResearch.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.iresearch.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshan--mehta/https://www.connectqik.com/Getting to Aha - BookSupport 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

Ilan Peleg is 29 years old, and has been a long time middle distance runner. He previously ran the 800 meters, and served int he Israeli Army as a professional athlete. At the age of 21, he retired and started his tech career. He said that there are many who would correlate their Israeli service area of their professional success. He just recently got engaged. He proposed to his fiancé outside of Tel Aviv, on a cliff, in the same spot where they had their first kiss. Generally, he enjoys sports and athletics, and sees it has a positive effect on how he manages his team at Lighten. He also likes to travel, and stay educated on the topics he follows.Ilan and his co-founder were developers in many different types of companies - startups, enterprises, etc. It seemed to them that it was easy to debut and troubleshoot applications in development, but found it very difficult to observe applications in production. They realized that most developers were not equipped with the right tooling to troubleshoot and understand live applications in the wild.This is the creation story of Lighten.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://lightrun.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilan-peleg-5a31396bSupport 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

Bruno Demuro is first and foremost, a father of 2 children. He says this is the single most awesome thing, and yet at the same time, the most challenging thing. He has a background in industrial engineering and design, but considers himself a generalist and a relentless problem solver (which he admits, can be hard on this wife). He loves all thing tech - hardware, software, you name it. But beyond tech, he loves working on and restoring classic cars, along with surfing on a long board.Earlier in Bruno's life, his mother had to undergo surgery to have a brain tumor removed. Though the surgery went WELL, in order to remove a tumor the size of a penny, the doctor's had to make an opening the size of a grapefruit. When Bruno asked why, the Doctor said that it was the only way they could be sure that the tumor would be accessible. Bruno found this answer to be unacceptable.This is the creation story of Armor Bionics.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.armorbionics.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunodemuro/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

Kyle Bernhardy had a less than traditional path to the tech world. He has been in the industry since the late 90's, but it all started when he was growing up, attempting to program text adventures games on his Commodore 64. In High School, he started running and they became a major part of his life - so much so, he went to run for Penn State University. He settled into an exercise and sports science major, so he could stay close to the sport.Post college - he didn't know what to do with his degree. He worked in a few corporate fitness centers, but didn't enjoy what he was doing and didn't see a path for himself. During that time, he ended up getting a job in tech support. He grew in this role, in his knowledge of DB basics, SQL and supporting database reporting. Once this happened, he moved into the development world.Programming for Kyle is a creative outlet, but not for art... for problem solving. In 2010, he started working for a data center company and met his now co-founder. They would hang out and chat about what it would be like to build something together. While working for a large data aggregation company, he worked through a number of data availability, reliability, and infrastructure around massive data processing. Internally, he thought there must be a better way.This is the creation story of HarperDB.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://harperdb.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylebernhardy/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

Cherish Santoshi started his professional career when he was just 18. He plays music, being a one man band through his guitar, bass and drum skills. He's even got a studio setup at home, and enjoys lo fi hip hop, especially when he is working. Cherish reads and watches a lot of content, specifically around theoretical thought experiments, which help. Him to think about things from a different angle. Along with this, he likes to travel... to get out, see the world, and experience new people and ways of thinking. He likes to interact with like minded developers, founders, and startup folks, which makes his current role as Head of Community a perfect fit.Being startup minded, he set out with his founding members to continue the growth of SaaS in India, and build a product specifically for then developer community, and building an auth product that furthers the password less revolution.This is the creation story of SAWO.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://sawolabs.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherishsantoshi/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

Robert Ross, also known as Bobby Tables, has been into building stuff since he was 12 years old. Around that time, he Googled "how to make a website", learned from an online tutorial, and has been hooked on development ever since. He started making websites for people he knew in San Diego, which allowed him to facilitate his Xbox and Xbox Live needs. For gaming, he stuck to playing only Halo - and in fact, he already pre-ordered Halo Infinite over a year ago. But outside of gaming, he really loves to get analog - camping, being outside, and skiing.In high school he did a lot of marching band, and continued the art in drum core international after he graduated. Post competition, he started working full time with a web consultancy.Then went on to the next thing and the next, and he feels very lucky to have made the stops he made in his career, and the people he met along the way. He's grateful for his early work at an agency because it required him to move quickly, try out new things, and move on to the next project. This gave him a lot of rapid experience up front, which helped shape his skills later on.Eventually, he was an on call engineer - either by accident or intentionally - because he always wanted to help solve the problem. At one point, he set out to bridge bootcamp grads into the real world of software through a video series. As it turns out, the product he was building during the series was much more interesting - and desired - than the videos themselves.This is the creation story of FireHydrant.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://firehydrant.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-tables/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

Luke Hoban has been into tech and computers for many, many years. It started off when he was a kid, but sailed with him into college as he got into languages. He spent the first part of his career at Microsoft building tools, IDE's and programming languages. His take on the frame of mind required to build a language is centered around what you want it to do, combined with how it feels for the programmer to express what they want with it to do. Bottom line... it is an art, not a science, and is much more about product and user interaction design than anything.Post Microsoft, Luke went work for Amazon on the cloud, specifically EC2. The thing he had in the back of his head for many years was how to bring the programming model into the cloud space. He eventually left Amazon, and set out to combine his love of designing programming languages, with the movement and excitement of the cloud.This is the creation story of Pulumi.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.pulumi.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukejhoban/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