Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

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/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Thejo Kote grew up in Southern India. He came from an academic, intellectual family. Both of his grandfathers were authors, and in the house, they had built up a library. But not just a few books here in there... Thejo grew up in with 3500 books in his house. These were a combination of everything, but with a lot of reference and historical books. If he's honest, Thejo didn't appreciate it really until he got older - however, no one appreciated it when it was time to move.He was influenced a lot by what he was reading and watching, which he noted allowed him to learn from the experiences of others. Ultimately, his path took him down he road of tech and entrepreneurship. He's always been fascinated with how impactful tech can be on the world... you sit at home, write some code, and make an impact. Currently, he resides in San Francisco with his wife, and has been there for the last 10 years or so.Prior to his current venture, he co-founded Automatic, connecting cars to the internet. This eventually sold to SiriusXM for several million dollars. Looking into another problem, he saw that the way people spend money lacked true visibility and connectivity between systems. He asked some questions, got some feedback, and set out to capitalize on the opportunity to build a better solution.This is the creation story of Airbase.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.airbase.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejo/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Shinji Kim was born in Korea. Her family moved to Canada when she was 13 years old. She likes to hang out with her friends, watch movies and likes to be outdoors, skiing, hiking or doing yoga. She recently tore her ACL, though, which has put a damper on her physical activity. While she studied at the University of Waterloo, she was able to work with many different well known companies - Facebook, Sun Microsystems and Barclays. In 2014, she started her first company called Concord Systems, focusing on distributed stream processing. This was eventually acquired by Akamai, the largest CDN network in the world. We joked about the day it went down, cause it fell like the digital world went dark.At Akamai, she worked with large enterprises and saw that there was a problem around data discovery, and that it was growing in the middle market, as more companies migrated to the cloud. She decided to build an automated way for users to discovery and understand their data.This is the creation story of Select Star.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://selectstar.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shinjikim/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had two options - go to school for computer science or for music... and chose the latter. During school, he was working full time for his Dad's agency, building websites, email campaigns and such. While he was doing this, he built his first product called Form Lift, which is a Wordpress form builder for Infusion Soft.Around 3 years into school, he failed his first university course - a discrete computer science course around computer runtimes, big O notation, etc. He had invested a ton of money into the his degree already, but he started doing the math, and estimated he wouldn't complete school until 2025 because he was part time.With that in mind, he dropped out of University school, and thought - what next? He didn't want to do agency work forever. He took a look at how expensive, convoluted and clunky marketing technology tools can be. He vowed to create the ultimate suite of tools, and to do it on Wordpress.This is the creation story of Groundhogg.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.groundhogg.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriantobeyOur Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Brandon White started his career from his passion for fishing. In doing so, he wound up building the largest social networking and eCommerce site for sport fisherman. He got to travel around the world, fish all over, and do some amazing things with this company. But honestly, he got burned out on the sports and doesn't fish much anymore. He tells people today to be careful today when people are following their passion, because romanticizing a career doesn't work out for everyone. And, just because people aren't overly passionate about something - but are good at it - they should go after anyway, to help them to buy their time for their passions.The genesis of his current venture started with his wife, who manages a family office. At one point, she was switching accountants, which required the transfer of a massive amount of documents... the bulk of which was in email. He thought that there had to be a better way to find these documents, across accounts in the cloud.This is the creation story of File Finder.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://filefinder.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonwhite/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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, getting close to Thanksgiving in the states. For today, I'm sharing 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 8 - the topic of technical documentation is discussed. This is a fitting topic, given that the show is brought to you by Red Hat, which is the largest open source company in the world. The use cases for technical documentation for open source software seem pretty straight forward and obvious - if a developer or user needs to download a free, open source program, they will also need the correlated documentation so they can educate themselves on how to use the program.In my experience, the need for technical documentation goes way beyond the boundaries of open source. Within the walls of a business, the need to share technical documentation around product architecture, entity relationships, DevOps workflow and even product strategy are absolutely critical in ensuring that everyone is on the same p age to move forward.At the root, both types of technical documentation have the same goal - to inform the reader on how things should work. This episode was a great discussion on the topic, and I hope you enjoy Episode 8 of the Compiler podcast.Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Ulf Schwekendiek was brought up in Germany, but spent most of his life in the US. He speaks German with an American accent, and English with a German accent... so he claims to not speak any language properly anymore. Personally, he loves to para glide (not para sail, different thing). In fact, he is a tandem instructor. In this particular activity, you inflate a giant parachute and jump off of a mountain or cliff. From there, you use drafts or thermals to stay in the air, and can drift for around 100 miles sometimes. Ulf finds this super beautiful, relaxing, and a great way to get into a flow state.Ulf's background is two fold - engineering and UX. He has worked on many popular proudest, and with well known startups in the past. He was an iOS engineer at Siri, before it was bought by Apple. He started up a company and ended up selling it to Groupon... and ended up doing a couple more companies with the Groupon founder, one being Descript which it still going strong today. Finally, he spent some time at Postmates.He enjoys building software that invokes an emotion from its user. While he was at Postmates, he got really interested in the way people work, specifically around flow states. He studied the Pomodoro method, and its associated 25 minute cycle. This became the first building block into creating his current venture.This is the creation story of Centered.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.centered.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sulfme/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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