Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Guillermo Rauch is originally from Argentina. He has always been involved in the open source world, starting out working in Linux and native tooling. After a while, he feel in love with the web and the front end web system, working in the early days of AJAX, JS Animation and jQuery competition. When I asked him what he does for fun, he laughed - because he really enjoys what is does professionally on the web .On a personal level though, he has three kiddos so he stays pretty busu. He is into fitness, and does calisthenics and gymnastics. Beyond that, he is into coffee - though I don't know many tech people who aren't into coffee.Having been a JS person, he saw an opportunity to build out the frontend layer of the web. To put that in context, think about what Stripe, Twilio, etc. have done for the industry with their foundational, developer first API's. He decided to create a framework that had no opinion about how you got your data. Along side of this, he created the optimal ecosystem for developers to build very fast - specifically, to develop, preview, and ship.This is the creation story of Next.js and Vercel.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://vercel.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermo-rauch-b834b917b/https://nextjs.org/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

David Ciccarelli is a husband to his partner in life and business, Stephanie, and a dad to 4 kids - one boy, and three girls. He loves to be doing anything outdoors - hiking, biking, etc - and has a cottage out in the country. His most memorable hike was near his hometown, at the Provincial Park, where he climbed up to the top if the Sleeping Giant.Being a true Canadian, he was able to direct my suspicions about Poutine, which is French fries, gravy and cheese curds - aka an indulgent dish. He said that its more of a regular favorite in places like old Quebec, but most people enjoy it perhaps once a year, as you can't really have it every day.Growing up, David loved experimenting with sound - playing piano, tuning into radio stations, and tinkering with an old record player. He discovered there was an audio engineering program at school, and set out with the goal of starting a small project recording studio. He met his now wife and co-founder through their first voice recording project... which then, began to be advertised and attract more and more talent.This is the creation story of Voices.com.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.voices.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidciccarelliOur 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

Josh Dzielak is originally from the US, but lives in Paris now. And because of this, he likes to take advantage and walk around to take in the sights. He lives close to an area with a park, featuring gardens and lots of trees. He goes there to clear his head, have a little bit of nature, and also, to have walking meetings.Josh likes to stay active through running, cycling, and the aforementioned walking. He's married with a 13 month old daughter. He met his wife, not in Paris or the US, but in Thailand. He jokes that his young daughter is growing up faster than his company.He avidly confirms that the food in Paris is amazing. The simple things are fantastic, and he frequents the patisserie for his favorite almond croissant. His family loves to host people when the come to town, so they can ensure they try some of the exquisite foods and strong flavors.At a prior company as a developer advocate, Josh started using the Orbit model. He compared the model to being like the funnel for sales, except the Orbit model applies to community. After he left the company, he joined his now co-founder, using the Orbit model in a consulting context. Then, the aha moment occurred - what if we built a product to facilitate this?This is the creation story of Orbit.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://orbit.love/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dzello/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

Matt Dixon grew up job hopping, before eventually starting his own business. He is married with 5 kids - 1 daughter and 4 sons. He loves to eat, spend time with his family, mountain bike, and travel with his wife to new places. They just moved to Nashville from the Colorado Springs area. He found that starting his own business was the best way to find freedom to be present for his family. For a personal foundation, he likes to live with no regrets.Matt has been in tech industry for nearly 21 years, and started Front Range Systems, building software for bidding customers. He found that post difficult projects, he started to figure out that the best way to improve a project was to improve the team - the entire team, as a whole.This is the creation story of Code Program.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://codeprogram.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattdixon/https://frontrangesystems.com/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

Oleg Fridman has been at this startup thing for a while. Most of his career, he has been working for himself, remotely. In High School, he was drug into entrepreneurship by a few of his buddies, creating an e-commerce website in 2002 for selling furniture. They figured out that they sucked at selling furniture, but made a pretty good website. Post that, he got involved with restaurant ordering, and turned it into a thriving business. That business, called Onosys, sold to LivingSocial, after serving 4 countries, around 10k restaurants, and doing quite a bit of business online. Currently he lives in Cleveland, Ohio, but has done stints in Austin and Boston. He's married with 2 little girls, 3 years and 7 months old. His major hobby is legos. He has a huge Star Wards collection, owning one of almost everything. When asked if he shared the legos with his girls, he mentioned they know Daddy's legos are off limits.Prior to their current venture, Oleg and his co-founder, Dave, ran an agency focusing on high fidelity prototyping. After doing many projects, they figured out that the process of creating dashboards for a product was a mostly the same, but took a ton of time to prepare the data, extract data, and display it. They both figured out that they could create a solution to make this process simpler.This is the creation story of Verb Data.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.verbdata.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ofridman/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

Phill Lawson-Shanks has had a convoluted path into tech. In the past, he worked for a company that owned and operated airpots in Europe. He got involved in the very early days of servers - so early, that this was back when they were just PC's under someones desk. This took him down the path of migrating mainframes to more cost effective, productivity machines. He worked for Compaq at one point, which brought him to the states. Personally, he enjoys risk taking. He rides a Ducati motorbike way too fast, enjoys adventure sports, jumping out of planes, and rock climbing.In 2013, the founders of Phil's current company saw the way the data center industry was going. They saw that the energy consumption around DC's was going to be astronomical. They started building some incredibly innovative things in this area, and got Phil's attention. Three years ago, he joined the team.This is the creation story of Aligned.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.alignedenergy.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/plawsonshanks/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

For Laura Butler, tech has always been woven into her life. She left Harvard to go work full time at Microsoft, because she was having the time of her life as an intern. She went on to spend 20 years at the company, working on many different big name projects. To her, tech is solving problems for people by people - and everything boils down to tech. She is drawn to getting her hands on things, breaking them - then fixing them again.She is s self proclaimed professional contrarian, intentional rebel and successful misfit. She loves to read about people, history, and logistics - specifically, what works and what doesn't. She likes to run and walk, which is her yoga and helps to clear her brain. She is a cat mom right now, but loves all animals, and enjoys collecting art when she travels. Post Microsoft, she has been an angel investor multiple times, supporting startups and small businesses across a different variety of industries.When she decided to simplify her life and sell her house, Laura went through the process of buying a Condo.. and interacting with the HOA. She realized that the process was a bit arcane, and getting the details up front was near impossible. Her and her co-founder, who happens to also be her mother, set out to bring value to the buyers in the process, with the goal to eventually positively impact all stakeholders.This is the creation story of the Uplift Group.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.upliftinc.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauracatpjs/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

Anthony Castrio has been a freelance engineer and digital nomad for 3.5 years. He currently living in Mexico City, but is originally from upstate New York, up around the Adirondack Mountains area. He describes where he grew up very similar to the shire from the Lord of the Rings. His hobbies include reading, tennis and languages. He's learning Spanish, given his current location, but also has dabbled in Japanese and French.As a freelance dev, he mostly is a full stack web developer. He's been aggressively part time, or quarter time as he puts it, as a freelancer. He considers it the boots trappers seed round... it is how he keeps his runway infinite to work on his personal projects.Before he built his current project, every time he would move to a new city, Anthony would try to start a local indie hackers meetup. He started one in Boston and DC, and a few other places - but every time he moved, he lost his friend group. In order to stay connected with his friends, he decided to take his groups virtual. And it started to grow from there.This is the creation story of Indie Worldwide.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://indieworldwide.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antcas/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

Leon Kuperman comes from an immigrant family, who migrated to North America in the late 70's. He was born in a city that is not part of the Ukraine, but grew up in Canada. So he was brought up in western society, but closely observed his parents and their immigrant background, grinding as entrepreneurs throughout Leon's life.He's a brown belt in Brazilian Jui Jitsu, and has been training for over 15 years. This consumes a lot of his time outside of tech. Funny enough though, when he was living in Seattle, he was a part of a group of people from Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., who all did martial arts. He finds that there is a correlation between Jui Jitsu specifically, and tech.He's married with 3 kids, and of course, likes to spend time with his kids in different ways. His older son actually trains with him in martial arts, and also does tech - building raspberry pi's and engineering different things. Leon also plays piano, as coming from a Russian family, it wasn't an option not to.At his prior startup, Leon and his CEO would get into conversations about - you guessed - his cloud spending bill. He knew that the usage was justified, but could not point to why each piece of infrastructure was allocated. And further, he could not automatically optimize it, and reduce the bill.This is the creation story of Cast AI.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://cast.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itexecutivectoOur 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-podcast/what-is-technical-debt?pfe-ngumm8p1n=show-notesHey guys, I'm back again to share 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 4 - the team dives into the topic of technical debt, by first asking the question - what the heck is it? Its starts quite humorous, with the hosts slinging thoughts about financial debt and trying to bridge the gap there.There definition comes down to this - technical debt is the cost of delaying necessary work on a project or platform, so that you can hit your milestones on time. Essentially, the cost of delivering new features as a priority over bug fixes or maintenance of a platform.I think this is pretty accurate, but incomplete view of technical debt. I'd like to add my 2 cents to the definition. In my view, technical debt can also be inferior approach or framework decisions early on in the life of a piece of software, that you plan to uplevel, change or completely replace in the future. In the startup world, I find this to be the more commonly occurring form of technical debt, with the former definition occurring for more mature software solutions.At any rate, this was a great discussion on technical debt. Have a listen to Episode 4, titled "Do we want a world without technical debt." Be sure and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast catcher. I'll make sure and add a link to the show notes as well.And as always... Enjoy.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