The Work Item - Real Talk on Tech's Toughest Career Choices

When we choose our career path, we often try to optimize for one specific bucket - you're a product manager, or a project manager, or a UX designer, or any other variation of an expertise area in tech. Sam Saccone defies the expectations of a single role and instead believes in being a “plumber” - doing whatever work is necessary to enable others to do their own version of great work. I sat down with Sam to learn more about his path to a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, what it means to brute-force your way through problems, and what the best avenues are to become a force multiplier for your team. You can find Sam on the following sites: 🐘 Mastodon 🐤 Twitter 📝 Blog The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Leaving your full-time job behind and starting your own business based on your own brand is a somewhat scary proposition. And yet, this is exactly what Donny Wals, a prolific iOS developer and technology teacher, is doing. In this episode I sat down with him to talk more about his work, what was his thinking in going solo, and what one needs to learn quickly in an ever-changing technology space. You can find Donny on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter 📝 Blog 💼 LinkedIn 📸 Instagram The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Working on games is hard. It's even harder to go from an engineer to a founder of a game studio that is able to produce two blockbuster titles in a row. In today's show I chat with Moon Studios co-founder Gennadiy Korol about his work on Ori (if you're near an Xbox or a PC - the game is worth your time), learning the complexity of graphics engineering, and navigating the uncertainty that comes from starting a zero-to-one effort where you have nothing to fall back on. You can find Gennadiy on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter You can learn more about Gennadiy's work as well: 📝 Moon Studios 🐤 Moon Studios - Twitter 📝 Ori - The Game The podcast was produced by Den. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

If you are a web developer, chances are that you used CodePen more than once. You're also probably very familiar with CSS-Tricks for, well, more than just CSS tricks. The man behind these experiences, Chris Coyier, actually started his journey some time ago with a programming language called Turbo Pascal - many steps removed from web development. I sat down with Chris to talk more about his career, lessons in getting CodePen out into the world, and so much more. You can find Chris on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter 📝 Website The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

If you ever played any of the Halo games, you probably know that there is a wealth of data being exchanged between the game and Halo services. This includes stats and so much more. If you've ever wanted to use those stats, you also probably ran into HaloDotAPI - a Halo API wrapper for Halo Infinite and Master Chief Collection. Behind all of this work is one individual - Alexis, or Zeny_IC (on both Twitter and Xbox Live). Today I chat with Alexis about his early roots, what led him to explore reverse engineering as a viable career path, as well as what it took to actually figure out the Halo API. You can find Alexis on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter - Alexis 🐤 Twitter - HaloDotAPI The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

What does one need to do to make open-source code more approachable? How do you figure out which teams to join for maximum positive impact on your communities? And how do you build communities? These questions and more are the topic of my conversation with Monica Powell, software engineer extraordinaire, who also happens to be a GitHub Star - an exclusive group of contributors recognized for their outstanding work in the open-source software space! You can find Monica on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter 📝 Blog The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Carola Nitz is a seasoned engineer who has been involved in a variety of complex projects - from VLC, to Apple Maps, and now working at Netflix on their iOS app experience. She also started her career by learning medical computer science - what a way to jump in! In this episode, we're learning about her career, what helped her be successful, and how she thinks about the importance of jumps between projects and companies. You can find Carola on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter 📝 Blog The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

There are a few things in your engineering career that you should focus on relentlessly, but few as impactful as finding yourself a guide through the journey, as well as develop a set of complementary skills that can help accelerate your own trajectory. I chatted with Nicole Zhu, Senior Engineer at Vox Media, about the importance of mentorship, peer feedback (or any feedback, for that matter), and how skills that are not directly related to writing code can be more helpful to success than you anticipate. You can find Nicole on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter📝 Website📰 Newsletter The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

I don't talk about data science enough on this show. To remedy that, I brought in a remarkable analytics and data science expert - Nick Wan, who is a director of analytics for the Cincinnati Reds. Yes - the baseball team. We chat about his track from academia to working for a sports team, and how to build a career outside your typical FAANG (or is it MANGA) scaffolding. You can find Nick on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter🦹‍♀️ Twitch The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Vicente Plata is doing way more than one would expect from an engineering leader - not only is he an engineering manager, but he also advises startups and communities, is deeply involved in various mentorship programs, and is someone who is always eager to help. In this episode we sit down to chat more about his aspirations, how he balances time between all the responsibilities, and what someone working in tech can do to accelerate their career on an exponential trajectory. You can find Vicente on the following sites: 🐤 Twitter📝 Website The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay. Feedback If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!