Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

Software quality is like integrity - it’s doing the right thing even if no one is watching. That’s according to Merlin Quintin, Director QA Engineering at Redbox.Merlin joins Ledge in this episode to discuss her unique approaches to engineering leadership as a veteran team member at a disruptive media company. Merlin says engineering is about who you are as a person, working together with other people, to make a difference.This approach to leadership has guided Merlin Quintin through her time at RedBox and beyond. In this episode Ledge and Merlin discuss approaching leadership as an art, how to maintain emotional intelligence under times of stress, and how her emphasis on integrity and quality has shaped her career as an engineering leader. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is recruiting engineering talent similar to courting professional athletes? That’s been our experience at Gun.io, and Steve Bayette agrees.After traveling the world as a digital nomad, and successfully navigating two big-name exits, Steve now advises startups on how to hire world-class engineers and build industry-leading products. He’s also an investor in early stage technology and product companies.In this episode, Ledge and Steve talk about how to make yourself indispensable in your company, and how to make sure you’re solving the problem you were really hired to solve. Hint: it’s probably not about the code. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No stranger to screens big (very big) and small, David Shapendonk was the Direct of Technical Ops for IMAX before flexing his entrepreneurial muscles.He's now the CTO of Maestro Games, a startup helping to build technologies that incorporate music therapy with VR gaming to help people with anxiety, PTSD, autism, and other stress-related ailments.In this episode, David and Ledge chat about the differences in scaling between small and large organizations, having a F.A.I.L. mindset (first attempt in learning), and utilizing a “trust and verify” approach to technical hiring.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You'll hear a lot of stories on The Frontier about starting, growing, and enhancing engineering teams. In this episode, Philipp Svehla, helps us explore the other side of the coin: bringing a team to a close.At the time of recording, his company had been acquired by a larger firm that decided to wind down the engineering office he oversaw while consolidating overseas. Philipp had to shepherd the difficult work of rallying a product team to deliver their final project before being let go. It's a story heavy in human empathy, honest change management, and encouragement during times of adversity.Philipp is now an engineering manager at Workday and recently reported to Ledge that most of his previous team has successfully landed in new and exciting roles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, sometimes the number of new questions can seem to grow more quickly than the number of answers. In this episode Ledge talks to Leon Thomas, CEO of Jelecos, about their AWS services practice, using it as a lens into the changing world of cloud, secops, compliance, and more.One interesting question: does it make sense to focus on one public cloud provider? Or is it more prudent to spread your business around? Doing so might trade one type of risk -- vendor lock-in -- for another -- overhead and complexity in staffing.Multi-cloud or not, the choice of tools continues to grow, with all the cultural and people implications you'd expect. Leon helps us separate the signal from the noise.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What exactly is "technical evangelism?" At Gitlab, it's sharing opinions on what's going on in the community as technologists -- helping each other to collectively move forward to build better, ship better, and operationalize better so software is more responsive to customer needs. That's according to Ledge's guest, Priyanka Sharma. The great thing about evangelists? They have opinions, and they can give us the historical context necessary to make sense of the rapid pace of change in our industry.In this episode, Priyanka shares her thoughts on overtooling, how to handle the operations burdens of cloud and microservices efforts, and how to adjust process components for scale. Then she jumps into how to deal with media overload when you have a job that requires you to be up to date on tech trends. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You might have heard of the "Iron Triangle" of software development: Cost, Quality, and Speed. You can only choose two. How about the "Iron Triangle" of engineering leadership?No, it's not a new Game of Thrones episode, but it is an extremely useful tool for implementing leadership across your organization. In this version you choose amongst "Do, Lead, and Strategize".In this episode Ledge talks with Engineering Director Colin Henry about how to prioritize those roles for your team members and yourself so you can together build a stronger operation. Ledge and Colin also talk about the the importance of KPIs to measure what is truly valuable to your team and what's in store for the future of remote work.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if digital and marketing teams could really launch amazing web apps without needing developers? That's the promise of low-code and no-code platforms. The interesting paradox is the extensive engineering required to create and maintain them. That's what makes this work so interesting: freeing developers to work on challenging problems while enabling others to achieve more powerful results.Alex Howard is the lead engineer behind that process at Brandcast, and in this episode Ledge and Alex discuss the engineering challenges of simplifying (and democratizing) web development, balancing your workflow as engineer, and not painting yourself into a technical debt corner with features when you're building really complex, and innovative tools.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Embracing technology to make the world a better place; that's a common theme with this podcast. Kevon Saber’s story continues to weave that fabric.Kevon started his tech career developing mobile games, later making a personal pivot to focus more on the cross-section of business and people.After completing his MBA at Stanford, he went on to start multiple companies, ultimately landing as the CEO of GoCheck Kids, a mobile app that helps to detect early vision disease in children.In this episode, Kevon and Ledge discuss the importance of a people-first mentality, how to grow faster by learning faster, and how he instilled an effective Agile stragey across the entire company to take GoCheck Kids to the next level. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It only takes a few minutes of talking to Ravi Lachhmann before you realize, "This dude seriously loves engineering." That personality serves him well as a Technical Evangelist at Cisco company AppDynamics. Ravi's perspectives on production outages, operating what you build, and "Netflixian" organizational design all come back to one root idea: keep learning, and keep growing. In this episode Ravi and Ledge talk engineering flavors, purpose-built tools, customer empathy, and much more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.