Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

Imagine this: you get a call for a CTO job. The company has never had a CTO. It's a global company with boots on the ground in every country and all 50 states. It gathers scientific data in droves that very well might save the planet. What would you do next? Sherry Hammons knows the answer. She's the CTO for The Nature Conservancy and that's her story. In this episode Ledge talks to Sherri about technology leadership, coming to terms with managing and leading when you like being an engineer, and how to keep your team emotionally safe so they perform better under pressure. Sherri's career path has taken her from professional musician, to solo coder, through multiple M&As, to trailblazing global CTO. Her insights and and experience will leave you energize and inspired. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tyler Foster is the Vice President of Engineering for Sentient Technologies. As both a senior individual contributor and executive, Tyler has spent more than 18 years delivering technical solutions to the worlds hardest problems.Tyler’s past-experience includes leading firmware and control system development for subglacial lake exploration ROVs deployed in Antarctica with the MSLED / Wissard project, front-end platform architecture and service design at Apollo Group, one of the world’s largest private education companies, and distributed systems deployed by many Fortune 500 companies to solve their most complex data problems at Cloudera. Most recently Tyler led a cloud infrastructure startup with operations in the US, UK, and Asia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Morgan is a lifelong Chicagoan, with nearly 20 years of experience as a developer and manager. He’s worked across multiple industries including entertainment, paper products, transportation logistics, and health care. Technology is Dan's passion: he worked for five years on research data science with the University of Chicago, and currently serves as VP of Software Engineering & Development at Unitas Global where his team works to simplify the management of hybrid cloud environments. In his spare time, Dan is an active volunteer and board member with Ravenswood Community Services which helps secure food for families and individuals in northern Chicago. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Ledge chats with Ryan Burgess, Software Engineering Manager at Netflix, about leading their Acquisition UI team optimizing the signup and login processes for one of highest usage apps on the planet. They discuss the challenges of coordinating among engineering teams at massive scale, working on technologies that span a multitude of different platforms, and how Netflix incorporates A/B testing at the core of everything they do while delivering your weekend video binge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ahmad Nassri is a force in the open source world. Any given day you can find him leading advisory groups at the Node.js Foundation, kicking off OSS conferences, or masterminding technology communities like TechMasters.You might be surprised to know he's also an architectural lead at one of the world's largest telco companies. Wait...How does love of open source fit into the legacy corporate world? Ahmad and Ledge tackle the grey areas between software engineeing skills, the people factors of hiring, and open source as a place to grow and professionally develop whether or not your day job contributes to the space. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Burke Holland is a Nashville-based Developer Advocate for Microsoft. He's one of the rare people who's had a developer advocate position since way back in 2011, so I asked him about his path to what we now have started calling Dev Rel. In this episode Burke answers questions like what is a developer advocate? What does a developer advocate do? And even how to become one. We also talked about finding your own authentic writing voice and how to grow your advocacy platform through writing. Finally, I asked Burke to run me through some of the most exciting features of Microsoft Azure that every developer should be aware of including the VS Code IDE, Azure Cognitive Services, and Cosmos DB. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I spoke to Tyler Shambora in late 2018. At the time of this recording he was the Directory of Technology at BVA. He recently founder Pack Digital, an e-commerce agency focused on innovation and conversion.Tyler's role at BVA ecompassed a mixed bag of workflow, devops, standards, and automation. While attempting personal study in those areas, he realized that virtually no one talks about how to scale devops, delivery, and standards for high-growth agencies. "How we scaled" articles seem to always talk about product companies, but what about agencies, professional services, and dev shops who do the same thing day in and day out but for different emphemeral clients?How in the world do you scale build and deploy pipelines in that scenario? Tyler and I chat onboarding, training, and just how far technical leaders can take the plug-and-play concept with devs when the only thing team members have in common is that they're all in the same building working on different client projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nick Lumsden, COO of Online Tech, joined me in late 2018 to chat "digital transformation" or as I put it, "Hey, what's exciting between legacy and bleeding edge?" It turns out companies can make a pretty big mess when they throw all of their workloads on the cloud without a decent plan. The technology is the easy part. Remember when we cared so much about our servers that we named them? Those days are gone. In the CI/CD world we face a totally different paradigm. What used to be build, deploy, maintain is now build, deploy, destroy. The secret sauce of digital transformation is the total plan to bring along not just the bleeding edge, but also the legacy tribal knowledge that came before. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The fourth book in the Architecture of Open Source Applications series is called "500 Lines or Less." The book focuses on the design decisions that developers make in the small when they are building something new. Marina Samuel, Staff Software Engineer at Mozilla, is one of the authors featured in the book, for which she wrote a 500-line simple neural network for OCR. I spoke with Marina about her early career at Mozilla, her work on the Firefox Browser, notably on privacy initiatives, and about how to get involved as a first time contributor to open source. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Lengstorf runs developer relations at Gatsby, a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps. By addressing the problem of app launch from the perspective of progressive disclosure of complexity, Gatsby's entire ethos is designed around shipping fast React components generated from and requiring the lowest possible config overhead - in other words, dig deep into the config if you like, but only if and when you want to. Jason and I talk about keeping the open source community first and foremost in their mission, and the critical seat that's being filled by the dev rel community as the role and monetization of open source software heats up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.