The Solo Coder Podcast

I spoke with Christos Matskas. Christos is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft working with the Identity Platform.  After 2015, Christos started to do a lot of community speaking, conferences, user groups, blogging, open source contributions which all lead him to become a Microsoft MVP (most valuable professional). In turn, all of that activity culminated on him being invited to work at Microsoft in the UK. During our conversation we spoke about community building and how challenging it is to do it right. We discussed the importance of being willing to speak as a developer and what that can do for ones career. We also talked about his recent experimenting with TikTok, teaching people how to use Git via quick videos. I had a look and he is good! You can get the link in the show notes to check it out. You will learn quite a few things about Git from Christos videos. Oh, did I mention that he wants to be Microsoft's CEO? Watch out Satya! Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/100

I spoke with John Calderaio. John is as a technical writer currently working with Mosh Hamedani from Programming with Mosh. If you haven't heard about Mosh, he is a great content and course creator. John writes for Mosh's website. But John's story goes way beyond coding. As we discussed about his career, he revealed his troubled time from 12 to 20 years old when he dealt with drugs and alcohol, which lead to a car accident that got him in jail for 1 year. According to him, this was the worst time of his life. Thankfully he got himself clean and he shared with me that after jail, he went back to University, got his bad grades removed and finished with a 3.9 GPA in Computer Science Engineering. Unfortunately as a result of the car accident, he started suffering severe backpain which is still a constant in his life 24/7. Just to give you an idea of how bad the pain is, he was talking to me from his bed during the chat. Nowadays, John is looking forward to a surgery that should fix the problems on his back. If all goes well, has plans to go to med school and combine technology with medicine. I will leave you with the positive John Calderaio - technical writer and developer. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/99

I spoke with Rob Richardson. Rob is a veteran developer with over 18 years of experience in the field. Currently he works as a Developer Advocate for Cyral. Originally coming from an Industrial Design graduation, he quickly moved on to a Masters in Computer Information Systems. Rob has worked with many technologies and has seen many patterns and cycles. For instance, he shared that one of the biggest adjustments within his career was to see and adapt to the client and server cycles. His fresh perspective on this topic was very insightful and easy to understand. Rob shared with me that he always tries to bring the user's perspective to the center of the conversation. This is not very simple to do and most developers end up ignoring it and focusing way more in the technical details than what they should. To be a successful tech consultant, one must develop their empathy skills, otherwise they will not go too far. As Rob said, it is not uncommon for people to believe they are the center of the universe and forget about other people's perspectives. I will leave you with the eloquent Rob Rich, developer advocate, speaker and much more. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/98

I spoke with Garrick Crouch. Garrick is a Software Engineer working for Deka Solutions. Technology wise, his focus is React in the frontend and Laravel in the backend, which is a combination that he has been working with for a few years now. But coding was not always on his radar. In his early career he was an electrician. He almost got a degree, but in his final semester he dropped out as a result of his substance abuse. We have explored how he was able to move on with his life after 12 years of drug addiction. During the time he was in recovery, he came in touch with web development and it was the starting point of a complete turn around in his life. Garrick attended a coding bootcamp and got himself in College studying for a Computer Programming degree. So many lessons learned from Garrick's experiences. It shows that no matter what kinds of struggle we are going through, there is a light at the end of the tunnel as long as you are willing to move forward. I will leave you with the inspiring story of recovery and persistency from Garrick Crouch, Software Engineer. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/97

I spoke with Jan. Jan is a Shopify ecommerce specialist based in Germany. Originally graduated as a mechanical engineer, he started his career with robotics, developing automation robots for product manufacturing assembly lines. However, after just a few month in the job, he quickly realized that this was not what he wanted. He wanted to code but not robots. That lead him to web development. He started then a freelancing career initially using WordPress, but moved on to Shopify as he was interested in helping clients with their ecommerce needs and in his opinion, Shopify is a better solution. Now he is on a journey to help other developers and aspiring developers to start their freelancing careers focused on assisting clients with Shopify needs. Him and his partner launched a site called Freemote where you can learn how to build your freelancing business from the ground up. They have training content including videos and worksheets as well as a community to help each other. For this episode I brought Ken Fowler. Ken is an ex student of mine and he was the one who recommended me to talk to Jan. So the other person asking questions is Ken. I will leave you with Jan, Shopify and freelancing expert. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/96

I spoke with Ottawa based Ihab El-Waly. Ihab has a Computer Science background, but nowadays he works mostly with Digital Marketing. Ihab caught my attention as he was the one who reached out to me to be part of the podcast. Usually I'm the one inviting guests and the proactive approach that Ihab took was an interesting surprise which made me want to talk to him even more. I spoke with Ihab about his time as a Computer Science student and how he transitioned from University to becoming a freelancer website developer to then moving to digital marketing. I have worked with many digital marketers in the past as my clients, but never had the opportunity to talk to one for the podcast and this looked like a good chance. Ihab said that he was not cut out to be a super tech developer because of his business interests. He sees himself more as a middleman between technology and business. I think many of you listing to this might be in the same boat. We also talked about the fact that Ihab's family and friends didn't support him much initially but now, after positive results, they are more convinced that this was a good career choice for him. I will leave you with the soft-spoken digital marketer Ihab El-Waly. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/94

This was a different episode and we had a live audience asking questions. I think we will be doing this more and more over time and I would love to hear your opinion about this format. Do you like it? Don't like it? Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter - Links can be found @ SoloCoder.com. We spoke with Cristian Florea. Cristian is a Frontend Developer working for Novartis, the big pharma company. The format was a bit different from the traditional one and Cristian delivered a lot of valuable insights about the industry, getting experience as a frontend developer and many tips to help people landing their first job as a developer. Aside from working at Novartis, about 2 years ago Cristian started helping aspiring developers by creating a coaching program to give them a hand on landing their first job. Coming from a different background - Cristian studied Law - he has first-hand experience of how someone with non-traditional experience, can break into the industry. We have also explored the fact that Cristian is a bit nomadic right now, going from country to country for only a few months at a time. Sounds like a dream come true to many people who love to travel. From electronic music producer to barista to coder, you will take away a lot from this chat with Cristian Florea, coach for aspiring developers. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/93

I spoke with Chris Eidhof. Together with his business partner Florian Kugler, he runs objc.io where you can find books, courses, videos and resources in general about iOS and macOS development. Nowadays it focus mostly on Swift, but at some point in the past before Swift it was all about Objective-C as their site name suggests. We spoke about his origin story around Objective-C and the fact that he doesn't have a LinkedIn profile, making my life as I researched about him, a lot harder. Burn out is a topic that I'm always curious about. Chris spoke openly about it and how he was able to get to the other side of that challenging time. We spoke about objective-c.io and their approach to business which basically focus on creating great resources and letting the content do the rest of the work, instead of focusing too much on promoting the business. It seems to have worked really well for them. In the end he mentioned that currently they plan to release some of their own apps so they can stay hands-on to be able to talk proficiently about all aspects of mobile development and not just focus on teaching. Whether you are a mobile developer or not, Chris shared lessons and career tips in this episode that are applicable to all kinds of coders, no matter what their specific tech stack might be. I will leave you with Chris Eidhof, iOS developer and educator. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/92

I spoke with the dual Matt Lawrence and Mike Karan. Together they run a web development agency in Hamilton, Canada called "Digital Dynasty Design". Beyond that, they also run their own podcast show called "HTML All The Things" where they talk about web development, design and running a small business. I was interested in speaking to them about how and why they started their own web development company. I wanted to shed some light into this as a career opportunity. They were very candid about it. They covered the feast and famine cycles that are so common when running a small business. They also spoke about their focus on trying to create some sort of passive income stream that can help to minimize the ups and downs of the business. Of course we also talked about their own podcast and how they are able to keep it going with so much consistency. It was great to be able to talk such a good combination of business partners. They have so many complementing skills to add to each other. This is key when picking someone to go in business together. I will leave you with Matt and Mike from Digital Dynasty Design. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/91

I spoke with Jerome Hardaway. I caught Jerome in a transition. He just started working at Microsoft about 2 months ago as a Software Engineer. This is awesome on its own, but beyond that, Jerome is the founder of Vets Who Code, a non-profit organization that focus on teaching military veterans for free in the United States how to code so they can move to the tech industry after service. Vets Who Code has helped over 250 veterans to learn to code and find jobs. I spoke with Jerome about his own story as a veteran that got into coding himself. He shared the origin story of how Vets Who Code came about and how the organization operates. He told me about the advantages that veterans bring to the table when they get into the tech industry. The discipline, the focus, the team work, the desire to build something bigger than themselves, just to mention a few. In the end Jerome shared a few of potential next steps he may be taking with Vets Who Code and with his own career. Stick around to hear the stories from Jerome Hardaway, veteran and coder. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/90

I spoke with David Jorjani. David is Director of Product at Ideal.com and Instructor at the University of Toronto. Great to see a professional like David with a foot in Academia and another one in Startups. At UofT, David wants to help students getting real life experience to be ready for the industry. Then at Ideal.com, he needs to hire talent. Also, Ideal itself is a platform that helps companies with talent acquisition. So David seems to be surround by talent. From one end he needs to hire and select them, from the other end he helps to build them! We have explored what it means to be working for a start up and I asked him to help me sell the idea of being part of a start up to my students. We also spoke about teaching and his experiential learning practices of having students working with real projects. These projects are brought by real companies with whom he forms partnerships. I will leave you with David Jorjani, product builder and people developer. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/89

I have spoken with my good friend David Poindexter. David is the founder of nvisionative, a digital agency located in Mooresville, North Carolina. I have know David for many years as part of my involvement in an open source community called DNN. I have always admired David for the combination of his business acumen and his technical skills. David has been involved in many aspects of open source, from code contribution to conference organization and leading working groups. We spoke about being part of a community and how awesome it is to be in the flow with them. I have questioned David about the return on investment of time and money that he puts into open source and if it helps his business somehow. We have also spoken about his deep involvement within the music industry and how this experience helped him in the tech space. David shared the growing pains of moving from a solo coder business to an agency, where he had to hire people to help him out. This chat really felt to me like two buddies chatting over a beer, but there was no beer involved. I hope you enjoy the chat as much as I did. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/88

I spoke with Andy Hunt. Andy is one of the 17 authors who wrote the Agile Manifesto back in 2001. 2 years earlier he wrote, together with Dave Thomas one of the most seminal programming books called "The Pragmatic Programmer". The book has been referenced many times here in the podcast by so many guest that said it has shaped their careers. There were so many potential paths that I could have taken with this conversation. I decided to stick mostly to the present time to see what Andy does currently but we also went through some of the learnings from The Pragmatic Programmer, which I have the 20th anniversary edition hard cover with me. Andy spoke about the challenges that new people coming to the tech industry must face, which is: where do I start? So many technologies. So many options. How do I narrow them down? We also spoke about education and what is currently missing like teaching soft skills including communication and many more aspects. We discussed about what is at the code of being a pragmatic programmer, which according to Andy is the thirst for knowledge and the curiosity. We even talked about Andy's adventures in writing science fiction! I will leave you with The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/87

I spoke with Juri Strumpflohner. Juri is a JavaScript Architect working for Narwhal Technologies. Beyond that, Juri is a Google Developer Expert, title that he got as a result of his intense involvement with Angular. Juri is also an Instructor at Egghead, having created multiple courses not only about Angular, his forte, but also React and Git. As I had quite a few Egghead instructors in the podcast I wanted to ask him why Egghead instructors seem to enjoy so much working with Egghead. We delve a bit into this. Juri loves writing for his blog. He shared with me that at peak, his blog was getting 100K readers a month. Quite a feat! We have also talked about his passion for martial arts and how it has affected his work as a developer. Towards the end we discussed about his challenges with juggling multiple responsibilities and the strategy he uses to handle better prioritization. I will leave you with the polyglot and martial arts teacher and student, Juri Strumpflohner. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/86

I spoke with Hemil Patel. Hemil is a Front-end Architect but the reason why I came across his name was because of his YouTube channel called Techsith. It focus on front-end technologies like Javascript, React, CSS and even job interview preparation for front-end type of positions. Hemil has an interesting motto: "Make your weakness your strength" - And he lives by that. He is shy, but he says it made him want to be famous and in front of people. Interesting enough, at some point he wanted to be a stand-up comedian. He even attended a comedy school in San Francisco and performed in front of a live audience. He may have given up on comedy, but his desire to be famous is coming to fruition via his YouTube channel, now with over 120K subscribers! We spoke about this longtime experience in tech which exposed him, on a quick count, to over 70 technologies through his career and he is not stopping! Hemil said that in the long run he wants to transition to a more traditional teaching role. He finds it very fulfilling to be in class face to face with students. I will leave you with Hemil Patel, a shy, but not so shy coder. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/85

I spoke with Taylor Desseyn. Taylor is a Sr. Recruiter at Vaco. He has been working specifically with software engineers and developers for the past 6 years. First off, I want to apologise to Taylor for mispronouncing his name some many times. And I'm a sticker about pronouncing names correctly! With that said, this was a different chat. We did it via Zoom and I decided to invite a group of developers to build a live audience where they could also ask questions directly. I think it went quite well but let me know what you think. Taylor was very comprehensive with his answers about recruiting, job search, LinkedIn, the use of video and even TikTok when applying for jobs. Taylor was also very open about the problems within the recruiting industry and why recruiters get a bad reputation. This is a must listen episode if you are looking for a job and still a highly recommended one if you are not. Taylor will not leave you empty handed after listening to this chat. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/84

I spoke with Monarch Wadia. Monarch is the founder of Mintbean, an organization based here in Toronto. They focus on helping developers getting experience by taking part in Hackathons, Webinars and Workshops. The idea behind Mintbean is very much aligned with my personal goal of helping dev students to get real life experience and to find jobs. During our conversation we went deep into the weeds about hackathons as I was really curious about the ins and outs of putting one together. We spoke about how hackathons can be used to help coders learn new technologies and sharpen their skills. Monarch said that hackathons are not just for advanced developers, but they can target any level of experience. At this point in time, Mintbean business model is focused on partnering with companies using a sponsorship approach. Monarch shared with me the challenges he is facing with Mintbean, but he is confident that 2021 will be a great year for the growth of the organization. I will leave you with the visionary and enthusiastic Monarch Wadia! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/83

I spoke with Joe Eames. Joe is an educator with over 20 courses published on Pluralsight. When you look at his courses, you will quickly realize that Joe focus a lot on Test Driven Development and Angular. He has also acquired Thinkster a few years back, which is a learning site with courses on front-end development. Joe loves putting together tech events and he is one of the original ng-conf organizers. ng-conf is the most well-known Angular Conference and at the time there was no conference like that in the Angular space. We have explored a bit the challenges of putting together an event like that. Joe also mentioned that nowadays he is a sales engineer as part of a new venture with a friend. They are helping clients with extended support for an older version of Angular called AngularJS. All-in-all, I just had a great time talking to the super nice Joe Eames. Listen to this conversation to understand why Joe says that the things that you don't get paid for are the ones most valuable to you. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/82

I spoke with Mariot Tsitoara. He is a Full Stack Developer focused on React and Python. Mariot lives in Bordeaux, France but he is originally from Madagascar. I was very excited to be speaking with someone from Madagascar for the first time in my life. Beyond that, Mariot is also a book author and speaker. I came across his name because I bought his book "Beginning Git and GitHub" which he got published by Apress. Very well put together and beginner friendly book about git. The book was a result of a presentation he give. We spoke about the process of putting the book together and the strategies he used to get it done, which included the Pomodoro Technique, of which I'm a big fan myself. He shared the story about a tough situation he found himself in. He was asked to create code to check people's productivity. Then he should come up with a list of employees that they should be fired!  Check it out how he handled this odd situation. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/81

I spoke with Preetam Nath and Sankalp Jonna. They are the founders of DelightChat, a platform helping Shopify businesses with their customer service needs. I came across Preetam after reading his blog post about Micro-Saas. The concept grabbed my attention. Preetam wrote so eloquently that I said I had to talk to him. Naturally with co-founders, Preetam is more in the business side and Sankalp in the technology. We spoke about what is the first thing someone should look at before jumping to building their own Saas product. Saas means Software as a Service and we have discussed about it during the chat. Preetam and Sankalp are not new to doing business together. Their first product was so successful that their competitors tried to bring down their site by launching a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack also called DDoS. I found these guys to be very smart but also very humble. There is so much they can teach us and if you stick around you will also come to the same realization. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/80

Do you think that blogging is done? No longer relevant? Too many people already doing it? My guest today started blogging a year ago and it has already helped her to land a job with PayPal. I spoke with Victoria Lo. Victoria is a consistent blogger with over 100 post done during 2020. I admire her drive, focus and determination. Her background is in business and finances, but she no longer focus on them. Her articles are mostly focused on web development topics ranging from front-end to backend and databases. She is also a hackathon aficionado, and you will find out why. We've covered a very wide range of subjects including a discussion about payment processing services and the fact that she speaks 5 languages. If you think there is no point in blogging these days, think again and listen to this episode. It can change your career forever. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/79

I spoke with Barry Luijbregts. Barry is a Pluralsight author with over 20 courses ranging from Cloud Design and Azure to Blazor, .NET and Front-end Development. Barry had various different phases of his career starting as part of a consulting company and working closely with many corporate clients to then starting his own freelancing consultancy. Years later that led him to a burnout. He got out of that by taking care of his health and by finding a new career path as a content creator. In 2020, Barry has released his first book: "200 Things Developers Should Know". They range from technical tips about programming, troubleshooting to career strategies, productivity, health and learning. Barry and I have a common passion beyond code. "Developer Weekly" is the podcast that he has started in 2020 where he talks to developers and technologists that are interested not only in tech but also life-long learning. Barry is super creative and full of ideas, but he is also determined. He goes from idea to focused execution, which is the key to high-achievers. I will leave you with Barry Luijbregts - A Dutch coder and content creator. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/78

I spoke with Ido Shamun. Ido is the co-founder, CTO and, for now, the solo developer of daily.dev. daily.dev is an aggregator about development news, built as a Google Chrome extension, which gets feeds from all major tech news outlets including Smashing Magazine, The New Stack, CSS-Tricks and many more. daily.dev started as an internal initiative within Ido's previous company, The Elegant Monkeys, and eventually they decided to open it for anyone to use. Him and the team of 3 people, started daily.dev just about 6 months ago, in August 2020 and they already have around 80 thousand weekly active users. Unbelievable to see how much can be done these days with such a small team! One aspect that surprised me was the fact they decided to make it open source, so if you want to look under the hood of daily.dev, you can! As a coder, daily.dev can help you to get up to speed with what's going on in the coding space. Have a listen to the stories of Ido Shamun, Israeli solo coder at daily.dev! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/77

I spoke with Eric Simons. Eric is the CEO of StackBlitz, an online browser based IDE where you can start coding on any front-end framework is seconds. I personally use it when I'm teaching full-stack development using Angular or React. Eric is a super nice and talkative guy. We discussed about his previous company Thinkster, which was acquired a few years ago and how that company give origin to StackBlitz. Eric shared with me his long term vision for StackBlitz and the kinds of hard problems they are trying to solve within his current team of about 10 people. When asked which front-end framework he would pick from Angular, React and Vue, his answer and reasoning will surprise you! Stick around to hear from the outspoken Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/76

I spoke with Kent C Dodds. After so many past guests of the podcast mentioning that they admire Kent, I decided to invite him and he readily accepted it. Kent is a power house content creator with the personal mission of "improving the world with quality software". He is the creator of TestingJavascript.com and EpicReact.com - Both have a blend of course and workshop flavor. Kent has a big following on both YouTube and Twitter. We spoke a bit about why he has such large following. He also does a lot of live streams including his "Office Hours" which is when his students are able to ask him anything. Kent shared the bold strategy that he used to move from intern to full-time employee as he was just starting out in the industry. You can't miss that! Admired by many and just a nice humble guy, I leave you with Kent C. Dodds, my first guest of 2021! Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/75

I spoke with Swizec Teller. Originally from Slovenia, he moved to the US in 2015. Swizec is a software engineer, instructor, blogger, vlogger, conference speaker, and author as well. Yes, he has published a book on "Data Visualization with d3.js". Swizec is one of the most interesting characters I came across in the podcast. If you check his YouTube videos, he is usually accompanied by a screaming bird in the background called "Kiwi" (I hope I got this right :). Unfortunately Kiwi was traveling in business and wasn't able to attend to our chat. Our conversation took an unexpected turn when Swizec started to talk about career and being part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He shared what it really means to be part of that environment, which for so many of us we only know a fraction of what goes on there. From being an immigrant in the US, to tech trends like Micro Saas, we have covered a lot of topics. Stick around to hear the stories from Swizec Teller, a geek with a hat. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/74

I spoke with Les Jackson - Les is a book author and Developer Advocate at Marketplacer in Australia. About 3 months ago he has published his first book by Apress called "The Complete ASP.NET Core 3 API Tutorial". Beyond writing books, Les has a passion for long form video content. His YouTube channel is full of 1 to 3 hours long training videos. When he goes into a topic, he goes really deep! Amazing to see that his longest video, which is over 3 hours long, is also the most watched in his channel. In a way it goes against the general thought that shorter videos will do better than long ones on YouTube. During our conversation, Les mentioned that one of the main reasons why he was hired as a Developer Advocate was because of his YouTube channel success. Listen to Les's stories and maybe you will get inspired to start your own YouTube channel. You never know how that can benefit your career. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/73

I spoke with Niall Maher. Niall is a self-taught web developer with great expertise on JavaScript and React. This year, 2020, he started to record and create content for YouTube. He does a lot of live streaming and that became a source of video content too. He is also the organizer of a meetup called Codú, which is an extension of his own company. The meetup happens monthly and it has a workshop format, where either him or someone else in the community goes deep into a technical topic related to web development. As of our recording, Niall's company has been acquired and he was about to become the CTO of the acquiring organization. We even had a chance to talk about Ireland and why the country is so attractive to big tech companies. From being broken 7 years ago to having his company acquired, let's hear the stories from Niall Maher, a web developer from Ireland. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/72

I spoke with Kevin Powell. Kevin is a teacher working for many years in an adult technical career centre in Montreal, Canada. But recently things have changed for Kevin. In the last year or so, his YouTube channel picked up in subscribers and he decided to move from a full-time traditional teaching career to the online self-paced version of that. Kevin creates videos and courses related to CSS and Front-end technologies. I found it very smart of him to focus much of his content on CSS. He does explore front-end technologies in general but CSS has been the hook of his content. As of today, December 2020, Kevin's channel has 180K subscribers. Let's talk about how he got there and what is he doing next with all those students. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/71

I spoke with Erik Hanchett. Erik is a Senior Software Engineer working for Cerity. Beyond that Erik has a YouTube channel with over 70K subscribers. Most of his content focus on front-end development and more specifically on Vue.js. For the ones that are not familiar, Vue.js is a JavaScript Framework that goes head to head against Angular and React. Erik is also a book author with published books by Packt Publishing and Manning. Erik is a big proponent of Vue.js and when asked which JavaScript Framework he would pick,  guess what was his answer? Did I mention that Erik has create a full online course on Vue.js? Stick around to hear from Vue.js fanboy Erik Hanchett. Enjoy! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/70

Imagine that as a teenager you had the life anyone could only dream of. You had everything you wanted. Your family was well-off. Money was not a problem. But then, all of a sudden on your early 20s, the rug gets pulled from under your feet and the family business goes under. You and your loved ones loose everything you have. I spoke with Chris Sean. Chris was able to turn his life around by learning how to code and this is how he did it. Enjoy his amazing comeback story. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/69

Imagine that you want to prove a point to your teenage kids. You challenge them to come up with business ideas. After a few days, crickets, nothing, no ideas. Then as a parent you think about what they like to do most, and you see that they spend a lot of time on YouTube. You challenge them to start a YouTube channel, but they don't. Then you decide to do it by yourself to prove your point. 2 months later and 10 videos in, you have 300 subscribers. But you don't stop there. 1 year and 4 months later you got to 100K subscribers. I have spoken with Jesse Hall. Jesse has a successful YouTube channel called codeSTACKr which has 108K subscribers as of November 2020. Jesse is a very low profile individual. He said he has never imagined that he would be doing something like this in his 40's. Jesse still keeps the fact that he has a YouTube channel very private from his full-time job, but he has the goal of leaving his job to become a full-time content creator in the next few months. This is the story of how he did it. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/68

Imagine that you started to create some content on YouTube. You got some traction. You got subscribers. You start to enjoy the process. Then a company comes in willing to hire you to create more videos for them as well! I spoke with James Q Quick. James is a Developer Advocate at Auth0. James has a growing audience on YouTube of over 23K subscribers. We spoke about one of his videos in particular that at the time of the chat recording it was at 60K views, but now, about a month later, it is already at 110K. What is the secret of a successful YouTube video like that? He has created courses for Scrimba.com as well, on how to build apps using front-end technologies like React and plain JavaScript. James is living the dream now. In his new job he gets paid to create more videos, more content and talk to people about technology. Isn't this awesome? We spoke about his career, his video creation process and about the 5 advices he has for someone to becoming a successful web developer. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/67

I spoke with Kethmar Salumets. Kethmar is a software developer from Estonia. He has started his YouTube channel called "Developer Habits" just a few months ago, back in February 2020. He says that the channel is focused on people interested in growth mindset,  developer lifestyle and technical tutorials. Besides that, Kethmar was working for Pipedrive, which is a cloud based sales software company. During the interview, Kethmar revealed that he was about to leave Pipedrive and, as of this publishing, he has already moved on. His new position involves working a lot with Python, which is new to him. Kethmar spoke about a very common problem that professionals from all kinds of industries face at times: burnout. I had a lot to learn from his experience. Have a listen to find out how Kethmar is handling burnout and getting better. This might be useful to you at different stages of your own career. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/66

What was your a-ha moment? The moment that you have discovered a possibility that didn't exist before to you. One of those things that you just don't know that you don't even know about it, but now you do know and it changes everything. For James that was when he came across mobile development and he built his first mobile app. He knew that would be the next step for his career. That was a 180-degree change for him. From working with "exciting" printer software to developing mobile apps with Xamarin. My guest for this episode is James Montemagno. James is a Principal Program Manager for Mobile Developer Tools at Microsoft. Beyond that, he runs 3 podcasts, he blogs, he's a speaker and loves cycling around Seattle. James shared with me the challenge he took on this year which was to become a manager at Microsoft. Imagine a plate juggler. We discussed how he goes about balancing his individual contribution with his work as a manager and his personal life. Stick around for an awesome conversation with James Montemagno. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/65

Have you ever heard about the term "pen name"? A pen name or a literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by some book authors in place of their real name. There are many different reasons why someone would opt to have a pen name. Most often it comes from the need for privacy. Greg Lim is our guest in this episode. He is an author and a very private person. He writes books about coding. But he didn't want his writing to interfere with his main professional activity. He is a full-time church pastor living in Singapore. You can imply that Greg Lim is not his real name, and that is ok. It didn't stop us from having a very interesting conversation about, coding, career and a brief mention about religion. What an interesting combination isn't it? Religion and Technology. Greg is the author of 11 coding books. I have 2 of them with me related to Angular and Node.js. He spoke about his faith and how he reconciles his tech work as a book author with his religious  calling. We also talked about how to get a book self-published within the Amazon ecosystem. Have a listen and you may even get inspired to write your own book. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/64

Imagine that you are 30 years old and you have been working at a gas station for over 10 years. You have no college education, a young family and financial obligations starting to pile up. The pressure to keep things as they are and not rock the boat is enormous. You are overworked with 80 plus hours a week. You ask yourself: "Is that it? Is this what life had in store for me?" My guest in this episode asked this question and changed his life around within the time-span of 3 years. I have no idea where all his energy comes from, but he his this eloquent way of talking. Very strong, very passionate, very inspiring. It is hard to describe.  He reminds me of a pastor preaching at church to his congregation. Have a listen and I would be curious to know your impression about him? Do you connect with his style? What do you think about his intensity? Is it real? Is it for show? You tell me. What do you think? I will leaving you Danny Thompson, a very unique coder. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/63

Imagine that you are studying at college or university. You are broke. You have very little money, aside from a part-time job. Every month, at the end of your paycheck, there is no money left, but there is still 2 weeks left before your next payday. You have no more money for food. What would you do? Well, in my case I would simply ask my parents for help. However our guest in this episode was too stubborn for that. She hated to be dependent on her parents. Call it however you want: pride, determination, honor. So she came with a strategy: she would go to different meetups all week long to get food. And that changed her life. From going to meetups because she was just hungry for food, to going because she was hungry for helping others to grow. Stick around and listen to the many stories from Sandra Ahlgrimm, Cloud Advocate at Microsoft Berlin. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/62

I spoke with Adrienne Tacke. Adrienne is a Filipina Software Engineer working as a Developer Advocate at MongoDB. Yes, the no-sql database. The reason why I have mentioned "Filipina" e because this is how she likes to introduce herself. Too bad that I didn't ask her about this, but I assume she does that because she is very proud of her origins. Beyond her job, Adrienne is a public speaker, a course creator for LinkedIn Learning and a book author. That is how I came across her name. I bought her book Coding for Kids - Python. During our conversation Adrienne told the story that she quit her previous job because upper management didn't agree with her taking time off to speak at conferences. However she made clear that her direct team was very supportive. From content creation to spreading the word about technology on social media, Adrienne does a bit of everything. Oh, did I mention that she streams gaming and coding on Twitch as well? Content, content and more content. That is what Adrienne likes to do and there is no slowing down for her. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/61

I spoke with the flamboyant Cassidy Williams. Cassidy is a Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. From a technical stand point, she does a lot of work with React, but her reach goes way beyond that. As a public speaker, she talks about topics such as Women in Tech and STEM education. As many of us, she was directly affected by covid as the company she used to work for, a react training company, had to layoff all their staff at the start of the pandemic but being connected as she is, she got a new position at Netlify right away. Cassidy has her own very popular weekly newsletter called "rendezvous with cassidoo" where she talks about technology and coding. She is also a curator of "The Overflow" newsletter published weekly by Stack Overflow. From her adventures as a public speaker to her passion for mechanical keyboards we spoke about everything. Enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/60

What does a "Global Senior Vice President of Talent Transformation and Innovation" do? I have no clue! But I can tell you this: it has nothing to do with coding. I spoke with Anthony Shaw. Anthony is a "Python Foundation Software Fellow". To become a Fellow, you need to contribute a lot to the Python ecosystem and be recognized by your peers to be nominated. Anthony contributes with various open source projects that can be found on his GitHub repository. Anthony is an English expat living in the beautiful Avoca Beach in Australia. I was curious about the connection between his job and coding. I found out that there is not much. But it didn't stop Anthony from being not only enthusiastic about coding but also being a great coder! We spoke about his passion for Python and what motivated him to start contributing to open source. Listen to this conversation to understand why Anthony says that if the thought of making a living as a developer doesn't excite you, but you like technology and programming, there are so many other options available to express yourself as a coder. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/59

Imagine that you learn how to code in an expensive bootcamp (or college). Not everyone can afford thousands of dollars to learn how to code. So you decide that there should be a better way to support people starting to code. You create an online community to help new coders and unexpectedly it becomes your business. That is what my guest in this episode went through. I spoke with Saron Yitbarek. Saron is the founder of CodeNewbie, which was acquired back in January 2020 by DEV. Saron is a coder, a podcaster, a speaker, an entrepreneur. She is currently working on her next business called DISCO, which provides audio courses for people in tech. The first course is an introduction to Machine Learning. During our conversation we went through details about Disco and producing educational content, which is an area that I am particularly super interested. Saron is a very straight talker with a sharp mind. She goes right to the point without any extra fluffy. You will see this in the episode. I'm really curious as to where she will be taking DISCO next. Enjoy the conversation with the business minded coder, Saron Yitbarek. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/58

Moving to a new country. Looking for a new life. A new beginning. The difficulties with a new language. You cannot express yourself properly. You don't have friends and family close by anymore. So hard and at the same time so wonderful. So full of discoveries. Such an adventure! That is what my guest in this episode went through. I spoke with Veronika Kolesnikova. Veronika is a Software Engineer and a Microsoft MVP focusing on AI. MVP means Most Valuable Professional. She moved to Boston in the US in 2013 from Russia. Even though she describes herself as an introvert, she does not shy away from opportunities to present and do public speaking on meetups and conferences. "Challenge myself" that is a recurring line that Veronika kept mentioning during our conversation. The desire to improve herself via public speaking is how she got the Microsoft MVP award. We spoke about career, cultural differences, community, dreams and how Aerial yoga helps her to be a better Software Engineer. Check out in particular the lesson she got from her driving instructor back in Russia. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/57

You may have heard about open source. In simple terms, it's software, code, libraries, frameworks available for free to anyone who wants to use them. But do you know that you can make money creating free software like that?? It sounds strange, doesn't it? "free" and "making money" in the same sentence? Yes it is! That's why I'm speaking with Caleb Porzio in this episode. Caleb is a PHP and Laravel open source developer. He is making a full time income from his open source projects. Just to be precise, by full time income I mean over $100K a year and it's growing. The strategy that Caleb is using is very unusual and I haven't heard about this approach at all before I came across his story. Caleb is using GitHub Sponsor feature, which allows anyone to support a developer on GitHub with a monthly contribution which can range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month. As of this recording on September 2020 Caleb has almost 700 GitHub sponsors. That is how he is making over $100K a year. During our conversation we went through exactly how he is doing this. My hope is that out of the many lessons from his story, you will be able to apply some of them to your own journey. I also want to give a shout-out to Julio Ordonez for suggesting Caleb to me. Enjoy the chat with Caleb Porzio! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/56

I spoke with Jay Miller. Jay is a Python and JavaScript developer who has been running a podcast called Productivity in Tech for the past several years. He also helps clients producing their own podcasts. Jay is a blunt guy. He will tell you what he thinks, but he is caring and kind too. We discussed about him going homeless for a few weeks because he was just too hard headed to ask his parents for help. We also talked about his time in the military and how it has helped him becoming the professional he is now. I had the pleasure myself of being part of his podcast just a few days ago and we had a great time talking about coding and education. By the way, since we spoke back in July 1, 2020, he got into a new position as a Developer Advocate at Elastic. I hope you enjoy this conversation with the self-describing multipotentialite Jay Miller. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/55

I spoke with Yihua Zhang. Yihua is a Software Developer. In beginning of 2019 he started to teach React online on Udemy and Zero to Mastery Academy. On Udemy he has over 45K students as of August 2020. But Yihua has not been coding for a long time. He used to be in the Fitness industry until he developed mild sciatica which made him decide to move on from the athletic space. That was when he stumbled upon coding and decided to learn by joining a bootcamp in 2015. We spoke about a lot of things including the value of working for free and how to get hired by a big tech company like Apple, Google, Amazon or Facebook. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/54

I spoke with Josh Pollock. Josh is a community-trained PHP and Javascript developer. What does "community-trained" mean? It means that he didn't have a formal Computer Science degree and his knowledge came from his community engagement and participation. Josh came out of the WordPress community where he has developed several plugins for the platform over the last few years. CalderaWP was the company that he co-created and it was acquired in 2019 by their competitor, Saturday Drive. It is where Josh works now and he is still helping to create and mainlining amazing plugins for WordPress. We spoke about his experience of selling his baby, I mean, his company. And now becoming for the first time in his life, a full-time software engineer. We also spoke about the future of WordPress and why he said that he should have seek therapy earlier in his career. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/53

I spoke Aaron Smith. Aaron is a Scotland based Medical Doctor. Yes, you've heard me well! A Medical Doctor! That is what caught my attention about Aaron. I came across his name as I was researching about a web-scraping Python library called Scrapy. Aaron had published several articles on the topic and after digging his profile I realized he is actually a Professor and Medical Doctor. Wow! What is a medical doctor doing with Python coding? I had to figure it out. This question lead me to having a conversation with Aaron, where we have explored how his desire to helping his patients brought him to web-scraping and workflow automation. You can say that coding became a sort of creative outlet for Aaron. Come with me while we explore the intersection between coding and healthcare. Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/52

I spoke with Frank Kane. Frank worked for Amazon and IMDb for 9 years. Today he is a very successful online instructor teaching topics around machine learning, big data, AI, and data science. Why did I say successful? Because loving what he does, with half a million students and getting close to 2 million dollars in lifetime revenue, we should be safe to qualify Frank as a successful professional. Udemy is the main educational platform he works with, but he has courses published on other platforms like LinkedIn Learning and his own website. Beyond courses, Frank also writes books including topics on how to be successful with online teaching. During this conversation he shared how it is overwhelming at times to touch so many students and having so many people wanting a little piece of his time. I am so glad and lucky to be able to share with you today a little piece of Frank's time, experience and wisdom! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/51

I spoke with Josh Starmer. Josh has a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. But that was not how I came across him. When I was studying Machine Learning, I needed additional information about statistic topics and that was when I first saw Josh's videos on YouTube. Josh makes on-line educational materials teaching data science, machine learning and statistics. His YouTube channel is called StatQuest and it has 300K subscribers. When we recorded this conversation 2 weeks about it had 290K. Not too shabby to get 10K new subscribers in just under 2 weeks! Josh has this power of explaining complex topics related to statistics and machine learning in such a way that you can't help but just understand it. Together with his music background and a great sense of humor, he creates these little jingles as the intro for each of his videos. It is just so unique! We spoke about the different revenue sources he has including Google Ads, Study Guides and Monthly Webinars. He even sells his own StatQuest t-shirts. Have a listen to find out how Josh is able to make Statistics fun and interesting! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/50

I have spoken with Erin Doyle. Erin is a full stack engineer with a passion for accessibility and making sure that everyone is able to use the products and application that she helps to create. So much so that she created a course on Egghead.io on how to Develop Accessible Web Apps with React. Teaching is also another avenue for Erin to express herself and she has been working with Egghead not only on course creation but also on putting together live workshops. A curiosity about Erin? She used to work for a space company providing services to NASA! We spoke about her near-space experiences and the fact that she was working next to where NASA scientists lunched their spacecrafts. Have a listen and enjoy the flight! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/49