
Work In Programming
By Matthew Weeks
Each episode, Matthew interviews folks from all facets of the tech industry. We'll be interviewing developers, product managers, scrum masters, and managers what their day to day is like, what practices keep their team running smoothly, and what they look for in new team members.

Work In ProgrammingMar 11, 2021

Brian - Breaking Down the Steps to Becoming a Technical Founder
This week Matt sits down with Brian Faber. Brian is the CTO & Co-Founder of Mayday. In this episode, we discuss how Brian went from getting his first computer at the age of seven and teaching himself to program, to skipping university and getting his first development contract building Game Boy Advanced. We discussed the process of building a start-up & managing time.
Other things discussed in this episode include:
- Hiring Practices
- Working for Ubisoft
- Does it make sense to go to school for gaming?
and so much more.
If you liked this episode, check out Mayday or connect with Brian directly (Of course, Mayday *is* hiring!)
- Brian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-faber-4117203/
- Mayday website: https://mayday.am

Mark Prince–Dive In & Be Obsessed

Josh Cunningham - Digging deeper into a product to understand the entire software development lifecycle
Other things discussed in this episode include:
Writing code that's testable means writing better code.
How to give useful code reviews.
Tests are documentation, and other lessons from Lucho.

Andy Knight - Automation Panda origin story, BDD, test automation before it was cool
This week Matt sits down with Andrew Knight. You likely know Andy from his blog AutomationPanda.com or from one of his many talks at Tech Conferences spanning across the globe. In this episode Andy discusses how the TI-83 got him hooked on programming, how Automation Panda started as a place for him to save his notes between jobs, and how blogging led to speaking at conferences, consulting, and many more opportunites. Other things discussed in this episode include:
- Writing Cucumber before it was Cucumber
- Never planning on being a Developer
- LexisNexis being the greatest opportunity of his career and so much more
You can follow Andy on:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutomationPanda
- His Blog: https://automationpanda.com/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwkshD85UGzUH651KyVK4zQ

Landy Simpson – Growth Happens in Uncomfortable Situations
This week Matt sits down with Landy Simpson, engineer. Landy discusses the first talk she gave for Power to Fly & what she learned from that experience. We also cover why Landy took up writing, including a very successful Elastic Search Engine article that peaked the interest of some important industry folks and led to her Power to Fly conference.
Other topics discussed in this episode include:
- Companies can always tell you their vision but not exactly what they want
- Why optimizing search engines matters
- Why zoom Socials kind of suck, and much more.
Landy's blog: https://simplyy.medium.com/
Landy's Twitter: https://twitter.com/simp_lyy

Charity Majors, CTO of HoneyComb.io — Empowering great engineering teams with great tooling
This week Matt sits down with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. Charity discusses the dangers of aging code in pre-production, what it takes to lead an engineering organization, from on-call, to management, to hiring.
Some other topics discussed in this episode include:
- Spending 3 years at a big company is enough
- Do Managers need to be technically literate?
- Why having a work “home base” is important
- Why having a little bit of curiosity will save you time in the long run & much more...

Nora — Confidence as a junior developer & should you do a bootcamp?
This week Matt sits down with Nora, a junior developer at a digital consultancy, to discuss having success in theprofessional world of programming despite not having a University Degree. Noratalks about the confidence that graduating from a programming bootcamp gave her & how she has been able to take that with her to excel in her career.
Another highlight from this episode included how continuing to learn about other aspects of programming are important to your growth, even if you are not using them on a daily basis.

Sameer Mehta - Engineering Organized Learning & Productivity
This week Matt sits down with Sameer to talk about excelling in your first role and using it as a stepping stone, establishing a personal knowledgebase, and the importance of staying organized. We dive into how Sameer got started building contract versioning software for the Real Estate space and his experience converting a legacy Ruby on Rails and Ember application to NextJS.
Some other highlights from the episode:
- How Sameer implements Zettlekasten to take detailed notes of his favorite books and podcasts.
- Why the experience from your first job may be more important than the job itself.

Thom Lamb - Freelancer vs Agencies vs Product Companies

Dan Moore - Blogging, how to get started in the start-up world and building developer relationships in a virtual world
In this week’s episode Matt sits down with Dan Moore. Dan is currently working at FusionAuth as a Developer Advocate. I spoke to Dan about his origins of creating an automated mailing system for his parents’ Insurance Company, how even your “weak” relationships can still create opportunity down the road & why it is important to test your cofounder. Dan’s new book “Letters to a New Developer” is available right now.
Other things covered in this episode include:
- The Spectrum of Developer Advocacy
- The importance in committing for 6 months when growing a blog
- Maintaining a community & much more
Get in touch with Dan:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mooreds/
- https://twitter.com/mooreds
- https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/
- http://www.mooreds.com/
- http://boulder-ruby.org
Check out Dan's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-New-Developer-Starting-Development/dp/1484260732/

Ivan Aimufua — From trades to professional developer in 1 year
In this conversation, we covered:
How to learn effectively.
The skills that developers need to master AFTER they learn to code and get the job.
The challenges involved in working with clients.
How to balance work and life while working remotely.
And more!

Arunoda Susiripala — Building Storybook, Meteor, Next and communities on open source
There are plenty of lessons in this episode on how to create useful content, build a community, and to just get started with open source development.

Kadi Kraman — React Native, leading teams, and consulting for major companies
Find Kadi on Twitter — twitter.com/kadikraman
How to publish an NPM package — dev.to/kadikraman/an-open-source-maintainer-s-guide-to-publishing-npm-packages-1218
Kadi's React Native course on Frontend Masters — frontendmasters.com/courses/react-native-v2/

Guillermo Rauch — NextJS 9.4, JAMStack, distributed systems, and manging eventually consistent state.
We spoke about:
• New features in ReactJS and NExtJS 9.4 like hot refresh, incremental static site generation, and more
• Components as the perfect abstraction
• Distributed systems
• Pushing content to the edge
• Building systems but maintaining creativity with tools like Figma
• How Infrastructure As Code might not be so great
• Why you need to put your work out there early (#100DaysOfCode)

Jesse Herlitz — Building CastroFM's ad system using No-Code tools, designing the right experience for your users, building relationships

Riegie Jeyaranchen — Learning development, starting companies, and using your team to accelerate growth

Mike Moll — Remote working and team management, and how to start a business if you've lost your job.
To find him online, check out:
His website, mikemoll.to/
His podcast, mikemoll.to/podcast
His webinars on starting a business (information will be available on his website and social media)

Thom Lamb — Startups, military, learning to code, teaching, powerlifting, and more.
Thom's journey is a very interesting one. He started in the military. After his active duty he taught himself basic programming to make his job easier, so he could study computer science at nearby U of A. From there he got into personal training as a powerlifter, which lead him to creating his first startup, and eventually learning web development with the MERN stack in order to build and grow his product. When he decided he wanted to work for someone else again, he journeyed all the way from New Brunswick to Toronto, Ontario where he knew he'd get more connections and accelerate his growth.
Since then he has come to join our team at Quantum Mob, and is one of the inspirations for starting this podcast. He is one of those unique individuals who treats everyone with the same level of directness and respect.
This is a long one, but please enjoy! We cover many actionable topics from startups to working in a team. Timestamps to come later.

Jonathan Lorimer — Starting a meetup and functional programming

Alex Hess — Designing for accessibility, and building a social network in real life
Alex Hess currently works as a product design lead at ICF Next. While he is a fantastic designer, he identifies as a generalist. He started his path to design while freelancing as a web developer at the same time as completing his masters in economics. His approach to everything stems from empathy and authenticity first.

Aditya Murray — Getting started, and leading remote teams.
