Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Stephen Blum finds that his life outside of tech is tricky to define, given we are surrounded by tech everywhere. He was inspired to be a game developer at an early age, and he found it fun and exciting. In the gaming days, he really enjoyed the Legend of Zelda, Metroid - those adventures and the animation was fascinating to him. After a while, he found more excitement within the business world, a...

Hello listeners... it's time to embark upon yet another season of the Code Story podcast. As we dive into another journey together, in fact our 6th journey together, you an expect to hear more (even more!) amazing stories about MVP's, trade offs, determining feature importance, building teams - and scaling, or fighting scale, as you grow. Our guest list this Season is truly epic, with appe...

This is Season 5, signing off.... Thank you for listening! Season 6 of the Code Story podcast will be starting SOON, so stay tuned. Our Sponsors: * Check out Cash App and use my code CASHAPP10 for a great deal: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/mt82fpxl #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued...

Guillermo Rauch is originally from Argentina. He has always been involved in the open source world, starting out working in Linux and native tooling. After a while, he feel in love with the web and the front end web system, working in the early days of AJAX, JS Animation and jQuery competition. When I asked him what he does for fun, he laughed - because he really enjoys what is does professionally...

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had t...

Back in 2019, we had Shelby Stephens on the show to talk about his project then, called Jolly . Since that time, the COVID pandemic shut down events and crippled their progress at the time. They pivoted the product a bit, to be a sort of eCommerce like site for freelancers to offer services. While they let their Jolly pivot grow, he and his co-founder started building a new product... one which al...

Adam Wiggins was from California originally, but has lived in Berlin for the last decade. Earlier in his life, he did burning man art installations and was a DJ. Now, he is a middle aged family man, so he focuses on his family, his daughter, his adorable dog and his career/software projects. His partner is also an immigrant, whom he met while in Berlin. Adam loves Berlin, and in fact, loves Europe...

Lydia Davies is from the UK originally, but she has lived all over the world. She was Born in Thailand, and has lived in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Alaska, the Middle East and now in Houston. She has always been into sports - playing, supporting, etc. When she was 16 years old, she signed on to a music label as a singer and pianist, traveling around the world to perform. When she left the music in...

Nick Clayton has been into tech most of life. Outside of tech, he loves a good strategy game or board game - in face, he met his fiancé playing these types of games. He is an avid Magic the Gathering player, and has been enjoying the game for over 20 years. When I asked the difference between Magic and Dungeons and Dragons, he notes that DND is a role playing game and more about telling a story, w...

Marco Palladino migrated from Italy about 10 years ago.. and brought all of his Italian hobbies with him. He loves to cook - specifically pasta, of course - and enjoys a good glass of wine. He has a family, with 1 kid and 1 on the way. He loves sports, soccer and skiing. Beyond that, he is a self taught developer, where tech has been his side hobby and passion, but turned into his full time gig. M...

Oona Rokyta is a first generation American, which you wouldn't expect from her lack of accent. Her parents are artists from the Czech Republic, who migrated to the US 6 months before she was born. Because of her parents profession, she comes from the land of not understanding business, nor tech. Her parents are role models for her - in fact, they are her personal heroes. From this inspired pla...

Ari Jacoby grew up in the DC Metro Area, but has lived in New York City for the last 17 years. He's married with 2 kids at home, ages 12 and 9, and he spends a lot of time outside of his business building legos, math homework, and stem projects with his kids. The biggest hit of the stem projects has been circuitry, to see something buzz or light up at the end of the exercise. He's a big fa...

Ben Dowling lives in Seattle, and loves it there. He is married, and a father of three kids - ages 11, 8 and 5 - so he's a busy dude. He loves to hike, and recently took his family on a weekend trip to Mount Rainer. He loves to snowboard, and get away from the screen - though he admits, that tech is also his hobby... building side projects, apps, websites, etc. Ben was working on a bunch of di...

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-write-technical-documentation Hey guys, we are narrowing in on the Christmas holiday's in the states. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New year! For today, I'm sharing yet another fantastic episode of the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat. As a reminder Compiler is a show hosted by tech veterans, discussing tech topics - big...

Max Stoiber was born and raised in a small town, just outside of Vienna, Austria. From a young age, his biggest influence was his mother, who left her job to start her own business as a medical expert in the courts. It has been inspiring for Max to watch her find her place in the world, and to box through everything life threw at her. He still finds great inspiration from that today. And, very ear...

Darshan Mehta has a degree in marketing and finance, and has typically served those disciplines. However, he has been accused of having the extra tech gene, since he was born in India. He enjoys out door activities, and is scuba diving certified. He really likes to do activities around what he is passionate about. For example, he is launching a hackathon in Bangkok called Big Mango, to help teams...

Ilan Peleg is 29 years old, and has been a long time middle distance runner. He previously ran the 800 meters, and served int he Israeli Army as a professional athlete. At the age of 21, he retired and started his tech career. He said that there are many who would correlate their Israeli service area of their professional success. He just recently got engaged. He proposed to his fiancé outside of...

Bruno Demuro is first and foremost, a father of 2 children. He says this is the single most awesome thing, and yet at the same time, the most challenging thing. He has a background in industrial engineering and design, but considers himself a generalist and a relentless problem solver (which he admits, can be hard on this wife). He loves all thing tech - hardware, software, you name it. But beyond...

Kyle Bernhardy had a less than traditional path to the tech world. He has been in the industry since the late 90's, but it all started when he was growing up, attempting to program text adventures games on his Commodore 64. In High School, he started running and they became a major part of his life - so much so, he went to run for Penn State University. He settled into an exercise and sports s...

Cherish Santoshi started his professional career when he was just 18. He plays music, being a one man band through his guitar, bass and drum skills. He's even got a studio setup at home, and enjoys lo fi hip hop, especially when he is working. Cherish reads and watches a lot of content, specifically around theoretical thought experiments, which help. Him to think about things from a different...

Robert Ross, also known as Bobby Tables, has been into building stuff since he was 12 years old. Around that time, he Googled "how to make a website", learned from an online tutorial, and has been hooked on development ever since. He started making websites for people he knew in San Diego, which allowed him to facilitate his Xbox and Xbox Live needs. For gaming, he stuck to playing only Ha...

Luke Hoban has been into tech and computers for many, many years. It started off when he was a kid, but sailed with him into college as he got into languages. He spent the first part of his career at Microsoft building tools, IDE's and programming languages. His take on the frame of mind required to build a language is centered around what you want it to do, combined with how it feels for the...

Thejo Kote grew up in Southern India. He came from an academic, intellectual family. Both of his grandfathers were authors, and in the house, they had built up a library. But not just a few books here in there... Thejo grew up in with 3500 books in his house. These were a combination of everything, but with a lot of reference and historical books. If he's honest, Thejo didn't appreciate it...

Shinji Kim was born in Korea. Her family moved to Canada when she was 13 years old. She likes to hang out with her friends, watch movies and likes to be outdoors, skiing, hiking or doing yoga. She recently tore her ACL, though, which has put a damper on her physical activity. While she studied at the University of Waterloo, she was able to work with many different well known companies - Facebook,...

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had t...