Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Brandon White started his career from his passion for fishing. In doing so, he wound up building the largest social networking and eCommerce site for sport fisherman. He got to travel around the world, fish all over, and do some amazing things with this company. But honestly, he got burned out on the sports and doesn't fish much anymore. He tells people today to be careful today when people ar...

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-write-technical-documentation Hey guys, getting close to Thanksgiving in the states. For today, I'm sharing 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, strange and small. On this particular episode - which is episode 8 - the topic of...

Ulf Schwekendiek was brought up in Germany, but spent most of his life in the US. He speaks German with an American accent, and English with a German accent... so he claims to not speak any language properly anymore. Personally, he loves to para glide (not para sail, different thing). In fact, he is a tandem instructor. In this particular activity, you inflate a giant parachute and jump off of a m...

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...

David Ciccarelli is a husband to his partner in life and business, Stephanie, and a dad to 4 kids - one boy, and three girls. He loves to be doing anything outdoors - hiking, biking, etc - and has a cottage out in the country. His most memorable hike was near his hometown, at the Provincial Park, where he climbed up to the top if the Sleeping Giant. Being a true Canadian, he was able to direct my...

Josh Dzielak is originally from the US, but lives in Paris now. And because of this, he likes to take advantage and walk around to take in the sights. He lives close to an area with a park, featuring gardens and lots of trees. He goes there to clear his head, have a little bit of nature, and also, to have walking meetings. Josh likes to stay active through running, cycling, and the aforementioned...

Matt Dixon grew up job hopping, before eventually starting his own business. He is married with 5 kids - 1 daughter and 4 sons. He loves to eat, spend time with his family, mountain bike, and travel with his wife to new places. They just moved to Nashville from the Colorado Springs area. He found that starting his own business was the best way to find freedom to be present for his family. For a pe...

Oleg Fridman has been at this startup thing for a while. Most of his career, he has been working for himself, remotely. In High School, he was drug into entrepreneurship by a few of his buddies, creating an e-commerce website in 2002 for selling furniture. They figured out that they sucked at selling furniture, but made a pretty good website. Post that, he got involved with restaurant ordering, an...

Phill Lawson-Shanks has had a convoluted path into tech. In the past, he worked for a company that owned and operated airpots in Europe. He got involved in the very early days of servers - so early, that this was back when they were just PC's under someones desk. This took him down the path of migrating mainframes to more cost effective, productivity machines. He worked for Compaq at one point...

For Laura Butler, tech has always been woven into her life. She left Harvard to go work full time at Microsoft, because she was having the time of her life as an intern. She went on to spend 20 years at the company, working on many different big name projects. To her, tech is solving problems for people by people - and everything boils down to tech. She is drawn to getting her hands on things, bre...

Anthony Castrio has been a freelance engineer and digital nomad for 3.5 years. He currently living in Mexico City, but is originally from upstate New York, up around the Adirondack Mountains area. He describes where he grew up very similar to the shire from the Lord of the Rings. His hobbies include reading, tennis and languages. He's learning Spanish, given his current location, but also has...

Leon Kuperman comes from an immigrant family, who migrated to North America in the late 70's. He was born in a city that is not part of the Ukraine, but grew up in Canada. So he was brought up in western society, but closely observed his parents and their immigrant background, grinding as entrepreneurs throughout Leon's life. He's a brown belt in Brazilian Jui Jitsu, and has been train...

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-podcast/what-is-technical-debt?pfe-ngumm8p1n=show-notes Hey guys, I'm back again to share 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, strange and small. On this particular episode - which is episode 4 - the team dives into the topic o...

Nate Joens was born and raised in Iowa. And in fact, he plans to spend out the rest of his days there, cause he loves it. He lovingly calls it the Silicon Prairie, though he admits that most people don't call it that. He studied at Iowa State University, majoring in Geographic Information Systems and Urban Planning - which is basically mapping on steroids. He learned how to map topography, thr...

Ryan Johnson is originally from Saginaw, Michigan, and now lives in Atlanta. He never imagined he would get into tech. In fact, when he was growing up he wanted to be an orthodontist. He got into school, and immediately saw how difficult the classes were going to be. So he switched to business, and that part of school stuck and came naturally to him. As a college elective, he took computer science...

Kordel France has always been infatuated with finding order in chaos - and has carried that way of living throughout his life. He is an engineer by training and schooling, but grew up on a farm. What triggered his interest in AI was the day that his father brought home autonomous driving systems for the farm equipment. His Dad let him tinker with it, and Kordel was hooked. In college, he studied P...

Phillipe Kwiatkowski has been addicted to gaming since he was a teenager. He played games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Grand Theft Auto. In the process, he discovered multiplayer mods, that allowed you to play online - which was his first introduction to coding. When he was 16, he got his first freelancing gig building websites. Eventually, he studied computer science at University, and in...

Joshua Whole was born in the Netherlands. Before he was 13, he actually went to 5 different schools. Afterwards, he moved to Switzerland and went into the public school system - which was all in French (which he didn't speak). In his younger years, he started building websites and ultimately started a company, with 35 other high school students building these sites. Eventually, he moved to Lon...

Mahmoud Abdelkader immigrated to the United States from Egypt, from a city 100 km east of Cairo, on the Suez Canal. He was 8 years old when he moved to New York City, and later in life, he moved to Maryland, which is where he really started to get into gaming... er... computers. He used to play World of Warcraft and Age of Empires a lot, and through his gameplay, he was led down a path of reverse...

Sergei Egorov grew up in a small city of only 100,000 citizens (which is huge compared to some cities). He grew up in Siberia, in the cold part of the country. His personal record for how cold it was during his time there was -53 Degrees Celsius. And a funny story, on that same day, he had to go to the post office to pay his internet bill.. so he could play video games at 16 years old. His favorit...

Tigran Nazaryan started out doing science in University. In fact, he was studying physics, and then went on to do his PhD in Astronomy in Astro Physics. He never imagined he would eventually become a CEO of a company. He's a research guy, and introvert naturally, who likes to read, hike, and do nothing... and by do nothing, he means watch a sunset or the waves of the ocean. After school, he jo...

John Kodumal grew up really into computers. And, he is old enough that during his childhood, it was abnormal to be so into computers. To illustrate just how much he was into computers, he told me a story about how he taught himself to touch type in grade school.. using the DVORAK keyboard layout. He is a family man, with 2 children - a 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son. Outside of family, he...

Brian Singer has always been interested in computers. He into gaming in high school, which he claims is what led him to an engineering degree in college. He got his start in the industry with low level stuff, designing ASIC chips. Post that, he branched into product development, got his MBA, and funny enough, starting working in marketing for the software industry. Eventually, he started his own c...

LaKeisha Turner is a strong woman. She has her hands full, as a single mom of a 16 year old girl, and an 8 year old boy. She is a breast cancer survivor, and lover of classical music - previously playing instruments in her high school days. She chose a tech path at a very early age, heavily influenced by her grade school computer science teacher, ultimately leading to her decision to pursue a care...

Lyric Jain comes from a family of business people, and is an engineer by training. He was born in India, and spent the first half of his life there. When he was 12, he moved to the United Kingdom. He has always been fascinated in physical engineering, mostly, which is interesting since he plays in the digital space now. He is a huge football fan - thats European football, or soccer for us in the U...