Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

Software quality is like integrity - it’s doing the right thing even if no one is watching. That’s according to Merlin Quintin, Director QA Engineering at Redbox. Merlin joins Ledge in this episode to discuss her unique approaches to engineering leadership as a veteran team member at a disruptive media company. Merlin says engineering is about who you are as a person, working together with other p...

Is recruiting engineering talent similar to courting professional athletes? That’s been our experience at Gun.io, and Steve Bayette agrees. After traveling the world as a digital nomad, and successfully navigating two big-name exits, Steve now advises startups on how to hire world-class engineers and build industry-leading products. He’s also an investor in early stage technology and product compa...

No stranger to screens big (very big) and small, David Shapendonk was the Direct of Technical Ops for IMAX before flexing his entrepreneurial muscles. He's now the CTO of Maestro Games, a startup helping to build technologies that incorporate music therapy with VR gaming to help people with anxiety, PTSD, autism, and other stress-related ailments. In this episode, David and Ledge chat about the di...

You'll hear a lot of stories on The Frontier about starting, growing, and enhancing engineering teams. In this episode, Philipp Svehla, helps us explore the other side of the coin: bringing a team to a close. At the time of recording, his company had been acquired by a larger firm that decided to wind down the engineering office he oversaw while consolidating overseas. Philipp had to shepherd the...

As companies move more and more workloads to the cloud, sometimes the number of new questions can seem to grow more quickly than the number of answers. In this episode Ledge talks to Leon Thomas, CEO of Jelecos, about their AWS services practice, using it as a lens into the changing world of cloud, secops, compliance, and more. One interesting question: does it make sense to focus on one public cl...

What exactly is "technical evangelism?" At Gitlab, it's sharing opinions on what's going on in the community as technologists -- helping each other to collectively move forward to build better, ship better, and operationalize better so software is more responsive to customer needs. That's according to Ledge's guest, Priyanka Sharma.  The great thing about evangelists? They have opinions, and...

You might have heard of the "Iron Triangle" of software development: Cost, Quality, and Speed. You can only choose two. How about the "Iron Triangle" of engineering leadership? No, it's not a new Game of Thrones episode, but it is an extremely useful tool for implementing leadership across your organization. In this version you choose amongst "Do, Lead, and Strategize". In this episode Ledge talks...

What if digital and marketing teams could really launch amazing web apps without needing developers? That's the promise of low-code and no-code platforms. The interesting paradox is the extensive engineering required to create and maintain them. That's what makes this work so interesting: freeing developers to work on challenging problems while enabling others to achieve more powerful results. Ale...

Embracing technology to make the world a better place; that's a common theme with this podcast. Kevon Saber’s story continues to weave that fabric. Kevon started his tech career developing mobile games, later making a personal pivot to focus more on the cross-section of business and people. After completing his MBA at Stanford, he went on to start multiple companies, ultimately landing as the...

It only takes a few minutes of talking to Ravi Lachhmann before you realize, "This dude seriously loves engineering." That personality serves him well as a Technical Evangelist at Cisco company AppDynamics. Ravi's perspectives on production outages, operating what you build, and "Netflixian" organizational design all come back to one root idea: keep learning, and keep growing. In this episode Ravi...

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 t...

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 proj...

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 Eng...

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...

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...

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...

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 sc...

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...

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 he...

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 over...

"Manager Voltron" Lara Hogan knows some things about high performing engineering teams.  Following roles as Engineering Director at Etsy and VPE at Kickstarter, she founded Wherewithall to run workshops, trainings, and coaching on delivering great feedback, setting clear expectations, and balancing mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring -- all critical skills for anyone rising through the engine...

Innovative shopping experiences drive e-commerce revenues by turning shoppers into buyers. In this episode I talk with Andrew Guldman, VP of Product Engineering and R&D at Fluid. Andrew and his team have innovated the Fluid Configure product all the way from Flash and Flex to React and Node. Their metadata and decision engine tackles the most complex of product configurators for the likes of O...

CTO of Labdoor, Helton Souza, has stories to tell. Stories about moving to America to learn English, about selling pigs (yes, pigs) online, about pitching for Startup America, and ending up in Silicon Valley. He's also got insights about taking scientific lab data and making it consumer-readable, about saving 46% on infrastructure costs with smart cloud moves, and about countless hours around a ki...

You might not recognize the name Kevin Nether, but chances are you've watched at least one video by Kevin The Tech Ninja. If you haven't, fire up your YouTube app. A self-described "guy who's just always loved technology," Kevin's videos have won acclaim and following for his creative, down-to-earth unboxings, product reviews, and the occasional rant. In this episode I talk to Kevin about being a...

David Feinman is the CEO of Viral Ideas Marketing. We met him in his role as one of the Community Managers of Online Geniuses, a huge internet marketing community known for their industry leader AMAs. In this episode David and I compare notes about customer experience and UX as leads become trials and users become evangelists. Marketing, technology, and product SMEs speak different languages, but...