Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

Boston Code Viking, Steff Kelsey started as engineer #3 at Notarize. This episode was recorded while he was their VP of Engineering, leading a team of 40. He's now the VPE of Appcues.  Scaling an engineering org is challenging enough on it's own, but what about doing that in a totally new market segment? That's what Notarize did as it moved the Notary Public process to a video-driven SaaS int...

A veteran of Microsoft, Groupon, and now Mode Analytics, Engineering Leader, Ushashi Chakraborty has gotten used to hearing the most abnormal feedback: "I love coming to your meetings!"  She realized after some reflection that her extensive improv experience through Chicago's famed Second City Conservatory, had instilled in her skills and habits that were just as useful for running engineerin...

Practitioners turned tech founders give us a unique view into the customer discovery process because they usually start their companies in order to solve a problem they've experienced themselves. Such is the case for attorney turned startup founder Alex Nordholm, CEO of DealWIP, a legal tech startup whose product is a SaaS due diligence project management and workflow tool for corporate attorneys,...

Google Staff Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower is tech community famous for his down-to-earth and refreshingly funny keynotes. In this episode we talk about putting people first and tools second on the path to engaging and authentic engineering practice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sina Golshany is the Director of Technology at Fabricated Extrusion Company. He previously spent 8 years at Boeing in various aerospace engineering roles. Sina established and manages the computational engineering function responsible for supporting the custom extrusion business and product design needs of customers in various industries including, heavy machinery, aerospace, automotive, medical d...

In it's purest form, the microservices architectural pattern tells us to "dream small" while designing services, which is all well and good, but how small is still useful? Pragmatic microservice design helps draw some useful boundaries, and keeps our eyes on shipping product.  In this episode we talk to Director of Engineering Daniel Knight about breaking down business problems into known obj...

Business and technology leaders face consistent pressure to bring products to market faster. Never in the last quarter century has the pace of change, the quantity of available tools, and the raw compute power been greater. In this episode, slashBlue CEO Tom Dodds joins me to talk about how to build technology that's aligned with the people, process, and purpose of the organization. Does it help p...

When we talk about the software development lifecycle, we often focus on the product and engineering functions, potentially leaving out a critical team: Sales, and specifically Sales Engineers. To add a little color to this role, we invited Chris Goodman, Director of Integrations and Alliances from SentinelOne. Chris gives a different look at customer empathy - one that's directly tasked with help...

Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) is a global leader in the B2B Travel Management space. The Hotels division within CWT was rebranded as RoomIt in the summer of 2017. My guest in this episode, Alex Behrens, was brought in as Director of Engineering to lead that effort.  It's no small feat to build an entirely new tech startup inside of a legacy IT organization, and I talk in detail with Alex abou...

There's a difference between working for a startup, founding a startup, working freelance, and working as a consultant for a company on payroll. It all comes down to the risk profile you are willing and able to tolerate, and that is itself a function of the stage of life you're in and other variables. In this episode I sit down with Mong Truong who has worn all of those hats. We talk about the dif...

When you hear "mainframe" I bet you think "old school," or "dinosaur," or at the very least "legacy." After this episode with Compuware's Tim Ceradsky, you might change your mind. With hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL driving the vast majority of transaction processing in the US economy, mainframes aren't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, with COBOL programmers retiring en masse over th...

When it comes to Quality Assurance, the hot buzz words are "automation" and "moving left." It's true that automated testing beats manual, but throwing a bunch of automated tests on your UI just to increase your test coverage isn't productive. A holistic QA approach means everyone from product to engineering to business stakeholders is on board.  In this episode we speak to QA leader David Mor...

There comes a time in almost every engineer's career where they may need to communicate with a customer, train a teammate, pitch a project, or prove they are credible to a potential client. Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer of Mint.com where she launched v1 of the ubiquitous personal finance platform. She went on to Found Femgineer, an education firm that trains technologists on pre...

Alan Spadoni is the Director of Engineering at Buildout. He's was an engineering leader at Groupon for six years prior to his current post. Alan shares some awesome insights on making your engineering culture attractive from a recruiting perspective in a highly constrained hiring environment, especially when you're recruiting for talent on technologies that are no longer at the peak of their hype...

One of most promising areas for artificial intelligence research rests at the intersection of biology and medicine. That's where we found Robert Fratila, CTO and Co-founder of Aifred Health. He and his team won an XPRIZE at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. He's worked on brain-state classifiers, computer vision packages for autonomous underwater vehicles, and predict...

Mike Talbot is the CTO of Veracity Consulting where he leads their data and emerging technologies practices. He writes and advises on distributed ledger technology for government and business clients and he's the author of "A Brief Description of Blockchain," which aims to break this hot topic into layman's terms for business decision makers. In this episode we delve into finance, smart contracts,...

Rusty Wilson started his career as a signals intelligence analyst in the US Army where, while deployed in Korea, he cut his algorithmic teeth on Perl scripts that ended up slicing days of processing time from his intelligence data processing before "Big Data" was even a catch phrase. Rusty is a Certified Ethical Hacker, and a Hacking Forensic Investigator, among 10 other professional certification...

Simon Reggiani is a multi-platform native and hybrid mobile developer with over a decade of experience launching apps on iOS and Android using Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, Swift, and React Native. Simon shares his opinions and insights based on his experience at Slack and other high-growth startups. He talks about when businesses should go native vs. hybrid, and how developers can make the leap from...

Jim Nasr is Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Synchrogenix where he spearheads strategy and implementation of emerging technologies such as large scale blockchain and machine learning in healthcare and the life sciences. He previously served as Chief Software Architect for the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In this episode Jim walks us through the critical requir...

Steve Peak is the founder and CEO of Asyncy, an ambitious foray into the brave new world of DevOps automation, orchestration, and choreography. An accomplished software engineer himself, Steve's contributions to the development toolchain includes other efforts like Codecov.io, which he founded in 2015. The future of application choreography in the cloud era requires new ways of thinking about abst...

Travis Scheponik is a Master Software Engineer, currently with Capital One. His previous decade of experience has included work in finance, government, education, and a series of multi-industry startups. His areas of expertise include legacy system conversion, cybersecurity, and application performance, as well as recent projects in service discovery, a topic we delve into in detail in this episod...

As blockchain technologies proliferate, one of the most challenging aspects for business users and developers alike is accessibility and user experience. In this episode, Ledge chats with Joel Neidig, CEO and Co-founder of SIMBA Chain, a robust developer framework and API. Originally developed through a DARPA grant, SIMBA Chain enables anyone to quickly create blockchain distributed applications f...

Ledge sits down with Laurel Farrer, a remote work strategist and consultant, to chat about what it takes to strengthen virtual communication, streamline digital processes, and develop long-distance management strategies necessary for remote teams to work . If you love The Frontier, we bet you'll love our weekly newsletter, the Wayfarer. You can subscribe here . We promise to make you laugh at leas...

Roland Cooper is a 10-year technical operations and infrastructure expert with broad experience in fintech, e-commerce, and B2C. In this interview Roland talks to us about the tensions between on-prem and cloud deployment. On the bleeding edge of software development we often forget the vast majority of technical infrastructure still resides on-prem and in private data centers. Roland walks us thr...

Our guest this episode is Chris Venturini. Chris is a healthcare technologist in the venture technology space with broad expertise in platform development and domain-driven design. In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into Chris's perspectives on disruptive healthcare technologies and then dial in on risk mitigation through domain-driven design in the full software development lifecycle. If you...