Episode 25: Vaidehi Joshi

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Show Notes:

A job interview inspired software developer Vaidehi Joshi to create Basecs, a weekly series, as a way to teach herself Conway’s Game of Life and other computer science problems. Along the way she's helped thousands of others do the same.

“I thought it was just me who didn’t understand it.” 

Vaidehi shared how she found a balance when doing a weekly project, how she accidentally created a computer science curriculum and her process for learning and writing about a brand new topic in less than a week. 

 

Episode 24: Jake Sutton

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Show Notes:

Jake Sutton is a software developer and the creator of Tonight’s Negroni and the Dipsomania Podcast. Jakes uses side projects as a means of exploring different types of media.

“I didn’t do it to create an audience, I did it for creative expression."

Our wide ranging conversation covered the challenges of different mediums, how to build in feedback loops and shifting from a consumer to a creator. 

Episode 23: Justin Weiss

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Show Notes:

Justin Weiss is a software developer and the author of Practicing Rails.

“Opportunities showed up or it was this job needs doing. So I’ll go and do it."

Justin told us about learning to be a manager for the first time, how he knew when it was time to make a change, the question he asked himself to find happiness in his career and how open source helped him get a new role. 

Episode 22: Andrew Nesbitt

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Show Notes:

Andrew Nesbitt, creator of Libraries.io,  Dependency CI and 24 Pull Requests, cares deeply about solving the problems of discoverability and sustainability in open source. He created Libraries.io to help developers find new open source libraries, modules, frameworks, and keep track of the ones they depend on.

“You are not your code.”

We talk about Libraries.io, which has indexed 30 million open source projects. Our discussion covers the trouble of single points of failures in projects, how they developed attributes to assess repositories, how they got funding and how to make decisions about the risk of a transitive dependency. 

Episode 21: Michael Eaton

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Show Notes:

Michael Eaton heads up Kalamazoo X, a tech conference that’s about everything except code. We talked about what it's like to run a conference described as a braver, more profane set of Ted Talks.

Michael talks about the challenges fo marketing a conference that’s about the human side of technology, leaving the content in your speaker’s hands rather than curating it and how one talk changed the course of the conference. Finally, he shares he knew it was time for a change and what's next.

Episode 20: Anne Gentle

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Show Notes:

After writing a traditionally published book, Anne Gentle, self-published her second: Docs Like Code.

“No one else is doing this, I better write this down.”

A product manager at Cisco, Anne used her side project as a way to experiment with the full scope of product management from writing, to selling, and marketing it.

Anne shares how she got better at self-promotion, why she hired a life coach and how she wrote her book while having a day job.

 
 

Episode 19: Zed Shaw

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Show Notes:

Software developer and author Zed Shaw recently made the decision to start charging for his Learn Python the Hard Way book. He discusses why he made this decision after offering the book for free to the community for years.

“In many ways open source has conditioned me to not appreciate the value of what I do.”

Zed talks about the challenges of making money in open source software, the value of consistent practice and how he consciously switches mindsets for different phases of work.

Episode 18: Carla Hackett

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Show Notes:

Calligrapher and hand-letterer Carla Hackett shares her journey translating an in-person workshop into a paid online course.

“Could this be a new path I take?”

After holding successful workshops in-person, Carla longed to serve more clients internationally. Carla tells us about the process, how she choose which currency to sell the course in for a global audience and when she starting promoting her new product. 

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Episode 17: Kim Goulbourne

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Show Notes:

Often businesses and side projects are born out of a desire to solve a problem we have. That’s exactly what Kim Goulbourne was doing when she launched No Questions Asked. Kim created this community event while she had a day job.

“I need deadlines or nothing will get done. I have to be working towards something.”

Kim talks about how she lowered her out-of-pocket expenses through sales and sponsorships and how she plans to build more marketing into her schedule in the future.

What to read: Why your brain hates selling

 

Episode 16: Matt Wynne

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Show Notes:

Matt Wynne, the CEO and a founder of Cucumber Ltd talks about building Cucumber Pro, a product designed to solve collaboration problems and bridge communication in software.

“It’s harder than you think. It takes more resilience than you think."

Matt gives us a behind-the-scenes look at building a boot strapped product. He shares the mistakes they made with Cucumber Pro 1.0, why they eventually built code they knew they'd throw away and the importance of asking the right questions.

What to read: How learning to ask questions transformed my career