IT Career Energizer

GUEST BIO: Corey Quinn has been an engineering manager, a public speaker and an advocate for cloud strategies. He now specializes in helping companies control and cost optimize their AWS cloud footprint without disrupting the engineers using it. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Corey Quinn, who is a cloud economist, consultant, business owner, blogger and podcaster. His early career was spent as a system administrator. He later moved into DevOps. Today, he is a consultant who specializes in creating cost-optimized AWS cloud solutions that work efficiently, despite the fact that the cost of running them has been cut drastically. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (00.28) – So Corey, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself. Corey explains that he is a cloud economist. He started as an assistant systems administrator, which is the equivalent of an SRE, doing both individual contributor work and managing teams. But, for the last couple of years he has run his own AWS consultancy company. His main service is fixing the huge AWS bills that many companies end up with. More recently, he has become for his Last Week in AWS newsletter, which pulls together what is happening in the Amazon cloud ecosystem. At this point gives an important tip. Making fun of giant companies will make you less employable than you think. He also runs the Screaming in the Cloud podcast. (2.09) – Phil asks Corey for a unique IT career tip, one the audience probably does not already know. Corey says it is important not to lose sight of how valuable you are to the business. Being able to understand and prove your true value will really help the next time there are layoffs. So, it is wise to get into the habit of tracking that type of data. (3.16) – Phil asks how someone who cannot easily visualize their monetary value to the people they work for and how they would go about evaluating their true worth. Corey says that the best way he has found to do that is to speak to people within the company and outside about his role. Doing this has enabled him to get some perspective. He has been able to see how they think his type of role benefits a business and how it adds value. Finding a mentor helps too, they will also provide insight into this. You can also ask your boss how the company realizes the benefit of having you there. Don't be afraid of asking this question. Doing so enables you to better understand your role and be able to fill it more effectively. It stops you from focusing on things the company does not ascribe much value to. Things they are not really interested in your taking care of for them. (4.48) – Corey is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Corey has a reoccurring moment. He has been "let go" several times and being fired never feels good, especially when you don't see it coming. Over the years, Corey has been let go five or six times. Usually, because he was misaligned with what the business found valuable. He was just not focusing on what they wanted to have done. However, in some cases, it was a cultural mismatch that led to him being fired. Being let go hurts and can make you feel like you are a loser, even though you are not. But, on the flip side you usually end up feeling relieved, liberated even. (6.52) – Phil asks Corey if being fired has become any easier, over the years. Corey explains that it has gotten easier in that he knows what to do next. But, emotionally it is still hard. This is despite the fact that he knows every job comes to an end, at some point. In reality, you are either going to leave, because you are no longer a good fit, or your company is going to let you go, for the same reason. It is a fact of life. Besides which if you are no longer a good fit, continuing to work for that company is not good for you or your employer. Despite that, being told you have been fired is still painful. (7.53) - Have you ever experienced a situation where perhaps the company has moved on and the role that you're performing is no longer as valuable as it was previously? In Corey's case, this has usually happened because the role has shifted radically. This has definitely been the case when he has joined a company during its early days. What a firm needs doing during start-up is very different from what they require once they are fully up and running. Corey enjoys fixing problems and turning things around. But, once everything is settled and he has to switch to take care of mundane day-to-day tasks he quickly gets bored. When that happens, it is best for him to move on quickly. (9.12) – Phil asks Corey what his best career moment was. For Corey that has definitely been helping a friend of his to grow her career. Over the years, she has regularly sought advice from him. Today, she credits him with some of her success. Corey gets more of a sense of achievement from having helped her than he does from saving companies large sums of money or help them to recover from pr

GUEST BIO: Ruth is an award-nominated digital artist, web consultant, keynote speaker and writer with 15 years of experience in the digital industry. Ruth is a Google Development Expert, having worked for companies such as O2 and BSkyB and with clients including the BBC, NBC and Heineken. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Ruth John is Phil's guest on today's I.T. Energizer show. For the past 15 years, she has worked in the digital design and development field. Ruth has worked for start-ups, creative agencies and media companies as well as in the telecommunications sector. She specializes in data visualization, animation, audio and 3D. Ruth is also a technical writer and a regular conference speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­(0.57) – So Ruth, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Ruth explains that currently she is a self-employed consultant. She specializes in helping companies to build or document creative development. Usually, she ends up filling in skill gaps for her clients, especially when it comes to audio, animation and visualization. (1.32) – OK, so what led you into that particular avenue? Ruth explains that while working for agencies on front end development projects, she ended up filling a range of skill gaps. One of which was design. Despite the fact that her focus was research and development, she ended having to use her creative skills a lot. It was this that made her realize that she had a flair for design and the creative side of IT and that she enjoyed that kind of work. (1.53) – Phil asks Ruth for a unique IT career tip. Ruth's number one tip is not to be afraid to turn work down. Sometimes it is because she sees red flags, other times it is because the job is not fully suited to her skill set. She is especially cautious if it looks like the project has not been spec'd properly or is underfunded. Phil asks her if that is something she has had to learn from experience. Ruth said yes. When you are self-employed getting the balance right is tricky because you've still got your bills to pay. This fact makes it harder to learn to say no and will mean that occasionally you will have to say yes even when the role is not a perfect fit for you. (3.57) – Ruth is asked to share her worst career moment. Like quite a few IT professionals, Ruth has made the classic mistake of deleting a production database. Of course, that was a serious mistake, but one that was relatively easily rectified because they had a proper backup. Throughout the early part of her career Ruth experienced sexism. In one office, every morning when she walked into the office they shouted boobs at her. A pretty awful environment for her to work in, but that job did not last long. Fortunately, things are getting better now for female IT workers. The other negative situation that sticks in Ruth's mind was landing a very well paid job only to then discover that the working environment was toxic. Plus, the team was not great. That was a very low point for Ruth. Sadly, it meant that her best career moment was rolled up with her worst one. (5.09) – Can you explain how your worst career experience rolled into your best moment. Ruth said that she left that job. It was a difficult decision for her to leave such a well-paid role, but doing so was extremely liberating. (5.45) – So, have you learned anything from that particular experience in terms of who you choose to work with? Ruth explained that it gave her a better understanding of when to say no and when to say yes to a project. For example, she recently took on a project that was slightly underfunded. She did so because it gave her the chance to work with someone she already knew and trusted. It turned out to be a great decision. (7.28) – Do you see the trend of applying multiple technologies to one problem continuing? Or do you think that it is going to go the other way? Ruth said that she hopes multiple technologies will continue to be used. Having options helps people to be innovative, dig deeper and come up with interesting solutions. (6.44) – Ok, Ruth what is it about the future of the IT industry and careers that excites you, in particular. Ruth is excited by how creative IT is getting, especially at the front end where she works. You can now build anything using CSS or JavaScript, even something quite abstract. (8.48) – What first attracted you to IT, Ruth? Ruth confesses that when she first left university she was not attracted to a career in IT, at all. Her entertainment technology degree was similar to media studies, but, with the focus being on technology. For example, music technology, 3D and film animation. During her course, she did a year of Java programming and hated it. But, despite that, she applied for and landed a job as a web developer and ended up enjoying it. (9.38) – So, there must have been something that kept you going in terms of wanting to continue to work in the industry? Ruth agrees and thinks that it was seeing 3D artists and vid

GUEST BIO: David Linthicum is the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting and was recently named the #1 cloud influencer in a report by Apollo Research. David is an experienced CTO and CEO as well as an author of multiple books on computing. He has also presented at more than 500 conferences, has published more than 5,000 articles and has a weekly podcast on cloud computing. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today's guest on the IT Career Energizer podcast is David Linthicum. In 2016, he was named the #1 cloud influencer. He has been working in the IT industry for more than 30 years. During that time, he has headed up his own business and headed up 4 successful publicly traded companies as CEO. He is a top thought leader in the cloud computing sector, so his services as a speaker are in great demand. David has shared his knowledge widely, writing over 5,000 articles and 13 books. He also continues to host a weekly podcast. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­(1.07) – So David, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? David explains that he is currently the Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting. During the past 30 years, he has run his own firm and been the CEO of four publicly traded companies. All of which were all sold. He is always looking ahead. Working out what problems we will be solving and identifying how we are going to be doing that. (1.46) – Is there anything in particular that sort of motivates you, that gives you the drive in terms of what you focus on in IT? Helping people is a huge driver for David. He enjoys helping people to leverage computing properly, to grow their businesses change directions when they want and produce great services and products. Seeing people who work with him, read his books, listen to his podcasts and books succeed, is something that David gets a kick out of. (3.00) – David, can you maybe share a career tip, perhaps one that the audience doesn't know and should. David's most important piece of advice is to be willing to self learn. In his experience, they are the ones who become truly successful. They are the people who think in terms of where things are going and acquire the skills needed for the future. Often, they become interested in a particular subject and immerse themselves in it and become passionate about the subject. When they do this they automatically become great employees. David also explained that it is important to be passionate about what you do. If you do not enjoy or get excited about your work, it is time to look for a new career. (4.09) – So, you have touched on self-motivation, do you have any particular approaches that you use yourself? Being able to see the benefit of what your doing is a big motivator. Knowing that you are making a difference will push you out of your comfort zone a bit. But, doing so will ensure that you grow and gain recognition for your efforts. Sometimes the reward may be a long way down the road. For example, it took a couple of years for David to see and truly understand the positive impact his first book had on people. You need to figure out what it is that you find rewarding and seek out those projects that are likely to work best for you. Taking this approach will help to keep you motivated. (5.21) – David is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Like most people, David made mistakes when he was young and just starting out. He started his career working for MOBIL OIL, as their Computer Services Technical Director. David had a system that he wanted to build. One that he thought would add value, but he was not listening to anyone else. As a result, he ended up building an elaborate system that virtually nobody used. That experience taught David that you have to test the value of your ideas. You need to weigh up the opinions of the target users, your peers and consider the market too. Combined they will provide you with the data points you need to make sure that you are building the right stuff. (6.26) – So how do you do things differently, now? Do you have any particular tips? David's main tip is to look at the market and what it is going to do in the future. Don't simply read the analyst reports and use your feelings or opinion to do this. Instead, use all of the data points that you can find. You need to look at the facts to figure out where the market is going. What technology are people using? How are they leveraging the technology? What do they want to do with it next? You need to figure out where the ball is going to be kicked to next, to recognize the upcoming trends. David has been very successful at doing that in the past 20 years, especially when it comes to cloud computing. All he did was to do the research, gather the data, put it in a line and determine what the facts said. It is not magic, you just have to take the time to do that. (7.51) – Phil asks David what his best career moment was. David's biggest success was AI, specifically enterprise application

GUEST BIO: Dan is a software test engineer and founder of The Test Doctor. Dan enjoys running workshops and speaking, especially in the technical testing and security space and likes to help others to become better testers by attending events, blogging and giving training. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest today is Dan Billing. He has been involved in the IT testing sector, for much of his career, specialising in security. Dan is the founder of The Test Doctor and a leading member of the testing community. His workshops are well-attended and he is a popular conference speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­(0.58) – So, Dan, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Dan says he is now based in the southeast of England. Initially, he trained to be a teacher, but changed his mind and after briefly working in an AOL call centre, he kind of floated into testing. But, the foundations for his career were really laid when he was a child. He started out by programming his ZX Spectrum and Commodore Omega. Dan has always been fascinated by how people use and interact with applications and products. (3.15) – Phil asks Dan for a unique IT career tip. Dan says his biggest tip is to learn to understand and alleviate risk. Understanding what your clients and members of your team feel the risks are is a good way to do this. However, it is not just the technical risks that you need to understand. It is important to keep an eye on the well-being of your team too. First, check that it is a healthy team. Identify any blockers and manage them to negate the negative impact they tend to have. Also, look out for anything that may affect your team's ability to work efficiently. For example, does your team have enough room to work in? Can they work flexibly enough to be able to take care of family responsibilities and maintain a good work life balance? Asking yourself these sorts of questions will help you to see where things could go wrong. Looking out for the wellbeing of your team, being empathetic and communicating effectively all reduce the risk of the team not being able to gel or burning out. (5.49) – Dan is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Dan explained that happened very early in his testing career. Basically, he lost his temper with a member of his team. At the time, he was not familiar with Agile working practices and was not good at communicating. Plus, the software was not sufficiently developed to allow him to test it properly. All of this led to him becoming increasingly frustrated, until, eventually he lost his temper with one of the developers. Clearly, that was not good for anyone. However, that event taught him to own up to mistakes, learn from them and not let them stop him from moving forward. By its very nature the tester role is one that can lead to conflict. After all, a big part of their role is to be a professional critic. So, for testers, learning how to highlight the issues in a way that is positive is important. Testers need to ask the right questions at the right time and in the right way and do so without being rude. That early negative incident taught Dan to take a more empathetic approach to his work. When he is testing, he thinks about the various software engineers. How they work and what they are trying to achieve, so that he can tailor his feedback to be as useful to them as possible. Naturally, he is also thinking about the product owner, the customer, and the end users. The system needs to meet the customer's spec and be user-friendly. However, at this point, Dan points out that quality assurance and testing are not the same things. (11.04) – Phil asks Dan to tell him about his career highlight. Dan says that the most rewarding work he has done is when the team he has been a part of has achieved something good. For example, on a recent project the team had struggled to deliver on two or three sprints. So, when they did gel, hit their stride and achieve they were elated, Dan included. For him those moments where everyone successfully pulls together and achieves are his career highlights. From a project point of view, the naval charting systems job he worked on, when he first started working as a freelancer, was a highlight. Being part of a team delivering charts that keep people safe at sea was a great feeling. Landing his first keynote speech also felt great. (14.46) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? Dan is excited by the challenges, in particular, the ones that are unique to the UK. With Brexit nearly upon us the IT industry is potentially facing having to operate in a very different environment. The UK IT community is going to have to adapt quickly to the changes that Brexit brings, whatever they may be. In all likelihood, their customer base will change significantly. For example, it is highly likely that UK firms will find themselves with more non-EU clients. These clients will likely approach th

GUEST BIO: Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux, OSX and Windows. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. Cal is also a conference speaker as well as the author of several books including "Culture of Respect" and "Uncle Cal's Career Advice To Developers". EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Cal Evans. Cal has had a long and successful IT career. He started by working as a developer and programmer using PHP, MySQL, OSX and Windows. But, most of his career has been spent building and running development teams. Cal is a well-known conference speaker and the author of 11 IT career and programming related books. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.03) – So Cal, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Cal explains that he got into software development pre-internet. His first computer was a Commodore 64. So, he has been coding for 35 years now, and he loves it. (1.54) – Is there any particular thing that keeps you engaged so that you stay on top of things? Cal said that he is a creative person, yet, he often introduces himself as "a man of many skills, but few talents." He has found success by focusing on those relatively few talents. Perhaps his strongest talent is the ability to break a problem down into its component parts. A skill that is essential for successful software development. (2.43) – Phil asks Cal to share a unique IT career tip, one that listeners may not already be aware of. This tip comes directly from Cal's book - Uncle Cal's Career Advice for Developers. He says that it is important to remember that the job will never love you back. These days, companies work hard to keep their developers with them, in particular startups. They do all sorts of things, regularly host parties, provide lunch at the desk and a long list of other things to keep their developers happy. But, at the end of the day, you will always find that the company is not as committed to you as you are to them. (3.44) – Phil agrees and says that you always have to "look after your own interests." Cal agrees, he sees so many developers working themselves to death for the sake of their companies. Unfortunately, if a startup goes belly up it is the developers and workers are the ones that end up losing out the most. Typically, the founders will walk away with something while everyone else is left high and dry. Cal says, that as a result, you need to be realistic about what the relationship is. Basically, you are exchanging your time and talent for money. As soon as you run out of either of those the company will be finished with you and move on to someone else. It is OK to be committed to doing a good job, but it is not wise to overdo things and burn yourself out. (5.26) – Cal is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Cal explains that circa 1999 he was managing three teams. They were working on a big Oracle and Java application. At that time, most of his work was related to the medical field, big contracts that involved a lot of money. One day, he received a text message that said the production database was down. Naturally, the outage was having a huge negative impact, so Cal went in to sort out the issue. When he got there he discovered that one of his young developers has accidentally deleted the data mix. The team restored everything, within the hour, using the backup. But, it was a costly mistake. During the debrief, Cal was asked if he was going to fire the young man who was responsible. Cal said no. The ways he saw it was that he had just paid out a lot of money for that developer to learn a tough lesson. The last thing Cal wanted was for that young man to end up putting that newly acquired knowledge to use working for another employer. (7.52) – What was the most important thing you learned from that incident? Cal said it taught him the importance of being able to stand back and not interfere. He understood that as a director his main role in that situation was to keep communication flowing. He had to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, to give his team the time and space they needed to be able to work uninterrupted. Cal recognized and acknowledged that, in this situation, they had more expertise than him. So, he was willing to take care of the menial sounding task of sending out an update, every 15 minutes, via email. There was no Facebook or Twitter back then, so this was the most efficient way to keep everyone in the loop. (8.59) – Phil asks Cal what his best career moment was. To date, that would be running the Zend training and certification division. When Cal first got involved it was very early days for PHP. Yet the training material was already woefully out of date. As the scripting language, and the way it was used, changed the training had not been updated He upgraded the certification and all of the training. Very quickly, they went from the training being about 18 m

GUEST BIO: - My guest on today's show is Emma Wedekind. She is a Software Engineer working on GoToMeeting. In February this year Emma quit her job as a Front-End Developer at IBM, sold everything, and moved from Austin, Texas to Karlsruhe, Germany. Emma enjoys blogging about her career and technology and is an avid reader. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest today is Emma Wedekind. She got her B.S. in computer science at Siena College and also studied at City University, London. Emma is a multi-discipline software engineer who also has a flair for, and experience, of design. Her career started at IBM where she worked as part of the IBM Spectrum Control and Suite teams as accessibility lead. Later, she became the front-end developer for IBM's Quantum computing initiative and went on to design and launched that network's website. In 2018, she joined LogMeIn as a software engineer, working out of their German office. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­(0.55) – Phil asks Emma to tell the audience a bit more about herself? Emma explains that she got her computer science bachelor's degree, in 2015. During her internship for IBM, she worked on automating the installation of a web server application using z/OS in Python. This led to her working on the IBM Spectrum Control, enterprise storage system, as a full-time employee. Emma was soon invited to join the Vice President of systems and transformation's design team. In that role she worked on numerous projects including quantum computing. For that role she worked as a developer. During that time she worked on prototyping and created the quantum network site. In the early part of 2017, she quit, moved to Germany and started working for LogMeIn, as a software engineer. (2.33) – Phil asks Emma how her new role is going and whether she has noticed any cultural differences between the two companies. Emma says she loves it and is learning lots of new skills. When it comes to working culture, the biggest difference has been the fact that in Germany the work-life balance is a lot better. When hometime comes, you are genuinely finished for the day. She has also noticed quite a few structural and logistical differences. But, this is probably more to do with the fact that LogMeIn is a much smaller company. Emma feels that working for a small company has enabled her to make more of a difference. (3.55) – Phil asks Emma for a unique IT career tip. Emma's top tip is to find your niche. For her that is design and accessibility. She also points out that, in IT, there is no "one path fits all". For example, not every successful developer has a degree in computer science. Her first manager at IBM was an English graduate. Interestingly, a lot of very successful engineers have musical backgrounds. Emma has noticed that there is a duality between those who are involved in the arts and music and many roles within the IT field. (6.13) – At this point, Emma is asked to share her worst career moment with the audience. That happened while Emma was building the IBM quantum network site. Unfortunately, the night before the website was due to go live she was asked to make some fairly big changes to it. Somewhere along the line there had been a failure in communication with marketing. This resulted in these last-minute changes being necessary. To get the site up and running on schedule Emma had to spend some of her family holiday time sorting things out. This unfortunate experience taught her that good communication is key to a project's success. Emma also spoke about the fact that in many workplaces engineering still sits in a kind of silo. Something that Emma feels needs to be challenged and dealt with because it is a barrier to effective communication. (8.19) – Phil asks Emma what her best career moment was. Interestingly, it was the release of the IBM quantum computing network website. Emma said that it felt good to build something from scratch, using technology that she had never used before. Emma is particularly proud of the fact she was able to take her worst moment and turned it into a career highlight. (9.50) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact that the industry is so volatile is very exciting. It is impossible to get bored when you are working in a field that is always changing. There is no limit to what you can build. You can learn anything and there is always someone willing to help you. Phil agrees that is exciting. But points out that anyone who wants to work in the industry needs to be prepared for the fact that constant change is something they are going to have to deal with. Emma says for her getting used to this constant state of flux has not been easy. Her personality means that change can make her feel uncomfortable. But, over the years, she has been able to learn to get "comfortable with being uncomfortable." (11.14) – What drew you to a career in IT? Both of her parents worked for IBM, so they encouraged her to look at engineering. But,

GUEST BIO: My guest on today's show is Katrina Clokie.Katrina leads a team of around 100 testers as a Test Practice Manager in Wellington, New Zealand. Katrina is also an active contributor to the international testing community as the author of "A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps", an international keynote speaker, a co-founder of the WeTest New Zealand Testing community, the founder of Testing Trapeze magazine as well as being a frequent blogger and tweeter. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Katrina Clokie is Phil's guest, on this week's podcast. Like so many IT professionals, she started her career as a developer. After several years filling various roles she moved into the field of testing. Katrina is the co-founder of WeTest a New Zealand testing community. She regularly speaks at conferences and is the founder of the Testing Trapeze magazine and the author of "A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps". KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (1.01) – So, Katrina, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Katrina started her career after completing a computing and mathematical science degree. She majored in software engineering and started her full-time IT career, 10 years ago, by working in development. But, for a while she moved from sector to sector, finally, settling on testing as her field. Katrina is currently moving more into coaching and management within the testing domain. (2.04) – What made you switch from development to testing? Katrina explains that she found developing to be quite an isolated role. A way of working that she does not really enjoy. So, she switched to being a solution delivery engineer. The job gave her the chance to travel and work closely with others, something that appealed to her, at the time. She worked across Central and Latin America and Asia carrying out Telco network installs. Katrina had to test the installs as well as physically put them in place. She found the detective work involved in tracking down the root cause of any issues to be interesting, so decided that testing would be her new focus. (4.38) – Phil asks Katrina for a unique IT career tip. Katrina's tip relates to finding new opportunities within IT. She points out that there is no need to pigeonhole yourself, something that most people tend to do. It is easier than you think to move into new disciplines within the IT industry. (6.13) – Phil agrees, but wonders if Katrina has any more tips to help people to identify where the opportunities lie. Katrina's advice is to be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities within the organization you work for. When you see something a little different, that interests you, go and speak to some of the people who are currently filling that role or working in a similar field. If possible also talk to the person who is doing the recruiting, before, you edit your CV and apply for it. Taking this approach will give you a much deeper understanding of the types of roles that are available. If your application fails, don't be afraid to ask for feedback. This will help you to improve your approach for your next application. (7.30) – Katrina is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. She explained that happened when she was working for a mobile service provider, in Uruguay. They had a big problem. People were double-dipping on their mobile top up codes. Basically, one person was buying $20 worth of credit, entering that code into their phone, and then sharing it with their friends. Their friends were then also getting $20 worth of calls, but without paying anything. Naturally, the company wanted the development team to solve the problem quickly. For Katrina, as a new team member, working under so much pressure was particularly difficult. But it was a situation that she learned a lot from. In particular, she saw how effective distributed communication could be when senior people conducted themselves in the proper way. It taught Katrina the importance of effective communication. A skill set that Katrina noted is, sadly, not taught as part of a computer science degree. (10.49) – Phil asks Katrina what her best career moment was. Katrina said that setting up and seeing WeTest succeed has been her career highlight, to date. She set this software testing community up with Aaron Hodder, in 2012. Just 6 years later they have been able to reach 500 testers and now run conferences in both Wellington and Auckland. The conferences have already attracted international speakers. WeTest has grown fast and is now influencing the conversations happening throughout the testing community in New Zealand. (11.54) – Phil asks what excites Katrina about the future of the IT industry. Katrina says the technology is exciting, as is the way the community is tooling and developing systems using it. It is clear that this new wave of technology is going to have a drastic impact on society, this is also exciting. But, Katrina is also very interested in the ethics, social science

GUEST BIO: Lee Byron is helping to lead web engineering at Robinhood having previously worked for Facebook for nearly ten years. He is also an open source contributor and was a co-creator of GraphQL whilst at Facebook, which is an open source data query and manipulation language for APIs. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Lee Byron. He spent the first 10 years of his career working at Facebook. While there he developed several new tools, mainly for mobile. His work at Facebook led to Lee co-creating GraphQL. In 2018, he left and joined Robinhood. There, he is helping to lead web engineering and fulfill the company's mission of democratizing access to America's financial services. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.03) – So Lee, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Lee explains that he spent 10 years at Facebook, where he started out as a data scientist. Eventually, becoming a product designer working on Facebook Mobile, then on Front End Engineering, this led to him co-creating GraphQL. Lee has now moved on to Robinhood helping them to democratize finance by solving some of their technical challenges. (2.04) Phil speculates that Lee must have seen a big difference between the cultures of Facebook and Robinhood. Lee agrees, but explains that there were also quite a few similarities. When he first joined Facebook there were only around 400 people working there. Right now Robinhood is a similar size, with around 250 people. Both companies are very product orientated. They both "lend trust to the team" and transparency levels are high. Facebook held weekly Q&A sessions where people like Mark Zuckerburg gave a roundup about the important things that were happening then took questions. Often, answering quite tough questions. A process that makes sure that the tough conversations are had, Robinhood does something similar. (4.06) – Phil asks Lee for a unique IT career tip. Lee says he always looks for the overlap between two different skill sets. When you do that, it is possible to find a way into something new and can begin to solve problems in that field. He has very little formal training. Instead, he learns by doing. Lee has progressed mostly by seeing a problem, finding the end of the thread and pulling on it. This process leads him through the underlying issues and pushes him to find a solution to each of them, which, eventually, solves the overall problem. Over time, he has learned to get past his feelings of being an imposter because he has no formal training. Lee now realizes that when he is working with people who are smarter than him, that is a good thing. He can still contribute and, importantly, learn from everyone else, at the same time. (5.54) – Lee is asked to share his worst career moment and what he learned from it. Lee said that while at Facebook he bet big on HTML and the web platform as a way to do mobile development. They built a mobile website version that had a higher level of functionality than the existing app did. The mobile website worked extremely well on touch devices on Android and iOS. All in all, they reasoned, the site was well received and worked. So, they doubled down on that way of doing things. When it was time to build the iOS and Android apps out they did it in a similar way. Basically, the apps were glorified web browsers loading pages. At the time, this seemed like the right approach. After all iOS had mobile Safari and Android had their own browser. It seemed logical that these would be developed over time and continues to get better. Unfortunately, the opposite happened they got buggier. As a result, the functionality of the mobile site lagged further and further behind the desktop version of Facebook. In the end, they had to change direction. At that stage, Mark Zuckerburg stated that focusing on HTML5 had been a mistake. Naturally, for Lee, this was hard to hear. But, the good thing about the whole incident is that they went on to put together an API to enable native iOS and Android apps to be developed. That in turn, led Lee and his team, to create GraphQL. One of the things he is most proud of. (11.52) – Phil asked Lee if he now does anything differently to ensure that he will not pick the wrong technology, again. Lee explains that, nowadays, when working on a project he pauses at regular intervals and asks whether the choices he is making are still the right ones. Technology moves at a fast rate, so doing this is essential. In 2009, building a high-quality mobile website made a lot of sense for Facebook. But, by 2011, user habits had shifted significantly. People were now using their mobile phones far more than they were using touchscreen tablets and similar devices. That was the point at which Lee and his team should have switched from developing the mobile website to developing full iOS and Android apps. Instead, they doubled down on the work they had already done, which was a mistake. (14.25) – Phil asks Lee wha

GUEST BIO: Simon Maple is the Director of Developer Relations at Snyk, a Java Champion since 2014 and was a JavaOneRockstar speaker in 2014 and 2017. Simon is also a Duke's Choice award winner, the founder and organizer of Virtual JUG, co-leader of the London Java Community and a regular conference speaker. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Simon Maple. He is a developer advocate who spent 20 years working with IBM and is now involved with start-ups. Simon is well known for setting up vJUG, the Virtual Java User Group, which now has 16,000 members. He is also the co-leader of the London Java Community and a Java Champion. On a regular basis, Simon presents at major conferences, including, Devooxx Fr and UK, JavaOne, JavaZone, JAX, JavaLand and many more. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­(1.02) – So Simon, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Simon started his career as a developer for IBM, 20 years ago. After 10 years, he moved into what IBM called technical evangelism, which is also known as developer advocacy. It was a big change. Suddenly, he had to do public speaking, customer engagement and blogging. Developer advocacy, for Simon, is all about helping developers with the day to day issues that they have. He does this in many different ways. Mostly, by introducing tools and techniques that can be used to make things easier for the developer. Part of his role is to educate developers about different issues, for example security. (2.50) Do you find that there are certain subjects that people ask questions about more than others? Simon says that is more to do with the number of questions people ask rather than specific topics. When a developer has the confidence to start asking you more questions, you know you have hit the right level in terms of the information you are giving out as an advocate. If you overwhelm people they clam up because they are having trouble keeping up. Give them too little information and they find it impossible to piece things together and understand what you are trying to say. When you get the balance right, you know because the conversation flows and the questions come. People will talk more about topics that interest them or that resonate with them. Also, after speaking about a topic a few times you will pick up on the questions that most people want to be answered. (4.22) – Phil asks Simon for a unique IT career tip. Simon explains that his role is basically to communicate something to someone. Over the years, he has learned that it is important to share the information your audience wants to consume. This is the case whether you are talking to one person or a thousand, or more. When you empathize with the person you are speaking to, you naturally adjust what you say and make it as relevant to the audience as possible. Empathy will also help you to change the way you say things, so that it easier for them to digest the information you are sharing. When you do that, regardless of what your role is, you will progress in your career. (6.26) – Simon is asked to share his worst career moment with the I.T. Career Energizer audience. For Simon this was more of a personal situation rather than a professional one. As humans it is hard to keep up with all of the social pressure that comes with change. The developer world moves very quickly. You are doing your job in a certain way following a known path. Suddenly, Agile comes along and everything moves far faster. Testing has to be done in 2 weeks. Then you have to take on DevOps and SecOps as well as your main role of developing. Basically, the work keeps on being piled onto your plate. In that situation, it is all too easy to take on too much too quickly. When you do that, you burn out physically and mentally. That has happened to Simon twice, which put him in a bad place and stopped his career in its tracks. He is now careful about what he takes on and has got into the habit of prioritizing things properly. Simon has found that taking things out of his head and feeding them into a "to do" type tool helps him a lot. He finds that getting everything out of his head and into the tool enables him to concentrate once again on his work. Phil described it as removing clutter from his brain. (9.23) – Phil asks Simon what his best career moment was. Simon feels that the best inventions come about when someone is trying to solve a problem. His best career moment came about because Simon was struggling to see enough of his family and still fulfill all of his work responsibilities. He wanted to attend the London Java group events, they were very beneficial, but he was very short on time. So, he came up with the idea of setting up a virtual Java group. At the time, this way of bringing people together was very rarely done. Now user groups stream their events so everyone can benefit, regardless of where they are in the world. Today, the virtual community that he set up, vJUG has 16,000 members. It

GUEST BIO: Lisa is a software tester who enjoys sharing her experiences and learning from others. She is also the co-author of "More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team" and "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Agile Testers and Agile Teams". And in 2012 Lisa was voted the most influential agile testing professional person. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Lisa Crispin. She has spent much of her career working within the testing sphere. Today, she is also an author, public speaker and trainer. Lisa is the co-author of several books including Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Agile Testers and Agile Teams. In 2012, she was voted as the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person. She is currently working with mabl who specialize in automated regression testing services. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.02) – So Lisa, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Lisa explains that she has been involved in the industry for a long time, so has seen a lot of change. She is currently working with mabl out of Boston, a start-up that provides an innovative automated testing service. But, Lisa does a lot of other things too. For example, with Janet Gregory she has written books and put together a video course. Lisa also said that she likes to spend her free time looking after her donkeys, who are still adapting to the move from Colorado to Vermont. (2.12) – Phil asks Lisa for a unique IT career tip. Lisa's biggest tip is to ask questions. It helps you to learn and lets others know that you like to learn. It also helps the person answering the questions to think. As a tester that is 2nd nature for Lisa, but she knows this is not the case for everyone. (3.04) – Phil comments that a lot of people who are new to the industry are concerned about asking questions because they are afraid that it shows a lack of knowledge. Do you see that often? Lisa says yes people want to come across as confident and accentuate what they know. But, as a tester you have to ask questions. Doing that is the only way to uncover the unknown unknowns. That only happens when you ask the right questions. Lisa explains that testers have to be big picture people. They have to keep the end user in mind at all times, which their role as tester allows them to do because they are not focused on the code. (4.07) – Lisa is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. Lisa explains that some years ago a company tracked her down, told her they were admirers of her work and offered her a job. She was flattered and intrigued, but still did her due diligence, after which she accepted the job. But, on the first day they did something that was not in line with her values. She knew immediately she had made a mistake, but pushed that feeling aside and carried on working with them. Within 6 months she ended up leaving and, fortunately, going back to her old job. (6.02) – Phil asks Lisa what would she do differently now. Lisa said there were no warning signs before she started the job, but, now she would listen to her gut. She would pause and ask herself why she felt that way. Often your subconscious is telling you something important, so it is best to pay attention to those feelings. If she had done that, she would have left that unsuitable job straight away. (6.35) – Phil asks Lisa what her best career moment was. Lisa starts by sharing the fact that helping people is something she loves, so being able to do that is a big plus, for her. She was also lucky enough to spend many years working for a company that valued, respected and trusted their IT team. The team was great they really gelled. Importantly, the IT team was involved in many business decisions and they had significant input into what tools they developed for the firm. (9.00) – Phil asks what excites Lisa about the future for the IT industry. As a tester Lisa can see the need and benefits of using machine learning for testing. So, that excites her and she is currently learning as much as she can about it. AI has the potential to take on the burden of much of the boring tedious work, which frees up our time to do more with our brains and intuition. (10.24) – What drew you to a career in IT, Lisa? Basically, it was the fact that she needed a job and wanted to move to Austin. She saw an advert for programmer trainees, took the aptitude test. They wanted people with business knowledge to work on accounting and payroll systems. Knowledge Lisa had because she had formally worked a government job. (11.22) – What is the best career advice you've ever received? Lisa says that came from one of her line managers. He explained that a good leader makes sure people know what they and their team are contributing. She feels that this is part of the reason she has had such a successful career. The role of testers is not well understood and what they contribute can easily be overlooked. It is important tok how to get around that issue so that y

GUEST BIO: Bruno is a Java Developer and Open Source Evangelist at Summa Technologies and a Cloud Expert at Tools Cloud. He is the creator of Code 4 Life, helping Java developers to improve their careers and work on cool projects with great people. Bruno is also founder and organizer of SouJava, the Brazilian Java Users Society, which is one of the world's largest Java User Groups, as well as a founder of the Worldwide Java User Groups Community where he has helped in the creation of hundreds of Java User Groups worldwide. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Bruno Souza is Phil's guest on today's show. He has a passion for helping other developers to progress their careers and for the Java language. Bruno is the founder and organizer of the Brazilian Java User Society. He has helped to set up hundreds of other Java Users Groups, across the world. Bruno is the creator of Code4.Life. This project enables developers to work together to become better developers. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.11) – So Bruno, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Bruno responds by saying that for most of his time in IT he has been helping other developers to develop their own careers. He has done this in many ways. That includes creating user groups, working with them on complicated projects and finding innovative solutions. He helps them to become good enough to be able to easily break into working on all of the coolest projects. Those challenging projects push them to continue to improve and become even better developers. Thus, a positive feedback loop is established. (2.25) – Phil asks Bruno for a unique IT career tip that the audience perhaps doesn't know, but should. Bruno explains that developers tend to value their technical skills above anything else. This is understandable. After all, without the technical skills you cannot get into the game. But, Bruno has said that being able to communicate and share what you know is just as important. You need to be able to present and write well to be able to work on interesting projects. You need to communicate to people what you do, what you are good at. If you do not do that you cannot be in the running. It is also important to share. Sharing is the fastest and best way to improve your career prospect. Plus, when you share you get more clarity yourself. It is especially good to speak. Speaking out loud helps you to reorder and clarify your thoughts. That is why the rubber duck debugging technique works so well. (5.43) – Bruno is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. That happened when Bruno was working on what he thought was a cool project. The big innovative company he was working for, at the time, wanted to do all kinds of new stuff. It seemed exciting, but turned out to be a nightmare. The customer was all over the place. Every five minutes things were changing. There was no communication and a lack of honesty. Things were so bad that he did not want to get up and go to work in the morning. Like a lot of developers he put up with that situation. Now, he realizes there was no need for him to do that. Bruno says that developers need to learn how to say no. To stand up when they know something is not right. Should you not be listened to and things don't improve there is no reason for you to stay. After all, there are plenty of other cool projects you could be working on. (9.35) – Phil asks Bruno what his best career moment was. Bruno explained that his dad insisted that he did not work while he was at university. His father was an engineer and he had tried to juggle work with attending university. For him, that did not work out well. It ended up taking him far longer to finish his studies, so he did not want Bruno to make the same mistake. But, Bruno knew he needed to work to consolidate what he was learning. Naturally, he and his father got into a huge shouting match about whether he should work while studying at university. In the middle of it Bruno got a call from a friend telling him there was a job at Sun Microsystems that was his if he wanted it. He told his dad. Immediately, his dad stopped yelling and sat down to help Bruno to complete his resume. He landed that job and has always appreciated the way his dad put his feelings aside and helped him to start his career. It is one of the reasons Bruno works so hard to help others to move their careers forward. Every time one of the hundreds he has helped shares details of their success with Bruno he gets a boost. For him these occasions are the highlights of his career. (13.39) – Phil asks what excites Bruno about the future for the IT industry. Bruno is very excited to see developers taking responsibility, stepping up and leading. The fact that people are now doing this means that there is a brighter future for everyone. He is also pleased to see fewer developers simply relying on their companies to provide ongoing training for them. Instead, people are taking the initiative. They are going out

GUEST BIO: Eric Vanderburg is a cybersecurity leader, consultant, author and thought leader. He is Vice President of Cybersecurity at TCDI and Vice Chairman of the board of directors for the Technology Ministry Network. Eris is a continual learner who has earned more than 40 technology and security certifications and he has a strong desire to share technology insights with the community. He also the author of several books, a frequent writer of articles a regular presenter at conferences, seminars and other events. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Eric Vanderburg who is a leader in the cybersecurity field. He is a consultant, author and thought leader who leads the cybersecurity consulting team at TCDI. Eric is also the Vice Chairman of the board of directors for the Technology Ministry Network. This not for profit organization equips those involved in the ministry with technology tools. He is also a part of the advisory boards for several colleges. Eric has earned 40+ technology and security certifications. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.09) – So Eric, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Eric goes on to describe himself as a creative guy who worked at a college and created a curriculum for others to teach different programs. In time, he got into consulting, so has ended up working for lots of different companies. Over the years, he has been able to find some really interesting solutions for all kinds of problems. (1.53) – So, how did you find your way into cybersecurity, in particular? Eric explains that he has always found himself asking – "How could this system be broken or how could someone misuse it?" He became fascinated with trying to work out ways to defend against the ideas that he came up with. Basically, his curiosity led him down his cybersecurity career path. (2.43) – Phil asks Eric for a unique IT career tip. Eric's biggest tip is to seize those opportunities that will stretch you. It is important to get outside of your comfort zone. Eric often finds himself working outside of his comfort zone. If he had to wait until he had learned things 100%, he believes he would always be the "laggard at the end." IT moves so quickly, so you really have to push yourself in order to keep up. If you do not do that, you miss out on many opportunities. (3.52) – Phil comments that many of us forget to be on the lookout for opportunities, as a result they pass us by. Eric agrees. (4.03) – Eric can you maybe share with us your worst IT moment and what you learned from that. Eric's worst experience taught him to keep life in balance. A few years ago, everything was going really well. His business was growing as was his social presence. Yet, he was still able to spend time with his family and help his community. Everything was moving along well, the only problem was he did not have any buffer built in. So, when someone in the family got sick he had no choice but to put other things on the backburner. Fairly quickly, things that were not urgent started to become critical, deadlines were missed. So, he had to hand things over to others. At that point, Eric realized the importance of not maxing out your time. You need to leave a little breathing space so you can cope with change in your life and have some time available to take advantage of great opportunities, when you come across them. (5.41) – Phil asks Eric to tell the group about his best career moment. Eric starts by stating that – any great achievement requires a lot of work. For example, he is really proud of his first book. Eric had to dig deep to write about storage. A subject he thought he understood, until he started writing about it. At which point, all sorts of questions popped into his mind. Questions that he discovered were not being fully answered. So, he felt compelled to dig a little deeper and provide true answers to those questions. He took the extra steps necessary to do so. This included calling companies up and getting down to the nitty-gritty and solidifying his knowledge. It felt really good when he finished that book. His next two books were a lot easier because he knew the process. (8.04) – Phil asks Eric what excites him about the future for the IT industry and careers. IT is a part of every element of our lives. All of that needs development, support and security. So, there are plenty of opportunities for IT professionals.The way technology is hooking into and interfacing with real life makes now a particularly interesting time to be involved in the industry. (9.12) – Are there any directions or technologies that are of particular interest to you? Eric has always been interested in virtual reality. But, now, it is augmented reality and IoT that fascinates him. The potential applications for these technologies are almost endless. (9.41) – What drew you to a career in IT? Eric says he has always been interested in computers. He used to read the manuals and fix the neighbors computer

GUEST BIO: Adam Bien is a freelance architect and developer with a focus on Java. He has written several books including "Real World Java EE Patterns – Rethinking Best Practices". Adam is also a Java Champion and was Java Developer of the Year in 2010. He is also a regular conference speaker and three times a year he organizes Java related workshops at Munich Airport. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Adam Bien. Having worked with JDK 1.0, EJB, JavaFX, J2EE, and Java EE from launch onwards he has a phenomenal understanding of the language. He knows Java inside out and is a leader in the field. Adam regularly shares his knowledge by organizing workshops, speaking at conferences as well as writing books, articles and updating his blog. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.06) – So Adam, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Adam said that originally he wanted to learn multiple programming languages, work a bit and enjoy life. However, things did not work out that way. The demand was so high that he ended up sticking with Java. Even after 22 years, he still enjoys working with this language. (1.55) – Phil asks if he has plans to switch to a different technology or will he stick to Java. Adam says with Java, it is impossible to learn everything. He just keeps diving deeper. But, he is also doing a lot with JavaScript. He jokes that to learn both Java and JavaScript you would need at least two lives. (2.29) – Phil asks Adam for a unique IT career tip. Adam advises everyone to develop their own strategy. Not anything huge like - "I would like to take over the world, in 10 years time." It has to be something logical. For example Adam has been working to make development simple for the clients he works with. He uses standards, which makes it possible for his clients to use other consultants. Adam has found that his clients really like this approach. It is one of the reasons they like working with him. (3.30) – Phil asks when you talk about standards are you thinking of different ways of working and models as well as industry standards? Yes, says Adam. The availability of Java's quasi-standards like JCB Java community process, Java EE and Java SE are partly behind the language's longevity. While lots of other technologies and frameworks have come and gone, Java has remained in use and popular. Sticking with the standard means users can stay up to date using just incremental learning. Building on what they already know to learn to use the new Java innovations. There is no paradigm change needed. Understandably, clients like that because having to migrate to new technologies is always hard and bad for business. (4.33) – Adam is asked to share his worst career moment and what he learned from it. Adam says that surprisingly he has not had any really bad career experiences. He did have one funny experience though. During the rollout of Java 6 or 7 he was due to speak about it at two Sun Microsystems locations, on two different dates. Somehow the dates got muddled up. So, Adam ended up in the wrong city on the first date, which was a funny rather than bad career moment. Although, Adam did say that when his server goes down things can get a bit crazy. Everything is on there, including his website, so he gets hundreds of emails asking him if he realizes he is no longer on the internet. (5.58) – Phil asks Adam what his best career moment was. Adam runs something called Taskforces. For example, if a system dies in production and the issue cannot be resolved, Adam pulls together the relevant people to get things up and going again. During that process there is the often the chance to spring clean the system and make it stronger than it was before. It is a rare opportunity. If a system is running you would never dare to refactor it and rebuild it from the ground up. When a system is broken, you can do so. After all, you cannot make it much worse. (7.02) – Phil asks Adam what excites him about the future of the IT industry and IT careers. Adam says that the fact that there is always something new to learn excites him. He also finds it interesting how technologies cycle. Adam has spotted the fact that "everything repeats every 10 years." This pattern means that provided you do not forget things you are always ahead of the game. For example, JavaScript is becoming more and more like Java. So, now because Adam knows Java really well switching between it and JavaScript is actually very easy for him. He also enjoys the fact that in IT when you teach someone you inevitably end up learning more yourself. (8.54) – What drew you to a career in IT? Adam is not 100% sure why he followed this career path. But, he has always been a fan of Sci-Fi and he saw computers as being related to that. For him computers have always been magical things. When he got his Spectrum computer you could not do much with it, but Adam became obsessed with making it do more. He became fascinated by it. (10.44) – W

GUEST BIO: Dave is a computer programmer and was an original signatory and author of The Manifesto For Agile Software Development. He has also co-authored several books, including "The Pragmatic Programmer", and was a co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Dave Thomas is Phil's guest on today's show. He is a well-known programmer who works in numerous programming languages, in particular, Elixir, Ruby and agility. Dave is one of the original signatories and author of The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Over the years, Dave has published several other books and is a trainer. Currently, he is also an Adjunct Professor at the Southern Methodist University. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (0.45) – So, Dave, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Dave says that fundamentally he is a programmer. For the past 45 years he has enjoyed coding and has done it practically every day. Most of the other things, he does really just to make a living. For example, he published more books when things crashed in the early 2000s. Even then, he spent time writing the various bits of infrastructure, he just could not stay away from the code. (3.08) – Are you still involved in the pragmatic? Dave says that about 18 months ago, with Andy's agreement, he stepped back a bit on the day-to-day stuff. He had other things he wanted to investigate and basically did not have enough time to do so. Right now, he is almost like a Victorian gentleman scientist exploring things on his own. But, he has spent about a year shuttling from one thing to another. He is now focused again. (4.21) – Phil asks Dave to share a unique IT career tip. We work in the fastest changing industry that ever existed, so you need to keep up. You can't know everything, but you can look at what is coming up and pick a few things that are likely to make it. Then spend a bit of time learning and researching those. (5.20) – A lot of people say my employer does not give me time to do that. Dave's response is that is not your employer's job. It is your career - you need to invest in yourself. If you do not, you and your skills will slowly become irrelevant as new technology replaces what you are good at. (6.11) – Dave is asked to share his worst career moment and what he learned from that experience. After 45 years, Dave has understandably had quite a few bad career moments. At least, things that felt bad at the time. But, usually he learned a lot from those situations. So, in the end, many of those experiences turned out to be positive ones. When you are working in such a malleable format it is very easy to mess things up. However, with a bit of discipline and patience, it is also very easy to fix the problem. (7.29) – Phil asks Dave what his best career moment was. Dave explained that, like most people, he has a need to create. So, when he finds his "software expressing me" he gets a lift. A great example of this is the Prestel videotext system, from the 1970s. Dave was involved in writing a front end so that people could find flight availability and book them via travel agents. One day, Dave was walking down a High Street, looked in a travel agents window and saw his software running. Seeing that brought home the fact that what he was doing really was making a difference. (9.53) – Dave explained that whenever he publishes a book, he also goes to a bookstore to see it on the shelf. Seeing a physical manifestation of your work helps you to fully appreciate what you have achieved and is very fulfilling. (11.11) – So, Dave what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers in IT in particular? For Dave the fact that in IT you are shaping the world, literally. You cannot do much, these days, without IT. We can do great things with IT, which is exciting. In the very near future our coding will become part of the fabric of life. Now we code things that mainly happen via a screen or browser. In the future, our work will become an ambient background to people's lives. That is a phenomenal responsibility, but incredibly empowering. (13.31) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? When Dave did his A-levels he took them a year earlier, so had no work to do at school. Fortunately, he was not allowed to simply leave. Instead, his school sent him across the road to take the first-ever A-level UK programming classes. They were using Basic, with a teletype paper tape punch, but Dave was captivated by the work. He had planned to study math, instead he studies software at university and begun his IT career. (15.31) – What is the best career advice you were given? Dave's first job was working for a startup. They were asked to produce a coupon compiler, by a client. The director of that company had quite a bit of technical understanding, but there were some important gaps in his knowledge. So, at some point in the meeting Dave said – "No, you're wrong. That's not right" blah, blah. There was a deathly silence.

GUEST BIO: Trisha Gee is a developer advocate at JetBrains, where she gets to share all the interesting things she's constantly discovering. Trisha has developed Java applications for a range of industries and for companies of all sizes. Trisha has expertise in Java high-performance systems, is passionate about enabling developer productivity and dabbles with open source development. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest today is Trisha Gee. She works as a developer advocate for Jet Brains. Her goal is to help developers to make their lives easier and become more productive. Trisha spreads the word about how to do this using live training, social media and public speaking. Her expertise is in Java high-performance systems. She is the leader of Seville's Java User and Monod user groups as well as being a key member of the London groups. Trisha is a Java Champion and a MongoDB Master. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.04) – So Trisha, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? She responds by saying she is interested in everything and has been a developer for 20 years. Trisha has always resisted has always had broad interests, so has never stuck to just one discipline. As a developer advocate she talks directly with her company's developers about products, languages or frameworks that can be useful to them. Basically, she helps them to quickly get to grips with them. She enjoys the fact that, this role requires her to teach, present and write as well as use her technical knowledge. (2.10) – Phil comments that hiring a developer advocate is becoming more common. Trisha agrees that is the case. In particular enterprises like banks are starting to hire them. They have APIs that need to be widely used. Developers need to be able to easily incorporate them into what they are doing. In the past, difficult to read, official documentation was used to communicate with developers. Documentation that does not fit in with the way developers think. Today, there are developer advocates, like Trisha, who are able to quickly bridge that communication gap. (3.12) – Phil asks Trisha for a unique IT career tip. Trisha's advice is to learn communication skills as well as technical ones. Being able to listen properly and answer questions in a clear and understandable way is extremely important. If you want to become an architect or lead communication becomes even more vital. (4.20) –Trisha is asked to share her worst career moment with the audience. Trisha said that happened when she typed rm -rf in the wrong directory. It is a mistake that a lot of people make, just not in production or a huge 8 level live testing environment, which is what Trisha was working on at the time. Trisha thought she was in directory level 6, in fact she was higher up, so ended up trashing multiple directories. Just before Christmas lunch. The testers were in the middle of testing in every one of these environments. As a result, they were not in a consistent state. So, restoring from backups would have been too hit and miss. She had to ask the testers they would need to do some of the tests again. It taught her the value of owning your mistakes. She quickly explained what she had done and how it could be fixed. Once she had done that, everyone was OK about the situation and the problem got fixed faster. (6.42) – Phil asks Trisha what her career highlight has been. Going from being a developer to a developer advocate has been Trisha's career highlight. Becoming a public speaker was her first step along that rewarding path. But taking that step happened in a slightly unusual way. At a conference, she met Martin Fowler and mentioned the fact there were not enough female speakers. His response was "you can change that." You are an articulate woman, so you can speak at conferences and play a part in solving the problem. Trisha had planned to do exactly that, but was thinking of it more as a long term goal. Martin had made her understand that she could get started immediately. So, when her boss asked her to co-present with him at JavaOne, she just did it. The rest is history, at that moment she started participating in showing developers the way forward. (9.00) – How much practice did you have before you stood up on stage for the first time? For that speech, she did not get any specific practice in. She had seen her boss, Martin Thompson, present that speech before and she had been blogging about it. So, he knew that she could do it on the fly. They just went through the slides and she watched the earlier version. But, Trisha does not do that now. She always practices the entire speech, several times. (9.59) – Phil asks Trisha what excites her about the future of the IT industry and careers in IT. Trisha says the broadness of the field. You can be doing anything, solving any problem. Trisha expressed the wish to see the IT industry become more diverse. Improving the diversity should be done, but it will also bring many benefits. It w

GUEST BIO: Jess Dodson is a Windows Administrator living in Queensland, Australia. Jess describes herself as a Microsoft fan girl and for the past couple of years she has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. Jess is also keen to pass on information to others that is technically relevant, as well as other useful information for those in system administration. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Jess Dodson is Phil's guest on today's show. She has been supporting, managing and administering Active Directory & Windows Servers platforms. Her work has enabled her to become a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. She specializes in Windows Server Operating Systems, Active Directory, Group Policy, File and Print, OS Lifecycle management, information & account security services. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (0.58) – So Jess, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Jess explains that, after 15 years in the industry, she is now focusing more on Active Directory identity and security. In Australia, she is also heavily involved with the IT Professional Association. Their aim is to advance the practice of Information Technology as a profession. Currently, they are working to increase visibility and demonstrating the fact that the profession is not as boring as people make it out to be. She uses social media to convince people to give working in the administration side of IT, a go. Rather than automatically pursue a career on the developer side of things. (2,15) – Phil wants to know if Jess has noticed a big difference in the operational side of the companies she has worked for. So far, Jess has only worked for two organizations. A university and government department and she have found that they work in a very similar way on the organization side, but she is aware that in the corporate world culture differences are definitely there. (3.20) – Phil asks Jess for a unique IT career tip. Jess' number one tip is that getting into IT and enjoying the career you want isn't a straight line. There is no you get this degree to get this specific job path, in the IT industry. The best approach is to do what works for you. For some people, that is getting a degree, for others it means going straight from school into a mundane IT job and starting at the bottom of the ladder. You just need to do what works for you. (4.35) – Jess is asked to share her worst career moment and what she learned from that experience. She goes onto share two experiences, because she could not decide which of them was worst. The first one was when she did some live testing on her employee's production website and wiped it out. They were able to restore it, from backup, but it was a hard way to learn never to do any testing on a production website. The 2nd one happened when she needed to delete a production server from her employee's Windows Update server. A server that had been decommissioned so did not need updates. But, instead of deleting just that server, she deleted the entire production server group. More than 500 servers could not receive Windows update. This happened the day before the production patches were due to be deployed. Jess realized her mistake within seconds. The delete computer and delete group buttons were side by side and she knew instantly that she had hit the wrong one. For Jess, the lesson from that unfortunate mistake was to admit your mistakes immediately. She turned to a close colleague who had some experience in scripting and together they were able to fix the problem within an hour. If she had not admitted it, she would have had to fix it manually, which would have taken all night. Working as a team the problem was solved really quickly. (7.25) – Phil asks Jess what her best career moment was. She says it was speaking at Microsoft Ignite in Australia in 2013. She had never spoken publically before, so was very pleased when her speech was voted the third best of the conference. If you want to hear it you can do so here. Her speech was all about Active Directory & Domain Security, Administration & Maintenance and is called Righting the Right Rights. (8.26) – Phil asks how Jess practiced for her talk at Microsoft Ignite. She said she went online and did some research about technical speaking and followed the advice to practice 10 times the amount of time you are due to speak for. Jess has gone on to speak at Microsoft Ignite three more times and she may be speaking at the big Ignite conference that is on tour and coming to Sydney in February 2019. (9.51) – Phil asks what excites Jess about the future of the IT industry. The fact that everything changes so fast, is something that Jess finds exciting. You have to be really good at learning and keeping up. The shift into a whole range of areas that were not even thought of 10 years ago is really exciting. She also likes the fact that security is becoming increasingly important. (11.01) – Are there any other technologies that are of interest to you outside of your gener

GUEST BIO: Rob Lambert began his career as a tester, creating The Social Tester blog before moving into Engineering Management. He likes to share his experiences and the lessons he has learned in the hope that others won't repeat common errors. Rob is also an occasional speaker, an author and a podcaster. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on his show, today, is Rob Lambert. He began his IT career working in the field of testing. He spent years building an agile team and coming up with a process that reduced release cycles from years to weeks. A way of working that is now used across the world. These days, he runs his own consultancy company. His focus is on helping managers and leaders to find the right people, retain them and develop their skills further. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­(1.00) – So Rob, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Rob explained that he started his IT career by testing software. But, he always wanted to get involved in the creative industries by writing books and making films. It was that desire which led to him starting his blog and took him on his publishing and public speaking journey. He is kept very busy by his three kids and the demands of his work, but still finds the time to write his blog and publish a book every couple of years. When it comes to writing, Rob takes a disciplined approach. Every day, he just takes himself away, shuts off everything else and writes solidly for an hour. Usually, he produces 500 to 1000 words. Over the course of six months to a year, that adds up to at least one book. (3.01) – Phil asks Rob for a unique IT career tip. Rob says that one of the things he teaches is learning to "trade your freedoms wisely". Before you join an organization you need to stop and think about what freedoms you are trading to work for them. Organizations place all kinds of restrictions on you. They have rules you have to follow. Things like what you wear, where you work, which platforms you can work on, rigid processes you have to follow. All kinds of things, we never think about. If you end up working in an environment you hate on projects that bore you using clunky tools and processes, inevitably, you will feel frustrated. Think about your principles and values too. Rob and others involved in IT HR are seeing a lot of people burn out. Often, it is not because they are working long hours. It is usually because they are working for a firm that does not share their values and principles. (5.06) – So, evaluating your right decision before you make a commitment? Rob says "Yeah, I think so." Sometimes he goes into some less than stellar organizations and finds some really talented people, who could do a lot better. Yet they stay. Usually, it is because their most important freedoms are being met. Perhaps it is the salary, the fact the location is right for them, the team is good or that the projects they work on are interesting. Phil sums it up by saying it sounds like you need to find a fair balance between your values and the company you work for. Rob agrees, but says that sometimes that is not possible. In that situation working for yourself can be the right solution. (6.45) – Rob is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. A few years back, Rob got obsessed with wanting to earn more money. It led to him switching jobs. The interview was carried out in a swish, glamorous environment, but because the job was with The Ministry of Defense he did not get to see the actual office he would be working in. When he did, his heart sank. It was in a terrible state of repair, ceiling tiles falling off, holes in the wall. Nothing was happening, everyone was playing solitaire. It was awful - within 8 days he upped and left. Luckily, the next gig he found was perfect for him. (9.08) – Phil asks Rob what he learned from that experience. Rob said, it taught him to never be driven by money alone. It is never enough compensation for doing an awful job. He also advises you not to take a job without seeing the workspace you will be working out of first. His third tip is to think carefully about the freedoms you will have to give up. (10.27) – Phil asks Rob what his best career moment was. Rob is most proud of his time at NewVoiceMedia. While there he and that team took release rollout lead times down from 14 months to basically weekly releases. During his time there, they went from being a startup to employing 120 people and hired some of the best people in the industry. Employee retention and engagement was high and finding new colleagues was not hard. With hard but effective work, everything fell into place and the company was recently acquired. (12.18) – Phil asks Rob whether there are things he has taken forward from that experience. Rob says it taught him how to become a manager. Across those 7 or 8 years he interviewed about 400 people and discovered his talent for HR and building successful teams. Those are the skills that have taken him to

GUEST BIO: Phil Burgess is an independent consultant who helps companies to implement software applications and systems that support their business objectives. Phil has worked for independent software houses as well as large corporate companies across industry sectors including finance, utilities, legal and fine art. In 2017, Phil launched the I.T. Career Energizer podcast with the goal of helping others to start, develop and grow successful careers in tech. PRESENTER BIO: John Sonmez is a software developer who founded SimpleProgrammer.com to help software developers and other technical professionals advance their careers and to live happier lives. John is author of the best-selling books "Soft Skills: The Developer's Life Manual" and "The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide" as well as host of the Simple Programmer podcast.' EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today's episode of the I.T. Career Energizer Podcast is the 100th in the series, so it is a bit different, something special. Today, it is Phil Burgess himself who is being interviewed by John Sonmez. Phil first got involved in the IT industry in the mid-90s. He has developed and implemented new systems across numerous industries. Today, his focus is on helping others to develop their IT careers. He does so for everyone from absolute beginners to seasoned professionals. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­(00.31) – Phil starts, by introducing John Sonmez, who was his very first podcast guest. Today, it is John who is going to be asking the questions and Phil who will be answering them. (1.32) – John starts by congratulating Phil on his 100th episode. A remarkable achievement, especially when you consider that most podcasters only record around 7 episodes before giving up. John thanks Phil for inspiring so many in the coding and development industry. (3.24) – In true I.T. Career Energizer podcast tradition, John asks Phil to share a unique career tip. Phil says that it is vital to look at your plans and goals, so that you can understand where your career is going. He encourages people to put together a five-year plan. Of course, no IT career is linear and the industry moves fast. So, the plan is just a guide to give you some direction and a way of recognizing where you are. Setting a guiding goal will help you to navigate through the ever-changing world of IT. Particularly, when you regularly review and tweak your plan. Phil explains that pairing a long-term plan with short-term goals is especially helpful. Short-term goals like learning a language, taking on a public speaking engagement, attending more conferences or writing articles are all helpful. Setting goals like these will help you to identify the best ways to grow your skills, network and ultimately move your career forward. (5.24) – At this point, Phil is asked to share his worst career moment. For Phil 4 or 5 years into his career he attended a meeting with senior management and a director. The project was not going well, so the director was trying to motivate everyone and identify the issues. At one point, the director asked a technical question that had clearly been fed to him. When Phil answered it became apparent that the director had no real understanding of the issue, so could not really follow the response. Instead of seeking more understanding, the director tried to belittle Phil in front of about 15 senior managers. It felt terrible. But, it taught Phil the importance of understanding your audience. John says he has had a few similar experiences. It reminds him of one of Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, one of which is "never outshine the master". (8.25) – How about your career highlight? For Phil being able to help others with their careers is the thing he enjoys the most. Running the podcast has enabled him to do this for more people, so for him this has been a career highlight. He has also enjoyed meeting and speaking to so many great professionals. As well as getting feedback from his audience and answering their questions. (11.18) – John asks Phil to share one thing that excites him about the future of a career in IT. Phil says the fact that the possibilities are limitless is the most exciting thing. He went on to say that "the genie is out of the bottle". In the future, there will be opportunities that we cannot even conceive of right now. John concurs, for example, the idea of a driverless car would have been inconceivable up until a few years ago. Phil commented on the fact that technology touches every aspect of our lives and moves really fast. He goes on to speak about the amazing rate at which the motor car replaced the horse-drawn carriage. In just over a decade, a New York City road went from having one car and dozens of horses on it, in a photo, to being full of Model T. Fords. A strong example of just how fast technology changes our lives. (13.19) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Phil explains that at university he did a building survey course, something that had nothing to do wi

GUEST BIO: Lorna is on the Developer Relations team for Nextmo. Before that, she was a developer advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services which meant that she got paid to play with and talk about open source database technologies. Lorna is also the author of the books "PHP Web Services" and "PHP Master" as well as being a regular conference speaker and writer. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest today is Lorna Mitchell. She has a software engineering background and has worked as a developer advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services. Today, she works for Nexmo as part of the Developer Relations team. Lorna is also the author of two, very well received, books about PHP. She describes herself as being at her happiest when her GitHub graph is green. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(0.99) – Phil asks Lorna to tell the audience a bit more about herself? Lorna replies that Phil has pretty much covered everything with his introduction. (1.38) – Phil asks Lorna for a unique IT career tip. Lorna says here advice is to write things down. When you write something down, you process it in a different way. If you explain something to someone else you have to gain a deep understanding yourself. When you write a blog post you come to better understand the topic. Plus, once you publish, you get feedback and become known for being interested in that topic. As a result, you learn more. That continues, over the years. People know you are interested in the subject so start to share what they know too. This expands your knowledge even more. Plus, when you publish what you write online, people often leave insightful and helpful comments. (4.07) – Lorna is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. Lorna was once fired, which was a horrifying experience. She was left wondering how to pay the bills. Plus, Lorna was already having doubts that a software engineering career was for her. But, at the time, she had no other skills. So, she ended up having to take an IT related job even though she was reluctant to do so. As it turns out, she was very lucky. That job was a stepping stone to great things. It led to her speaking at conferences and becoming recognized for the code that she writes. She came really close to giving up a career that she now loves. Lorna comments that she has noticed a lot of people who are new to the industry wanting to give up. At the start, it is hard to find a company that has the resources and budget to allow you to do a really good job. It is all too easy to become disheartened and give up what is actually a great career once you gain enough experience to move on and secure a role with a good company. (6.15 – Phil asks Lorna what her best career moment has been. For Lorna, that was getting published by O'Reilly. It gave her an amazing sense of achievement. Plus, people started to listen more to her, which enabled her to help even more people. (7.29) – Would you write another book? Lorna replied that she definitely will when she can fit it in. Right now, she is working full-time, so that could be tricky. She wrote her other two books when she was a freelancer. (8.16) – Phil asks what excites Lorna about the future for the IT industry. For Lorna the fact that tech is everywhere and constantly changing is exciting. It means that she is always working on something fresh and new and learning about all kinds of industries. (9.40) – What drew you to a career in IT? For Lorna, working in IT was not the original plan. She was good at math and physics and has a degree in electronic engineering, so she never saw a future in IT for herself. While studying for her degree, she did a little bit of coding and really enjoyed the experience. So, when someone offered her a job in IT, building games, she took it. From there she was hooked. (10.40) – What is the best career advice you were given? At one stage, Lorna had an awful job. She knew that potentially she could get out of it by working as a freelancer. But, she was hesitant to take that step. So, a friend, who also worked in IT, said to her "Lorna, what's the worst that can happen?" When she looked at things from that perspective, she realized it was actually the right move for her and she became a successful freelancer. Now, if she is finding it tough to make a career related decision, she asks herself "What's the worst that could happen?" This helps her to make up her mind and continue to move forward. (11.35) – If you were to start your IT career again, now, what would you do? Lorna would not change a lot. She says it is good to take a lot of different jobs to build up your experience and broaden your horizons. However, Lorna wishes she had got involved in open source at an earlier stage. Working on these projects enables you to build a big skill set and do so fast. You will learn everything from coding to project management skills as well as how to interact with and work well with others. (13.02) – Phil asks Lorna what she is currently focusing on at the moment. Lorna says for her career

GUEST BIO: Vicky Brasseur has spent most of her 20 years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, and providing technical management and leadership consulting to small and medium-sized businesses. Vicky is also a Vice President of the Open Source Initiative, a winner of open source awards for contribution and a regular speaker at open source conferences. This year, has seen the publication of Vicky's book "Forge Your Future with Open Source", which I'm sure we will be talking about during the show. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today, Phil's guest is Vicky Brasseur who is an award-winning open source contributor and author. She has been working in the IT industry for 20+ years. During that time, she has worked on numerous open source projects, which have led to the development of industry-leading software. Work she now combines with her writing, public speaking and consultancy engagements. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.16) – So Vicky, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Vicky responds by explaining that for many years she spent a lot of time doing business management stuff. But, today she mostly helps companies to understand how to contribute to and release free and open source software. She shows how to do so in a way that is both good for their bottom line and the community. (1.45) – Phil asks to share with the audience some of the benefits of using open source. For a company, there are many benefits. It removes the need to continually invent the wheel. There are millions of wheels you can use instead of wasting time and resources writing all of that code yourself. Companies can get up and running much faster using open source. (2.39) – Phil asks Vicky for a unique IT career tip. Vicky's advice is to get involved in developing free and open source software. Doing so enables you to gain a lot of new skills and experience. Plus, it greatly improves your public and open portfolio. Importantly, you do not have to be a programmer to get involved in open source. There are many skills required to develop free and open source software, so virtually anyone can make a contribution and benefit by doing so. (3.40) Phil asks Vicky to share the best way to get involved if you are new to open source project. Vicky explains that there are lots of options, which is why she wrote a book on the subject. But, generally speaking she recommends that you pause for a moment and think about what your professional and personal goals are. It is important to work on something that interests you and will help you to grow. You could for example get involved in developing open source software for your favorite hobby. If you want to become more proficient in JavaScript and you like woodworking, go out and find a project that ticks both of those boxes. (4.53) – Vicky is asked to share her worst IT career moment. That happened when Vicky ended up working for a poorly run startup. Vicky felt she ended up in that position because she had not asked the right questions at the interview stage. It reminded her that finding a new job is a two-way street. A job seeker should be interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you. Vicky now has a set of questions that she asks every single interviewer. This enables her to compare the companies in a logical way. She finds that the way they respond is very telling. Often, it is what they do not say rather than what they do that is very telling. (7.25) – Phil asks Vicky what her best career moment was. For Vicky being asked by Pragmatic to write a book about a subject she is really passionate about has been amazing. Getting paid to work on free and open source software is also a highlight. But, the best thing for Vicky is helping companies to see the benefit of bridging the gap between corporate and community interests. To see that it is in everyone's interest to work in this way. (8.44) – Can you tell us a little more about your book, "Forge Your Future with Open Source". Has it been published yet? Vicky says yes, but she has not seen the physical book yet. On the evening of the podcast recording, she was hosting an unboxing party to reveal the book to her friends, colleagues and family. Her book is all about how an individual can contribute to free and open source software. The book explains what it is, why it matters and what copyright is. It covers licensing, intellectual property how to interact with everyone effectively. Plus, more complex issues like how to take something you may have developed in the workplace and legally share it with a wider community. (11.26) – Phil asks what excites Vicky about the future for the IT industry. Vicky is really pleased to see the IT industry opening up. Over the years, the industry has been too insular. It is great to see more diversity. Diverse teams come up with better ideas and work more efficiently. The fact that IT is becoming more inclusive is exciting and will greatly benefit everyone. (

GUEST BIO: Annyce Davis is a software developer and an Android Google Developer Expert which means she spends a lot of time developing videos, blog posts and conference talks. She has also created several courses for Caster, O'Reilly and LinkedIn Learning. Annyce is currently the software lead for mobile development at Off Grid Electric, a social impact startup. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Annyce Davis. She has already had a varied career. Annyce spent 7 years working at the Washington Post setting up their online content offering and user re-engagement initiatives. During that time, she used Python, Hive and several other tools to get the job done. She was part of the team that created PostTV Android. Today, she is an Android Google Developer Expert working for the social impact start-up Off Grid Electric. Annyce has also created numerous courses, a teacher and public speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.03) – So Annyce, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Annyce explains to Phil that when she is not programming she is busy settling her family into European life. The company that she works for recently moved their headquarters from Tanzania to the Netherlands. (1.57) – Phil asks Annyce to share a unique IT career tip with the audience. Annyce's tip is to find a way to teach regardless of what you do within the tech industry. Doing that enables you to make a positive difference in the life of others and "sound down" whatever you teach within yourself. (2.32) – Phil asks Annyce to share more about what she gets out of teaching. She says it really helps her to hone her own expertise and make things firmer in her own mind. It pushes her to learn more and deepen her own understanding of a subject. If she has a complicated concept, she has to break it down so someone else can understand it too. This requires research, a process that deepens her understanding of the subject. (3.53) – Annyce is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. Several years ago, Annyce had just completed a complicated project and was expecting to be promoted. But, that did not happen for her. Yet, other colleagues, some of whom had started after her, were promoted. At the time, she felt very down, but, learned several lessons from the experience. The first was the need to speak up. If you do not do that you can easily be overlooked. Make sure that your manager knows your goals and that you constantly check your progress towards them. Also, remember that "work is not school" you have to "advocate for yourself". Let everyone know what it is that you contribute to ensure that you advance in your career. (5.12) – Phil asks how else that experience has changed the way Annyce works. She explains that teaching keeps you visible and helps you to vocalize what it is you know and contribute. It enables you to interact with a lot of people. You become a force for positive change within your own organization and help people across multiple departments. Understanding the need to promote yourself has helped her to understand the value of being a teacher within your organization. (5.41) – Phil asks Annyce what her best career moment, so far. Annyce said that recording her first LinkedIn Learning course was a big highlight. She recorded in front of a green screen in a real studio. It was surreal and made her feel like a celebrity. Amazingly, it all started with the little step of going online and sharing a few tips. When Phil asked if she gets much feedback from her course, Annyce said yes, loads. She really loves people coming up to her at conferences and thanking her for what she taught them. (7.27) – Phil asks what excites Annyce about the future for the IT industry and careers in IT, in particular. She is both excited by and worried about how reliant we are on Open Source software. Not that long ago, most companies would not let you use Open Source code. Now, we actively look for it before we build something from scratch. It is exciting because you can get things done quickly. But, it is scary too. If it breaks there is not always an easy path to resolution. (8.28) - Do you see opportunities maybe evolving as a result of open source? Yes, definitely. It does not matter where you are in the world you can work with so many smart people and learn from them. (9.07) – What drew you to a career in IT, Annyce? One day, Annyce was playing with her favorite game, when her teacher told her that if she became a programmer, she could make games too. She did, in fact, create a word game for Android. (9.50) – What is the best career advice you were given? Annyce's unofficial mentor told her about "the rule of thirds". Basically, whatever you put out into the world falls into one of 3 buckets. One-third of people will appreciate it, one third will ignore it and one third will totally ignore it. You need to take whatever feedback you get and put it in one of those three buckets. Doing this e

GUEST BIO: Chris is the author of the award-winning Wahl Network Blog and host of the Datanauts podcast. Chris focuses on creating content that revolves around virtualization, automation, infrastructure and evangelizing products and services that benefit the technology community. He is also co-author of "Networking for VMware Administrators", has published hundreds of articles and a conference speaker. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: The guest on today's show is Chris Wahl who has been working in the IT industry for over two decades. He is the host of the Datanauts podcast and the author of the Wahl Network Blog, both of which have won awards. His focus is on using his experience to give others the expertise they need to create the data centres of the future. Chris specializes in workflow automation and building operational excellence and the successful adoption and integration of new technology. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.07) – So Chris, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Chris said that he spent most of his career rising through the ranks. Three years ago, he set up Rubrik, which is already a market leader in Cloud Data Management. He now runs a fairly large team. The change from individual contributor to a full-time kind of manager has been a blast. (1.45) – Did you make the decision to change in terms of moving more into a management role? Chris said, yes, kind of. But, he tends to gravitate towards new things that push him to learn. For him, it is an effective way of managing the "imposter syndrome" that most of us experience. He also realized that if he continued to work as an individual how much he could achieve would be limited. On your own you can only get so much done. With a team you can build in more capacity to get things done, move the technology forwards and complete large projects. Chris has found that creating a team has enabled him to pursue some passion projects. (2.34) – Phil asks Chris for a unique IT career tip. Chris explains that it is important to push yourself out of your comfort zone. It ensures you continue to learn to keep up with the fast pace of technology. Chris has what he calls a "fear compass". When he finds something that makes him go wow and take a step back initially, he usually dives in instead of backing away. You cannot afford to become stagnant or stale. (4.18) – Chris is asked to share his worst career moment. For Chris that happened early on. He was working for an IT shop that had a call centre type of operation to assist customers and keep the business running. One day Chris did an update and rolled it out without thoroughly testing it. Unfortunately, he had accidentally put a wild card in the script which nuked everyone's system 32 folders. Leading to the operating system failing. On that day, 200 terminals went down. Chris could have tried to sweep his mistake under the carpet. But, he didn't. Instead he was transparent, which enabled him and his team to get things back up and running as normal, very quickly. He felt really guilty about it. But, since then he has never broken the "test first" rule, which has helped him to deliver excellent solutions and propel his career forwards. (7.95) – Phil asks Chris what his best career moment was. Chris says that moment goes in tandem with his worst IT experience. On another job, a client asks him to do an upgrade at 11 am on a Wednesday. One of the busiest times of the week, so he warns them this is not a good idea and documents the fact. Yet, they insist he does it and everything goes down. Immediately, Chris was surrounded by the whole team, very upset and all panicking. Despite the pressure Chris was able to remain cool and quickly solve the problem. His worst career moment had helped him to understand the importance of remaining calm at moments of crisis and give him the chance to practice that skill. So, he was ready and able to deliver his best career moment. (9.26) – Phil wants to know what excites Chris about the future of the IT industry. Chris says the fact that the way we deal with IT is changing to a more collaborative way of working is exciting and important. Chris calls it the DevOps blend. He also likes the fact that everything is becoming more workflow and process driven. It is also good to see automation being utilized more. (11.19) – Phil asks Chris what drew you to a career in IT. Chris was only about 3 or 4 when he started playing computer games. He was programming by the time he was 8. He said that IT chose him rather than him choosing it. (12.18) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Surround yourself with the right people and success will follow. Positive people who challenge you and are great to work with will always drive you forwards. (13.04) – Phil asks Chris if he has ever been involved in Masterminds. Chris says not exactly. But, whether he is working on a project, attending a conference or something else he always seeks out the experts. Of

GUEST BIO: Denise is a web design and development industry veteran and author of the book The CSS Detective Guide which is about troubleshooting CSS code. Denise is also founder & CEO of The Creative Dose, helping individuals to unleash their creativity by banishing their inner critic and hacking their creative brains, as well as being a regular speaker at conferences around the world. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today, Phil's guest is Denise Jacobs. She has been working in the IT industry since 1996. Over that time, she has been a developer, designer, writer, speaker and mentor. Right now, her focus is on teaching, in particular helping others to recognize and overcome self-doubt. A positive step that frees developers and programmers to be more creative and excel at what they do. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.08) – So Denise, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Denise explained that she started web design when the web was really young in 1996. She worked for Microsoft and several other companies. In the end, she realized that what she really liked doing was teaching. So, she started teaching web design and development at Seattle Central Community College. When she moved to Miami she worked at a software company that produced a CMS. That experience made her realize she really wanted to work for herself. She also started speaking at conferences, around the same time, in 2009, she was asked to write a book. The CSS Detective Guide was a big success. Writing it and speaking about it got Denise more interested in the creative process. So, she started to talk publically about that side of IT work. Her latest book is about silencing your inner critic, so you can unlock your creativity and get into a flow state so that you can do your best work. (4.47) - Do you feel that writing the original book was that reason for getting into this more creative area? Denise explained that it was really the catalyst. The process of writing the book made Denise realize that she had crippling self-doubt. She was always seeking validation, questioning her developer and writing ability. Worrying about how she was perceived. Writing the book got Denise to the stage where she was finally felt comfortable with her work. (7.48) – Phil asks Denise for a unique IT career tip. Denise's advice is to "be your brilliance" – tune into what you do well and focus on that. Unfortunately, we rarely recognize that we are good at something, especially if it is really easy for us to do. She gave the example of a gymnast. They will think nothing of balancing on a beam and not really think about the fact that doing that requires a good sense of balance. Yet, the fact that they have an excellent sense of balance, something which is obvious everyone else. To identify their brilliance, Denise advises people to - "think back to the last time that you did something that was so enjoyable that you lost time." If you were so consumed that you forgot to eat or use the bathroom you were, likely, in a flow state and working in one of your areas of brilliance. (9.50) – Denise is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. In one job Denise was singled out by one of her managers for "special treatment", but, not in a good way. The company had a flexible working policy. Yet, her manager bullied her into coming in before 9 am and staying late. For Denise it was an awful time. It did not matter how many sacrifices she made her efforts were not recognized. Instead, she was demeaned. For example, one of her project managers was an introvert, so she ended up picking up the slack quite a bit. Effectively she became the de-facto manager. Despite assuming all of the stress and much of the physical work, when presents were handed out to everyone on that time all she got was a joke gift of a date ball. That was it; Denise saw the light and took a step back. (14.08) – Phil asks Denise what her best career moment was. For Denise becoming a public speaker has turned out to be a highlight. It has opened up a whole new world for her and enabled her to meet and help so many wonderful people. (15.36) – Phil asks Denise what excites her about the future of the IT careers. The opportunities are huge. Recently, an HR manager told her that a lot of positions are going unfilled. So, there is plenty of work available. More importantly, there is room for innovation and creativity. The possibilities and opportunities are huge. (16.32) – What drew you to a career in IT? Actually, Denise fell into an IT career by accident. While working at the University of Washington, she realized that the website was not getting updated. So, she sought out the person who was responsible for the website and discovered they were no longer keen to work on it. So, Denise learned HTML and a few other skills and took over. That was the beginning of her IT career. (18.10) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Denise says it is important to surround yourself w

GUEST BIO: Joe Birch is an Android Engineer, working as part of the Android team at Buffer. He is passionate about coding and loves creating robust, polished and exciting projects for mobile, the web, TV, wearables and whatever the latest thing is. Joe is also a keen writer and public speaker, enabling him to share his learnings and experiences with others. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Joe Birch. Currently, he is working as a Senior Android Engineer at Buffer. He also spends a lot of time at Caster.IO sharing his knowledge as an Android Instructor. Joe has also worked as a content manager for Eroski and as a freelance photographer. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.02) – So Joe, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Joe explained that he is also a Google Developer expert for Android and that he loves playing with anything technology related. Phil noted that Joe's current role provides him with a nice balance. In that role he is able to continue to develop his skills as an Android developer as well as explore new tech. (1.42) – Phil asks Joe for a unique IT career tip. Joe believes that sharing what he has learned is helping him to continue to learn new things. At first, he was reluctant to speak publicly and share what he knows in writing. Like many developers, he was afraid that people may not think he was good enough or what he was saying was right. He was worried about being trolled and having to deal with a lot of negative comments. In reality, the opposite is true. He believes that putting yourself out there is a great way to further your IT career. It is especially good for networking. (2.54) – At this point, Joe is asked to share his worst career moment. About 3 years ago Joe wanted to make a big change at the company he worked for. In an effort to achieve that change, he ended up spending virtually every waking moment online. He believed that he had to be constantly online to be able to advance in his career. In reality, that is not necessary. Joe did not burn out completely, but, it did have a negative effect on his well-being. (3.56) – Phil asks Joe if this experience has lead to him changing his approach. The answer is yes, he balances work out with running and keeping fit. He goes to the gym before going on his laptop and makes time to read and does not work right up until he goes to bed. (5.01) – Phil asks Joe what his best career moment was. He says that when he gave his first public speech, the fact that it was a success significantly boosted his confidence and opened several doors for him. It gave him the speech bug and really helped him to build a name for himself. If he wants to learn a new technology, he will apply to give a speech about it. That pushes him to really dive in and learn everything he can about that new technology. (7.03) – Phil wants to know what excites Joe about the future of the IT industry. For Joe, it is the pace of change. You know that there is always going to be something new to explore. Just look at Android, to start with it was just phones. Now there is Android TV, Android Things and Google Home, with more in the pipeline. (8.24) – What drew you to a career in IT? Joe studied computer science at university, but he was not sure exactly what he wanted to do. For his final project, he created an App. The thrill of seeing people download and use it is what hooked him and made him pursue a career in IT. (9.14) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? At Joe's last job his boss had a chat with him about the fact that it is not necessary to "know everything". He helped Joe to realize that he was getting caught up in the latest things instead of focusing. His boss wanted him to stop being so distracted and focus in on the things he enjoyed and was passionate about. (10.06) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right, now, what would you do? Joe says it is important to network right from the start. He used to attend conferences, but never spoke to many people. This was largely due to a lack of confidence. (10.51) – Phil asks Joe what he is currently focusing on his career. Joe explains that for about two years now, he has wanted to write a book. He is in the process of trying to make that a reality. Joe also has several side projects on the go, some of which he has been working on for a while. Right now, he is focusing on actually getting them finished. (11.38) – What's the most important non-technical skill that has helped you in your career? The ability to say no has really helped Joe to focus on what he really wants to do. Joe has noticed that for a lot of developers saying no is really hard. Phil agrees, he says it is a combination of not wanting to miss out and feeling the need to please everyone. "The risk is that you just say yes to everything." (12.51) – Phil asks Joe to share a few final words of career advice. Joe's advice is to learn new things and share what you know. Put it out there, get

GUEST BIO: Randall Hunt is a Senior Technical Evangelist and Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services. Randall spends most of his time building demos and writing about new services and launches on the AWS News Blog. Python is his favourite programming language but he can sometimes be found in the dark realm of C++. Prior to working at AWS, Randall launched rockets at NASA and SpaceX but he found his programming passion at MongoDB. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Randall Hunt. He started his career working as a physicist for NASA and SpaceX. He is now working at Amazon Web Services. His favourite programming language is Python, but he also works with C++. Over the years, he has worked in several different verticals, so he has a lot of business and technical experience. Randall helps developers to maximize their productivity in the cloud, especially at conferences and similar events. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.16) – So Randall, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Randall studied physics and a little computer science at Western Carolina University. He did a kind of internship at NASA and whilst there realized that software engineers earned a lot more than physicists. So, he switched careers. Randall had been programming as a side hustle, since he was about 12 or 13. But, he only officially started his IT career in 2010. (2.15) – Phil asks Randall for a unique IT career tip. Randall has worked for a lot of startups. He said that he definitely left a lot of money on the table with his first few jobs because of 90-day expiration window clauses. So, he recommends that people learn about contracts, so that they can make an informed decision before signing one. (3.00) – Randall can you tell us about your worst IT career moment and what you learned from it. Randall answered this by sharing a particularly frustrating experience with the audience. It happened while he was working at SpaceX. The launch process involved the system going through a series of checks prior to the launch. But, there was an outage. Randall and the other engineers knew the cause of the issue and how to fix it, but the stakeholders took a lot of convincing. It taught Randall the importance of earning the trust of the stakeholders and the need to communicate effectively. (6.53) – Phil asks Randall what his best career moment was. Randall enjoys the AWS re:Invent event. Every year, it gets better. For him it is great to see how customers are using the technology to do everything from cure cancer to build electric scooters. There is a huge range of really interesting and cool things going on. (8.20) – Phil asks Randall what excites him about the future of the IT industry. AI is going to have a big impact on how we code. Intellisense style autocomplete features in IDEs are already available. So, we are not far off the point where you will be able to ask your computer to build a simulation using a simple command and a few basic parameters. Then, just leave it to "intuit the program", including any of the defaults or variables. There will be savvy business folks who will learn just enough code to be able to use these systems. Many of the mundane tasks will disappear, leaving people free to focus on more exciting differentiated stuff. That is part of what the SaaS movement is all about. Businesses that use it are freed up to focus on innovating and growing. (10.06) – What drew you to a career in IT? For Randall it was the money. When he saw an intern earning 9k a month Randall was stunned and realized that a career in IT was the way to go. (10.30) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? "Think about where you want to be in five years and work backwards." (10.56) – If you were to start your IT career again, right, now, what would you do? Randall said he would get involved in AI and study it academically and pragmatically. (11.16) – Phil asks what career objectives are you currently focusing on? Randall would like to do more live coding and live streaming on Twitch. He wants to focus on sharing his expertise and making it more accessible for everyone. He is also planning to scale up his outreach, so that he can take on more speaking engagements, which he will record. He wants them to be more accessible and interactive. (11.55) – What would you consider to be your most important non-technical skill? Randall has an understanding of how startups and convertible notes work. This gives him a better understanding of what the stakeholders are trying to achieve and how they are getting it done. Being able to read profit and loss statements and understand what resources are available really helps you to make viable decisions. Having a little bit of business savvy is a very useful skill. (12.37) – Phil asks Randall to share a few final words of career advice. He responds by saying "Ignore that 90-day exercise window in any start-up contract that you sign." BEST MOMENTS: (2.48) RANDALL – "I de

GUEST BIO: Eric Lippert is a programmer who builds tools for other programmers. He's worked on Visual Basic, JavaScript and C# at Microsoft, designed code analyzers at Coverity, and is now working on a variety of programming language design problems at Facebook. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Eric Lippert. His career has been a long and varied one. He was a Principal Developer at Microsoft and a member of the C# language design team. Eric was also involved in the design and implementation of VBScript, JScript, Windows Script Host and Visual Studio Tools for Office. Over the years, Eric has published and edited numerous programming books and is now working at Facebook. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (01.00)­­­ – Phil asks Eric to expand on his brief introduction. Eric said that he studied computer science and maths at the University of Waterloo. There they run a co-operative education system where you study for 4 months and work for 4. He was an intern at Wacom and Microsoft. When he left Microsoft he went to work at Coverity. He is now working on developer tools at Facebook. (3.39) – Phil asks Eric for a unique IT career tip. When Eric was a young developer at Microsoft his manager told him to "find a source of questions and learn to answer them". He put that advice to work straight away and read every question in the JavaScript group. If someone asked a question that related to his area that he did not know the answer to, he would go away and find out. That taught him to answer queries concisely, which in turn honed his own knowledge. (5.54) – Can you tell us about your worst IT career moment and what you learned from the experience? Eric says it was probably the morning he woke up to the headline "Worst Security Flaw Ever Found in Internet Explorer". Eric had worked on the piece of code that was involved in the issue. At first, he thought that he may have made the error. It turned out that his code had been changed and that change had not been properly reviewed, so the potential weakness was not found. The security flaw was nowhere near as serious as reported by the press. It would have required a virtually impossible hack to be executed in order to take advantage of the flaw. After that, a much stronger culture of code reviews was put into place. (9.17) – Phil says to Eric - Can you maybe take us through your career highlights or greatest success? Eric says there were two. The first was his work on a new version of VisualStudio. They met the completion target date and every single planned feature was included in the release. His other highlight was being involved in the "from scratch" C sharp rewrite. That massive project was also successfully completed and shipped. C sharp now has over 5 million lines of code, it is truly huge. (14.42) – Looking to the future Phil wants to know what excites Eric about the IT industry. Eric says it is the fact that we have still only really scratched the surface. There are so many features that can still be added to the various languages. For example, we can take features from programming languages and add them to production languages which would immediately raise the bar. We want to be able to write programs that can reason naturally about all kinds of probabilistic things and we are getting there. There is still a ton of stuff to do in the programming languages and tools space. (17.43) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Eric started programming before he owned a computer. He would write them out on paper and type them into the school's Commodore PET. He had intended to study either mathematics or physics. But, he soon realized that he was not good at physics. He was much better at computer programming and enjoyed it, plus he could work while studying IT. (19.22) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Eric reiterated the advice to find a source of questions and answer them. But, he added that it was important to learn how to write well. Learn how to be concise and convince people that you've written correct code. To do that you need to write convincingly. (20.29) if you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Eric says he would study statistics. Much of the machine learning and probabilistic programming is about understanding statistics. With differential programming there is even calculus involved, something Eric never expected to see. (21.27) – What objectives are you focusing on now Eric? He responded by saying, "Building cutting-edge tools and helping real developers to get real stuff done". The same focus he had at the start of his career. (21.30) – What would you consider to be your most important non-technical skill? Being able to communicate effectively, it is crucial. (22.57) - Eric, can you share a parting piece of career advice with the IT Career Energizer audience. Know your tools. I get pitched features for tools and programming languages that already exist. It shows that a lot of people do not know

GUEST BIO: Stefan Tilkov is a co-founder and principal consultant at INNOQ, a technology consulting company with offices in Germany and Switzerland. He has been involved in the design of large-scale, distributed systems for more than two decades, using a variety of technologies and tools. He has authored numerous articles and a book and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil's guest on today's show is Stefan Tilkov who is a co-founder of, and the principal consultant, at INNOQ, a leading technology consulting company. Stefan and his team design large-scale distributed systems. Over the years, he has worked with numerous programming languages including C++ and CORBA over J2EE/Java EE and Web Services to REST and Ruby on Rail and several others. He is also a published writer who frequently speaks at conferences across the world. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.00) – So Stefan, you can I ask you to expand on that brief summary and tell us a little bit about yourself? Stefan said that Phil had covered what he had done over most of the past 20 years. Today, Stefan rarely gets the chance to program anymore. But, he does get the chance to do many other things that he enjoys. Particularly, consulting with clients and talking to them about architecture and the design of systems. A lot of his time is also taken up with the company management stuff. When he can, he still does some of the technical work. (1.54) – Phil asks Stefan for a unique IT career tip. Quite early in his career Stefan started public speaking. He feels that doing this has benefitted him greatly. It has helped him with client engagement, with meetings and with negotiations. The fact that he is very used to talking to people in his career makes all of these situations far easier. (3.38) – Stefan is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Interestingly, it is related to public speaking. Early in his career he was working on a project where C++ was used. Things had worked out so that he was the only one on the team who knew anything about that language. So, when the project manager was unable to make a client meeting, Stefan was the only person with enough knowledge to be able to make the presentation. But, he was very new to the world of work and had not had any time to prepare. Unsurprisingly, he completely "bombed" and felt really awful about it for quite a few days. (5.09) – So, moving away from your worst moment, can you maybe talk about your IT career, highlight or greatest success. Strangely, that happened when Stefan was working on a project that went completely wrong. It was a disaster on every level. Everybody had given up a little on the project. But, various members of the business, including Stefan, pulled together and were able to turn the project around. The client was surprised they had managed to do so and went on to use it for a decade or so. Stefan felt better about this project than ones he has worked on where everything has gone smoothly from the start. (7.09) – Phil asks Stefan what it is about the future of the IT industry that excites him. Stefan says there has never been a better time to be involved in IT. Since around 2008/9 the industry has gotten progressively more interesting. Technology now touches and influences every part of your life. Everyone is talking about it and understands how important it is. Right now, IT professionals influence so many things and are able to work in a much more connected fashion. Stefan would not trade his IT job for any other. (8.59) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Stefan said it was the amazing discovery that he was able to tell the machine what to do. He started using computers at age 10 or 11. At the time, computers were very rudimentary. Stefan loved the challenge of having to figure absolutely everything out from scratch. For him learning new things was like a detective story. Phil commented that he often forgets that, in the early 90s, when you bought a computer, there was nothing on it. (10.43) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? Early on someone encouraged Stefan to write documentation, proposals and to explain what he was doing in writing. Later he went on to write articles and books. Writing is an important piece of the puzzle. Being able to express your thoughts clearly is vital. (11.35) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Stefan said I would look for fun stuff to play with. Building things is fun, so, if you have the time, play and learn. Use your skills to do things for yourself, friends, your community and maybe help society or do some open source work. Not everything you work on needs to be commercial and about making money. (12.40) – Phil asks Stefan what career objectives he is currently focusing on. Right now Stefan is focused on the company. Along with his colleagues he is working to maintain a healthy company culture as the company continues to grow at a fast rat

GUEST BIO: Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile as well as an occasional conference speaker. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: In this episode Phil speaks to Kelsey Hightower, who is known in the industry as an innovator who makes things happen. He strongly believes in the power of the community, so works on bringing people and motivating them to produce products that truly work. He is currently working on the GoogleCloud project and is a popular technical workshop speaker and teacher, who believes in and advocates the use of Open Source products. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (00.59) – So Kelsey, you can I ask you to expand on that brief summary and tell us a little bit about yourself? Kelsey explains that he has been in tech for about 14 years with various companies including Puppet Labs and Chrome OS. He is currently working at Google making sure that all elements of the Google Cloud work together. Kelsey says he is working on the computer side of the house, on everything from Kubernetes to the Google service platform. He now describes himself as a generalist. Phil described Kelsey's role as creating "seamless integration from a user perspective" (2.00) – Phil asks Kelsey for a unique IT career tip. Surprisingly, Kelsey's tip is to "write it down". In IT we tend to do things on the fly. Often, we do this because we are trying to minimize outage time. Sometimes it is because we want to implement change and feel we need to move quickly to keep everyone on board. Operating like this means that, often, we do not come up with the right solution. In the long-term this can turn out to be a big problem. It is important to stop, sit down and capture all the facts and consider the pros and cons of your proposed solution. You also need discuss the idea with others. For this a document acts as a great reference point. It also enables you to look back and understand why you made the decisions you did. (3.25) – Phil asks - Do you see that as an iterative process, as well? Kelsey agrees often these projects can span many years. Over that time, things will change so the objective or goal can also evolve. But, that document you created captures the current situation. It does not mean that you should never change your opinions and the direction you take. (4.24) – Phil asks - do you see it as a problem in IT generally that people don't necessarily think too far ahead in terms of what the future might look like? In IT people tend not to take the time to document why things are done the way they are. Plus, they do not always work to push things forward. When someone asks them to change, their immediate response is that "it is not possible". But, when you ask them to explain why the change is not viable, they do not really know. They just know that things have always been done that way and can be resistant to change. (5.31) – Kelsey is asked to share his worst career moment with the audience. For Kelsey it was the moment that he realized that to be able to make progress on a project you have to convince people that things need to happen. The realization put out a flame for him. Prior to that, he believed that he could just make things happen. He was a bit disappointed to realize that he had to overcome people's resistance to get things done. But, he soon adjusted and learned to do both. So, in the end his worst career moment resulted in a positive change for Kelsey. (7.10) – Phil asks Kelsey what his best career moment was. Kelsey explained it was the day he first spoke publically at a meetup in Georgia Tech. He did a lot of preparation for that event, so that he could make his points concisely and take the entire audience, including the newcomers, with him. It went really well and he got great feedback. That day inspired him and set the scene for the rest of his IT career. Today, he enjoys seeing the light bulbs going on as the audience "gets it". (10.11) – Phil asks Kelsey what excites him about the future of the IT industry. Kelsey responds "the potential". Today, it is possible for a newcomer or new business to come along and use some of the existing systems to get what needs to be done. They do not have to worry about legacy systems and integrations. It is possible to install a modern system that just works and takes care of the basic functions, leaving the new firm to focus on growing their business. (11.55) – What attracted you to a career in IT? When Kelsey started his IT career, you did not need a college degree and you could earn very good money. Both of these facts attracted him to the field. Working in IT is a great way to connect with others, make a difference and be rewarded financially for your efforts. (12.46) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Definitely, "write it down." If you believe something is

KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.02) – So Tim, can I ask you to expand on some of those things and tell us a little bit about yourself? Since Tim was a boy he has had a fascination with all things tech. This is part of the reason he is now a generalist with a deep understanding of everything from the hardware to the software. Over the past couple of years, he has focused on the public cloud, in particular Microsoft Azure. (1.50) – Phil asks Tim for a unique IT career tip. Tim explains that developing the ability to organize your thoughts and present them clearly is very important. Public speaking ensures that you learn and practice those critical skills. (3.06) –Tim is asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Fortunately, Tim's worst IT career moment has a silver lining. Tim has always been a teacher as well as an IT professional. So, when he was in the running for an IT directorship in a local private High School he focused on securing that role. But, the school changed its mind and decided not to go in that direction. This was a big blow and very depressing. But, the experience taught him the need to keep the prospect of a future position in context. IT moves at the speed of light, so you need to take a flexible and agile approach to your career. (6.00) – Phil asks Tim to tell everyone about his career highlight, his greatest success. That happened when Tim was speaking at a big conference about WireShark. The audience was a big one and they were eager. So, eager in fact that some of them were applying what he was telling them immediately. There was even a group of programmers from one company who were instant messaging his troubleshooting advice back to their datacenter. That experience demonstrated to Tim the importance and practical value of the technical education he was providing. It was great to see people developing their careers, live, right there in front of him. (7.50) – Phil wants to know what excites Tim about the future of the IT industry and careers. Tim loves the fact that industry work can now be done from anywhere. There is no longer to spend ages in a car traveling or to work in a data center. Cloud computing is definitely the future anyone involved in IT cannot avoid working with cloud computing. However, it is a little worrying that newcomers are not likely to be able to do any actual cabling. Tim's experience of interfacing with the hardware has helped him to develop software-defined networks that work properly. (9.00) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Puzzle solving and the fact that you become a perpetual student, there is always something new to learn. Tim was inquisitive from an early age, so for him IT was the perfect fit. (9.55) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Tim said his grandfather told him "if you're doing work that you would do even if you weren't getting paid for it, then you found your right career." It was a good piece of advice and one of the reasons Tim continues to work in tech and information. (11.38) - If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Tim says that is tricky because today's IT industry is very different than when he started. He sometimes wishes he had majored in computer science. He advises someone entering the field today to survey as many different disciplines as possible. Then whittle down where their interests and aptitude lie. (12.20) – Phil asks Tim what he is currently focusing on. Tim is still creating Microsoft Azure training and doing consultancy work when he wants to do so. Tim is also doing his best to give back to the IT community, by talking at workshops, mentoring, teaching and attending meetups. (12.58) – What would you consider to be your most important non-technical skill? For Tim it is public speaking. There are plenty of ways to learn this skill and it is well worth taking the time to do so. Being confident and able to be concise and persuasive will help you with job interviews, pitching ideas and selling your case. (14.03) – Phil asks Tim to share a few final words of career advice. Unless you enjoy the work, Tim advises considering another career. IT requires a lot of time and effort, so it is not something you want to be doing if you do not enjoy it. BEST MOMENTS: (2.33) TIM – "The ability to organize your thoughts and present your thoughts clearly is going to carry your career." (4.46) TIM – "It's important to be that flexible and agile in your approach to your career." (10.03) TIM – "If you're doing work that you would do even if you weren't getting paid for it, then you found your right career." – Tim's grandfather." (14.00) TIM – "You really can't go wrong with by honing your public speaking skills." (14.09) TIM – "In information technology careers, you're never going to be hurting for work." CONTACT TIM WARNER: Website: https://www.techtrainertim.com Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TechTrainerTim

GUEST BIO: Simona Cotin is a Developer Advocate for Microsoft and an Angular enthusiast. She is passionate about knowledge sharing and has mentored at workshops for Women Who Code and NgGirls, and is also co-organiser of the JavaScript London meetup. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today, Phil is speaking to Simona Cotin a Developer Advocate for Microsoft. She is a passionate mentor in the NgGirls, codebar and Women Who Code workshops. Over the years, she has hacked all kinds of projects in Delphi, C/C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Lisp and is still learning new languages. She has a passion for working with Angular. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(1.00) – So Simona, can I ask you to expand on that brief summary and tell us a little bit about yourself? Simona explained that her job at Microsoft was to make sure that they build "great developer experiences in the cloud for web developers." She is also passionate about teaching, so is a regular mentor at several workshops. One of which, codebar she recommends everyone checks out. This group is working to make tech more diverse and bring people from different backgrounds together. (2.21) – Phil asks Simona for a unique IT career tip. Simona says get out there share your knowledge. Try to contribute to open source projects and be active in local communities and on social media. (3.17) – If you were talking to someone who was just starting their IT career, what would you recommend to them as the easiest way to begin? Simona recommends finding some of the projects you are passionate about and diving deep into those. Follow the project and creators on GitHub and Twitter. Also, use meetup.com to find local meetups and attend. (3.54) – Phil asks what her worst IT career moment has been? – Simona says – "I've been lucky enough not to have been in such a position". For her all of the teams she has worked on have had a positive impact on her career. However, she does regret not finding a mentor while she was at university. Had she done so she would not have taken a job (her first one) which meant that she was working on a desktop project when it was the web that she was passionate about, at the time. (5.38) – What has been your best career moment,? For Simona it is the job that she has right now. She is working on a great team. Everyone on her team is a superstar. Working with them is enabling her to learn a lot and have an impact on the products that are shaping the way we write software. (7.05) – Phil asks what excites you about the future of the IT industry? All the hard problems we are solving now and in the future excite Simona. For example, how self-driving cars will make our commute much simpler and less risky or the way in which AI is improving workplace safety. How technology will help us to build a more sustainable environment. She encourages everyone working in IT to focus on the problem that they are solving rather than the tech that they are using. (8.43) – What attracted you to a career in IT? Simona loves mathematics and was not really good at anything to do with literature. This fact narrowed down her options so she felt she had to focus on economics. While doing that she learned about computer science and algorithms. Basically, she "fell in love with algorithms." (9.11) – What is the best career advice you have been given? – Embrace failure. Simona explained that she came from a culture of "perfection and shaming failure". But, she realizes now that there is "no growth without failure". Phil agrees most seasoned developers feel that they learn more from projects that do not go well than those that are easy. (9.48) – If you were to begin your career again, what would you focus on? Simona said she would focus on machine learning because we can solve so many interesting problems using it. (10.05) – Phil asks Simona what she is currently focusing on, currently. Simona said that she is focusing more on machine learning and understanding how to use it to solve problems. She is also working on connecting to communities and using her Azure work to have an impact. (10.31) – What's the number one non-technical skill that has helped you in your career so far? Being a huge fan of people and being a good communicator has helped Simona throughout her career. (10.41) – Phil asks Simona to share a few final words of career advice. Simona's advice is to never stop learning and building things. Have fun, be meaningful and intentional about what you do. BEST MOMENTS: (2.57) Simona – "I think we can all equally benefit from just putting ourselves out there." (5.16) Simona - "During university I would find someone to mentor me, I would find someone to chat about my passions, chat about what are the opportunities for me out there." (8.07) Simona – "Focus as much as you can on the problem that you are solving as opposed to the tech that they're using." (8.09) Phil - "The technology is the means to the end. It's the problems that need solving that are the important part of it." (9.15) Simona

GUEST BIO: In this episode Phil talks to Wes Bos. Wes is a Fullstack web developer and designer who spends most of his time working with JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5. Wes is also a lead instructor at HackerYou, an instructor for Ladies Learning Code and a regular conference speaker on everything from Front End Dev to ServerSide JavaScript. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (1.00) – Phil asked Wes to tell the audience a bit more about himself? Wes says he has been a Fullstack web developer for about 10 years now. He spends most of his time writing JavaScript. Mostly React on the frontend and Node.js on the backend. He also builds web development courses and has been running his own podcast for about a year now, which is regularly in the iTunes top 40. (1.53) – Phil asks Wes for a unique IT career tip. Wes starts by saying that for his whole career he has been teaching people how to learn code. Over the years, he has noticed that most people become frustrated with their rate of progress. They want to know what the secret code is in order to understand things. I always tell them that there is no secret. Repetition is what you need to learn. You have to keep putting in the time and just build stuff. Developers need a continual learning mindset and they have to put what they learn into practice. (3.40) –Wes is asked to share his worst career moment. Wes explained that this happened when he was working for an oil and gas company. At the time, he was earning great money. It was a 4-month summer co-op deal, which was fortunate, because Wes hated it. For him, that time was his career low point. However, the experience taught him that he was far better off running his own business. That is what he has done and it is working out really well for him. (5.12) So, has your focus been courses as much as anything else? Wes, says yes, but not only courses. He has continued working as a freelancer to ensure that he stays sharp. But, right now, most of his income comes from his courses and teaching work. (5.53) – Can you take us through your career highlights or greatest successes. Wes ran a blog and wrote a book about Sublime Text. At times he doubted anyone would read it. However, when he finally published it, within a month he had been paid way more for his time than he would have had he used that time to work as a freelancer. It was a good feeling. (7.04) – Phil wants to know what excites Wes about the future for the IT industry and careers. Wes finds it amazing how fast things are developing. He likes the way an ordinary person, a regular developer, can radically change things. That is exciting, so is the fact that industry moves so quickly. It means that anyone can start learning now and be at the forefront quickly if they are prepared to apply themselves. (8.38) - Are there any particular technologies or languages or anything like that, that you think right now are the ones to look at? For Wes it is learning JavaScript and things like TypeScript. Ordinary people can learn how to use it and within 3 or 4 years be doing amazing things with it. (9.28) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Wes's dad worked in IT, so they were the first kids on the block to have a computer, followed by the internet. He got used to, and liked, being at the cutting edge of everything and he loved computers. For him a career in IT was a natural progression. (9.57) – What is the best career advice you've ever received? Wes tells Phil it was "double your rates". He tried it and it worked. This enabled him to work part-time on client work and still have enough money and time to spend on other interests. (10.46) – If you were to begin your career again, right now, what would you do? Wes said he would start by spending a lot of time on YouTube just soaking in much as he could. (11.28) – Phil asks Wes what career objectives he is currently focusing on. Wes says he has always "optimized for happiness" and still does today. He is currently able to spend as much time as he wants with his kids, take holidays whenever he needs to, and he feels happy with what he produces. So, his focus is on maintaining that freedom, staying happy. (12.35) – What's the number one non-technical skill that has helped you in your career, so far? Wes says funnily enough it is writing. He sees himself as a terrible writer who is always making grammar and spelling mistakes. However, he can convey what he needs or wants to be done, in succinct emails, which is a great skill to have. He is also able to write good copy for marketing websites, which is also useful. (13.41) – Phil asks Wes to share a parting piece of career advice with the audience. Wes says – "Just go out there and start. Start doing it rather than sitting around pontificating about it." BEST MOMENTS: (2.30) WES - "I always tell people, there's no formation without repetition." (3.36) PHIL - "Learning is only balanced by the doing. That's the vital ingredient from my point of view." (3.40) WES - "You definitely have to have

GUEST BIO: Jon Skeet is a Staff Software Engineer at Google, working from the London office on the Google Cloud Client Libraries for .NET. He's probably better known for his contributions on Stack Overflow and his book, C# in Depth. Jon is married to Holly Webb, a prolific children's author, and they have three children together. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: In this episode Phil interviews Jon Skeet who is a senior software engineer for Google. He is the author behind C# in Depth, a book that made him something of a C# legend. Jon is also a well-known Stack Overflow contributor who has a reputation for providing descriptive answers that solve the toughest challenges. Some go as far as calling him "the Chuck Norris of programming". KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (1.00) – So Jon, can you expand on that summary and tell us a little bit more about yourself? In response, Jon explains that he is a big fan of working from home. So, he does not spend very much time at Google's London headquarters. Instead he works out of a high tech, air-conditioned shed, complete with an ice-cream maker and surround-sound. Jon is a feminist, a Methodist and a local preacher who has a passion for musical theatre. (2.03) – Phil asks Jon for a unique IT career tip, something the audience should know. Jon replies that it is important to remember that "you will make far quicker progress in the long run, if you take one step at a time. Work through the problem in a structured way using a language you are really familiar with. If you are learning a new language, start by doing really simple things. But, don't be afraid to "step into the dark" to try something totally new. Just do so consciously and accept that failing, at first, is fine. You will learn a lot that way. Spend most of your time working in a familiar way and try just one new thing at a time, so that you are always making progress. (4.14) Phil asks if Jon would describe that as a sort of incremental process. Jon said yes, "it is really don't run before you can walk." (4.38) – Phil asks Jon to share his worst career moment and what he learned from it. For Jon his low-point was not directly related to coding or a technical issue. He was working on a product launch with a looming deadline. As a result, he ended up working very odd hours to get the job done. Instead of arriving at the station at his normal time of 6.45 he was getting there at about 3.30am. He was compensating a bit by going home a little earlier than normal but he was actually working long hours. Plus, even though he was going to bed earlier he was not sleeping well. People were telling him he did not look well, so he was clearly stretched. But, he carried on working that way, until one morning he was mugged. The mugging probably would not have happened if there were more people around. Being mugged stopped Jon in his tracks and he realized that he needed to take more care of himself. He decided to stop putting in a lot of hours at the wrong times of the day. He no longer pushed himself so hard or let others do it to him. Jon realized that he had to take care of himself. (7.18) – Phil wants to know what Jon's best career moment was. Jon starts by explaining that he is proud of helping thousands of people and being at the top of Stack Overflow as well as his book and software. But, his career highlights have come while talking with other people. For example, in June, Jon spent several days talking with and teaching alongside a lead designer on C#. During that collaboration he learned a huge amount about why C# is designed the way it is. Talking and working with others teaches him a lot and is very fulfilling. (9.18) – Phil asks what excites Jon about the future of IT. To some extent for Jon it is how little we know about it. "We are now in an age where when you go to university half of the jobs the student take up don't exist yet." The fact that we cannot really tell what tech is going to look like in 10 years time is exciting. Potentially, a whole area that nobody is even considering now could easily come to the fore. (10.56) – What drew you to a career in IT, Jon? From the age of 8 Jon played games on a ZX Spectrum 48K. Eventually, he started programming on the Spectrum. For his first project, he created a logo interpreter. He was motivated to do so because the BBC microcomputer at school had one. His innocence meant that he did not know that you could not implement the code yourself. So, he did not see that so-called impossible barrier. As a result, he just kept working at it until he got it done. By age 9 or 10 he was in love with programming. (12.32) – What is the best career advice you were given? "Be good at one thing" – make sure that there is one thing that you are really comfortable in. It is good to have several strings to your bow. But, be the go-to person for at least one topic or discipline. (13.36) – If you were to start your IT career again, what would you do? Jon said that because things are changing so quickly he ha

GUEST BIO: Justin is co-founder of Test Double, an agency of highly skilled developers on a mission to fix what's broken in software. As well as running Test Double, Justin is also an occasional conference speaker. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Today, Phil is talking to Justin Searls who is the co-founder of Test Double. An agency that embeds their developers into businesses to deliver the software they really need. Their approach includes refactoring legacy code, where appropriate, and mentoring the clients they work with. Justin is also an occasional public speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (0.41) – Phil asked Justin to share a bit more information about himself. Justin responded by saying that he is a lifetime consultant, so has worked on many different projects. As a result, he deeply understands how software teams fail. This, in part, inspired him to start Test Double. He realized that he needed to hire developers who were passionate, positive. People who were happy to act as teachers and mentors while fixing company's software issues. (2.37) – Phil asks Justin to share a unique career tip. Justin explains that following your passions all of the time was not necessarily a good idea, at least in the long-term. He explained that when speaking at universities most students say they want to be games developers. This is understandable, but the market is flooded with games developers. So, many of those who go ahead and follow what they love end up being paid relatively low wages. When Justin started out he resisted the temptation to just do things he liked. He focused on JavaScript testing. At the time only a few other people were doing that. So, they ended up with an almost unique, highly sought-after skill set. Justin focused on what people needed more than what he wanted, which led to a successful career. (5.39) – Justin is asked about his worst career moment. For Justin that happened when he was working for a major financial institution. Many of their transactions had to be confirmed and recorded in writing, so they received around 40,000 pieces of mail every day. It all had to be opened and processed manually. Justin was a key part of the team that put together an OCR style system that would capture all of that data and improve the efficiency of the mail system. On the night of the handover, all of the servers went down. Justin had no internet and because the phones were VOIP no way of communicating with anyone. It turns out a cleaner had knocked a fire extinguisher over in the server room, which pressed the cut out button. It took the firm days to get the old system back online. Then they still had to go through the process of moving to the new system. It was a disaster. That experience showed Justin how important continuous delivery is when switching to new systems. Taking an incremental approach when you can is far safer and more efficient in the long run. (8.56) – Phil asks Justin to share a career highlight. Justin explained that Double Test now employs 40 people all of whom work remotely. Most of them rarely meet each other. However, every now and again they get together at a mentor retreat with their plus ones. Seeing them all together like that, the first time, made him realize that he had played a role in creating a group of people who all respected and cared for each other and were able to pull together as an effective team. For Justin, that was a truly joyful moment, a career highlight. (10.55) – Phil wants to know what excites Justin about the future for the IT industry. Justin starts by saying if you were to ask a group of business leaders about who would be coding in 10 years you would get conflicting answers. Half would say everyone, while the rest would say nobody. He suspects that both sides are right to some extent. Some things will be done automatically, but everyone will end up at least tinkering with code. For example, the Siri shortcuts that have recently been released will allow users to create their own custom workflows. The future of coding is going to be different, which is exciting and brings all kinds of opportunities. (15.36) – Phil asked Justin what drew him to a career in IT. Justin got the bug at a young age. On a school vacation his luggage was lost, which meant that he did not have the clothing he needed to be able to spend time outside. So, he was stuck indoors with just what was in his backpack. That happened to be his homework and a graphing calculator. Using this tiny handheld computer he started to program simple games. That was it, Justin had the IT bug. At that point he realized that coding opened up untold (17.25) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Justin says he was advised to live below his means for as long as possible as a student and after qualifying. He did it for a long time and saved up a lot of money. Doing this gives you the financial freedom to move jobs whenever you want. There is no need to be stuck in a bad job or one where you are not growing

Today, Phil chats with James Shore. James teaches, writes and consults on Agile development processes. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-creator of the Agile Fluency Model, and co-author of "The Art of Agile Development". James has also been named as one of "the most influential people in Agile" by InfoQ. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(0.31) – Phil started by asking James to tell everyone a bit more about himself. James explained that he started his I.T. career as a programmer. In 1999, he was introduced to what was known as Extreme Programming (XP), which is the most prominent of the Agile software development methodologies. At first, James was not convinced, but when he tried it, he was hooked. So much so, that he decided he could not work any other way. At the time, he could not find anybody else working the XP way, so he decided to teach the method himself. That is how he became an Agile consultant. (2.45) – Phil and James discuss the fact that Agile is not new. It has been around for just over 20 years now and the movement is really gathering pace. However, James does point out that "a lot of what people call Agile is not really Agile." The quality of implementation varies quite a bit. (3.26) – Phil asks James to share a unique IT career tip. James responded by saying you need to "make a point of understanding the business impact of what you're doing." He went on to remind everyone that a typical software team costs circa $1 million to run. A cost that has to be covered by the value the team adds to the business. He highlighted the fact that a 5% improvement in a team's performance is worth at least $50,000. When you ask for something to improve efficiency remember to make the business case and explain the cost savings clearly. (4.44) – Phil asked James to share a business experience from which he learned something important. For James that happened 20 years ago. At the time he was working for the firm that provided the robots used by Intel to move silicone around on its chip production line. James was part of a team who worked on a distributed system that had multiple services running on different computers. Each service worked in its own environment, but when they hooked it all up the problems began. At the time, the waterfall or phase gate development method was the norm for software development. It was supposed to be a flawless development process. But, in reality, it was not. That project and several others James worked on that followed the standard "waterfall" method were disasters. At that point, James realized the futility of a development method that tried to predict everything in advance, lock things down and come up with the entire design. He also saw how dangerous it was to wait to the very end to validate the work and make the biggest decisions. It was then he understood the flaws of the way development was managed 20 years ago. It was this experience that helped him to recognize the true value of Agile development methods when he was introduced to them. (8.51) – Phil asks what James considered to be his best career moment. James explained that about two years ago he consulted for a start-up that had just gone public and had growing pains. They had 40 teams, so keeping tabs on what they were all doing was impossible. Plus, there was a lot of interdependency between teams, so everything took forever. James discovered that waiting around for another team to do something was causing 95% of the delays. On one project, during a 3-month period, only 3 or 4 days of real work could be done. This stop-start, multitasking way of working, was terrible for focus too. James minimized the teams and got the firm to start by working on the smallest projects that added value, first. These changes minimized the amount of inter-team dependency and got everyone working together and actually delivering working projects fast. He also encouraged teams to solve more of their problems internally. The net result of his changes was that they reduced the delays from 95% to 0%. Most MMFs were completed in just a week or two. The company thrived and grew very quickly. (12.49) – Phil wants to know what excites James about the future for the IT industry. James explains that the fact the industry is so young is exciting because it means change is possible and can happen quickly. Agile is the exact opposite of the Waterfall way of working, yet in less than 20 years people have adopted this new way of working. That is a 180-degree change. In an older industry that just would not happen. In I.T you can suggest new ideas and people will actually be willing to try them. (15.05) – What is the best career advice you have been given? James responded with three words "be well-rounded". (15.11) Phil asks if you were to begin your I.T. career again, right now, what would you do? James says that he would focus on networking and finding a mentor. (15.20) – Phil asks James what he i

GUEST BIO: Michael Kennedy is known best for being a Python expert. He is a Python Software Foundation fellow. His two podcasts Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes are well regarded, as are his developer training courses. Michael has been working in the developer field for more than 20 years and has spoken at numerous conferences including NDC and DevWeek. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: In this episode, Phil interviews Python Specialist Michael Kennedy. He is the host of Python Bytes and Talk Python to Me. Michael is also the founder of Talk Python training and a fellow of the Python Software Foundation. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (0.59) – Phil asked Michael to tell the audience a bit more about himself? In response, Michael explained that when he started his work life he focused on the science sector. While working on his maths PhD, he discovered programming. He said, "It just really connected with me". That was 20 years ago, yet every day he feels a little bit more excited than he was the day before. With IT you are always learning, which is exciting. (2.05) – Phil asks Michael for a unique IT career tip. Michael started by saying that it is important to remember that "small things add up". He said, we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, but massively underestimate what can be done in a couple of years. He pointed out that you need to carry on learning to progress. He also explained that it is important to realize that in the IT world there are no longer gatekeepers. The days when you had to ask permission from somewhere like IBM or Oracle to be accepted into the IT world are gone. Today, you are in control. "You no longer have to ask permission to be part of this, excel and be a leader, you just have to want it"If you want to do something all you have to do is to work gradually towards doing it. (4.13) – Michael was asked to share his worst career moment by Phil. Michael said that happened while he was working for DARPA, which is an advanced US government research facility. He was working on a secret project that used software to pull together the efforts of several companies and organizations. Unfortunately, the software did not work properly, so needed debugging. Under normal circumstances that would be a tedious task, but not a huge problem. But, for this project, his main partner was a man from the UK and he did not have the necessary security clearance to attend the meetings where the issues were discussed. He could not be in the room. Someone had to summarize what the problems were and he had to use that information to debug the software. Very stressful. (6.55) Phil asked "did you learn anything particular from this situation?" Michael said, yes, we should have tested more and used a technical person who could have physical access to the thing we were working on. (7.23) – On the flipside, Phil asks Michael what his best career moment was. Michael explained that he started working as a developer and enjoyed that work. But, it was starting to teach programming and developer skills that has been the highlight of his career, so far. (11.14) – Phil wants to know what excites Michael about the future for the IT industry. The fact that it is relatively easy for new people to enter the field and learn is something that Michael finds exciting. Students no longer have to hope that they can work it out from a book because there is plenty of support available. (11.14) – What drew you to a career in IT? Michael enjoys the fact you actually get to build things, rather than just working with theories. He enjoys the debate involved in developing a product and being able to press the button and find out if what you have done actually works. (12.10) – What is the best career advice you have been given? Because Michael was self-taught he said that he did not get much IT career advice from mentors and teachers. But, after speaking to others working in the field, he thinks that the most important piece of advice he can share is "just take action." He said, "Even if you go the wrong way you will learn enough that you actually learn more about what the right way is." (13.38) – Phil asks what approach Michael would take if he were to start his IT career again, right now. Michael says he would have been more selective and strategic when it came to choosing the projects he worked on. He feels that this would have made things easier for him. (14.30) – Phil asks what career objective Michael is currently focusing on. Michael said "I'm really focused on trying to inspire and inform developers". The fundamental goal of his podcasts is to make people aware of new things that they should be interested in. He is working to make it easier for people to learn Python and develop successful IT careers. (15.33) – What would you consider to be your most important non-technical skill? For Michael, learning to speak publically had been especially beneficial. The urge to share helped him to overcome his fear and communicate better. (16.36) –

In this episode Phil's guest is Kevin L Jackson, who is a senior information technologist specializing in information technology solutions that meet critical business and mission operational requirements. Kevin is founder and CEO of Gov Cloud Network. He is also a published author and a regular speaker. Over the years, he has worked with many different companies including IBM, JPMorgan Chase &Co, and the SENTEL Corporation. He also enjoyed a 15-year US Navy career as a pilot and aeronautical engineer. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(0.52) – Phil asks Kevin to tell everyone a little more about himself. Kevin explains that his IT career began while he was serving in the Navy. For 10 years he was a carrier pilot but, later, he trained as an aerospace engineer. In that role he worked on Low Earth Orbit Systems, which are used to deliver vital information to the Navy and Marine Corps. His work as an aeronautical engineer gradually led him into the IT sector. This was before the modern internet existed. Instead he worked with the early packet-switching network The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and HoTMetal one of the earliest HTML authoring software packages. (4.21) – Phil asks Kevin if he has a unique career tip to share. Kevin's advice is – "Don't do a job unless you have a personal goal in doing it, unless at the end of your timeframe and that job, you're going to attain a goal that you want." (5.18) – Phil then asks Kevin what you should do if you lose enthusiasm for a project part way through. Kevin explains you need to remember that everything in life is connected. While completing that job you will inevitably learn new skills that will benefit you in the future. Every year, Kevin imagines where he wants to be in five years and works out how what he has learned in the previous year can be used to get him to where he wants to be. (6.10) – Phil points out that every career has its ups and downs. The path to success is not a linear one. (6.40) – Phil asks Kevin to share his worse IT career moment. Kevin went on to talk about the fear he felt when he lost a job because the firm he was working for went out of business. It was an experience that demonstrated to him the importance of building a true career and believing in himself. The fact that he had done this enabled him to fall back on his network and quickly identify his next step. (7.50) – Phil then wanted to know about Kevin's career highlight. When he left the military, Kevin worked on the New Horizon spacecraft for NASA, which travelled to Pluto and photographed it. Working on this project was his career highlight. But, unusually, it took him 10 years to realize this was the case. The spacecraft took 10 years to reach the planet and for Kevin's work to bear fruit. Only at that point did he really understand that he had worked on something that the whole of humanity could benefit from. (10.11) – Phil asked Kevin to tell everyone what it is about the future of the IT industry and careers that excites him. For Kevin the fact that IT is now a business driver rather than just a "must do" task is exciting. Information Technology is now seen as an enabler. Technology is now pushing the pace of business change. (12.06) – What is the best career advice you've ever received? Surprisingly, Kevin said it came from The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Simply put it is "know thy self". (12.36) – Phil asked Kevin what he would do if he were to start his IT career again. Kevin said he would focus on the application of the technology rather than the details of the information technology. He explained that you need to understand how and why stuff works. (13.22) – What are you focusing on now Kevin? Building a strong network is an important aspect of any successful career. Kevin explained that connecting with others, understanding their thoughts and exchanging ideas all help to bring your own thoughts and ideas into sharper focus. Doing this has really helped Kevin to accelerate his career. (14.33) – Phil asked Kevin, What is your number one non-technical skill? Kevin explained that writing was something he struggled with for many years. He did not really see it as an important or relevant skill for him. When he started to write his blog he began to find writing much easier and found that doing it drastically improved his ability to communicate. (15.49) – Kevin shares a last piece of career advice by explaining that it is important not to underestimate the power of social media connections. They are crucial. BEST MOMENTS: (4.32) Kevin - "The best thing to do for any career is to do something you love. If you're not doing something that you enjoy, you won't be good at it." (6.10) Phil - "Using what you've learned, what you've taken on board over the recent period to understand where you might be able to go in the future." (6.19) Kevin - "You're always doing a course correction in your career. Don't expect to be right at the very beginning. You don't know enough to be right."

In this episode, Phil talks to Michael Bolton, a consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people to solve testing problems that they didn't realize they could solve. Michael is also the co-author of Rapid Software Testing, a methodology and mindset for testing software expertly and credibly in uncertain conditions and under extreme time pressure. Michael has more than 25 years of experience testing, developing, managing and writing about software. And for almost 20 years he has led DevelopSense, a Toronto-based testing and development consultancy. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­(2.00) – Phil asks Michael to tell everyone a bit more about himself. Michael explains that he is – "in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with the state of software, in the state of testing." But that he knew this was not necessarily a bad thing because a state of dissatisfaction leads to a desire to change things for the better. Software testers need to help people to identify the problems that represent risks to their businesses. They need to be good critics and to be able to fully understand the value and importance of small things. (3.46) – Phil asks for a unique career tip. Michael says that IT specialists need to have a reputation for "excellence, for good work, for competency and for ethics." You need to work closely with others and be willing to put yourself out there. It is important to express your thoughts and feelings and be prepared to share your experiences, good and bad. You should not be reticent to "expose yourself". He went onto say: "That's how we come to a better world. We get to that by explaining our experience to each other." (6.07) – Phil asks to hear about his worst career moment and what Michael learned from it. For Michael, this happened many years ago when he was working as a program manager on a memory management system. The package did not work as well as was anticipated. Unfortunately, at first, he and the team did not acknowledge the problem fully. He said: "The big mistake I made was looking for circumstances in which the product would work successfully." Luckily Larry, the development manager, did fully recognize the seriousness of the issue and encouraged the team to actually tackle the problem. This experience made Michael realize that "a focus on the problem rather than a focus on success is the path to success." From that point Michael refocused his attention on testing and awareness of the product and pricing. (11.13) – Phil asks Michael to share a career highlight. For Michael this is a tricky question to answer. No one project stood out. But he explained that he felt he had achieved the most when he was able to thoroughly examine the product and gain a deep understanding of it. When he was given the time to do that, he was able to work with the client more effectively. Together they were always able to identify those bugs that really needed fixing and avoid wasting time sorting out those that could easily be "lived with". (14.00) – Phil wants to know what things about the future of IT Michael finds particularly interesting or exciting. Michael responds by saying: "I would like to see the application of a little bit more skepticism and a little bit more nuance in our enthusiasm for new technologies we've seen over the last seven years." He went on to explain that while these innovations could bring us together they could also drive us apart. So he wants to see us be "a little bit more sober, a little bit more reflective in our embrace of new technologies." He believes that it is the best way to be prepared to deal with problems which can and do arise when things change. (16.36) – Phil asks, "what first attracted you to a career in IT?" Michael previously worked in the theatre, so the prospect of a steady income was what first attracted him to the IT field. For many years he had worked for companies as a full time employee before becoming an independent contractor. Once involved in the IT world he became fascinated by "figuring out how these machines work and what makes them not work." He relishes the chance to "create beautiful and amazing things". (18.47) – Phil says - what is the best career advice you've ever received? Michael quickly responds by saying "your CV must be focused on solving the problem for the hiring manager." It should not be an elaborate list of where you worked. This sound advice influences most areas of Michael's work. When he works on a project he asks himself repeatedly – "What is the problem that the person hiring me is trying to address?" This habit keeps him on track and ensures he does not try to contribute things that do not actually solve the problem at hand. (21.10) – Phil asks, if you were to begin your IT career again, what would you do? "I would focus on diversity." Working in many different places, in various roles and on a range of projects has served Michael well. (22.57) - What career objectives are you currently focusing on? Michael says - "I'm curre

EPISODE DESCRIPTION: In this episode, Phil talks to software developer Kent Beck, director of Three Rivers Institute (TRI) and author of multiple programming books. Kent shares his thoughts on how he looks at software development, the value of community and the untapped potential of engineering talent that exists in different areas of the world. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (1.39) - Phil opens by asking Kent to expand on the introduction and tell everyone a bit more about himself. Kent explains that for the last 7 years he has been working at Facebook. His main focus, while there, was on the engineering culture. During those 7 years, he did a lot of writing, coaching and educating. As well as studying the culture as a whole. (2.18) - Phil asks Kent to share a unique career tip. Kent says: "It's easy to treat software development as a production process where there's some functionality and the more quickly you can produce it, the better you are and I think that that's it's an understandable mistake but a fairly large mistake." "I prefer to look at software development as a learning process that throws off running software as a by-product. If you do that, you'll learn to do your job better and better, over time, and those improvements compound on each other." (3.15) - Phil asked Kent to share his worst IT moment and what he learned from that experience. Kent said it was the first time he was fired. He went on to explain he was not paying enough attention to the feedback by saying: "I thought here's the job. I'm doing this job. That was much more important to me then what the team as a whole was trying to accomplish and I did my job as I saw it. It just wasn't what the person signing the checks cared about." (4.09) - From then on, Kent has made a point of really listening and also making sure he is communicating effectively. He said: "So you'll hear me, if I give a talk with question and answer, I almost always will say 'Does that answer your question?'" (5.00) - Phil asks Kent about his career highlight or greatest success. Kent said – "Right at the beginning of my career, I stumbled into a relationship with Ward Cunningham, who would go on to invent the wiki. And it was really a mentor-student relationship, at first". He explained how working with Ward gave him confidence in his abilities and reinforced, in his mind, the need to value his ideas. As well reinforcing the importance of listening to others. (6.43) - Phil asks if Kent felt it was the foundation of many of the things he went on to do subsequently. Kent said he thought it was. For example, "This habit of checking in started very much with the work that I did with Ward. So we would spend a few hours maybe programming something. And then we would go have a coffee and talk about not just the content that we'd worked on, but the process that we'd used for it." Regularly checking in enabled them to pick up on little details at each stage. For example, something as simple as the fact that they had used 4 keystrokes for a process prompted them to ask can we make it 3? They optimized everything from the micro stuff all the way up to how does this fit into society. (7.39) - Phil asks what excites Kent the most about the future of the IT industry and careers in IT. Kent responds saying that 'things are going to definitely radically change'. He expands this statement by explaining that there's unbelievably good engineering talent in Africa which may lead to large-scale collaborations. Kent then states that "we're going to have to find ways of having finer-grain commits and quicker path to production, better feedback from production; but also we're going to have to confront some of the limitations of the social structures that we've built around programming. (09.44) – Kent went on to say that things have the potential to change a lot but also the potential to stagnate if people become complacent. (9.55) – Phil asks Kent whether or not he thinks the trend of diversity will continue. Kent says, "I think the world has big problems, engineers and software engineers can be part of addressing those problems. We don't have near enough engineers to throw away five sixths of the world's engineering talent just because it happens to be female or have melanin in its skin." (10.31) - What first attracted you to a career in IT? (10.41) – "My dad was an electrical engineer, and then a programmer. And when he gave me my first book about BASIC, it was like remembering. It was not like learning. It was just like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how that works." (11.00) – Phil asked - So you felt you found the logic behind it quite straightforward? It just worked with the way you think? Kent said yes and explained he took a microprocessor manual and just read it repeatedly until he remembered it. Even though he did not completely understand it. He knew that he just had to continue to work hard and expand his knowledge. (11.34) – What is the best career advice you ever received? Kent replied

In today's episode Phil chats with Spencer Schneidenbach. Spencer is a software engineer and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, specialising in ASP.NET, C#, JavaScript and Angular JS. Spencer is passionate about software engineering, sharing his knowledge within the community and is a regular speaker at conferences and user groups. Spencer tells us why it's important to be able to experiment and why we should not undervalue the value of networking. Spencer also shares his worst career moment as well as some of his career highlights and talks about a few of the things that excite him about the future of the industry. KEY TAKEAWAYS: [1.23] Phil asks Spencer to expand on the opening introduction. Spencer says that his interests lie in software engineering and architecture, and community involvement. He is currently a chief architect for a company called Ryvit who build integration software for the accounting and construction industries. [2.02] Phil asks Spencer for a unique career tip. Spencer talks about his very first development job where he was given room to experiment. If you have the ability to learn you should experiment with different things. It will help you to get started and to figure out what you love to do. [3.01] Spencer provides a second piece of career advice saying that you should focus in on the needs of the business and of the people within the business. It will help become not just a good I.T. professional but a good all round professional and put you ahead of those who only focus on the technical aspect. [4.11] Phil asks Spencer to share the story of his worst I.T. career moment. Spencer describes an early lesson in deployment which was of an anti-virus software package. Spencer pushed the software update out to fifty nodes thinking, "What's the worst that could happen?" Five minutes later the accounting department were reporting that their computers were running slow. Spencer identified that something about the update was using up all the CPU time preventing users from getting any work done. Spencer learnt that everything you do has an impact in some way and that he should have started small, with one or two computers. [6.39] Phil moves the conversation on, asking Spencer about his greatest I.T. career success. Spencer responds saying that his current position is his greatest success. Spencer talks about his involvement in the creation of a product which continues to be used and is making money for the company. Spencer also talks about updating another software package to use Angular JS rather than web forms. It was rebuilt, from the ground up, making it easier for the end user and resulted in an increase in sales and bookings for the company. [10.37] Phil then asks Spencer what excites him about the future of the I.T. industry and careers in I.T. Spencer talks about machine learning and artificial intelligence saying that they are deep topics that have a lot of implications for the future. [12.12] Phil begins the reveal round and starts by asking Spencer what attracted him to a career in I.T. Spencer says that he grew up around computers and loved technology. But remembers saying, as a kid, "I don't see myself working with computers as a career." However Spencer fell into an I.T. career by accident when someone said "Doesn't Spencer know something about computers?" [13.24] Phil then asks Spencer what has been the best career advice he has received. Spencer talks about the power of building relationships over that of building technical solutions. Get to know people on a personal level and what they care about. [14.14] Phil asks Spencer what he would do if he was starting his career again in today's world. Spencer says that he would probably do the same again. The only thing he may have done differently is learn some algorithmic stuff earlier. [15.41] Phil follows up by asking Spencer about his current career objectives and Spencer says that he feels that he is working in the role he wants so his only goal is to continue to provide business value. [16.41] Phil continues, asking Spencer what non-technical skill has made the difference to his career. Spencer says that he believes it is empathy and being able to put himself in other people's shoes. [17.59] Phil asks Spencer for a parting piece of career advice. Spencer says that we should not undervalue the value of networking. Go to meetups, talk to the attendees and the speakers. Get to know them and be willing to engage. ABOUT THE HOST Phil Burgess, an I.T. consultant, mentor, and coach, is the creator and host of the I.T. Career Energizer Podcast. His podcast continues to inspire, assist and guide anybody wanting to start, develop and grow a career in I.T. by inviting successful I.T. professionals, consultants, and experts to share their advice, career tips and experiences. CONTACT THE HOST Website: itcareerenergizer.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philburgess ABOUT THE GUEST Spencer Schneidenbach is a software engineer and Microsoft

In today's episode, Phil chats with Andy Hunt. Andy is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He's authored a dozen books including the best-selling "The Pragmatic Programmer," and was one of the 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto and founders of the Agile Alliance. He also co-founded the pragmatic bookshelf, publishing award-winning and critically acclaimed books for software developers. Andy shares his story about why he chose I.T as his career and reveals his best and worst experiences in the I.T world. Listen to his career tips and advice. There is a lot to learn from Andy that will help you to become the best that you can be. KEY TAKEAWAYS: [1:21] Phil asks Andy to expand upon the brief introduction provided. Andy shares the story of how he had a real interest in radio electronics at that time. He says that he was very interested in early computers with the S100 BUS and CPM. He recalls that he loved how programming lets you go in and create your own world which, for Andy, is still the most exciting aspect of it. Andy says that programming was easier and much more self-contained back then. The programming world is a very different place than it used to be. [2:41] Phil requests for Andy to share a unique career tip for the I.T Career Energizer audience, one that the audience should know but don't. Andy excitedly answers that he'll give two tips. He talks about his 2008 book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning", the thesis being that the two things you do more than anything else as a programmer are learning and communication. We communicate with the machine. We communicate with each other, and to end users to gather requirements, to learn requirements. Besides the tech stacks and the latest language of the day, you're learning how the evolving system behave, you're learning how your team behaves, and you're learning how the end users work and what they expect, what the market demands. So, we're all about learning in communication. Those are the important things. [3:42] Andy's first tip is to never stop learning. When you come across something unfamiliar, a term you don't know, a framework you've never heard of, a new language, look it up, Google's right there. It's on your phone. It's right on your screen. Take the 5 seconds when something you're unfamiliar with comes up and see what it is. Look into it. Look more into it if it's something interesting or something that you might have to work with. So, always take that extra step and pursue the unfamiliar. That's part one. [4:16] Andy says that this second tip makes the biggest difference for people who are successful. Always write down your ideas. Carry something with you always where you can jot down a quick note. It doesn't have to be electronic. It might even be better if it's not. Use an App on your phone, send yourself a voicemail. Andy says that he found out that most of the processes in the brain are asynchronous. You get interesting ideas or the seeds of great ideas randomly and usually when you're not at a computer and not at work. So you need something with you to jot them down because you won't remember it later. And then, when you have a chance later, when you're at the computer, when you're working, whatever, follow up on it. Make a note somewhere else more permanently. That's really key to capturing the great ideas that you have but most people just loose. And Phil totally agrees with the idea. [6:54] Phil asks about Andy's worst career moment and what he has learned from it. Andy recalls a story from early in his career when, between the time of being interviewed and starting the job, his interviewer had been fired and the position eliminated. Andy was therefore assigned to a different group. It was an awful place to work and within a year the company went out of business which made an impact on him. The myth of working for a big company and having stability is just a myth. You're not stable with a big company. You're not necessarily stable with a small startup either. So, in terms of career preparation, you really can't count on the organization being there for you for any number of reasons. Later on, during Andy's consultant career phase, one project that he rather enjoyed and he had a good time at. It was very clear from their practices and what they were doing on the project that they were going to fail. Andy made his report, talked to the boss and said, "Okay, here's the problem. This is what you need to fix." They said, "Thank you very much." and didn't change a thing. They lost $14 million. That was a lot of what inspired Andy to get on the early train of lightweight methods which was when the term 'agile' was coined. Andy then provides some insight into the Agile Manifesto. [12:34] Phil asks about Andy's career greatest success. Andy recalls one of his projects which was highly successful. It was replace a debit card transaction system. In fact, that's the project where Andy met his partner Dave Thomas. They wrote "The Pr

Guest Bio: Jeff Atwood is an experienced software developer with a particular interest in the human side of software development. In 2004 Jeff started the blog "Coding Horror" which led to him founding Stack Overflow and subsequently the Stack Exchange network, now one of the 150 largest sites on the internet. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil chats with Stack Overflow Founder and writer of the blog "Coding Horror", Jeff Atwood. Jeff shares his career journey from starting his blog to founding Stack Overflow and starting his latest project, Discourse. Jeff recalls his experience way back on how hard it was to get hold of resources about programming, unlike today. Aside from these, Jeff also stresses how important it is to hone your communication skills – whether it be through writing or networking face-to-face with people. Discover how important this is and how it can help you to grow your career. Key Takeaways: (1.02) Phil opens the show by asking Jeff to share a little more about his career journey. Jeff emphasizes that a huge part of his career is coloured by his blog "Coding Horror." Jeff shares how he started his blog in 2004 as an open research notebook. He adds that his writings are still accruing benefits for him so he advises that you also make your work public. (4.10) Phil highlights the technological changes that have happened since Jeff started his blog. It's all about portability and smartphones right now. Jeff agrees and adds that the speed of conversation is moving forward rapidly. There's lesser long-form writing which he considers not to be a bad thing. He also recognizes that information is digested more through images than words. (6.28) Phil then asks Jeff for a unique career tip. Jeff's primary advice is to take into account the people you're working with. He says that you should make sure that your team is better than you. You should not be the smartest or best person at your job. He adds that any programming job today is navigating the waters of and interacting with other people in the IT industry. (8.54) Phil and Jeff talk about Jeff's worst IT career moment. Jeff talks about pre-internet times when it was hard to find people that you can actually learn from. All his IT failures were due to limitations in being able to learn and grow. He says that programmers nowadays are lucky to be living in a hyperconnected world where resources and mentors can be found easily. (12.21) Jeff says that meeting his hero Clay Shirky was his career highlight. Jeff claims that him building Stack Overflow has been greatly influenced by the writings of Clay Shirky about the human interactions in programming. Stack Overflow is really about one working programmer helping another working programmer. (16:29) Phil proceeds to ask Jeff's take on the future of IT. Jeff agrees that a programmer is needed in building and fixing things. But he says that he's got mixed feelings about how we perceive it as essential for everyone. Some people are just interested in how they optimize the use of computers and tech, in general. And, that's what all programmers should consider. (19.20) Moving onto the Reveal Round, Phil first asks what attracted Jeff to start an IT career. Jeff answers that it's about being a kid living in the world without control. And the only thing he considers he can control is a computer. It's not just entertainment he gets but he also learns from it. (20.45) Phil then asks about the best career advice Jeff ever received. Jeff advises that whenever you're at a crossroads and you have to make a decision, you should choose the option that scares you. He adds that if there is no fear, then you're not really challenging yourself. (22.02) When Jeff was asked what he'd change if he was to start his IT career again right now, he answered that he'd choose to start 15 years earlier than when he started. There's so much information that he thinks he could use and it's accessible to everyone. (23.44) Phil wants to know about Jeff's career objectives. Jeff shares that he's currently working on Discourse. This is very different from the Q&A platform of Stack Overflow. Discourse concentrates on a more social kind of interaction between users. As Jeff puts it, "It's a tool for not letting online discourse devolve into the howling of wolves." And unlike Stack Overflow, Discourse is open-source. [26:34] Phil then continues the conversation asking about Jeff's non-technical skill and which one has helped his career the most. Jeff quickly answers that it's his writing skills. Practicing your writing skills will help you in the grand scheme of things. He says that even Stack Overflow hones good writing skills. The best answers are always those which are clear and concise. [28:07] Finally, Jeff shares his parting career advice for the IT Career Energizer audience. He reiterates his original advice to challenge yourself and to pick things that scare you a bit. Once you're exploring difficult scenarios, you're honi

DESCRIPTION Welcome to episode 76 of the I.T. Career Energizer, a weekly podcast where your host Phil Burgess chats with inspiring I.T. professionals, consultants and experts from around the world. On today's episode Phil interviews founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad, Mitchell Hashimoto. Mitchell is a passionate engineer and professional speaker whose goal is to make the best DevOps tools in the world. Mitchell is also an O'Reilly author and a top Github user in terms of followers, activity and contributions. To find out more about the podcast visit itcareerenergizer.com And remember to "Subscribe" to get new episodes automatically downloaded to your device KEY TAKEAWAYS (00.59) Phil introduces Mitchell and asks him to tell us more about himself and his I.T career. Mitchell eagerly responds to state that for the last 6 years he has been hyper-focused on building out Hashicorp and the open source tools around it. He names DevOp tools such as Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad to give context to his focus. (01.47) Phil asks Mitchell to share a unique career tip with the audience. Mitchell gives the advice of time. He mentions that you should always schedule time, not to go on holiday but to try new things related to what you're trying to achieve. In Mitchell's case this is exploring new cloud based tools to see how they work and how to maintain them in real life projects. Mitchell mentions that by taking this time you can become inspired and keep abreast of the latest technology and this can help in your job (03.13) After hearing Mitchell's advice, Phil asks if he feels that this helps him stay motivated and enthused by what he does. Mitchell responds saying that this time away can keep you innovative and up-to-date with the latest trends (05.53) As a result of hearing Mitchell's worst mistake in his career, Phil asks him to share with the audience his career highlight. Mitchell says that a change in thinking came about with the development of 'Vault' a secrets management tool. It's different to other management tools and now has lots of adoption in businesses and fortune 500 companies (07.07) Phil asks Mitchell to share with the audience what excites him about the I.T industry. Mitchell says that I.T infrastructure is being viewed more and more as disposable machines and as a result it improves stability and makes everything more resilient (09:48) Phil begins the Reveal Round and asks Mitchell what first attracted him to a career in I.T? Mitchell says that he has always gotten a kick out of watching things work the way they are supposed to. Mitchell saw I.T as an opportunity to automate vast fleets of servers to do things for him (12:38) Phil asks Mitchell to share his career objectives, that he's currently focusing on? Mitchell says he is continuing to work on HashiCorp and to continue building confidence in the I.T industry and better integrate Vault and Terraform into more complete packages (16:37) Finally Phil asks Mitchell to share a last piece of advice with the I.T. Career Energizer audience. Mitchell responds to say, focus on automation as we're nowhere near the limit. There's no future without automation and anytime that you are doing a manual task consider how it could be automated BEST MOMENTS (03.09) "Find time to step away from being in the trenches to motivate and inspire yourself" (05.20) "It was misconfigured checks on our IP server that caused no traffic to be sent to the ad server" (06.45) Mitchell Hashimoto mentions that; "Google made an announcement without telling Hashicorp of their integration with Vault" (06:58) Speaking about 'Vault' Mitchell states that "The thing I'm most proud of is not it's success, it's a different way of thinking" (10.21) "What attracted me to I.T was the huge automation problem waiting to be solved (10.28) "The best career advice I've received is to 'do everything' don't focus on one thing and be the best at it, it's the time to do everything and understand what you really love" (17.10) Mitchell confidently states that; "those that have dedicated themselves to automation are wildly successful" ABOUT THE HOST Phil Burgess, an I.T. consultant, mentor, and coach, is the creator and host of the I.T. Career Energizer Podcast. His podcast continues to inspire, assist and guide anybody wanting to start, develop and grow a career in I.T. by inviting successful I.T. professionals, consultants, and experts to share their advice, career tips and experiences. CONTACT THE HOST Website: itcareerenergizer.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philburgess ABOUT THE GUEST Mitchell Hashimoto is best known as the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul. Mitchell is the founder of HashiCorp, an open-source software company based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides open source tools and commercial products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secu

Guest Bio: Sam is a software developer who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. He started his software development journey with C and later Objective-C creating Apps for iOS. Sam is also a keen blogger and writes a blog series called "Junior Dev Diaries" where he talks about what he's learnt in the first few years of his career. In addition to blogging, Sam is an improv actor, public speaker, writer and future thinker. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil talks with software developer Sam Jarman about everything from his early days as a high school student developing his interest in I.T., handling lack of recognition as a junior, how to control your emotions and communicate effectively in a team environment, the exciting future for the growing I.T. industry, dreams of becoming a senior developer and how sporting wisdom can apply to software development teams. Key Takeaways: (1.14) Phil opens by asking Sam to share a bit about himself. Sam tells of his blog series, Junior Dev Diaries which documents and captures the lessons he's learned in his career, to help others avoid the pain. Sam shares that he's been "doing IOS apps since high school", where he had 10 to 15 apps in the App Store before going to university and has been dabbling ever since. Sam says he joined the BNZ Bank's IOS team in New Zealand seven months ago, to work on their IOS app. He says it's been "pretty fun" going back to IOS full time. Sam says he performs Improv shows on the weekend in Wellington and while it's different to coding there are similarities, "there's a fair bit of making it up as you go along, which is a good skill in life, I think." (3.16) When Phil asks Sam for a unique career tip, Sam says that in programming, your code shouldn't be thought of as for yourself now, but for your team or yourself later. It doesn't have to be perfect, or bug free, it just has to be understandable. It makes you think about code structure and quality and the asset you're adding to the business environment. (4.39) Phil asks Sam to share the story of his worst career moment and what he learned from that experience. Sam shares what he calls the "low point" in his career, when he was working at a startup and he was very negative and defensive in a team meeting and towards a new hire. He says he learned how to control his emotions and communicate more effectively in a team. (7.46) When Phil asks Sam whether he's changed his approach to be more open minded and collaborative, Sam expresses that the difficulty as a junior, is that it takes three to four years to be able to say something with confidence and experience behind it. (8.54) Phil asks Sam to share his I.T. career highlight or greatest success so far. Sam was recently named New Zealand's Young I.T. Professional of the Year by the Institute of I.T. Professionals in New Zealand, where he was recognised for his blogging and work at the startup. (11.57) Phil asks Sam what excites him about the future of the I.T. industry and careers in I.T. Sam says the most exciting thing is that there's so many people entering the industry, there's a lot to be taught to and learn from new developers. Sam predicts that there's also going to be exciting opportunities in technical leadership in 5-10 years' time. Sam's also excited about technology, artificial intelligence and an API-driven world. Sam says I.T. is a growing, new industry and isn't going to go away. (15.15) Phil moves into the Reveal Round and asks Sam what attracted him to a career in I.T. Sam reveals that the "bug first hit me" in Year 9 when he had the opportunity to build a website and discovered programming with the help of the school's I.T. support person. (17.40) Phil asks Sam for the best career advice he's ever received. Sam says developing empathy for other developers and for your team, understanding other people's wants and needs is something a lot of people need to work on. (18.13) Career-wise, Phil asks Sam what he'd do if he could do it again. Sam says he would learn Python from scratch, Ruby or JavaScript and more website front-end development, because it's visual and you can get fast feedback on what you're doing. (19.21) On the topic of career objectives, Sam says he'd like to transition to a Senior Developer, become a better developer and help others improve. (20.38) Phil raises the subject of non-technical skills and what has helped Sam in his career so far. Sam says with self-awareness, things become simpler. (22.19) Finally, on sharing his parting piece of career advice, Sam says the codes or languages or tools or technologies you write don't really matter as they're always changing. What's important is that you have to learn how to learn. He says, develop your "soft skills", being a developer is a team sport, it can be handy to apply sporting wisdom to teams in software development. Best Moments: (11.16) Sam "I think feedback's career food and I absolutely love it and when people have no feedback for me, I get almost a little

Welcome to the I.T. Career Energizer Podcast. In today's episode, your host Phil Burgess interviews curator of JavaScript January, vice president of developer relations and product marketing for Kickbox and developer advocate Emily Freeman. After many years of ghostwriting Emily made the choice to switch careers to software engineering. Learn more about her journey on today's episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS from Phil Burgess (05.53) It's all about branding and positioning and it's similar to brand/self-marketing (08:16) There's a lot to be said for the changes in the way I.T. is delivered these days, unfortunately some corporates still follow a traditional waterfall approach, handing the process off to a series of individuals, resulting in friction and communication failure. (13.14) The reveal round: Phil asks Emily some quick-fire questions. Q1. Phil: What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? Emily: The problems and the ability to think abstractly, I love the idea of being a tenacious problem solver. Q2. Phil: What is the best career advice you've ever received? Emily: To be you; when you are your authentic self, you are your best self. Q3. Phil: If you were to begin your I.T. career again right now what would you do? Emily: I would rewind back to school and learn more about 'true computer science'. You can learn the CS fundamentals in a fun way. Q4. Phil: What career objectives are you currently focusing on? Emily: Growth and moving towards the next challenge. My biggest objective would be to solve increasingly bigger problems. Q5: Phil: What's the number one non-technical skills that's helped you in your I.T. career so far? Emily: Absolutely my writing, I put so much practice into writing and it's really helped. The best writing is conversational, authentic and written the way you speak. Q6. Phil: Can you share a parting piece of advice with the audience? Emily: What I tell everyone is, if you have to choose between becoming better at something or promoting yourself, I would choose promoting yourself. You don't have a lot of time and the people that are 'experts' aren't the most technical, they're just the most visible. KEY TAKEAWAYS from Emily Freeman (01.06) Phil asks Emily to tell us a little bit more about herself. Emily welcomes the audience and shares in more detail her career story. Emily found a career in ghostwriting and runs a freelance copywriting business called EditingEmily (@EditingEmily). After moving into engineering her background in writing has been significantly helpful, and now Emily has been an individual contributor in Java and is currently a 'Developer Advocate'. (02.34) Phil responds to Emily's career background, asking her to explain what her role as a 'Developer Advocate' is? Emily replies, by stating that the role is relatively new to the industry and that it involves getting intelligent developer users to use API's. It's a mix between engineering and marketing and it can be described as the connection between engineering, marketing and product to ensure the wishes of the community are communicated to the company. Emily summarizes by saying "It's a very interesting role and no two days are the same" (04.41) Phil asks Emily to share a unique career tip, that the audience might not know and should? Emily responds quickly to say that "It doesn't matter who you know, it matters who knows you". Emily recalls a previous life lesson that explains that you can blend your professional and personal life together, to help your career move forward. And when an opportunity comes up, you want to be the name that pops into someone's head. Emily goes on to say that by acknowledging self-promotion and personal branding we can highlight what we do well. (06:38) Phil asks Emily to tell us what her worst career I.T. moment was and what she learnt from the experience. Emily replies to say that in her first job as a developer, it was like an accelerator into finding out everything that was wrong in the industry. The setup of the engineering department was very old school and the developers didn't have production access etc. That set up creates a great deal of personal conflict. (11.20) Phil asks Emily to explain what she is most excited about in the I.T. industry. Emily passionately responds to say that our technology is evolving so much faster than our brains. The biggest problems that we're facing right now is that we're human. It's our fear, our patterns of behavior, our brain functions and our limitations because of that. As a result I.T. is an exciting area that is overcoming this, removing the decision process errors and choice ability so that people can do what they do best, and engineer. BEST MOMENTS - Emily states that her writing background has significantly helped her in her engineering career. - The aim of the Developer Advocate role is to speak marketing to engineering and vice versa, because a lot of the time these two things miss each other. - I feel uniquely blessed that I can talk at con

Guest Bio: Gojko is a partner at Neuri Consulting. He is the winner of several awards, including the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award and the Jolt Award for his book, Specification by Example. Gojko is also a frequent speaker at software development conferences. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil chats with Gojko Adzic about experiencing the joy of coding and programming, but also recognizing the importance of seeing the big picture when it comes to projects. Gojka highlights this by advising people work "close to the money" to gain a better understanding of how customers use the products he makes, and how his first startup went bankrupt when he got too wrapped up in tracking technical effort instead of product value. Still, he says he can't imagine doing anything other than working in IT. Key Takeaways: (1.00) Phil kicks off the interview by asking Gojko more about himself. Gojko talks about writing books, how he got his start developing software, but he always wanted to do more than just "sitting in a development box," as he puts it. He prefers working on projects end-to-end. (3.21) Phil follows up by asking Gojka for a unique career tip people might now know. Gojka answers with the advice: "stay as close to the money as possible." He goes on to say that he feels like today, IT is often extremely divorced from the customers and users that they are actually making things for. It becomes hard to tell if your work is having an actual impact. Staying close to the money means making sure that the things you do serve a purpose. (7.45) Phil moves on, asking Gojka about the worst experience of his IT career, and Gojka jokes that it's difficult to pick the "worst." He says the one that made him feel the worst but was the most important learning experience came when he was a CTO of a startup and that they were good at the technical side of things but had no idea how to calculate value and properly run a business and so they went bankrupt. He was way too focused on measuring effort and not value. (13.06) Phil switches things up and asks Gojka about his greatest career success so far, and he says that he hopes he hasn't made his greatest success yes. But he's very proud of a project called Mind Map and that it has helped him rediscover the joy of coding. (15.00) Phil then asks Gojka what excites him the most about the future of the IT industry, and he says software specifically is the closest thing to magic there is, and that it's incredible that people can make something that has such a huge impact on the real world, essentially out of thin air. (15.50) Phil starts the Reveal Round by asking Gojka what motivated him to pursue a career in IT, to which he answers that he never wanted to do anything else, quite literally from the age of six onwards. (17.01) Next, Phil asks Gojka for the best career advice he's ever received. Gojka says it's probably something he read in one of The Pragmatic Programmer books, which was: "don't say no, offer options." Instead of saying that something isn't possible, try to come up with options for things you CAN do instead. (18.10) Phil then questions Gojka as to what he would do if he were to begin his IT career all over again now, and Gojka answers that he never really wanted to do anything different, but that he would try to switch jobs faster to learn as much as possible about as many different things as he could. (19.01) On the subject of current career objectives, Gojka talks about writing a new book that's actually about a technique that can be used to solve the problem of his worst career moment. (20.03) Phil asks what non-tech skill Gojka has found the most useful during his career, and he responds that he doesn't really differentiate between what's technical and non-technical, but that the idea of selling value and not time was a non-tech thing he learned that has made a major impact on his career. (21.31) Phil wraps things up by asking Gojka for any parting words of advice for the listeners and he advises people to not waste time working on things that they don't really care about or find important and that they should be able to work on creating things that bring them joy. Best Moments: (1.15) Gojko: "I tend to write books to download the stuff in my brain so I can leave more spare capacity for new things." (5.48) Gojko: "My career advice for people starting here would be to figure out where the money is and stay as close as possible to that because that just cuts through the whole bullshit that most people shouldn't really care about." (7.24) Phil: "I think it's all about what the end purpose is, rather than the actual solution that gets you there." (12.50) Gojka: "IT's really nice as an industry because you can make stupid mistakes and learn from them and then kind of pull yourself up." (14.48) Gojka: "If people feel that their work is dull they should build their own product." (21.56) Gojka: "You can spend a lot of time building stupid s

Guest Bio: Chloe Condon is a former musical theater actress and Hackbright Academy graduate. She is now a developer evangelist for Sentry. She's passionate about bring people from non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech, and in February of this year, Chloe was named one of the "200+ Thought Leaders in Crypto and Blockchain." And yet, she claims to know absolutely nothing about them. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil interviews Chloe Condon, an engineer who has written many articles on her experiences as both a woman in the tech industry and also someone coming from a very non-traditional background in musical theater. Chloe talks with Phil about the ways her theater experience has proved to be an advantage, whether it's speaking confidently at conferences or creating more entertaining and engaging events for meetups. She also stresses the importance of speaking up for yourself and continuously learning new things. Key Takeaways: (1.02) Phil kicks the interview off by asking Chloe more about herself, and she refers to the joke at the end of her bio, saying that she frequently writes about her experiences as a woman in tech from a non-traditional background. However, she found out that her name had been copy-pasted into an article about the best people to speak at conferences about Crypto and Blockchain, and that she really doesn't know anything about these topics. (2.42) Phil asks Chloe to share a unique career tip, and she says the biggest tip she can think of is to be authentic and real about yourself and your background, talking about how she was worried about not fitting in as an engineer, but that her background has actually helped her in the tech industry, including public speaking and event planning. (4.00) Phil then asks Chloe to describe her worst IT career moment and what it taught her. Chloe replies that one of her lowest moments came when she was working in tech but before she was an engineer. She worked in various admin roles after college to try and support her theater career. She felt very invisible at her job and that the work she was doing was being taken for granted. This has taught her to always be appreciative and supportive to everyone she works with. (7.15) Phil shifts things over to Chloe's greatest career success so far, and she talks about publishing an article called, "What It's Like to Be a Woman at a Tech Conference," and the experience of coming from the female-dominated profession of theater to the much more male-dominated world of tech. People responded really well to it because it gave men insight into how isolating it could be to be a woman in tech, and also Chloe has received very positive international recognition for it. (10.20) Chloe goes on to add that when she's at conferences and gets asked if she's enjoying being there with her husband and being able to respond that actually, she's the keynote speaker, it can feel equal parts good and upsetting. (10.47) Phil continues the interview with the question of what excites Chloe the most about the future of the IT industry. She says that, broadly, the tech industry is exciting because everything's always changing and there are always new things to learn. Specifically, she's excited about developing mobile apps and also machine learning. It's an interesting time in technology to see how we interact with machines. (12.08) Phil moves things into the Reveal Round, beginning with why Chloe started working in IT. She says that it began with wanting to learn a new skill that was so different than what she had been learning as a theater major and that technology has always fascinated her. (12.29) On the topic of best career advice she's received, Chloe re-emphasizes the importance of being yourself and bringing your background and perspective into the industry. She also says some very good advice she got as a woman in IT was to not be afraid to speak up and let herself be heard. (13.05) Next, Phil asks Chloe what she would do if she were to start her whole career over from scratch, to which she replies tongue-in-cheek that she would not get a theater degree and instead teach herself to code online and take her tuition money and buy a house with it. (13.39) Phil then asks Chloe to talk a bit about her current career objectives, which are focusing on mobile development and enjoying getting creative with a smaller design space and what applications she can make in it. (14.10) When asked about the most useful non-tech skill that's helped her in her career, Chloe refers back to earlier in the interview, mentioning that her theater background has given her an advantage when it comes to both public speaking and event planning to make tech meetups more fun and entertaining. (16.21) Finally, Phil closes things out by asking Chloe for any parting words of career advice for the listeners, and she says that it's never too late to learn a new skill, whether it's changing from musical theater to coding or just feeling pigeonhol

Guest Bio: Jennifer is a JavaScript developer, international speaker, foodie, fitness geek and community organiser, most well known for her work creating innovative and highly sought-after programs for women in technology. Jennifer is also the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology, an organisation aimed at growing the number of women in technology careers in Kansas City. And, amongst other things, Jennifer is Missouri's Coolest Woman, according to Pure Wow. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil sits down with Jennifer Wadella to talk about how she entered the IT industry, women in IT in general, and what to do when you find yourself in a negative work environment. Jennifer also talks about self-motivation, and that you don't necessarily have to find inspiration in other people, but can focus on your own personal growth and skills and have faith in yourself to be able to improve and succeed. Key Takeaways: (1.13) Phil begins by asking Jennifer to tell the listeners a bit more about herself. Jennifer says that she's been a nerd her entire life, and while she liked being among nerds, she really didn't see much in the way of women nerds and has made one of her missions to get more women involved in IT. (1.38) Phil says he's seen a lot of progress on that front, with more women entering the industry and Jennifer agrees, laughing while recalling that while at the last Kansas City Developer Con, there were so many women that there was a line for the ladies bathroom, which was a first. (2.08) Phil moves along, asking Jennifer if she has a unique career tip that she'd like to share, and she talks about how she often hears people talking about being stuck in terrible job environments with terrible bosses and that because people in IT love their craft and what they do, they'll stay in these jobs they hate. She advises people in those situations to not waste time in leaving to find a place where they can be happy doing the work they love. Phil strongly agrees that a good work environment is extremely important. (3.01) Phil then asks Jennifer to speak about the worst experience in her IT career and what she learned from it. Jennifer replies that during one of her first jobs out of college, she had a boss that was a poor leader who would give her projects without much direction, and when she compiled reports on how long the project would take and the resources it would need, he didn't like her answers, cornering her alone in the office to yell at her about how she was "a bad person with a bad work ethic." (3.45) Jennifer continues, saying that this was one of the lowest moments of her career, but it taught her to stand up for herself in the future and to understand and value her self-worth. The story at least has a happy ending, as she was able to get a new job just three days after updating her resume to leave that one. (5.02) Phil takes that opportunity to ask Jennifer about her greatest success in her IT career. Jennifer talks about being a web developer right when things were expanding with JavaScript frameworks and single-page applications. As she learned JavaScript, she felt like she was struggling compared to other, more experienced people. But one day one of them came to her with a framework question and she was able to help them, and it gave her confidence and motivation to keep moving forward in her career. Phil agrees that this is often a turning point for people in their career. (6.31) Phil asks Jennifer what she finds most exciting about the future of IT, and she answers that people are drawn to IT because they like problem-solving and that right now it feels to her like there's no cap on what technology people can come up with to solve problems. Specifically, she's excited about the possibilities of advancements in IoT. (7.58) Phil moves into the Reveal Round, beginning with why Jennifer started working in IT. She says that, like many, she fell into IT a bit on accident. She was a graphic designer but couldn't find work. In the meantime, she was building websites mostly for fun and realized it could be a career, and she was attracted to the creative side and creating something from nothing. (8.33) Phil asks Jennifer for the best career advice she's ever gotten, and she tells him that she had a mentor tell her not make herself fit a job, but to make the job fit her and not to try to force yourself to fit a mould. (9.03) Phil then switches gears and asks Jennifer what she would do if she had to begin her IT career all over again right now, and she replies half-jokingly, "start younger." (9.32) As to her current career objectives, Jennifer says that she has been focusing on public speaking at international conferences and being at a place where she can "be a happy little code monkey." (10.05) Phil asks Jennifer's opinion on what has been the most helpful non-tech skill to have in her career so far, and she answers that for her, it's a tie between leadership skills and faith in herself and her ability

Guest Bio: Dylan is a software architect, conference speaker, and musician. He designs APIs and distributed systems based on Microsoft .Net and he also helps to run the London .Net User Group. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil talks with software architect Dylan Beattie about everything from understanding that software is not always the solution to a problem, avoiding getting burnt out, how writing websites can eventually get you speaking at conferences halfway around the world, and the future of tech will involve difficult lessons about community interaction and a greater shift towards user-inclusivity. Dylan also talks about finding the fun in IT, even the uninteresting parts, and why he's glad he chose a career in IT over one playing guitar. Key Takeaways: (1.05) Phil opens by asking Dylan to tell a bit more about himself, with Dylan recounting his early days as a webmaster and that he got into IT purely because he thought it was fun and then learned that he could make a career out of it, and is currently working as a CTO at Skills Matter. (2.50) When Phil asks Dylan for a unique career tip, he tells a story about how senior manager at a company he was working at had asked him to create a secure digital storage system for some sensitive documents. After learning that they only had 30 or 40 documents to store, Dylan advised them to just use a safe instead, offering up the tip that even when you're a software developer, software is not going to be the solution to every problem. (5.11)Phil then asks Dylan to share the worst moment in his career in IT and Dylan explains that he's never had a specific worst moment, but several "worst periods" where he was getting burnt out working too hard on projects that he didn't really care about. He recalls struggling with companies that were more concerned with a big picture vision than a clear roadmap of steps, milestones or deliverables necessary to get there. (8.14)Phil changes tack to ask about career highlights and Dylan discusses starting out going to user groups and community events to listen and learn new things and that, before long, he was the one giving the talks at this events, eventually moving up to conferences and keynote speeches in other countries. (9.25) Dylan specifically recalls going with a group to speak at a conference in Ukraine and going to the chance to go to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and marveling at how strange it was that his particular career journey had allowed him to experience this, finishing by saying, "The highlights are the things which are unexpected." (10.35) When Phil asks Dylan's opinion of what's the most exciting thing about the future of IT, he and Dylan recall the massive impact smartphones have had on how software interacts with the world and that back in the 1990s, no one could have even conceived of it. Dylan says that he thinks that another, similar paradigm shift will happen soon, involving how we think about online communities and interactions. (13.52) Dylan also talks about a shift towards making things not only more user accessible, but more generally inclusive, and that software development needs to catch up with that movement, joking that, "We think we can solve anything by making the fonts bigger." (15.54) From there, Phil moves into the Reveal Round, asking Dylan why he started working in IT, to which he reiterates that he always thought it was fun and was interested in the potential of machines and making them better, and then realized he could get paid to do that. (17.22) On the subject of the best career advice that he's ever received, Dylan remembers initially wanting to be a professional guitar player, only to have a local guitarist he looked up to tell him not to play for a living. He says that playing is something you do because you love it and if you make it your job then you'll have to do it even when you don't feel like it and you'll grow to hate it. (18.41) Dylan contrasts this with the career in IT that he pursued instead, saying that in tech, even when you don't want to do something, there's usually a compensating factor, like if a problem is boring, finding the solution might be interesting, or vice versa. (19.34) Phil asks Dylan what he would do differently if he was just now leaving university to start a career in IT, and Dylan says he'd be at a bit of a loss because he has had the luxury of having software development complexity grow along with him and now things are much more technical and specialized. (22.54) Phil then asks Dylan about his current career objectives, and Dylan is at a loss for an answer and instead talks about Rockstar, a new programming language he created as part of a joke that recently went viral in the online dev community. Dylan jokingly says that he'd like to make refining Rockstar a career objective and be able to go to conferences with stickers and branded swag just as a laugh. (25.10) Phil's asks Dylan about what he thinks is the most useful non-tech skill to

Guest Bio: Ben is a technologist working in the Office of the CTO at Confluent Inc (the company behind Apache Kafka), where he has worked on a wide range of projects, from implementing the latest version of Kafka's replication protocol through to developing strategies for streaming applications. Before Confluent, Ben led the design and build of a company-wide data platform for a large financial institution, as well as working on a number of early service-oriented systems, both in finance and at Thoughtworks. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil sits down with Ben Stopford to discuss different kinds of career progress, the future of streaming data between different applications, and the importance of a healthy and positive work environment. Ben also touches on the benefits of learning everything you can from more experienced co-workers, and the power of motivation. Key Takeaways: (1.02) Phil starts off the episode by asking Ben a bit more about himself. Ben reveals that, unlike most people in the IT profession, he did not study computer science in school but physics instead. He further elaborates that the majority of what he sees as the second phase of his career has been spent working on improving application streaming platforms. (2.06) When Phil asks for a unique career tip, Ben emphasizes that it's important to remember that there's more than one way to progress in your career and that people shouldn't feel pressured to try to"climb the corporate ladder" by taking management positions that really don't suit them. He reiterates that you gain influence through respect and that you don't have to be in management to achieve respect, just be someone who adds value. (4.36) In answering Phil's questions about his worst experience working in IT, Ben thinks back to his first job at an investment bank, where he had a boss who was extremely difficult to deal with and would scream at Ben and other employees. This prompted Ben to make a rule to never work for anyone he doesn't like, and he advises that if a job isn't right and makes you feel terrible, then it isn't worth staying at, which Phil completely agrees with. (6.30) Phil takes a lighter turn asking Ben about his favorite successes, to which Ben replies that he feels a major highlight of his career was forming a team at a different financial institution to find a way to increase its tech efficiency and how the different services of the company shared data. Ben says that it felt like they were on a mission and that it was productive and innovative work. (8.46) Phil asks Ben what excites him the most about the future of IT and, like many other guests, he's most excited at how quickly the future is changing and that being in IT means being at the heart of that change. He points out that the future his one-year-old daughter will live in isn't going to look like anything that came before it and that thinking about it "keeps him up at night," to which he quickly adds "in a good way!" (10.45) As they enter Phil's rapid-fire Reveal Round, Ben sheepishly admits that he started working in IT for the money and that, while he did enjoy being a physicist for a while, it wasn't making him enough money to survive on. (11.20) Phil changes tack and asks about the best career advice Ben has ever received. Ben responds that the best advice he ever got was on dealing with difficult workplace situations by taking emotion out of the equation and sticking only to facts. He says that this helps defuse tension but is a lot easier to do in an email than in person. (12.46) When Phil asks what Ben would do if he was starting his IT career over right now, Ben replies that first, he would start out learning computer science instead of physics, and he would make a point to work at a place that does pair programming so he could soak up as much fundamental knowledge as possible from the more experienced people around him. (14.28) Phil asks Ben about his current career objectives, to which he affirms that he's still on his mission to find better and more efficient ways of moving data between different applications. (15.40) On the subject of the non-tech skill he finds the most useful, Ben brings up something called the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is sort of assuming the worst of people, like that the person who cut you off in traffic is just a jerk instead of someone who might be experiencing an emergency. Ben says that fighting against that urge and thinking more about why people do the things they do instead of making assumptions gives you a more balanced view of the world. (16.56) To finish things off, Phil asks Ben for any parting words of advice for the listeners. Ben's advice is to recognize that motivation doesn't always last, so make the most of it when you have it and to capitalize on feelings of desire and motivation as much as possible. Best Moments: (3.15) "Autonomy comes, really, from the respect that other people will have for you. If you add value to a company then

Guest Bio: Daniel Bryant is a technology specialist with expertise in the design, development, and deployment of enterprise-grade software applications and platforms. Daniel also excels in leading teams that build these systems, and regularly shares his knowledge by presenting at international conferences and writing for well-known technology websites. Episode Description: In this episode, Phil talks with Daniel Bryant about the benefits of working in a variety of areas across IT and business and how it can help you figure out the work you're best at and will enjoy the most, as well as just taking in a wide range of new experiences. Daniel also stresses the importance of a strong and supportive community of peers, as well as the need to make sure your foundational learning is a priority. Key Takeaways: (1.24) Phil opens things up by asking Daniel to tell a little more about himself and what he does. Daniel explains that he actually started his career as an academic but fell in love with consulting while working on his Ph.D., emphasizing that academia was all theoretical and that he wanted to actually build things. (4.37) Phil asks for Daniel for a career tip and Daniel recommends trying many different things, explaining how he's worked on everything from coding to racking and stacking servers as well as on hiring teams and in positions of leadership. He says that all these different things helped him learn to empathize with people in all areas of business and IT as well as helping him discover what kind of work he enjoys most and is best at. (5.31) Dan admits that while there is a comfortable level of stability in doing just one thing, you're unlikely to find something you are both good at and enjoy on the first try, and that the different jobs someone does, the roles they play, and the people they meet will have a huge impact on shaping them as a person. (6.47) Phil follows up by asking Daniel about his worst IT experiences, to which Daniel replies that he thinks his biggest mistakes include not doing due diligence in learning more about a company before signing up to work there, as he has found himself at several companies whose values did not line up with his own. In that same vein, he goes on to say that he has a problem with not thinking ahead and rolling into new positions or jobs without fully considering whether or not it's the best idea. (9.50) Phil then switches things up by asking Daniel to talk about what successes he has experienced. Daniel describes joining communities of people with shared interests and career paths and getting involved with them, specifically citing the London Java Community as a group that has provided him with friends, mentors, and career opportunities. (13.16) When Phil asks Daniel what he finds exciting about the future of IT, he responds that it would be easier for him to list what DOESN'T excite him, since almost everything these days involves computers and technology and there are so many ways to be a part of it. In particular, though, he is excited to see developments in AI and augmenting human abilities with machines. (15.08) Then, Phil enters the rapid-fire question round, with Daniel explaining that he was first attracted to a career in IT because he loved building things and wanted to help people and that the best career advice he ever received was to find mentors and to be a mentor. (15.26) Daniel goes on to say that if he had to begin his IT career over again now, that he would nearly the same things that he already does, but with more of a focus on AI, and that his current career objective involves learning more business-specific skills so that he can help organizations solve both tech and business problems. Daniel also tells Phil that public speaking and writing have been the most useful non-tech skills he's ever learned. (16.12) Finally, Phil asks Daniel for some parting words of advice, which are to learn the fundamentals. Daniel reiterates that variety and learning lots of different things is important and useful, but advises to not skimp on making sure you know the basics and not to get too distracted by exciting new things to learn that you don't get the fundamentals down. Best Moments: (4.08) Phil: "You certainly seem to be quite diverse in the things you do." Daniel: "One of my sort of founding values, I guess, is I always enjoy learning and I kind of want to know everything." (5.31) Daniel: "There is a sort of stability with doing one thing, but what're the chances that we actually find something we like and are good at first off?" (6.33) Daniel: "The world is genuinely a massive place and there's so many different things we can do. I think having some of those experiences and conversations will help you find your niche." (14.48) Daniel: "Technology impacts politics, it impacts the markets, it impacts social stuff we do. What's not to love?" (17.21) Daniel: "Learn many different things, talk to many different people, read many different books, but be