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Rachel Ober is helping to pave the way for women of technology everywhere. Rachel began with her loves of art, technology, and cognitive thinking and married the three together. Rachel’s love of technology soon leads her to a form a movement that helps support and educate women across the country. Listen in to Arsalan and Rachel in this exciting new episode for more juicy details.

Rachel’s Bio:

Rachel Ober is a Ruby on Rails developer based in New York City. A true renaissance woman, Rachel has significant experience in and a passion for user experience, user interface, and cognitive design. Rachel is a senior developer at Paperless Post where she serves as a technical mentor for all front end developers on the development team and leads front end development for the company. Rachel encourages other women developers to hone their skills by contributing to the 3-day conference Write/Speak/Code as a co-organizer. Founded in 2013, Rachel organizes and volunteers her time to teach women Ruby and Ruby on Rails through RailsBridge NYC. Rachel lives in Brooklyn with her husband and fur-child Isabella and loves scrapbooking and card making.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today I have Rachel Ober with me. Rachel, how are you?

Rachel: I’m doing great. How are you?

Arsalan: I’m so excited to have you on here. I’ve been trying to get you on the show for a while, but we’ve had some scheduling issues. There’s something very interesting about you. You are a speaker and a presenter and a teacher. You focus on Ruby on Rails. You are a conference organizer. But, there’s something interesting about the way you started your speaking and public career that’s a little bit unusual. You weren’t asking for it. It just came to you. Tell us a little bit about it.

Rachel: I really did not expect to get to the point where I started my own conference with some friends. It wasn’t until somebody had found me and reached out to me to teach at general assembly concerning Ruby on Rails. So that’s just a little bit about what got me into it and it was kind of the ignition point in my life.

Arsalan: I think that this is really inspirational for me personally because your girl and women have certain issues when it comes to technology careers, and getting accepted is sometimes a problem. We’re going to talk about this. You are an organizer for a conference that focuses on women and helping women to speak. So, were going to talk about all that because it’s really exciting and I think that all of us who don’t know about the conference should go and check it out. It’s going to be in Chicago. So if you’re in the area, then go ahead and get there.

Rachel: Get yourself to Chicago in June.

Arsalan: Get yourself to Chicago in June. Chicago in June, by the way, is the place to be. Where else will you be, right?

Rachel: Right.

Arsalan: So, describe yourself for us. Who is Rachel Ober?

Rachel: Rachel Ober is probably first and foremost a dreamer and a creator. I love technology, and everything about me has to do with software engineering, coding, creating something new. Even in my free time outside of my job, I’m working on coding one of my projects or helping others do something similar. I would also say that I’m an entrepreneur. I wouldn’t have really called myself that it until somebody said “Rachel, you’re really an entrepreneur. You started all these things. ”I definitely like being supportive of other people. And it all comes down to all the things that I’m passionate about and being able to share what I’ve learned.

Arsalan: That’s great. You’ve been coding for a while. Do you remember your first encounter with programming?

Rachel: Wow. I would have to go really far back. I always joked about this back in college. My father conditioned me from a very young age to be a software engineer. Whenever I told him that I had been telling people this, he actually said that he really has been doing that.

Rachel: As early as I can remember, my father always supported me in my two younger sisters as well. He never treated us like princesses. He would always make us go out and do yard work like mowing the lawn and not treat us differently. He would bring me to his computers because he was also in software engineering. He would tell me what different things in the computer would do. From an early age, he also made sure that I would attend a computing class. So, the first programming language that I learned was Logo. I think that’s the official name.

Arsalan: Yes, the turtle language.

Rachel: Yes, the turtle. That’s how my mom and dad described it to me. They said, “Rachel, we signed you up for this class that you have to take. We want you to learn this and what you do is move a turtle on the screen and then you flip over a page and see all these different lines of code that tell the turtle where to move.”

Rachel: Whenever I picked up HTML later on, I think that visionary example always stuck with me. I dabbled with TextMate as my ID, but it’s not really an ID. Then I would use Dreamweaver because I had this mental model of looking over the page and there was HTML on there. That model has since expanded and changed, but that was back in 1992 or, in early grade school when I learned that.

Rachel: It wasn’t until I got into middle school when I can access the Internet on my own without being in school and understanding with the Internet was. It was then that I started work with websites and graduated from a WYSIWYG editor into writing HTML rather than just dropping elements onto the page. That was getting into programming when I discovered that I don’t like typing out the same thing to make the pages all look the same. That’s where and I picked up PHP and CGI scripting. Then I was learning about databases and I realize that I could store all this information.

Rachel: My dad noticed that I was really getting into programming when I could explain to him that I had designed a database without having to research a lot. I was doing relational database without realizing what relational database was. I was picking up things like it had come naturally to me. That’s a brief history on how I got into programming.

Arsalan: This is really fascinating. I think you’re really lucky. I would say that your father cared enough to share his passion with you. It’s your initiative. If you’re a child or a teenager and you’re interested in software development, you may have an uncle or a parent or somebody else who you could look up to who is in this field and whom you could aspire to be like.

Rachel: As with my sister, it’s being able to not think of careers and interest as being gendered.

Arsalan: It’s important to know that for most of us that is not always the case. Nobody in my family or anybody that I knew had ever done anything with programming or computers. I had nobody to look up to or talk to. I did figure everything out myself the hard way, which computer to buy and which programming language to pick.

Rachel: So how did you get into computer science then? What made you interested?

Arsalan: I’ve always wanted to do it. I’d watch a documentary about computer programming or something similar on TV. One day early in high school I was walking around a used bookstore and picked up a book on the basic programming language. I bought it. I started reading it and that I was hooked. It was like a novel to me. I didn’t have a computer so I would write programs in my notebook. I did that for a couple of years. When you’re a kid or are just starting out, you’re going to take something that exists and tweak it a little bit.

Rachel: That’s definitely how I started. I had a website that displayed my art and what I wanted to do was have a form of people who are essentially admirers, which I think was about 20 people. At the time, I was writing a story about them. This was back in middle school and high school. The impetus for me to create the website was my art, but I had such a greater interest in the end, on the basics of how to create a website that it became so much more.

Rachel: I started with installing this forum and people would ask for certain features to be implemented and it went from there. Sometimes I would do something that would break it, but once you understand the concept of version control, you can always roll it back. There’s really very little damage that you can actually do besides may be overloading your server. I created something and posted it back to the creators of the forum software and they invited me to fix bugs, but it was all on open source. I learned so much by messing around with forum code that somebody else had written.

Arsalan: So this is something unique to our industry. We emphasize open source because you can actually do something about it. There might be other projects that need help or need fixing, but their source code for the original programming is not available for you to fix. You can go to this repository called GitHub, located at github.com.

Rachel: If you find a project there that is open to the public, which is open source, and you start using it, you can change it if you realize that it doesn’t work in a certain situation. You can change it on your local computer and then push those changes back up to the original person and that person can then merge those changes into his or her own repository and thus you become an open source contributor. It’s a badge of honor. If you do that a few times people will take notice.

Rachel: This is something that can be very hard for open source maintainers. Let’s say you spend a lot of time and emotional labor creating this project and then you have a bunch of users. It becomes popular. They start finding bugs. They can then take a lot of the emotional energy out of view by alerting you to what changes need to be made.

Rachel: You can give back to your community. You can give back to this person who has created this project for you by taking a look at their issues in GitHub, which is public, and fixes something. Then go back to that person and let them know what you fixed and how you fixed it and asked for feedback. They are often happy to talk with you and walk through the code that you contributed and merge it into their project. That’s a great way to learn more about the tools that you’re using and also give back to the community and learn from somebody who’s been doing it for longer than you. It’s a great way to find a mentor, even if it’s a short relationship.

Arsalan: One more tip. Sometimes maintainers like to get contacted before you send it a pull request. So, you might just want to send an email letting them know that you want to try to fix the issue because maybe someone else is already working on it. Sometimes they want to talk about their approaches and they can guide you a little bit.

Arsalan: Let’s talk about how you went about constructing a career. You had a good beginning. You had a fantastic dad. Dads like him energized me. I have two little daughters that I have been trying to indoctrinate into programming. One of them is almost two, so it’s hard to indoctrinate her.

Rachel: Well, if they have an iPad, a tablet or something, and they love the game, you can say “you know you can create something like this.” Just see that information. I think that being a creator, in addition to consumers is such a powerful thing.

Arsalan: Absolutely. So now you’re doing all this. You’re learning to program and going through school. At some point, you would’ve started to think about it as a career. Did you go to college to learn this professionally or were you just taking it as a hobby?

Rachel: There was some struggle as to whether I was going to take this dabbling of programming to a higher education. I don’t think it took a lot of arm wringing to get me into programming in college, but I do think there was a bit of negotiation about that. As I mentioned, I loved art. I was doing to computer stuff. I took a lot of computer art classes when I was in high school. It was something that I really like doing because it was very imaginative.

Rachel: I have the struggle with being into programming and how I could fit the two together. So, I told my parents this, and at the time, we were living in a Boston suburb. I was introduced to Northeastern University. They have an excellent computer science college and I’m not just saying that because I’m alumna. What really made a different then all of the other computer science programs that my parents were showing me was that they had started this idea of dual majors with computer science and throughout the university. One of the choices was computer science and cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is about how humans think and how we interact with things. That really struck a chord with me because you’re thinking more about what you’re writing, what kind of tools you’re creating, and how your users are going to be using them. So I got I got to do both things that I was interested in. I got to you do the programming, but I also got to learn about how this is going to be used in a way that is going to be meaningful to somebody else.

Arsalan: How was your experience as a computer science undergraduate and doing this double major? Not everyone can do that. You spent a few years doing that.

Rachel: Yes, the program was five years at Northeastern. It wasn’t because it was a dual major, though. They wanted us to have a co-op experience. For one and a half years. It was divided up into different semesters. We would take a job and work full time for six months so that by the time we graduated we would already have a year and a half experience.

Arsalan: That is highly unusual and I think this is great. I think we should explore this a little further if we get a chance because most colleges don’t do that. They’re not trying to produce workers. Computer science is generally about learning the science of computing, the theory, and all the other finer points. My experience is that generally, most computer science programs are focused on that and not necessarily on getting jobs, especially in the public universities.

Rachel: In general, universities are extremely expensive and it’s getting worse every year. That’s why going to Code Bootcamp is so attractive, even if it’s a high upfront cost. It’s because they’re basically committed to bootstrapping you into a programming language and most of the times its Ruby on Rails and teaching you the bare minimum so you can get out there and start working. For someone who doesn’t like their job or doesn’t get paid enough, the attractiveness of being able to go and get a well-paying job is mind blowing.

Arsalan: Right, and there is this choice if you have some money on hand. You could go to college and get a computer science degree or computer engineering degree. Or, you could go to Code Bootcamp, but for a lot of people that isn’t a very realistic choice because they want to have a degree as well. But, for some people, that’s a real choice. I think for a lot of people they have moved on from their college years and perhaps a are in a job that they don’t like, and they want to switch careers. Code Bootcamps are a fantastic way for them to get a foot in the door.

Arsalan: You never went to a Code Bootcamp. I know that you taught at one, but you never were a student.

Rachel: No. I didn’t feel the need that I had to because I always sounded easy to teach myself the language, but I’ve met many people who need that structure. I have considered doing something like the Recurse Center which used to be called Hacker School. It’s very open ended and you spend that time working on personal projects and the focus of that type of schools much different than a code boot camp.

Arsalan: Did you have any difficulty getting your first job? You already had some experience with co-op, which is incredible. You had a resume and you had something to show. Was it just a snap of a finger to get a job?

Rachel: I graduated in 2008 with my degree. Back then, there was a lot going on. That was the start of the great recession. After I graduated I felt burned out because I had been doing so much, not just getting my degree, but also with the different student groups that I was involved in. So, I took some time off.

Rachel: I decided to adopt a dog and bond with her and then start looking for work. I decided that I wanted to find a job in New York City, but I was living in Pittsburgh with my parents at the time. If I remember correctly it might’ve been more difficult to find a job doing Ruby on Rails because it was still a fairly new language and you were more likely going to find more startups doing Ruby on Rails than the larger companies. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do a startup, but I did end up taking that route. What was the original question?

Arsalan: How did you get your first job?

Rachel: So I did want to move to New York City. My boyfriend, now my husband, was living there at the time and I was trying to be closer to him. I sent out dozens of resumes. It took a long time to get called back.

Arsalan: I wanted to ask you about your choice of Ruby on Rails because you were looking for, Ruby on Rails jobs in 2008. Back then it wasn’t clear that it was going to be this big giant framework that would dwarf every other framework in the startup world. For a lot of new developers Ruby and Ruby on Rails were their first experiences with programming. It’s not something that I would’ve expected back in 2008. Around that time I was starting to learn Ruby and although it wasn’t a new language, it wasn’t a widely accepted language.

Rachel: It wasn’t well-established at all.

Arsalan: It wasn’t a well-established framework at that time. It wasn’t very clear that you should be doing that, but that was your first job. I also know that in college. They don’t teach you Ruby on Rails. So, what got you interested and why were you looking for Ruby on Rails jobs?

Rachel: It was 2005 at Northeastern University College of Computer Science; we had the student chapter for computing machinery (ACM). The student group would teach students skills like programming languages or work on a project. We would have a student teacher who would serve as a guru of the technology or project we were working with and teach other students who were interested in learning it.

Rachel: One of my friends, Chris Lambert, who is the CTO of Lyft and who introduced me to my husband, he did the 5 Minutes to Blog. Everyone knows who started back then with Ruby on Rails. That blog video on how to start a blog in 5 minutes, that’s with Ruby on Rails. Whenever I saw that I thought it was amazing. You can prototype things so quickly with Ruby on Rails. I think that was the draw for a lot of startups. That’s what I liked about it and I think that’s what drew me to developing with it.

Rachel: After that experience, I started doing my own Ruby on Rails projects. At the time, it was a little difficult to get web hosting with Ruby on Rails. We had an experimental server at the college that I would deploy code to and that’s how I would test it. I also took my capstone project in software development and used Ruby. There was only a handful of us at the time that was using Ruby. Everyone else was using something else, probably Java due to its popularity at the time.

Rachel: Documentation on Ruby then was very poor. I had to create a lot of my own methods to get things working or we would’ve had to deal with other really shoddy open source products to get certain basic things like XML working correctly. Despite all this, I still saw so much potential on primetime with Ruby that I kept with it and even convinced my final co-op boss to allow me to write this prototype software in Ruby on Rails. So, I guess I just got super passionate and obsessive with it.

Arsalan: That’s a recipe for success, my friend.

Rachel: Obviously I wasn’t the only one because maybe the hotness of Ruby on Rails has died down a bit, but there are so many legacy applications out there and so much need. This boot camp culture is built almost exclusively Ruby on Rails, or at least some part of it is. So, there was an attraction to it.

Arsalan: Have you encountered any challenges while trying to become prominent and acknowledged, or getting the respect you deserved? Do you have any tips for others entering the industry?

Rachel: I think I find more discrimination. I’ve felt that discrimination more in my day job than going out and speaking. I think that’s also in the venues that I choose to present. So, I’m a little bit cautious with that, but I could probably be a little bit bolder in where I choose to present. I started as a full-stack Ruby on Rails developer and have since moved into a front-end architect and have done speaking on that. I was pretty well known in the NYC Ruby on Rails community, so they were a little surprised when I told them that I am also a front-end architect. At Paperless Post, I’m recognized just as a front end developer. So I live in these two worlds.

Rachel: I think as I get further along in my career it becomes more difficult with promotion or the feeling of belonging. I think some men do feel uncomfortable being alone with a woman. It’s almost like that ingrained line of thinking where if you see a woman and a man together it’s a romantic thing going on, but that’s not the case. It’s like a woman can’t get mentored by a man without being seen as something “fishy” going on. Sometimes even I feel awkward trying to teach a male. I have to wonder whether he respects me, whether he would come to me with a question or would he prefer speaking to another man. We still have these ingrained things in society that prevent us from having a clean exchange of information between the genders.

Arsalan: This is a story of most women, not just certain women. They get so used to being treated differently, and sometimes mistreated, and we know that; it happens. It doesn’t just happen in software development. It happens everywhere. There are always going to be people out there who don’t have the right intentions. But, my belief is that most people are good, they just don’t know how to be nice, kind, and good.

Arsalan: I think we could talk on and on for hours. I think we will probably have to have you on the show again at a later time. Right now I’d like you to tell us about this upcoming conference that you’re organizing.

Rachel: The conference is Write/Speak/Code. It is our 3^rd international conference. This year we are holding it in Chicago. The past few times that we’ve held it, beginning back in 2013, have been in New York City. That was never our intention, but that just happened to be the easiest place for our organizers to get to because they live there. So, it’s in Chicago this year and this year we’ve introduced a fourth day, which is outside of our original 3-day curriculum.

Rachel: The extra day has to do with self-care and career development. It was something that we wanted to see and all the organizers had been in a position in the past few years where they were burnt out and overworked, and even considering whether or not to stay in the technology field. We all had to learn independently how to do self-care and why it was so important. We also introduced our alumni track. This is not just for people who’ve attended the conference before, but also for people who have spoken.

Rachel: Even though we have a curriculum for a “write” day, a “speak” day, and a “code” day, we wanted to offer a space for people who’ve already done all that and are still looking for inspiration on how to get to the next level. So our conference is really for women who’ve been in the industry for a number of years and want to do more. So our alumni track is for women who have already been writing and speaking publicly and are looking for something more. It includes writing ebooks, creating independent projects, better communication skills. We’ve sourced some of our friends who are great at these topics as well as people through an independent CFP process to talk more about these intricate topics.

Arsalan: Is this open only to women?

Rachel: Yes, because we feel we needed to create a safe space for these women to talk about their experiences. It’s not that we don’t love men. We just wanted to serve a specific community and this was how we decided to do it.

Arsalan: I think there’s a lot of room in technology to service people from a lot of different demographics. It’s cool. We should support our women. If you are a woman and listening to this and you want to be a software developer or you are a software developer, and you want to learn other skills to move your career forward, I recommend you go to this conference. It is going to be in Chicago in June 2016.

Arsalan: Rachel has been kind enough to offer you, the audience, a 20% discount off the ticket price. Just go to the Write/Speak/Code website listed in the show links, go to “register,” and use “mentoringdevs” as the discount code when you purchase your tickets.

Rachel: Yes, we want people to be able to make it. We offer three levels of ticket pricing.  The regular ticket prices are for attendees whose employers are paying for their ticket. We also have a transitional ticket price for those who are either unemployed or paying for the ticket by themselves and are not sponsored by their employers. Finally, we also have a student price, which is for someone who is in college or taking a boot camp because we want them to also be able to make it to our conference. We really try to make it affordable to different demographics.

Arsalan: Is it 20% off all tickets? Or is it just the higher priced tickets?

Rachel: I believe it is for all tickets. That is how I tried to set it up. If you have any problems, feel free to reach out to us at info@writespeakcode.com because we would love to work with you to get you to our conference.

Arsalan: You’re not making money from this, right? It is not a business.

Rachel: We recently registered it as a non-profit. We are attempting to get it registered as a 501c3 so that we will be able to offer tax incentives to companies. But, no, we don’t make any money off of it. Maybe one day, but it is mostly a labor of love for us. Despite what many people think, it actually does take a lot of time, money, and effort to run a conference. We don’t make money off of it. Any money that we do make is usually reinvested into other things that we do.

Arsalan: Okay, so it is our job to help make this conference a success. Hopefully, we’ll have a full house and sell out the tickets. Let me know how it goes. Be sure to check it out.

Arsalan: Rachel, it was such a pleasure talking to you. I hope that you find time to return to the show at some other time.

Rachel: Absolutely. This was lots of fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Arsalan: Is there a place people can check out? I know you have a website and Twitter. Do you want to share some of that?

Rachel: Sure. I’m known everywhere as Rachel Ober on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and www.rachelober.com.

Arsalan: Okay, that’s a marketing and branding tip for you. It was a pleasure talking to you and we’ll talk to you later.

 

Important Links

• RailsBridge
• Paperless Post
• Write/Speak/Code
• Write/Speak/Code Tickets: Use discount code mentoringdevs for 20% off the 2016 ticket price
• Ruby Nation
• GitHub
• Code Bootcamp
• Recurse Center

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Angelo went from software developing to becoming a founder and CIO of a podcasting technology and community. After spending some time working with C++ and discovering the many benefits that PHP has to offer, Angelo changed gears and the rest soon became history. As with most of our podcasts, Arsalan and Angelo discuss how he entered the field, his training, and many experiences and revelations along the way.  Listen in to Mentoring Developers episode 32 for more information.

Angelo’s Bio:

Angelo is the founder and CIO of Raw Voice, an Internet media company including subsidiaries blubrry.com podcasting community, techpodcasts.com technology podcast network, and subscribeonandroid.com, simple One Click subscribe links for all Android podcast applications to utilize. He is passionate about WordPress theme and plugin development and has created many themes and plugins for clients and wordpress.org, including the PowerPress podcasting plugin. Angelo is a seasoned developer experienced with PHP, MySQL, HTML5/CSS/bootstrap/jQuery, Android, iOS, Roku and other SmartTV development, and Ubuntu Apache/Nginx web server administration. His free time is spent with family, friends and restoring a 1981 Trans Am.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Today we have a special guest, Angelo Mandato. How are you?

Angelo: Great.

Arsalan: I know a little bit about you. I’ve known you for a little while and I know that you’re doing some really cool stuff. So tell us about it. How do you see yourself?

Angelo: Today I see myself as an expert in the podcasting development space. It’s kind of been a long road to get there. I kind of just fell into it by being exposed to a lot of the web type technology throughout the year 2000.

Arsalan: I know that your developer and that you’re involved in developing podcast hosting. Are you a founder of Raw Voice or are you one of the early employees?

Angelo: Yes, I’m one of the co-founders. There were five of us that created the company, virtually, and everyone was just spread out throughout the country. So we just used tools of the time to create the company with Skype, GoToMeeting, phone calls, chat, and you name it.

Arsalan: What does the company do again?

Angelo: We provide podcasting services.

Arsalan: All right. Well, I’m a customer. I wanted everybody to know that it’s a good service.

Angelo: When we first started we were originally focused on the monetizing in podcasting with advertising. We started our first network which was Podcaster News. The idea was a podcast. This could create up to five-minute audio recordings of whatever news topics they preferred and give their new show their own name all on our website. Then, we could do a 70/30 with them. They would get 70% of the revenue and we would get 30%. Within the first few months, we quickly discovered there was a bigger market to do more than just news. We launched the Blueberry in the summer of 2006 to be an all-encompassing network for podcasts, not just limited to news. That became our mainstay and our original business model fell off the wayside for just specifically focusing on news for podcasting. Now we’re here today strictly doing services, mainly.

Arsalan: You have been coding for a while, right? How long have you been coding?

Angelo: As a career, since 2000.

Arsalan: Okay, so that’s been 15 to 16 years. Do you remember how you encountered programming for the first time?

Angelo: Yes. I had a roommate who was studying mechanical engineering during my college years and another roommate who is taking computer engineering and he was doing some coding back in about 1996. He was doing some coding to solve some problems with Perl. He was also real big on setting up servers and, I don’t want to call it hacking, but, getting computers to do things they weren’t intended to do. That was kind of the cool thing back in the 90s. I was exposed to a lot of this stuff from him and it just got me kind of excited to where I wanted to change my career and I went into computer science.

Arsalan: So, you didn’t feel the need to study computer science to actually get formal training? You just decided you were going to learn it and do it?

Angelo: No, I actually switched my major to computer science.

Arsalan: Okay, so you got a bachelor’s degree in computer science?

Angelo: Yes.

Arsalan: Do you think that was really helpful and give you confidence in a lot of skills that you wouldn’t have had otherwise?

Angelo: Initially, when I graduated, I didn’t feel like I knew anything. There was a good year there where I felt that I just needed experience. I think everyone who comes out of their education in that industry kind of feels the same way. It almost feels like being thrown into the industry and the school didn’t prepare you well enough for it. But after about a year into my career that completely switched. I found that the school gave me a lot of problem-solving education rather than just knowing specific platforms or software or languages. That was actually more valuable long-term than short-term.

Arsalan: On the problem-solving, is it because you studied computer science or is it just college? I know that if you’re a mechanical engineer you solve a lot more problems than if you’re a computer science graduate, but it’s a different set of problems. Do you think that it matters that you studied computer science?

Angelo: At the time when I graduated I thought that it was just a degree that was helping me get my foot in the door, but I would almost disagree with you on the problem-solving. Everything that you do every day, it’s solving a problem and doing it very efficiently. My college education gave me the ability to understand how to attack a problem.

Arsalan: I think that’s a really good point. Specific languages, technologies, and frameworks keep changing and your knowledge is definitely going to be stale after a while. But the concepts don’t change, and what’s behind the technologies doesn’t change. So it gives you a good bearing in knowing where to look. I think that’s a very fair point.

Arsalan: So, you got into college, and you were learning computer science. When you were studying during your college years, did you work somewhere? Did someone pay you to do programming?

Angelo: No, I did not have the luxury or opportunity to do internships, but I was still working somewhat in the industry. So, while I was at school. I also worked on the residential network. This happened during the late 90s, a time when students were just beginning to afford the ability to have a desktop computer to take to school. So it was the popular thing for the college to provide networking services to the get a network card put into these computers so that the kids could network in their dorms. I was kind of in the right place at the right time and did a lot of networking and hardware work. The last summer before I graduated I went and got A+ certified and worked one summer at CompUSA as a computer repair tech.

Arsalan: Good old CompUSA. I used to go there a lot and then obviously it disappeared. Okay, so after you graduated and had a little bit of money from working on the side, how long did it take for you to work as a software engineer professionally after you graduated? I’m assuming you didn’t go to graduate school, is that true?

Angelo: I had a job lined up before I graduated, but I kind of regret not taking a week or two and just relaxing. I needed to work right away, though, because I was also paying all of my loans and stuff. I was ready to have a job just so I could finally have some cash in my wallet. I think it took about a year before I could say that I was a programmer and could solve problems on my own. It didn’t take long for me to feel that I was contributing, though.

Angelo: The employer I was working for was using C++ to program everything and I stumbled upon PHP and learned that what it took me to program in four days using C++, I could do the same in PHP in about a day. When I told my manager he decided we would switch everything over the PHP.

Arsalan: Now you’re a PHP guru. You’ve been in PHP for how long now?

Angelo: It’s been since December 2000 when I really started digging into it. Yet, I remember getting a book on it that fall. There’s always a buildup time. I remember getting a book and reading the first chapter and letting it sit for about a month. But once I really started digging into it I realized that it was going to work and how much it was going to save time. All these things kept running through my mind and then everything just kind of snowballed. We had all the CGI apps that I wrote converted over within a month while also working on their other projects at the same time.

Arsalan: That’s incredible. PHP is not the most popular language in the world in some ways, but in other ways it is. It is an incredible language because it allows you to build web pages and websites quickly. It’s very efficient, but it has some quirks that some people don’t like.

Angelo: some of the quirks probably make it ideal for the solutions that it’s for which is for the web. In Perl or C++ you have to add a library in order to parse and deal the Git and post and cookies, and all these web-based pieces of data that need to process and convert to what you’re trying to do in your application. PHP natively makes all of these variables already available and also handles conversion of decoding the URL into what you need its actual value to be.

Arsalan: I’m wondering about keeping up with PHP development and web development in general. I know that I’ve had to work really hard in my career to keep ahead of whatever technologies or techniques come out. It’s a constant process of learning. I don’t know much about PHP. So, from your point of view is it something that evolves or changes a lot and that you have to keep up with it? I know that PHP has its own frameworks as well. Is it a bit of a struggle or is it easier than other programming languages?

Angelo: I find that it’s easier when the core basics of it haven’t changed much since around 2000 or since version 4. The functions have come and gone. It used to be that you could split and join a raise to strings and now you have to implode and explode them. But, it’s more of a function name change than anything else.

Angelo: Now, libraries for frameworks have come and gone and that’s one that you really do have to keep up on. Let’s take word press, for example. If you’re a plug-in developer, then you really think of word press as a kind of framework. If you’re a theme developer, then you think of it a little differently. In that regard, it’s a constant struggle to keep up with the function names and the libraries and hooks and actions. Other than that, it’s not that hard to keep up with the basics.

Angelo: The code itself has not changed in structure. There have been some changes in the way that classes have been implemented, which is a good thing. PHP is getting closer to the way that classes and objects work in Java or C++. So, that’s a really good thing.

Arsalan: is PHP object oriented?

Angelo: it can be either or. It’s very similar to C++ where you can still write some functions in C style. If you wanted to, or you can create classes and create objects from those classes.

Arsalan: Well, it’s definitely a very interesting language just because it has a lot of adoption and because of that we cannot ignore it. There are some people who don’t like the syntax and the mixing of presentation logic with business logic and database and all that. But, it works and it gets you to a finished state pretty quickly, which is why it’s popular. Any language that lets you build a framework like WordPress, I can’t argue with.

Angelo: That reminds me of some of the different things that I’ve been exposed to over the years. I was originally writing code for Windows applications at the same job with C++ platform called Power ++, and hopefully, no one knows what I’m talking about. But, Power ++ was ahead of its time in the fact that you developed your application based on what you wanted it to do and then you right-clicked on the graphical view of your application as you’re building the skeleton. It was very powerful at the time and inspired a lot of other languages to adopt that same kind of model.

Arsalan: Let me ask you about the trajectory of your career. One of the questions that I think a lot of people have when they’re first starting out is should they really pick the best job as their first job? What was the approach that you used and how did it work for you?

Angelo: I always kept my opportunities open because you never know what might come next year or what might change. Don’t make a plan and limit yourself because something might change and you might change with that and that’s always a good thing. Don’t limit yourself to thinking that you have to work for a specific type of company. When you interview at a company don’t think of it in terms of “this is Google.” Think of it as a company that doesn’t have a known name, but what potential you have while you’re there to have an influence on what is going on.

Arsalan: That’s a good point. You worked at a company that didn’t have 100 developers. They were a small company and a small IT shop which means that one person had to wear different hats and do different things. That gave you the opportunity to learn all these different things. So, working for small startups or small established companies with a small IT department will give you the opportunity to work in different areas.

Arsalan: What’s your best advice for people looking to hire new developers?

Angelo: the first thing I like to do is find out if the person you’re interviewing has taken any initiative to do things on their own. If they’re doing anything open source outside of school or work, that tells me they are passionate about their career and that they’re able to solve problems and create things without having to have a team there and can work independently.

Arsalan: What’s your advice for people looking to get hired and land their first job?

Angelo: Don’t limit yourself to any one particular thing. Be open to anything and don’t pigeonhole yourself into only doing one particular thing because the industry changes and you will have to change with it.

Arsalan: I want to talk about the work that you do. Tell me a little bit about your company and the services it provides and why we should care.

Angelo: we provide pretty much the gamut of everything that you would need for podcasting from the hosting of the media files, the publishing, and the tools to easily publish those, integration into Word press so that you can do everything from your own WordPress site, and subscribe and player tools as well. We also do podcast download measurement and play measurement, and help podcast managers monetize their content.

Arsalan: So, the bottom line is if you’re thinking about starting a podcast, Angelo is a great person to talk to because he can help you. He’s helped me and without his help, I wouldn’t be able to produce the show.

Arsalan: I think it’s coming to the end of the show and I’m so excited that I was finally able to get you here. How can anyone get in touch with you if they wanted to?

Angelo: The easiest way would be through my personal site, www.angelomendato.com. I think I have contact information over there as well if you wanted to email me.

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In the end, you ultimately must find what works best for you and your team. So, if you’d like a little insight on this hot topic, step right over and listen in. Feel free to leave us a comment afterward if you’d like. We’d love to hear from you.

Edward Stull’s Bio:

Edward Stull is a user experience (UX) designer and researcher in Columbus, Ohio. He has held positions in large traditional agencies, mid-size system integration firms, small design studios, as well as a one-person consulting practice. He has worn many hats during his career. Thus, his background grants an uncommon perspective into how various teams understand, practice and sell UX. When he is not working, he is usually hiking.

David Gatti’s Bio:

David Gatti began his career in IT as a Systems Administrator. He learned how to code in PHP out of boredom, and made some simple internal tools to help him while managing the company network. He later became a blogger and wrote about mobile technologies before the iPhone came into existence and PDAs had cellular modems. David also wrote the CMS for the website itself when WordPress was first starting. Then, he began working as a web developer for a company that did simple Facebook games.

After his initial experience, David ported a Windows Mobile app to Android 2.3. He then became a Brand Manager for a mobile game company and a Marketing Director for another company and at that company – he transitioned to Developer Relations Manager and worked for two companies with this title. It was a job that he fell in love with.

But, while hunting for his next opportunity, he struggled to find the right company. Out of frustration he created Simpe.li (simply) so he could keep doing what he does best – Development Relations Management done right.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today are bringing to you a really good discussion. The topic of the discussion is how to build a great team. Our panelists today are David Gatti and Edward Stull. How are you guys?

David: I’m doing great, thank you for asking.

Edward: I’m doing fine.

Arsalan: So, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you guys and why are you interested in this topic?

David: My name is David. I call myself a tech evangelist now because I like to explain stuff and in particular about technology. My experience with this topic is that I’ve managed teams at my previous jobs and I’ve hired people, developers especially. So, I think I might have something interesting to say about this stuff.

Edward: I’m Edward Stull and I am a user experience consultant here in Columbus, Ohio. Although I work independently now, I’ve been a part of large teams as well as managed very fairly large teams. I think it’s such an intriguing topic just because it’s my belief that if you can have a really good team, anything that you end up encountering if it’s going to be a bad project, client, or situation, a good team will make it tolerable. If you have a good project and you have a great team. It makes the project wonderful. So, it’s a pretty vital part of any project.

Arsalan: Having a good team is good for morale. You want everybody to want to work together because when they work together, they communicate and communication is so important. Without communication, projects fail, everybody’s down, and people leave the company a lot.

Arsalan: So, what you’re feeling on building great teams? Has it been something that you enjoy doing, or has it been hard? What is your overall take on this?

David: I think it’s fun because the mindset that you have to have you need to understand the other person who is on the team has feelings as well. You need to understand if that person is happy or unhappy and try to determine by their body language what might be happening. For me, this is the most interesting part because it is the most intriguing. It’s almost like being a detective and trying to understand what is happening.

Edward: Playing off of what David was just talking about, I would have to second all of his points. Building a team is generally a fun exercise. Regardless of what size teams are, they amplify whatever is going on. So, if you have something that is successful, then it’s great being successful with the really large team because each personality is going to amplify that success. But you could say the same in the opposite as well.

Edward: If things are going south, the more team members you have, who are not feeling great about things, the more that gets amplified as well. The general notion is that if you start off with a good group of folks and you can lead them to success then it can be a whole lot of fun. But it’s vital that you manage a group of people like that. Well, because things can go south pretty quickly, sometimes.

Arsalan: So, you’re talking about working with good folks and that means being very careful about who you hire during the selection process. What kind of people. Would you hire?

Edward: One of the critical parts about when you do hiring is that you have a lot of bias anytime you meet any individual. In a working situation, you generally have two different sets of metrics. Can this person do this job? Are they a complete psychopath? The notion is that everything else is really biased. You want to make sure that you are empathetic with your colleagues and you treat them with respect. If they can do the job, then there’s a pretty good chance that things will work out in the end.

David: I want to say one thing about that. What do you think when a lot of companies try to hire someone and they focus a lot on the skills and don’t focus on whether or not that person is good for the team? From my experience, sometimes people will give you test that you have to finish. Some companies will not hire you if you score lower on the test. But, the test was building a way so it’s tested on what you could code. So, you could have written the worst code ever, but still, pass for whatever the reason and have the company hire you.

Arsalan: I have an opinion on this matter and I think Edward might as well. Let me just say what I think about these automated testing suites. Often you want to hire the best of the best and you don’t want to look at any of the rest. So, you want to whittle down the list of the top 5%. So this test serves as an automated way to accomplish that.

Arsalan: Humans are not involved with these, yet this is the criteria that we use for selecting people. It’s just a way of not having to look at everybody. It’s an example of us being lazy, not having enough time, or not caring enough to build a great team and go through people’s profiles to get a broader spectrum of people and not depending on one thing or another.

Arsalan: Sometimes it’s not an automated test that you have to go through. Sometimes it’s an in-person test. The tests are supposed to be an objective way of finding out who’s the best, but that’s actually not true. Most of the testing and the interviews and everything that goes into the interviews is not really related to the work that people do. They don’t really test their interest personal skills, communication, or anything else.

David: So, what do you think guides good criteria? I remember one situation when I was hiring at a game developer company. I was responsible for checking the person’s behavioral responses to see if they are behaving the right way. A good friend of mine was testing the person’s skills. So, he was always very interested in people who fit well into the company culture.

David: I remember when this one guy came in for an interview. He was off the chain. He showed us this game that he built. His skill level was amazing, but when my friend asked him which part of this engine he was most proud of, he had no answer. So we asked him why he designed this object in this particular way. His response was that this was the only way. It was almost like he was too smart for the average person like he didn’t compute that someone else might not understand that this is the way that you do something. Having someone like that on the team would make the team worse because he would not be able to properly share his knowledge with the rest of the team. It’s wonderful that he had skills but you also need to be able to communicate those skills with our other people.

Arsalan: You don’t want any rock stars. I’m not really a big fan of rock stars.

David: What do you mean by rock stars?

Arsalan: Rockstar developers. A rock star developer will come with his groupies and his attitude and all the stuff that goes with rock stars. Rock stars are not people who I would put up as role models. A rock star developer is a term that I get a lot and that people throw around a lot. It rubs me the wrong way.

Edward: You know, I wonder if it is ultimately the way that the team is managed. I worked with some folks who you could consider rock star kind of people and their particular aptitudes. But, if you take that same person and move them to one organization and they’ll be successful, and in another, they won’t. I often think about it as this management structure. You have to determine if they have the appropriate attitude to exercise something and then whether they have the authority. For example, can they actually do the things that they know? Also, are they accountable for it? You can take somebody is really good at doing something and who has the authority, but if they’re not accountable that I think it gets more towards what David was saying. If they truly believe that that is the only way of doing something and nobody’s ever going to call them on it, and that’s going to be a problem. But, if they’re being managed appropriately someone can show them that there are many ways of tackling a problem. As long as that person is not exercising their opinions on the rest of the team that’s fine and that person will simply learn.

Arsalan: Okay, so now we have a way of hiring people. We want to make sure that people can communicate, people can get along and all this is standard. We want good people on our team to contribute to the team spirit. The question is what is this team spirit that we’re trying to get to? Eventually, we will have differences and we will have people with different backgrounds and different people. A lot of people try to create team spirit by doing team retreats, whether it is once a week, once a month, once a quarter, or once a year. That is how they bond. You think that stuff works?

David: I have mixed opinions on that. I will let Edward go first.

Edward: I think the good part of team retreats is that it allows people to see the good part of the basic humanity of the people that they are working with. Someone is not simply a developer. They are Arsalan or they are David. That just happens to be what you do as a profession, not who you are as a human being. So, I think team retreats could be very good in that way.

Edward: I think sometimes you get this weird, manufactured consent. It’s like everybody’s going to go out and have a team retreats in your being forced to have a good time. That kind of stuff can tend to feel in organic and awkward, but you also have to be cognizant of how you’re spending other people’s time. Different companies have different policies on this. I almost think that nobody minds a team retreat that happens during work hours because they’re being paid. But if it’s just a social hour that people are being forced to go to after work, you can get into this precarious feel where you are being forced to work off the clock.

David: Yes, I also have experienced something like this where the CEO wanted to go after hours to have a drink or whatever and some of the team wants to go home at five because they have a life. Then, the CEO will look at them like they are worse than everybody else because they don’t want to bond with the team. That kind of situation is very bad, in my opinion.

Edward: Yes, I agree. That’s why those kinds of things should be only optional. One example is that while I drink, I have colleagues who don’t. So it would be unfair to have everybody go out for a beer when maybe one person in the group is a recovering alcoholic. Having everybody go out to dinner once in a while can be a nice time but I think there’s an art to it. People tend to know when they’re being coerced into doing something and when they are being given an opportunity to meet another human and converse with them. Almost nobody minds meeting someone and having a conversation. But if it also takes under the umbrella some force work thing, then I think you have to handle the situation differently.

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David Silva’s Bio:

David is currently a front-end developer at Doctor on Demand, a telemedicine company in San Francisco. Originally from Colombia, he has been in love with computers and programming from an early age and has worked as a programmer for the past 8 years.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today I have with me, David Silva. David, you did something really interesting back in the day. You went to a meeting with the FARC. What’s the FARC?

David: The FARC is a terrorist group that originated in Colombia back in the 50s. It started as a group of farmers and people who were unhappy with the way the government was treating them. Little by little they evolved to buying more weapons and got involved with drug trafficking and now they’re pretty strong organization in Colombia.

Arsalan: Wow. We’re going to get into how you got into the peace negotiations with the FARC’s organization. That’s going to be an interesting story, but first, we want to know a little bit about you. How do you see yourself? Who is David Silva?

David: I’m a software developer at a healthcare company. I originally went to art school but wasn’t very happy with the results. So, I started programming on my own about seven years ago. I enjoy programming a lot, but also do photography and painting. I’m living in LA right now and I really like it.

Arsalan: So, you live in the San Francisco Bay Area. You’re living the life. You’re working in a midsized startup type of company. So how do you like California?

David: I really like it. There are lots of good opportunities especially working with what I do. There are lots of talented people to me, and events to go out to. The weather is nice, but I would prefer a little warmer.

Arsalan: Yeah, northern California is not as warm as many people might think, especially in areas like Berkeley and San Francisco with the ocean breeze. It can be pretty chilly. But, down inland in areas like San Jose and the further inland you go, it starts to get warmer. If you go to LA and San Diego, then you’re golden.

David: Yes, here is too cold for me. I didn’t know it was this cold when I first moved here so I didn’t bring jackets. So, that was one of the first things I bought when I got here.

Arsalan: Well, you should count yourself lucky that you don’t have to live in the Northeast. Now, that’s really cold. At least it never freezes in San Francisco.

David: Yes, that’s a great thing. I enjoy going to Tahoe every now and then to enjoy the snow there.

Arsalan: Yes, Tahoe is awesome. California is awesome. California seems like this living organism. It is not a place; it’s a living breathing thing. With California, the California people are great, but when I lived there I found it hard to make my career there. So, I moved on to the Midwest and made my career there and it worked out really well for me.

Arsalan: So, how did you become a programmer because that’s not what you studied?

David: I started programming when I was a kid, but I’m not very good at math or physics. So, I didn’t want to go to school for that. I decided to go to art school. Instead, where I would be able to learn some programming, but would not be required to learn math or physics. Not doing what I wanted to be able to do turned out to be a little hard. I dropped out of art school and started doing programming on my own and I got my first job about 7 years ago.

Arsalan: okay, so seven years ago, you got your first job. Before you got your first job did you write any programs before then?

David: Not for work. I wrote a few games when I was in school and when I was a kid, and a lot of basic stuff when I was learning like calculators and Visual Basic. I did a copy of “Frog in Lingo.” It was a lot of code. I don’t know if you’ve used it before, but although we bought the product and killed it, it was a program called Macromedia Director. Every layer or sprite on the screen was like an object and the code was contained in that object. So, it was really messy and complicated, but it was fun.

David: When I started my first job, I was doing Juno templates for small businesses. It was an easy start.

Arsalan: Okay, so you got your first job. I want to know was it in this country or was it in Colombia?

David: It was in Colombia. I only just moved to this area three years ago.

Arsalan: Okay, so how did you get that first job?

David: I was looking around and shopping for jobs. I met this freelancer who was a designer and he needed someone to code his designs into HTML, PHP, and etc.

Arsalan: Okay, so you just met somebody who needed some work done and you agreed to do it. Was it easy for you to come to the US to work? Did you have to do anything special? I’m assuming you wanted to in the Silicon Valley. It’s the Silicon Valley. Everybody wants to be here. But not everyone gets to come here. So, why do you think you were able to do it?

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Thanks for Listening!

Do you have some feedback or some advice for us or our audience? Please give us a review on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher and share your thoughts.

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