Tell us a bit yourself and what you do? My name is Kevin Stewart, and I’m VP of Engineering at Heptio. Heptio is a company that was started by two former Googlers who were co-founders of the Kubernetes project as well as co-creators of Google Compute Engine. Heptio is looking to modernize IT by bringing Cloud Native technologies (like Kubernetes) to enterprises. As we are a startup, my primary role is to build the engineering organization and ship our open source projects and products. We are currently hiring for multiple
A few months ago, I received an email that often appears in my inbox. Its usually along the lines of “I’m a college student very interested in getting into tech, but I don’t study computer science, what do I do?”. I don’t consider myself the vanguard of all the necessary knowledge to answer such questions, but I do my best to answer based on my limited experience. Such is the frequency of these emails; I thought it would be smart just to make it into a blog post. That way I can
What made you decide to work in tech? Working in tech happened pretty organically, and was born from several interests I had as a child. Science fiction and video games were popular family pastimes and cultivated my interest in technology early on. My grandmother was the first in the family to get a computer, and whenever we visited, I would lock myself in her bedroom to draw characters in Microsoft Paint based on the stories I wrote in WordPerfect. Once I left New York City and went away to school,
Tell us about your career up to this point. It’s been quite nonlinear. My first job was as a reporter covering arts and theatre for the local edition of a national newspaper in Bangalore, India (where I grew up) at age 19. It was interesting because I knew nothing about arts and theatre. I was studying to be an engineer at the time. My first full-time job after graduating from college was as an engineer at JP Morgan Chase — I worked in a project management team that designed and
Tell us about yourself and what you do? My name is Chandra Arthur, and I’m the founder and Chief Friending Officer at Friendish. The app is designed to eliminate the bias in friend finding that hopes to dismantle the shallow dating app dynamic for Millennials and Gen Z. How was your experience on Planet of the Apps. Planet of the Apps was crazy amazing! The show was my first experience of doing anything of that magnitude, and I honestly felt superly blessed to be selected. There were so many great
What are you doing and how did you get into your current career? I’m working on the Growth Team as a Customer Success Director for Peg, a company that has built a suite of software for marketers to search, message, and collaborate with social influencers. It’s something that I love, and it took a bit of serendipity. Networking with friends (and friends of friends) and being honest with myself about what I needed from my next role was the key. After a grueling interview process, I landed what I would
How would you describe what you do and what you work on? What I work on is called Squire. Squire is a backend platform for small businesses primarily focusing on the male grooming space first. We provide software for CRM, booking management, analytics, and POS [point of sales] systems. So, we offer the full range of tools. So, is there any customer facing side to it? Yes. So, in addition to having our backend management system, we do have a consumer-facing product to coincide with our backend management system. We
How would you describe your job to somebody who is outside of the design and tech world? I help guide the brand identity team. We build the standards, rules, and creative brand expression for our team to breathe life and souls into our brands at Vox How long have you been there at Vox? I started August 2016. I was a speaker at one of their company retreats in 2015 where I spoke about work-life balance. I’ve very familiar with the company and their brands; I loved SB Nation and
What made you decide to work in the tech industry? I was initially in an administrative/office management roles. It wasn’t planned. I started a blog, and I became interested in learning how to code and started looking into boot camp programs. A lot of people who I knew had changed their careers and I thought maybe I could do the same since I wasn’t very happy doing what I was doing. I was eventually accepted into a program at a nonprofit called the Coalition for Queens. They were running a
What made you decide to work in the tech industry? Initially, I was pursuing a career in accounting. I declared it my major at college. After an accounting internship, I decided it was not for me, but I had done it for so long I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. So, I decided to do a second internship, with the hope of getting a full-time offer. It didn’t happen. I was devastated at the time and had no idea what I was going to do next. I was counting
