Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? After being raised in Saginaw, MI, I graduated from the prestigious Tuskegee University with a BS in Computer Science. I came to the DC area right after college after landing a Government contracting gig. I did a lot of soul-searching those first few years of my career after I realized Government work wasn’t for me. I eventually broke into the startup world which is much more my cup of tea (I like my tattoos and jeans). After some time, a
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do? I’m originally from Lagos, Nigeria. I moved to the US about four years ago to attend New York University. I currently work at LinkedIn as a software engineer on the design systems team. My team creates the building blocks for developers across the company to build their sites. Outside of work I consider myself more of an artist that uses code as a tool. I graduated from the “make your own major” school at NYU, and my concentration was at the
I sat down with Dara Elass only expecting to discuss life as a Data Engineer at Spotify. As I went on to uncover the amazing person that she is and more about her life journey, I knew that this discussion would go more in-depth than work and her life in tech. We thank you, Dara, for being so brave and welcoming to POCIT and for understanding how important it is to share your story with the communities and individuals you may reach. Tell us about your journey into tech. I
We spoke to Safia all the way back in Episode 50, and it was time for an overdue catchup to see whats shes been working on. What made you start the projects you’re working on at the moment? My biggest project at the moment is a platform called Zarf. Zarf is a content marketplace where writers can sell a subscription or one-time access to their work. Before I “officially” started working on the project in June, I had been thinking about building a platform like Zarf for a while. I
Tell the audience a bit about yourself? I’m Kendell Byrd. I’m a recent graduate of Swarthmore College where I studied computer science and economics. Throughout my college career which I just finished, I did several internships in tech. I started off my freshman year doing CODE2040 which is one of the best scholarships in the world. In the summer of 2014 I worked at Jawbone as a software engineer intern and season after that, I worked at JP Morgan as a technology analyst, and then in summer 2016, I interned
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
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,
Be the hero you always needed. This morning, I started thinking about my dad. He was never really there for us, but when he was “there”, it felt like we were a chore. This memory came to me: When I began designing and learning Photoshop, my dad made me create a flyer for a nightclub he worked at. I was just barely a teenager, and it was fun working on real projects — so I did the flyer without a second thought. It came out pretty good. The thing is,
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
What made you decide to work in tech? Problem-solving. Specifically, problem-solving with little costs for exploration. I was really attracted to solving problems with code. I loved that code could be changed to explore new ideas and improve on existing ones with the only real costs being my time and energy. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle? Transitioning to management, though I saw and see that as a challenge more than an obstacle. At the time I was a peer of the teammates
