CodeNewbie

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 130 - 30 Million Downloads (Jo Overline) Mar 06, 2017

Show notes

Jo Overline’s created 30 apps, totally 30 million downloads over the past ten years. He’s taken his success as an app creator and built a business around it, launching a consultancy that helps individuals and businesses build successful products. He shares his lessons learned in created successful apps, his thoughts on how apps have evolved over the years, and whether or not there’s still room for the independent app maker.

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Jo Overline

Jo Overline has been a successful iOS app creator for over ten years. He’s built over 30 apps in various categories, and over 30 million downloads under his belt holding the #1 spot in 94 countries. He's the founder of SwingDev, which specializes in web and mobile app development

Ep. 129 - Getting My First Developer Job (Paola Mata) Feb 27, 2017

Show notes

The dream is to learn to code for a few months and get a job right away. But reality comes with a few more twists and turns, as Paola discovered on her way to landing her current software engineering position at BuzzFeed. She was an assitant looking for a better career when she rediscovered code. But getting that better careeer involved attending two bootcamps, doing an internship, and job searching for a year before landing her full-time iOS role. She shares the ups and downs of becoming a developer, the emotional and financial stressess of looking for a job, and the resources that helped her reach her goal.

Paola Mata

Paola is currently building awesome apps at BuzzFeed, where she was part of the team that launched the highly acclaimed BuzzFeed News app. She's also actively involved in the tech community as co-founder of NYC Tech Latinas and regularly volunteers her time to promoting diversity in tech and supporting the next wave of new programmers.

Ep. 128 - Progressive Coders Network (Rapi Castillo) Feb 19, 2017

Show notes

Rapi wasn’t very politically engaged until his husband told him about Bernie Sanders, and soon after, Rapi was hooked. He joined the Coders for Sanders group and created the Bernie Map, an open source project that would become valuable for future movements. Rapi shares how he transferred the energy from the Coders for Sanders community to create the Progressive Coders Network, how he thinks about open source contributors as members instead of sources of free labor, and why open source is a powerful tool for activism.

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Rapi Castillo

Executive Director of Progressive Coders Network, passionate about building movements and creating platforms for people to become engaged, empowered, and excited, about a cause, campaign, or product.

Ep. 127 - Creating a Game for Vets (Evan Sanderson) Feb 13, 2017

Show notes

When Evan read an article about the rate of suicide among veterans returning from war, it broke his heart. So he decided to turn that heart break into advocacy. He read about and researched the experiences of vets and created a game designed to share theirs stories with the world. Evan tells us about his process, why games have a special power to create empathy and activate, and what he hopes for the future of games with a purpose.

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Evan Sanderson

Developer and creative nerd working at the intersection of arts & technology.

Ep. 126 - The Mechanic (Ray Acevedo) Feb 06, 2017

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Ray Acevedo was a mechanic, a full-time job he held while he learned to code part-time at the Coalition for Queens. In this specially produced segment, Ray shares his coding journey, how he came close to quitting altogether, how his brother got him through, and how being a mechanic helped him learned to code.

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Ray Acevedo

Mechanic turned Android Developer. Interested in making the world a better place through technology.

Ep. 125 - Learning to Code in the 1960s (Mary L Gorden) Jan 30, 2017

Show notes

Mary became a programmer in the late 1960s, back when coding was “barbaric,” as she put it. She takes us through her nearly 40 years of working with computers, starting with the era of punch cards. She shares the joy of using a terminal for the first time, her determination to stay technical even as she climbed the corporate ladder, and how the tools of coding have shifted the programmer’s job description.

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Mary L Gorden

Mary L Gorden's first career was in computers. She began as a programmer in 1966 and retired in 2001 as a chief systems architect. Gorden's second career is as an author. Her memoir, published by Green Hat Press in November 2016, is Life Without Ceilings: A Woman Career in Computers.

Ep. 124 - Open Source Newbie (Shubheksha Jalan ) Jan 23, 2017

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Shubheksha shares her experience contributing to open source, why it took her two years to contribute in a meaningful way, and how working on open source has boosted her confidence and sharpened her skills.

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Shubheksha Jalan

Shubheksha is a Computer Science major from India, currently in her final year of college and is also an Outreachy intern at Mozilla.

Ep. 123 - Rails Girls Summer of Code (Laura Gaetano) Jan 16, 2017

Show notes

Before becoming a developer, Laura had a number of job titles, including music blogger, DJ, and maid. But it was a Rails Girls workshop that brought her back to the world of web that she fell in love with many years ago. Now, as a manger at the Travis Foundation, she gets to help introduce other women to tech through the Rails Girls Summer of Code, one of the many initiatives she runs. She tells us more about what it’s like to be a scholar in the program, the power of doing meaningful work on open source projects, and how she reconnected with the web and became a developer.

Laura Gaetano

Laura Gaetano is a web developer, designer and artist from Italy. She runs the Ruby Usergroup and Pyladies chapter in Vienna, Austria as well as Rails Girls Summer of Code, a global initiative to bring more women into tech by offering them paid scholarships to work on Open Source projects.

Ep. 122 - The Ethics of Coding (Bill Sourour) Jan 09, 2017

Show notes

Bill Sourour was twenty-one when he was asked to build a website for a pharmaceutical company. It was a quiz that asked users to select symptoms so that it could recommend a drug as a possible solution. But for almost every option the user selected, the quiz would recommend the same drug. It didn’t feel right, but when Bill later heard that a side effect of the drug was depression and a young woman who had taken that drug had committed suicide, it felt very, very wrong. Bill tells us the story of his first code-related ethical conflict, his thoughts on the role of ethics in coding, and how the incident affects how he approaches code today.

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Bill Sourour

Bill is the founder of DevMastery.com. A 20 year veteran programmer, architect, consultant, and teacher, he helps individual developers and billion dollar organizations become more successful every day.

Ep. 121 - TechHire (Tess Posner) Jan 02, 2017

Show notes

If you’re hoping to get your first tech job and you haven’t heard of TechHire, this episode is for you. We talk to Tess, the managing director of TechHire, about working with employer and learning partners to place 100K people in tech jobs by 2020. She talks about the realities of finding a job in tech at the salary you want, what technology’s increasing demand for talent means for job seekers, and what every codenewbie can do to maximize their chances of launching their tech career.

Tess Posner

Tess is a social entrepreneur focused on increasing equity and economic opportunity in the education system and economy. Currently, she is managing director of TechHire at Opportunity@Work. TechHire is a national initiative in 70+ communities increasing opportunity for overlooked and underrepresented Americans to connect to technology careers.