CodeNewbie

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 39 - From Coding To Venture Capital (Andrew Chen) Jun 08, 2015

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He knew how to code, but when he graduated school, Andrew Chen decided to go into venture capital. Since then, he’s used his technical background to become an advisor and investor in many tech startups, including Dropbox, Product Hunt, and AngelList. He talks with us about how he leveraged his coding skills to being a tech advisor, how he’s maintained a solid blog for over eight years, and why you don’t have to be a great coder to build something great.

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Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen is a writer and entrepreneur focused on mobile products, metrics, and user growth. He is an advisor/investor for tech startups including AngelList, AppSumo, Barkbox, Cardpool (acq. by Safeway), Dropbox, Frankly (TSX.V:TLK), Gravity (acq. by AOL), Grovo, Kiva, Product Hunt, Qualaroo, Qik (acq. by Skype), Secret, Wanelo, and ZenPayroll.

Ep. 38 - Hacker Hours (Aidan Feldman) Jun 01, 2015

Show notes

When developer Aidan Feldman had a line of people waiting for their turn to get coding help from him, he decided to try a different format. Instead of one-on-one tutoring, how about open office hours for anyone coding to come together and work on their skills? And that was the beginning of Hacker Hours. Aidan tells us how he’s built Hacker Hours over the past few years, and how he manages to keep the community accessible and incredibly welcoming.

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Aidan Feldman

Aidan Feldman is a programmer by day, modern dancer by night. When not building open source software in and for the federal government at 18F, Aidan organizes meetups and teaches at NYU.

Ep. 37 - From Skates To Code (Aimee Knight) May 25, 2015

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She used to be a professional figure skater. And a few years ago, she decided to hang up her skates and trade them in for some code. Software developer Aimee Knight tells us what it was like to transition into tech, how she got her first dev job, and how being a professional athlete has affected her coding journey.

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Aimee Knight

Aimee Knight is a figure skater turned software developer, and a panelist on the JavaScript Jabber, and Angular Air podcasts. After teaching herself the basics and attending a six month bootcamp, she now works at Message Systems in Baltimore Maryland building out email infrastructure in Node.js and Angular.js for companies like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Ep. 36 - Creating jQuery (John Resig) May 18, 2015

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John Resig, creator of jQuery, talks about what it was like to build the most popular javascript library and then walk away from it five years later to follow his passion for education. We unpack what it’s like to maintain such a popular toolkit, how he feels about books, how he takes on his own learning, and why he made the Women Who Code twitter list.

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John Resig

John Resig is a developer at Khan Academy and the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library. He’s also the author of the books Pro JavaScript Techniques and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.

Ep. 35 - Stellar (David Mazières) May 11, 2015

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David Mazières, Chief Scientist at Stellar, talks to us about his work at the Stellar foundation building software to expand financial access. We also talk about how he uses temporary email addresses to ward off spammers, how he started coding in the fourth grade, and why he doesn’t think you need a computer science degree to make an impact in tech.

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David Mazières

David Mazières is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the Secure Computer Systems research group. He also serves as the Chief Scientist of both Stellar Development Foundation and GitStar, Inc.

Ep. 34 - Newbie Story: LaToya Allen (LaToya Allen) May 04, 2015

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For our first Newbie Story, we talk to LaToya Allen, junior software engineer at Avant, a fast-growing Chicago startup. She tells us how she went from bartending to becoming an apprentice, and got her first full-time engineering job in just three weeks.

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LaToya Allen

LaToya is a junior software engineer at Avant where she helps to detect and deter fraud. She is also a co-organizer of Chicago Ruby Hack Night, Windy City Rails organizer, and Girl Develop It volunteer. If you meet her, you should offer her tacos.

Ep. 33 - Detroit Water Project (Tiffani Bell) Apr 27, 2015

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When developer Tiffani Bell first heard about the water crisis in Detroit from a news article in the Atlantic, she was shocked. So she rolled up her developer sleeves and put up a page to help people who’s water had been shut off. Now, that page has become a full Y Combinator backed non-profit, and she’s the executive director. We talk about civic hacking, the technical challenges she had to overcome to make it work, and the impact her project has made to the lives of many in Detroit.

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Tiffani Bell

Tiffani Bell is the founder and executive director of the Detroit Water Project. She is also a developer and was a Code For America fellow.

Ep. 32 - Rockbot (Raquel Velez) Apr 20, 2015

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You probably know her as rockbot, the username that captures her passion for robotics. In this episode, developer Raquel Velez shares that passion with us, telling us all about competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge, how she feels about self-driving cars, and gives us a beginner-friendly walkthrough of how a robot works.

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Raquel Velez

Raquel Vélez is a Senior Software Developer at npm, Inc. in Oakland, CA. She is fairly certain that laughter and chocolate will cure everything, and uses robots as an excuse to get people excited about code and math.

Ep. 31 - Girl Develop It (Corinne Warnshuis) Apr 13, 2015

Show notes

Corinne Warnshuis sat in a Girl Develop It workshop to learn to code. Her love for the community and her community-building skills propelled her from coding newbie to Executive Director of Girl Develop It. She talks to us about her mission to make coding more accessible to women, how to be a good ally, and how the diversity movement in tech has impacted her work.

Corinne Warnshuis

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Ep. 30 - The Not-Bootcamp (Jeff Casimir) Apr 06, 2015

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At a time when people are lining up to get accepted by a programming bootcamp, Jeff Casimir decided to start one that is non-profit. But he doesn't like the term bootcamp -- he prefers "program." We talk about why he decided to make the Turing School non-profit, the complications of quantifying students' skills, and how Turing School approaches its programming curriculum.