War stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)

More from Software Misadventures All episodes →

1. 

   E33 · 19 Mar 2024 · 1 hr 19 min

   The hard power of management and the soft power of senior ICs | Josh Wills

   As a self-described "gainfully unemployed data person", Josh Wills is an angel investor and has worked on and led data teams at Slack, Cloudera, WeaveGrid and Google. We discuss: How to get started with angel investing without a ton of $$ Attributes that define great engineering managers What's it like transitioning from management back to IC Challenges in Climate Tech from a software perspective And more Segments: [0:01:35] Transitioning from management to individual contributor (IC). [0:10:19] Emotional intelligence and its role in engineering management. [0:25:21] Contrasting the hard…

2. 

   E32 · 5 Mar 2024 · 1 hr 5 min

   From High School Suspension to US Chief Data Scientist | DJ Patil

   Known for coining the term "Data Scientist", DJ is a renowned technologist with a diverse background spanning academia, industry, and government. Having led product teams at companies like RelateIQ and LinkedIn, DJ was appointed by President Obama to be the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist where his efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across the Federal government, new health care programs as well as new criminal justice reforms. We discuss: "Dream in years, plan in months, evaluate in weeks, ship daily" High school misadventures that shaped DJ's world view…

3. 

   E31 · 20 Feb 2024 · 1 hr 20 min

   Building Diverse Engineering Teams | Erica Lockheimer

   Erica is a former VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. Having almost dropped out of college, Erica's journey in tech is a testament to her perseverance and dedication. In addition to leading engineering teams at LinkedIn, Erica founded WIT (Women In Tech) to empower women within the company as well as the broader tech community. We discuss: How to create incentives for diversity-building work. Building your personal "board of directors". Balancing mentoring work vs sprint tickets. Structuring a community for long-term success. Much more. Segments: [0:18:04] building women-in-tech and the…

4. 

   E30 · 30 Jan 2024 · 1 hr 17 min

   Stories behind building HashiCorp | Mitchell Hashimoto

   Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp in 2012 and created many important infrastructure tools, such as Terraform, Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. In addition to being a prolific engineer, Mitchell grew HashiCorp into a multi-billion-dollar public company. We discuss: How to structure large projects to avoid demotivation or burnout The "A.P.P.L.E" framework for diffusing tense situations and handling trolls How to decide what to work on Mitchell's unconventional transitions from CEO to CTO and then back to an individual contributor (IC) The quality that Mitchell values the most in an engineering team.…

5. 

   E29 · 16 Jan 2024 · 1 hr 50 min

   Practical Guide to More Effective Mentorship | Dave O'Connor (Google, Twilio, Elastic)

   After 17 years building SRE teams at Google and serving as the Site Lead for Engineering in Dublin, Dave joined Elastic as the Sr Director of Engineering and later VP of Engineering at Twilio. Following a recent career break, Dave now divides his time between coaching engineering leaders and consulting to help busy teams be more effective. In the heart of our conversation, Dave shares the frameworks and practical tips he's amassed for making the most of the mentorship experience. Segments: [00:01:45] Growing remote SRE team as the Google Dublin Site Lead [00:19:49] Company Culture vs Company…

6. 

   12 Dec 2023 · 1 hr 2 min

   Automating away your job as a Data Scientist | Melissa Runfeldt (Salesforce, CueIn)

   Before joining CueIn last year as a Founding Data Scientist, Melissa was a Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce working on the Einstein Platform that focused on automating Data Science workflows. In this conversation we dive into Melissa's unique journey, what to do in the face of increasing job automation and explore the latest developments in practical AI. Segments: [00:02:13] Melissa's background in computational neuroscience [00:06:08] 7 years at Salesforce vs startup [00:11:31] Joining CueIn [00:19:30] Chatbot observability [00:28:16] Feedback loops [00:33:10] Use LLM to observe.. LLMs?…

7. 

   E26 · 28 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 1 min

   Open sourcing LinkedIn's Derived Data Platform | Felix GV (LinkedIn)

   What's it like to open source an internal project at a big tech company like LinkedIn? When should a company open source a project and what are the benefits and challenges that come along with it? If you want to open source an internal project, how should you go about advocating for it? Félix is a Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn where he works on the data infrastructure team that builds Venice. Venice is a distributed derived data store which LinkedIn open sourced in the fall of 2022. He joins the show to chat about his experiences leading the open source efforts for Venice , as well as…

8. 

   7 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 18 min

   When enough was enough - practical and emotional drivers for leaving big tech to bootstrap Metacast | Arnab Deka & Ilya Bezdelev (AWS, Google)

   Should engineers and product managers "stay in their lanes"? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a start-up? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? Ilya and Arnab join the show to share their journey quitting big tech to bootstrap a podcasting startup. Arnab and Ilya are the co-founders of Metacast. Before starting the company, Arnab was a Principal Engineer at AWS while Ilya was a Sr. Product Manager at Google and Principal PM at Amazon before that. While at Amazon, Arnab and Ilya worked together on various…

9. 

   23 Oct 2023 · 43 min

   Pete Warden - On launching "AI in a Box" and building a hardware edge AI company - #24

   What's "AI in a Box"? Pete Warden joins the show to share a new project he recently launched that encapulates Language Transcription/Translation and Question Answering capabilities into a wallet-sized board running locally without internet, as well as stories and learnings from building his new company, Useful Sensors, after 7 years of leading the tensorflow mobile project at Google. Pete is the CEO of Useful Sensors. After founding his own company Jetpac and selling it to Google in 2014, he became a staff research engineer at Google, where he led the TensorFlow Mobile team. Pete is also the…

10. 

    22 Sep 2023 · 1 hr 33 min

    Nathan Marz - On changing the economics of building large-scale software with Rama - #23

    What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X and the 10 years journey to build Rama, a new programming platform that made this feat possible. Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems. Outside of working, Nathan is a private pilot, loves going to…