This week Matt sits down with Brian Faber. Brian is the CTO & Co-Founder of Mayday. In this episode, we discuss how Brian went from getting his first computer at the age of seven and teaching himself to program, to skipping university and getting his first development contract building Game Boy Advanced. We discussed the process of building a start-up & managing time.

Other things discussed in this episode include:

- Hiring Practices

- Working for Ubisoft

- Does it make sense to go to school for gaming?

and so much more.

If you liked this episode, check out Mayday or connect with Brian directly (Of course, Mayday *is* hiring!)

- Brian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-faber-4117203/

- Mayday website: https://mayday.am

This week Matt sits down with Andrew Knight. You likely know Andy from his blog AutomationPanda.com or from one of his many talks at Tech Conferences spanning across the globe. In this episode Andy discusses how the TI-83 got him hooked on programming, how Automation Panda started as a place for him to save his notes between jobs, and how blogging led to speaking at conferences, consulting, and many more opportunites. Other things discussed in this episode include:

• Writing Cucumber before it was Cucumber
• Never planning on being a Developer
• LexisNexis being the greatest opportunity of his career and so much more

You can follow Andy on:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutomationPanda
• His Blog: https://automationpanda.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwkshD85UGzUH651KyVK4zQ

This week Matt sits down with Landy Simpson, engineer. Landy discusses the first talk she gave for Power to Fly & what she learned from that experience. We also cover why Landy took up writing, including a very successful Elastic Search Engine article that peaked the interest of some important industry folks and led to her Power to Fly conference.

Other topics discussed in this episode include:

• Companies can always tell you their vision but not exactly what they want
• Why optimizing search engines matters
• Why zoom Socials kind of suck, and much more.

Landy's blog: https://simplyy.medium.com/

Landy's Twitter: https://twitter.com/simp_lyy

This week Matt sits down with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. Charity discusses the dangers of aging code in pre-production, what it takes to lead an engineering organization, from on-call, to management, to hiring.

Some other topics discussed in this episode include:

• Spending 3 years at a big company is enough
• Do Managers need to be technically literate?
• Why having a work “home base” is important
• Why having a little bit of curiosity will save you time in the long run & much more...

This week Matt sits down with Nora, a junior developer at a digital consultancy, to discuss having success in theprofessional world of programming despite not having a University Degree. Noratalks about the confidence that graduating from a programming bootcamp gave her & how she has been able to take that with her to excel in her career.

Another highlight from this episode included how continuing to learn about other aspects of programming are important to your growth, even if you are not using them on a daily basis.

This week Matt sits down with Sameer to talk about excelling in your first role and using it as a stepping stone, establishing a personal knowledgebase, and the importance of staying organized. We dive into how Sameer got started building contract versioning software for the Real Estate space and his experience converting a legacy Ruby on Rails and Ember application to NextJS.

Some other highlights from the episode:

• How Sameer implements Zettlekasten to take detailed notes of his favorite books and podcasts.
• Why the experience from your first job may be more important than the job itself.