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Allison McMillan
Allison McMillan has hosted 52 episodes.
Allison McMillan is a Director of Engineering at GitHub. She’s worn many hats including community builder at the University of Michigan, software developer, and Managing Director of a national non-profit. She is a Mozilla Tech Speaker and speaks on a variety of topics including mentorship, working remotely, and being a parent in tech.
Speaking about and doing research on being a parent and developer is what inspired Allison to start the Parent Driven Development podcast. She has a 5-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter. When Allison is not coding, you can find her encouraging her son’s climbing skills, making funny faces at her daughter, or pretending she has time to bake. She lives in the Washington, DC area.
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Chris Sexton
Chris Sexton has hosted 40 episodes.
Chris is the VP of Engineering at Radius Networks, where he builds mobile proximity tools and services. He cofounded the Arlington Ruby Meetup and helps organize both Ruby Retrocession and Ruby for Good events.
When not working, Chris likes doing projects with with his kids: Hardware, LEGO, dog training, woodworking, and of course some programming.
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Katherine Wu
Katherine Wu has hosted 40 episodes.
KWu is a Ruby developer at Heroku and new mom to a delightfully chubby baby boy.
She previously worked at New Relic on the newrelic_rpm gem and at Google in various technical support and product operations roles. A proud New Jersey native, she nevertheless fits in well in Portlandia, with hobbies like knitting, sewing, and making pickles from local produce.
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Chris Arcand
Chris Arcand has hosted 11 episodes.
Chris Arcand is a senior engineer at HashiCorp where he works on Terraform, a tool for building, changing, and versioning cloud infrastructure. He organizes RubyMN, and as a public speaker has had the privilege of speaking at major conferences as close as the American Midwest and as far as Kyoto, Japan. Beyond programming he enjoys ice hockey, backpacking, and fulfilling his responsibility as a native Minnesotan to making pointless connections to Minnesota at every opportunity.
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Jess Szmajda
Jess Szmajda has hosted 11 episodes.
Jess is a mom of one wonderful kid, the CTO at Optoro, the host of the DCTech Slack, and an organizer of the Joy of Programming Meetup. She has held lots of roles in tech; including IT support, operations, development, and eventually leadership.
When she unplugs, Jess can be found around Washington DC playing music at open mics, cooking, playing board games, and spending time with her son.
Retired Hosts
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Andy Croll
Andy Croll has hosted 8 episodes.
Freelance CTO, Rubyist, Conference Organizer, Author, Speaker, Bootstrapper & Parent of Twins.
I’m tired a lot.
Emailer of One Ruby Thing
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JC Avena
JC Avena has hosted 15 episodes.
A husband since 1998, a professional software developer since 1999, and a parent since 2000.
JC has worked primarily as a web developer in many industries, including communications, financial, and e-commerce.
During this time his family has grown to four children and two dogs. They keep him and his wife busy and keep life interesting.
He’s also an amateur musician and considers himself a decent guacamole maker.
After all these years, he may be starting to figure things out, but there’s still a lot to learn.
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Johnny Ray Austin
Johnny Ray Austin has hosted 2 episodes.
Johnny is an experienced engineering & technology leader. He has served as a member of the IT advisory board for the National Academy Foundation where he helped to ensure students receive the resources necessary to prepare them for industry or college. He is the former Curriculum Development Lead for the DC chapter of Black Girls Code - an organization dedicated to teaching young women of color how to program. Johnny now serves as a technology advisor for Black Girls Code. He is also an educator - having taught various courses through General Assembly.
During his time as Director of Technology at iStrategyLabs, Johnny led the development of projects and campaigns for clients such as Facebook, Kroger, Volkswagen more. As a Tech Fellow, he helped drive the engineering culture at Capital One through high impact technology contributions and thought leadership. Johnny is currently working as Head of Navigation Data at Mapbox in Washington, DC.
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Mandy Moore
Mandy Moore has hosted 18 episodes.
Mandy is a single mom waitress turned entrepreneur. She specializes in quality audio processing and editing and provides complete show management for several podcasts including Parent Driven Development and Greater Than Code. She is also the Operations Manager for Ruby Together and Cloud City Development, a San Francisco-based Senior Full-Stack Development UX UI Design Consultancy. She lives and works remotely in the South-Central Pennsylvania area.
Women in tech, diversity and inclusion, and getting children involved in STEM education are all causes very near and dear to her heart. She lovingly refers to her 9-year-old daughter as “Chicken”.
Together, they continue to navigate the world one day at a time, and frequently travel to conferences where Mandy can be found emceeing or podcast field reporting. Meanwhile, Chicken, is taking on the tech world herself, and experimenting with being a “famous” YouTuber, ROBLOX and Minecraft Champion, and young robotics maker, while touting herself InquisitorMaster's #1 Fan.
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Sarah Olson
Sarah Olson has hosted 3 episodes.
Sarah Olson is an iOS developer for Trello at Atlassian. She lives in the exurbs of Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters (ages 4 and 7).
Sarah has over eighteen years of development experience in a variety of technologies, including iOS, Android, Java, and WordPress development.
As Director of Women Who Code Twin Cities, she leads a variety of initiatives and events focused on creating a more inclusive tech culture.
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Josh Puetz
Josh Puetz has hosted 23 episodes.
Josh Puetz is a developer with almost 20 years of experience making mistakes and telling stories about them. A veteran of several startups, he’s currently a senior software engineer at Codeship, focusing on building tools to help other developers write better code.
He lives in a small town in Wisconsin with his husband and 10-year-old daughter. When’s he not trying to figure out what to make for dinner, he enjoys photography and gaming.
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Adarsh Pandit
Adarsh Pandit has hosted 4 episodes.
Adarsh Pandit is founder and Managing Partner of Cylinder Digital, a consulting firm helping organizations grow using human-centered design and software.
Trained as a scientist, Adarsh left academia after finishing a doctorate to join McKinsey & Co. in New York as a Management Consultant and Strategy Fellow.
After teaching himself to code and working as a developer apprentice, Adarsh left Management Consulting and worked his way up from junior developer to Managing Director for a well-regarded boutique software development company. As SF's office lead, Adarsh focused on sales, advising, hiring, in that order.
Since 2015, Adarsh has led distributed consulting teams with clients around the world for his own company, Cylinder Digital.
Some of the work includes:
- Code for America - helping residents in California and Michigan sign up for food stamps in 6 minutes instead of an hour. Case study here.
- IDEO - Working with IDEO's insurance, finance, and non-profit clients to guide the building of software products and prototypes, working hand-in-hand with IDEO designers.
- Able Health - A Healthcare metrics company where we helped with software development, management of large volumes of sensitive personal health data, hiring, and teambuilding.
- Dynamicare Health - DynamiCare Health is a technology platform that addresses substance use and rewards healthy behavior. We helped with development planning/processes and hiring.
- Dolby Labs - Strategy for internal web tool to manage licensing agreements and ensure compliance from electronics vendors.
Adarsh holds a Ph.D in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the University of
Chicago and a B.S. in Honors Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, none of which is directly helpful for his daily work nowadays.To hear a longer podcast version of this story from 2014, click here.
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Arit Amana
Arit Amana has hosted 6 episodes.
In her late 30s, Arit completed a coding bootcamp while mothering 2 kids (one an infant). She landed her first engineering role 6 months later. In her free time, Arit passionately mentors women (especially moms) transitioning to tech careers.