Getting into IT with Grant

James Jones is an IT leader and the founder of the QOL Group, a non-profit organization providing support for the disabled.  He is a highly motivational speaker and I was blessed to be able to record an episode with him.

In this episode, James talks about his journey of getting into IT, the importance of emotional intelligence as a manager and leader, and shares experiences from the industry that have left an impact on him both personally and professionally.  We discuss what good leadership looks like, as well as how to be an ally to a diverse workforce, being supportive of people with different backgrounds from ourselves.

No matter your background, there's something we can all learn from James!

---

Connect with James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-jones-m-jur-mim-mis-csm-sa-0231a47

Support QOL Group at: https://qolgroup.net

Building a web, or internet, scale application is no small feat.  Yes, anybody can get something running in the cloud quickly these days, but that doesn't make it good!  If you want to build a good internet scale application, listen and learn what it takes.

We'll discuss the three pillars of scalable applications: maintainability, reliability, and availability.  And we'll talk about SRE, DBRE, and Security in the context of scaling compute and databases at a global scale.

This episode is intended to give you a perspective on why internet scale applications are so expensive, and what it takes to build and maintain them.

-----

The Gab case study

System Design Interview Study Course

Dustin Warner is a Lead Member of the Technical Staff (LMTS) at Salesforce.  He has been leading hugely impactful, high potential next generation software development on their platform and he was gracious enough to spend some time with me and let me ask a few questions.

In this episode we talk about his career and how he got to the position he's in.  We also discuss the ins and outs of platform development, not just on the Salesforce platform but across a few different ecosystems like SharePoint and ServiceNow as well.  There are pros and cons to running your business on a platform, and we debate those while also getting into his thoughts on how AI will potentially impact the work and lives of platform admins and devs as its capabilities evolve.

Whether you are new to tech, or a seasoned executive, there is value in what Dustin has to say so listen to his words of wisdom!

---

Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustin-warner-127bb44a/

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2rzeI9jiuw

ChatGPT is beginning to consume my news feed.  Everywhere I look I see blog posts written by AI paired with AI generated images made by DALL-E, all headlining in news articles from the mainstream media which are probably also reviewed or distributed by AI!  It's Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning everywhere we turn!

The rise of AI isn't bothering me as much as the trend of attributing *actual intelligence* to these robots.  In this episode, we'll discuss what is going on under the hood of ChatGPT.  We'll dive into neural networks and the various training mechanisms that are used, as well as looking at ChatGPT specifically and how it was constructed.

Along with these tools comes a lot of creative ways to use them, which we'll take a look at as well, so buckle up!  We're going to surround ourselves with robots and take a peek inside.

---

Additional resources that are mentioned in this episode:

3Blue1Brown - But what is a neural network? | Chapter 1, Deep learning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk

The history of chatbots

https://onlim.com/en/the-history-of-chatbots/

Okta was recently breached and some stuff was stolen by a hacker group!  Is this the end of Okta as a security provider?  You'll have to listen to find out what happened, how software exploits can work, and how to protect yourself (and your code) against them.

There are a lot of programming languages out there, so what's the difference between them and why would I choose to use one over another?  In this episode, I review the top 5 most used programming languages of 2022.  This will help clear up when these languages should be used, what they're useful for, and why they even exist in the first place!  I will talk about:

• Python
• Java
• Javascript
• C# (C-Sharp)
• C and C++ (C Plus Plus)

I've personally written a lot of code in these languages, so you won't just get a textbook knowledge from this episode.  You're going to get a whole lot of my personal opinion as well!

The world is watching Twitter become a brand new company under the leadership of Elon Musk, and in this episode I dive into the details of what has been going on!  The situation is changing from day to day, so by the time you listen to this episode new information may be available, but as of 11/22/2022 this is the story.  

This episode isn't just a "current events about Twitter" episode, though.  It also takes a look at Mastodon, one of the up and coming challengers to Twitter.  I have an account, have generated a fair amount of content on that platform, and share my experience with the ecosystem also known as the Fediverse (aka federated universe).  Mastodon is a distributed social media platform and is very interesting in its own right, even without all the craziness going on a Twitter.

My condolences to Uber on their recent hack (Sept 2022), but this does provide a great opportunity to highlight poor security practices, and share steps that companies can take so they don't fall victim to the same exploits as Uber.  In this episode we'll talk about security, as if it's an onion, do a step-by-step analysis of the Uber hack, and consider just how devastating this situation could have been if a real, malicious hacker had did exactly what this 18 year old did.

When you build a software application or product, you don't just start writing code and hope for the best!  Your code runs on a platform, typically accesses a database, and displays data to a user - all of these functions should be isolated and organized into a tech stack. 

Defining your tech stack should be one of the very first things you do, even before you write your first line of code.  Let's dig into this topic, talk about the tech stack in general and then actually define one!  We'll be using a budgeting application as our example and deciding what technologies to use in each layer of the stack.

If you feel stuck in your engineering career and are trying to break out into a different subdiscipline, then this episode is for you!  How exactly can you switch from being a Software Developer to being a Machine Learning Engineer?  Or from a Site Reliability Engineer to a Web Developer?  In this episode we will discuss how to make that transition, and how to best reflect on your current position to see why you want to transition in the first place.

-----

As discussed in the podcast, last month's episode was an article posted on my website.  Check it out here: Trunk Based Development and Continuous Integration