This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Juan Reyes, an engineer, entrepreneur, and writer living in Tokyo, Japan. An engineer by profession and a dreamer by heart, Juan crossed the seas to reach Japan following the promise of opportunity and challenge. Eventually, he left his stable career at a large IT firm to create his own startup, and he hasn’t looked back since. Let’s see what lessons he has to share for other aspiring entrepreneurs. Let’s start by talking about you: What has your…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to John Pereira. John is a technology enthusiast who’s passionate about his work and all forms of technology. With over 15 years in the technology space, his area of expertise lies in API and large-scale web application development, and its related constellation of technologies and processes. He lives in sunny Sri Lanka, where he works as a senior back-end developer for a Dutch SaaS event company. You can find him writing odds and ends on randomcoding.com and on…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Andrew Bryant. Andrew is a developer and data analyst living in Chile. He studied economics in school before pursuing a tech career. Andrew has worked for startups doing everything from natural language processing (NLP) to UI fixes. He also writes code that generates artwork. Let’s hear what he has to say about the benefits of working at a startup and how having a non-software engineering background helped him when he started his career. Basic logistics: Stack? How…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Juho Vepsäläinen, a conference director and consultant. Juho is behind the SurviveJS effort, where developers train to optimize their development workflow’s tooling. He has been active in the open-source scene since the early 2000s and has participated in projects like Blender and webpack as a core team member. You can follow Juho on Twitter @bebraw. Let’s hear what he’s learned on his career in the tech industry and how that coincides with his personal journey of self-discovery.…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. This week we’re talking to Jonathan Hall. Jonathan started out as a self-taught developer and is now a consultant and blogger who helps small teams benefit from DevOps best practices. He publishes a daily newsletter with advice about implementing DevOps, and you can follow him on Twitter @TinyDevOps. Let’s learn how Jonathan got his start in programming and how you can be a self-taught developer, too. Stack? How long have you been doing it? These days, I spend a lot of…

This post for those considering a career change to software engineer is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Ukpai Ugochi. Ukpai is a full stack JavaScript developer transitioning her career from marine engineering to software development. She loves sharing about her experience to encourage people who love software development and don’t know where to begin. She also contributes to FOSS in her free time. Let’s find out what lessons Ukpai has learned, like overcoming impostor syndrome, during her career change to software engineer. Basic logistics: Stack?…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Dawid Ziolkowski. Dawid has 10 years of experience. At the beginning, he worked as a network/system engineer, did DevOps in between, and recently became a cloud-native engineer. He’s worked for an IT outsourcing company, a research institute, telco, a hosting company, and a consultancy company, so he’s gathered a lot of knowledge from different perspectives. Nowadays, he’s helping companies move to cloud and/or redesign their infrastructure for a more cloud-native approach. If you’re considering a career switch…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we’re talking to Mauro Chojrin. Mauro helps PHP developers hone their craft through his trainings, books, workshops, and other tools. He’s been in the IT industry since 1997 and has held roles such as developer, architect, and leader of technical teams. Mauro also likes to write and vlog. Mauro is going to tell us about how he got his start in programming, and you may or may not recognize some of the throwback systems he references. While the technology may…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Everyone has a different path in life, and that’s OK! Today we’re talking to Michael de Ridder, who tells us about how getting into programming was accidental, not intentional. And that’s OK, too. Michael has worked in software development, data visualization, data science, research, consulting, and business analysis across health care, telecommunications, radio and finance. He enjoys the challenge of combining and utilizing the relationships between different domains and technology. A big fan of travel, Michael is a proponent for the…

This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started. Today we cover a lot of topics, from whether you should go into programming or IT to being specific about what you set out to learn to the lessons you’ll never learn until you start working. And we’re learning about all of these things from Gabriel Aizcorbe. Gabriel got into IT when he received his first 8088 at 14 years old. From then on, his whole life was about computers, programming languages, and learning more. As a project manager with PMP…