Episode 59: Starting Up In Miami With Brian Brackeen

Brian starts out with telling us about how his love for computing begin with his first Atari computer. He then talks to us about the various jobs he has before starting Kairos. Cecil ask Brian as what moment did he know it was the right time for him the launch a startup. Brian talks about Kairos, the problems they’re trying to solve and their vision for the future. Cecil ask Brian to share some of the interesting ways customers are making use of their APIs.

Brian used to work for Apple during the Jobs era. Cecil asks Brian what he learned about business from being around Steve Jobs. We then get into a discussion about why Brian decided to make Miami the home for his company. Brian gives us a run down on why Florida is a great place for startups.

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Bio

Brian Brackeen is founder & CEO of Kairos, a Miami based Human Analytics platform providing face recognition and emotion analysis to businesses with developer friendly APIs and SDKs. Kairos is an Endeavor company, and currently services more than ten thousand clients in 70 countries — processing millions of faces each month. Prior to founding Kairos, Brian served as a Senior Project Manager for Apple Inc., and before Apple he was a Senior Managing Consultant for IBM.

In addition to his work at Kairos, Brian lectures extensively around the world on entrepreneurship, code, digital economy, AI and machine learning— and participates in mentorship programs for organizations like Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code and School District of Miami Dade County.

Episode 58: Luis Atencio Reacts to Everything

Luis talks to us about how the advice of a family member got him into a career in technology. He talks to us about his past in Venezuela and also about having a child in the United States. We discuss moving to the US and balancing cultures for our children.

Luis talks to us about getting his first job as a student at FIU to working at Citrix. He also tell us about the importance of the cloud for software at Citrix. Then we then dive into talking about Luis’ books with Manning.

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Bio

Luis Atencio (@luijar) is a Staff Software Engineer for Citrix Systems in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. He has a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science and now works full-time developing and architecting web applications using Java, PHP, and JavaScript platforms. Luis is also very involved in the community and has presented on several occasions at conferences and local meet-ups. When he is not coding, Luis writes a developer blog at http://luisatencio.net focused on software engineering as well as several magazine articles for PHPArch and DZone. Luis is also the author of Functional Programming in JavaScript (Manning 2016), Functional PHP (Leanpub), as well as co-author for RxJS in Action (Manning 2016).

Episode 57: Joe Raio is in the Technology Mosh Pit

Joe introduces himself and shares how he got his start in technology. Joe then reminisces about his first technical job, his first programming languages, and how the community has grown over the past 20 years. Then Joe talks about starting three different companies and how he sold each one of them. Cecil then asks Joe to share how he transitioned from small business owner to Microsoft employee. Richie then inquires Joe’s experience with playing in a heavy metal band, recording, and album and touring. The panel then discusses their favorite playlists and what is their favorite music to listen to while working.

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Bio

Joe Raio is a Microsoft Technical Evangelist based in Miami, Florida. As a technical evangelist, Joe primarily focuses on presentations leveraging the Microsoft Stack focused on website development and cloud technology. Prior to becoming an evangelist for Microsoft, Joe successfully owned and operated three small businesses centered around website development and marketing. To learn more about Joe, visit his website at http://joeraio.com

Episode 56: The Family That Codes Together with Kathleen Dollard

This episode starts off with Kathleen telling us a little about her history being a Microsoft MVP, traveling, and her C# workshops. We then get into a discussion on where her passion for community comes from. She talks about the programming languages she’s learned over the years, and even talks about programming with Clipper. Kathleen also shares with us how she’s been able to stay relevant in her career.

We then get to hear about the lineage of programmers in Kathleen’s family. She also talks a bit about the Turing School for programmers and how her younger son’s reviews pull requests for homework. Moving forward Kathleen talks to us about her workshops, teaching techniques and going to conferences.

Kathleen also gives us a fun description of the Winter season in Denver, Colorado.

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Bio

Kathleen Dollard loves to code and loves to talk about code. Along the way she’s an architect, a “manager”, a teacher, a writer, a speaker, and hopefully still a fun person! She’s written tons of articles, a book, and spoken around the world. She’s the Director of Engineering for ROI Code, previously Real and has videos in both the Pluralsight and WintellectNow libraries.

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