The conversation starts with Charles describing his journey into software and starting in technical support. He then shares how he started to learn Ruby and how the community was instrumental in supporting him on his journey. Charles then describes how he became a freelance developer and what it was like talking to his wife about it. The conversations winds up with Charles sharing how his successful podcasting career started.
Links
Bio
Charles Max Wood is a podcaster, speaker, and the CEO of Devchat.tv. He co-hosts the Ruby Rogues, JavaScript Jabber, and Adventures in Angular podcasts.
He also puts on a large number of online conferences about various topics of interest to computer programmers.
When he’s not coding or podcasting, he’s reading to his kids, watching soccer, or finding new ways to automate parts of his business.
He currently lives in Utah with his wife and 5 children.
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.
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).
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 
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.
Annie is an illustrator living and creating in Napa, CA. She has worked with clients like RethinkDB, Twitter, and Let’s Mend, as well as published a few children’s books. She loves telling stories and cherishes their ability to help us discover ourselves.
Arturo J. Real was born in Venezuela and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as a project manager and producer of Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science. CS50. He is an advocate for volunteer work at all ages and in raising awareness of and action towards environmental causes.
Frank is an independent mobile developer living in Seattle, WA. He started work as an embedded systems engineer, moved on to be a web developer, and eventually found happiness as an iOS developer. He has written iCircuit, Calca, and Continuous. All the while, Frank has enjoyed releasing open source projects and contributing as much as he can to the software development community. His programming interests include computer graphics, simulation, programming languages, and artificial intelligence. When he’s not at his computer, you can usually find him hiking around some mountain or sleeping in a tent by a river.
Jessie starts the conversation by introducing himself and describing what it was like when he started in the technology industry. Cecil shares about the first book he ever had about programming, a book that Jesse wrote. Jesse then talked about his time at Microsoft and what it was like working under Scott Guthrie. Cecil then asks about why Jesse when back to independent consulting and how he finds clients. The episode ends with Jesse telling us a consulting horror story.