My guest today is Jess Lee. Jess is a partner at Sequoia Capital as well as their Chief Product Officer. Before becoming an investor, Jess co-founded fashion app, Polyvore, and was an early product manager for Google Maps. Most recently, she founded All Raise, a non-profit that is changing the gender balance in tech. Our discussion ranges from Burning Man to Marvel to Sequoia’s mobile app and I hope that Jess’s passion for delighting users rubs off on you. Please enjoy my conversation with Jess Lee.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
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Show Notes
[00:02:35] - [First question] - Why more investment firms don’t have a product mindset
[00:05:22] - How to approach building a productized version of capital
[00:08:00] - Ways Ampersand measures success and judging their own performance
[00:08:49] - Driving reasons that Sequoia wins deals beyond their brand name
[00:10:28] - How her work as CPO at Sequoia has changed her investing approach
[00:12:28] - Everything she’s learned about community and its relevance to business
[00:17:48] - What the gold standards are for studying strongly built communities
[00:19:42] - What it is about Comic-Con that works so well from a community standard
[00:21:18] - The role that scarcity plays in communities writ large
[00:23:10] - Product mindset and customer obsession
[00:24:33] - Knowing when it’s okay to begin expanding
[00:28:12] - Rates of change in her investment progress and dollars going to female founders
[00:29:36] - Systemic bias and what’s driving a lack of funds towards female founders
[00:32:26] - How she applies community building lessons to All Raise
[00:33:20] - The internal learning culture in Sequoia that others could adopt and benefit from
[00:37:01] - Which Marvel superheroes her Sequoia partners would be
[00:39:05] - Seeds of motivation for Arc and what it is
[00:44:31] - The best ways she’s seen companies manage and support human capital
[00:45:36] - Biggest mistakes made when managing human capital
[00:46:42] - What working on Google Maps taught her about product development
[00:48:42] - Someone she admires and has learned the most from in All Raise
[00:50:02] - Measuring success at Sequoia over the next ten years
[00:52:20] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for her
[00:53:42] - What it was that made the people who believed in her take a chance on her
[00:55:03] - Things in pop culture today that most has her attention
In this episode, Ben and I talk about the conception of CodeLand, last year's CodeLand, which had to switch to a virtual conference due to covid-19, and the biggest differences between CodeLand 2020 and CodeLand 2021. Registration for CodeLand is pay-what-you-want -- starting at $0. Grab your CodeLand 2021 ticket today at codelandconf.com. That’s codelandconf.com.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
CodeLand 2021
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern is co-founder of Forem.
In today's episode, we welcome back to the show Ali Spittel! Ali is a developer advocate at AWS Amplify. So, naturally in this episode, we discuss topics around what it means to be a developer advocate! Ali has a passion for making code accessible and fun, and you'll hear that in this episode.
✨ Sponsor: Linode
Thank you to long time sponsor and friends of the show Linode for sponsoring today's episode!
Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
Listeners of Developer Tea can now enjoy $100 in free credit! You can find all the details at linode.com/developertea.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
In today's episode, we welcome back to the show Ali Spittel! Ali is a developer advocate at AWS Amplify. So, naturally in this episode, we discuss topics around what it means to be a developer advocate! Ali has a passion for making code accessible and fun, and you'll hear that in this and the next episode.
✨ Sponsor: Linode
Thank you to long time sponsor and friends of the show Linode for sponsoring today's episode!
Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
Listeners of Developer Tea can now enjoy $100 in free credit! You can find all the details at linode.com/developertea.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
In this episode, we talk about what are the core skills you need to go from developer to entrepreneur with Ben Halpern, co-founder of Forem, which acquired CodeNewbie in 2020. Ben talks about getting into development with entrepreneurship on the brain, building DEV and now his new venture, Forem, and what skills he looks for when hiring developers.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
DEV
community.codenewbie.org
GeoCities
PHP
Linux
Ruby on Rails
Node.js
Lynda
Egghead
Udemy
Stripe
API
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern is co-founder of Forem.
Our much anticipated Family Feud rip-off inspired game show is finally here! Emma was joined by Nick and special guest Abenezer Abebe to form the Hypertext Assassins. KBall captained (despite never seeing Family Feud before) the DSL Destroyers with Mikeal and special guest Ali Spittel.
Holler if you want MOAR Feud and check the outro for a chance to win some JS Party swag.
Join the discussion
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Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Raygun – With Raygun Error and Performance Monitoring you have all the information you need at your fingertips to quickly find and fix errors and performance issues across your tech stack down to the line of code. Get started with a free 14-day trial, head to raygun.com and join thousands of customer-centric software teams who use Raygun every day.
AWS Amplify – AWS Amplify is a suite of tools and services that enable developers to build full-stack serverless and cloud-based web and mobile apps using their framework and technology of choice. Amplify gives you easy access to hosting, authentication, managed GraphQL, serverless functions, APIs, machine learning, chatbots, and storage for files like images, videos, and pdfs. Learn more and get started for free at awsamplify.info/JSParty
Featuring:
Ali Spittel – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Abenezer Abebe – X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Kevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Emma Bostian – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Mikeal Rogers – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
In this episode, we're talking about site reliability with Molly Struve, lead site reliability engineer at DEV Community. Molly talks about going from studying aerospace engineering, to becoming an options trader, to then becoming a site reliability engineer. She gets into the history of site reliability, what it is, and what it takes to do it well.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Site Reliability Engineering
DEV
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails
Water Cooler Meetings
LinkedIn
Hacker News
Aisle50
Kenna Security
Elasticsearch
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
DevOps
Molly Struve
Molly Struve is a self-taught software engineer turned SRE. During her time working in the software industry, she has had the opportunity to work on some challenging problems and thrives on creating reliable, performant infrastructure that can grow as fast as a booming business. When not making systems run faster, she can be found fulfilling her need for speed by riding and jumping her show horses.
Part 1Paul and Sara chat about what language is best to choose as your first when you're just getting started on your journey as a programmer. Probably not Mathmatica, but it's a neat one.
Jupyter Notebooks - an in-browser notebook for working with Python. You can write your words, have your code right next to it, and see how things play out. Or as Tom Butterworth put it on DEV.
"Jupyter Notebook is an interactive web application that interfaces with the iPython repl, allowing you to run structured but iterative Python scripts. It is the de facto choice for data scientists to rapidly prototype pipelines, visualise data, or perform ad hoc analysis."
Interview: Jess LeeJess Lee had some great perspectives to share on what it means to balance being an entrepreneur and a coder.
Issac Lyman kicked off a community project on DEV to create a book that would help guide readers through their first year in code. 15 contributors ended up writing chapters for the book, which is available for free here.
DEV is open source, and they have decided it can be a software platform other organizations can use to build their own communities. As Ben Halpern writes, "The future of our company will be based on delivering the DEV open-source software to power new standalone communities. We will work with a network of partners both inside and outside of the software ecosystem."
Part 2We dig into D3.JS. Stack Overflow has a lot to teach folks on this subject.
What's the best way to make a d3.js visualization layout responsive?
Just don't ask about a good book for learning the subject!
And finally, what's the difference between d3.js and jQuery? It's a silly question with some interesting answers and a nice history of the web in the background.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
We’re on the expo hall floor of OSCON 2019 talking with Eric Holscher, Ali Spittel, and Hong Phuc Dang. First up, we talk to Eric about his work at Write the Docs, ethical advertising, and the Pac-Man rule at conferences. Second, we talk with Ali about her passion for teaching developers, her passion for writing, and her new found love for podcasting. Last, we talk with Hong about her work at FOSSASIA, the disconnect between America and Asia in open source, and several of the cool open source projects they have on GitHub.
Join the discussion
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TeamCity by JetBrains – Deliver software faster with TeamCity — a self-hosted continuous integration and delivery server developed by JetBrains. TeamCity is super-smart at running incremental builds, reusing artifacts, and building only what needs to be built, which can save over 30% of the daily build time.
Innovate Software at OSCON – Whether you’re looking to understand where software development is headed, or want to dive into the key technologies that you need to build resilient, useful, innovative software, the O’Reilly Open Source Software Conference (OSCON) is where you’ll find the answers you need. Secure your spot for 2020 now and save 20% on your pass with code CHANGELOG20.
Featuring:
Eric Holscher – Website, GitHub, X
Ali Spittel – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Hong Phuc Dang – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Special thanks to our friends at O’Reilly Media and OSCON for making our trip to Portland possible.
Eric:
Write the Docs
Request For Commits #5: Documentation and the value of non-code contributions with Eric Holscher
The Pac-Man Rule at Conferences
Ethical Advertising
CodeFund
Ali:
Ali Spittel on Dev.to
Ladybug podcast
Hong:
FOSSASIA
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
We chat with Ali Spittel, a software engineer and developer advocate at DEV, an online community where programmers share ideas and help each other grow. Ali talks about the beginnings of her popular coding blog, strategies for dealing with online abuse, as well as some coding advice for beginners, such as what non-programming skills can help programmers, how to get past the cycle of just using online tutorials, and what makes a great website.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Django Girls Tutorial
Gatsby JS
Flexbox Froggy
JavaScript
CSS
Moving Past Tutorials: a course on problem solving for programmers
New York Times SET
codewars
A Complete Beginner's Guide to React
Codeacademy
General Assembly
DEV
Python
Django
CSS Diner
CSS Grid Garden
HTML
Rails
Preact
Ali Spittel
Ali is a software engineer and teacher who loves writing and teaching Python and JavaScript.
We're gearing up to launch season 9 on July 8th, and we couldn't be more excited for you to listen. We got a ton of great guests to talk about a bunch of awesome topics including workplace burnout, why you should learn user interface and design, and dealing with online trolls.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
Jeffrey Liebert
Jeffrey Liebert works with people in the technology industry struggling with issues related to anxiety, depression, and motivation in the workplace. He works on increasing their productivity, while decreasing anxiety and feelings of burnout.
http://jeffreyliebert.com/
Ali Spittel
Ali Spittel is a software engineer and teacher who loves writing and teaching Python and JavaScript.
Mina Markham
Mina is actively involved in the tech community, teaching for Black Girls Code and founding the Dallas chapter of Girl Develop It and DFW Sass. In addition, she has presented at various conferences, including Front-End Design Conference, Midwest.io and Distill. Lastly, she's co-organizer of Front Porch, a conference on front-end web technologies for developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and managers.
Andy Hunt
Andy Hunt is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He has authored award-winning and best-selling books, including the seminal The Pragmatic Programmer (now in a new and heavily revised 20th Anniversary Edition) and many others, including the popular Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, the Jolt-worthy Practices of An Agile Developer, and Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins for the kids.
Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas likes to code.
We all have different experiences coming into development, and today we talk with Ali Spittel, a software engineer at Dev.to, Director at Women Who Code - DC and lead instructor at General Assembly.
In part 2 of our interview with Ali we cover what Ali's working on now and things she wishes people would ask her more about.
Ali on the Web
Ali on twitter
Ali's website
Get in touch
If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or just want to let us know if you found this episode valuable I encourage you to join the conversation or start your own on our community platform Spectrum.chat/specfm/developer-tea
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge
This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware and be a better developer so you can have a positive impact on the people around you. Check it out and give it a try at https://www.teabreakchallenge.com/.
🙏 Thanks to today's sponsor: Sentry
Sentry tells you about errors in your code before your customers have a chance to encounter them.
Not only do we tell you about them, we also give you all the details you’ll need to be able to fix them. You’ll see exactly how many users have been impacted by a bug, the stack trace, the commit that the error was released as part of, the engineer who wrote the line of code that is currently busted, and a lot more.
Give it a try for yourself at Sentry.io
We all have different experiences coming into development, and today we talk with Ali Spittel, a software engineer at Dev.to, Director at Women Who Code - DC and lead instructor at General Assembly.
In part 1 of our interview with Ali we dive into her work at Dev.to and how she got into teaching.
Ali on the Web
Ali on twitter
Ali's website
Get in touch
If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or just want to let us know if you found this episode valuable I encourage you to join the conversation or start your own on our community platform Spectrum.chat/specfm/developer-tea
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge
This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware and be a better developer so you can have a positive impact on the people around you. Check it out and give it a try at https://www.teabreakchallenge.com/.
Abadesi is back to talk to Ben Halpern, creator, founder, and webmaster of DEV, an online community where developers share ideas and help each other grow. He is also behind @ThePracticalDev on Twitter and runs DEV alongside his two other co-founders, Jess Lee and Peter Frank. Fun fact: Ben is a Canadian who moved to NYC to join a startup and never left. He spoke to Aba from Brooklyn.
In this episode we talk about:
Why you need to lead by example when you're building an online community and how your behavior as a founder on the site can be more effective in setting a tone than complicated rules.
How DEV manages their distributed team, the advantages of working from home, and being honest with yourself about when you need to take a break from your work as a founder, even if it's not easy to do.
His love for open source, his predictions for future trends on the web and his very unique personal website, which is a throwback to the web of years past.
We also talk about his love for Tiles, the surprising usefulness of Android's Measure app, and why Ben says if you're not using a password manager, you're “not living your digital life to the fullest.”
We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support. 😸
Quotes from This Episode
“[On creating good communities] It didn’t just happen by accident, we really tried to foster this stuff by example. Anytime we try to create something new, some kind of new behavior or anything, we really try to do it by leading the way and being good ourselves and then rewarding those who get it, who share our understanding of what a good community needs to be.”
“You can really do anything you can want on the web. It’s a really fascinating platform. Anything you can hear or visualize is possible, it’s just our imagination that limits it.”
“[On remote work] I would say that it’s a good idea, but it’s not going to be something you get right at first, so you’re going to have to be accepting of it being a gradual thing that you don’t give up on but you also don’t just jump in and do without the expectation that anything’s going to go wrong.”
Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode
Amazon Alexa — Get information, news, weather, and more using just your voice.
LastPass — Essential password manager.
Measure — Measure anything with your phone.
Phillips Hue Smart Bulbs — Internet-connected color-changing lightbulbs that you can program yourself.
Tile — Track your lost items.
When Ben Halpern (@bendhalpern) decided to start another business, he set a very unusual expectation: He gave himself 10 years to succeed. In this episode, we discuss how Ben's patient approach and obsession with understanding things from his users' point of view helped him grow as massive following on Twitter and parlay that into fast-growing online community for developers.
Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/069-ben-halpern-of-dev-to
We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn’t open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.
Join the discussion
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Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Featuring:
Ben Halpern – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
dev.to is now open source
thepracticaldev/dev.to
dev.to roadmap
O RLY Cover Generator
Saron from Codenewbie
Making dev.to insanely fast
RailsConf talk on making dev.to fast
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Anil Dash joins us for hosting duties again this week along with co-founders Jess Lee and Ben Halpern of the Practical Dev. Topics include Shabbat elevators, Failure, and racist AI.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
In today's episode, I talk with Ben Halpern. You may know him from his tweets as @ThePracticalDev. Ben also is the founder of dev.to, a site for developers to share knowledge and culture with one another.
Check out dev.to to learn a bit more about what Ben has created!
In today's episode, I talk with Ben Halpern. You may know him from his tweets as @ThePracticalDev. Ben also is the founder of dev.to, a site for developers to share knowledge and culture with one another.
Check out dev.to to learn a bit more about what Ben has created!
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