#78 - I Left Hawai'i To Work In Startups, With Katie Fujihara

One’s journey from their early career to working at startups in Silicon Valley can take many forms. Some folks take the more traditional route of joining a company right after college. Others get tired of their corporate life and decide to try something different. Katie Fujihara, an engineer and a technical program manager amalgam, decided that her journey to the heart of “startup land,” San Francisco, would be an impromptu one - she just packed up her bags and set out on an adventure.

I am delighted to share with you this recording, where I talk to Katie about her early starts in Hawai’i, how working in engineering was not the end goal for her career journey, and what the best practices are for overcoming impostor syndrome.

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The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

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Transcript

Coming soon!

#83 - Don't Take The Easy Path - Jennifer Wong (Engineering Leader)

August 8, 2024

Jennifer Wong is a seasoned engineering manager who started her journey in civil engineering. The fast pace of the tech industry drew her in, and she stuck with it for years since making that call. In this episode, I chat with Jennifer about her transition from a non-traditional career path into software, reasons to take on management instead of being an individual contributor, and why taking the road less traveled in terms of career progression might just be the recipe for long-term growth and success.

#81 - Making A Career Out Of A Hobby - Kirupa Chinnathambi (Product Manager - Google)

July 2, 2024

In episode 81, Den Delimarsky chats with Kirupa Chinnathambi, a product manager at Google who has built his own personal brand in what is now known as kirupa.com. Kirupa is a talented web developer, designer, writer, and packs so much knowledge in his blog that you can learn how to create great web-based experiences on that content alone.

#80 - Web Development Is Theatre - Miriam Suzanne (CSS Working Group, OddBird)

June 12, 2024

One of the things that Miriam Suzanne realized early in her developer journey is that web development is a tool - she wanted to build a website for her theater company and ended up building a career and a company around it. And not just that, but she also joined the CSS Working Group - the official standards body that determines how the CSS stack evolves. In this show, we talk about her early discovery of the power of the web, how she joins creativity with technical prowess, and how CSS is really like poetry written in the browser.