Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Joshua Whole was born in the Netherlands. Before he was 13, he actually went to 5 different schools. Afterwards, he moved to Switzerland and went into the public school system - which was all in French (which he didn't speak). In his younger years, he started building websites and ultimately started a company, with 35 other high school students building these sites.

Eventually, he moved to London, initially to shape up his computer science background, given he was a self taught developer. He attended a 3 year Computer Science program at King's College, and the last year of University, he attempted to try to start another business. He and his co-founders declined an investment, and never got another one... so the business was out.

After University, he started a company called SuperAwesome - providing tools for safe digital engagement to almost half a billion kids every month, while also ensuring that parental consent was baked in. Seven years after starting the company, he eventually sold this to Epic games, the makers of Fortnite, and at the time of acquisition, the company was 170 people with offices all over the world.

For fun he is a whiskey lover, and has been collecting them for over 10 years now. In fact, once a week, he does a (fully remote) whisky tasting with a friend of his. His favorite is The Ileach, with his backup being a 10 year Laphroaig.

After many self learning adventures in his life, Joshua set out to create a product that would allow people to go through self directed learning online, but in specific learning pathways... and allow them to learn faster in the process. Self taught developer? Be able to prove you went through the appropriate material that you acquired the skills necessary.

This is the creation story of Mindstone.

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Links

• Website: https://mindstone.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuawohle/

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At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month.

Paul  shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probable Futures. Interested in doing work in software focused on climate change? Paul recommends you learn a bit about NetCDF files.

Follow Sara on Twitter here.

Follow Paul on Twitter here.

Enjoy our brain teaser of the week: a new way to cut pizza.

Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen In the fourth and final instalment of this blockchain-themed UNAJUA series with Citi Group's Ronit Ghose, Ronit explores the philosophical basis for backing the centralisation or decentralisation of global finance. He also tackles the notion of tokenisation and how societal consensus regarding the value of money shapes commerce and culture. Ronit Ghose is the Global Head of Banking, Fintech, and Digital Assets for Citi Global Insights (Citi Group). Ronit is also the lead author of the Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (Citi GPS) insights platform. He advises Pan-African VC, Launch Africa Ventures and talent search startup Remotexec, and sits on the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) advisory board. Click here (or on the microphone icon on the right of your screen) to leave us a 60-sec voice note with your reactions to any of the topics raised in the UNAJUA Series. (We will include some of your audio takes in future follow-up episodes.) PROMO: African Tech Roundup is partnering with Socialstack to launch a social token ($ATRU) on the Cello blockchain to drive community engagement. Listen in to today's episode to see how you could be one of the first few to receive some $ATRU social token. USEFUL RESOURCES: JOIN THE REVOLUTION: Create a Celo Account via Socialstack EARN $ATRU TOKEN: Click here to complete the form and earn your $ATRU. SUPPORT US: Support our independent media-making efforts by becoming a Patreon.

Enjoy the first episode of the four-part mini-series African Creative Business, Today (ACBT) capsule mini-series in a slight change of pace. The ACBT series explores in-trench personal and professional realities at the intersection of creativity, business and technological change. In this podcast, self-titled "professional music enthusiast" and live music curator Christine Msibi talks about navigating the post-COVID realities within South Africa's vibrant creative industry. Christine is an arts administrator and co-founder/managing director of Jozi Unsigned; an agency positioned as an independent musical talent incubator specialising in project managing, producing, and promoting the live music experience. She is presently contracted to The Music In Africa Foundation as a project coordinator. Some of Christine's career highlights with Jozi Unsigned include curating the first two UJ Weekend of Jazz festivals (2018/2019), curating the headliners for the award-winning I Love Soweto Market (2014 to date), leading the promotion of Msaki in Joburg (2014- 2016) and engaging in a pioneering partnership with Concerts SA (2014 to date). Editorial Disclaimer: African Creative Business, Today (ACBT) is a collaboration between African Tech Roundup and Ahmed Amine Azouzi's media production imprint, Qlam. This project's inaugural four-part capsule series is kindly supported by the BMW Foundation and the Segal Family Foundation. SUPPORT US: Support African Tech Roundup's independent media-making efforts by becoming a Patreon.

Links from the show:

• Swoole forked to Open Swoole, due to disagreement about hot-loading files : PHP
• Open Source PHP extension for Fibers Coroutines Async IO | Swoole PHP
• GitHub - revoltphp/event-loop: Revolt is a rock-solid event loop for concurrent PHP applications.
• Groovy TV Gets A Very Brady Makeover | Hackaday
• https://twitter.com/OndrejMirtes/status/1448544146944401409
• GitHub - sfx101/deck: DECK is a powerful and high performant local web development studio unlike any other.
• PER Workflow - PHP-FIG
• Disabled functions behave as if they do not exist - PHP 8.0 • PHP.Watch
• GitHub - rectorphp/rector: Instant Upgrades and Automated Refactoring of any PHP 5.3+ code

This episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:

• Honeybadger.io - https://www.honeybadger.io/

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Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. 

During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage.

Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. 

While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a foundational part of the SDLC.

Mahmoud Abdelkader immigrated to the United States from Egypt, from a city 100 km east of Cairo, on the Suez Canal. He was 8 years old when he moved to New York City, and later in life, he moved to Maryland, which is where he really started to get into gaming... er... computers. He used to play World of Warcraft and Age of Empires a lot, and through his gameplay, he was led down a path of reverse engineering hacks to aid him in winning.

Eventually, he started learning high level languages, all in the pursuit of building game hacking systems. He got into real programming when he was 16, slinging some C++ and deciding that he wanted to be a computer engineer. Post college, he worked on Wall Street, which in his eyes, was where he really became an engineer. After working for a startup, he joined Y Combinator and built Balanced, a payments marketplace system, which eventually transitioned to Stripe.

Outside of tech, he plays basketball, and used to weight lift and do long distance running. He likes to set goals, crush them - and then move on to the next thing, keeping a well rounded life. He used to ride motorcycles, but his wife put a stop to that... especially given they are expecting their 2nd child soon.

Post his exit from Balanced, Mahmoud began listening to customer needs. What he heard people say was that they really wanted everything that he built in his former startup, minus the payments. Companies wanted the heavy lifting of data security taken off their plate, so they could focus on building their differentiated products.

This is the creation story of Very Good Security, or VGS.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mabdelkader/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

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