I get asked about my work and background frequently. To that end, I’ll answer the ten most commonly asked questions here.
- Where are you from? Where do you live now?
- I grew up in West Fargo, ND
- I lived in Southern California for over 20 years
- I travel globally, some years more than 50% of my time, so ‘in an airplane’ as well
- I moved to Minneapolis, MN in 2019 to be closer to my family
- What do you do? What is your job?
- I have been an independent Software Architect, Developer & Educator since 2011
- I do contract work for clients globally
- Client contracts can run as little as 1 day or as long as 1 year
- I allocate 25-50% of my time as non-billable – for learning and volunteering. I wrote a Medium post about it – “Learn | Build | Teach”
- I am an advisor and board member of CarbonDown.
- Who do you work for? Who do you work with?
- I run my own company. I work for my customers, rather than for any big company
- I hire virtual teams (subcontractors) for each contract, usually on an hourly basis
- I often hire college students, career changers or others who are new to the technology we are working on. I wrote a Medium post about interviewing – “Tech Anti-Interviewing”
- Many people have asked to work with me. I wrote a Medium post about my process for hiring interns (any age) – “Intern with Me”
- Are you an employee of AWS, Google, Linked In, etc…? How many people have watched your courses?
- I was a FTE for Microsoft 2007-2011
- I am a recognized partner for AWS (Community Hero) & Google (Cloud Expert) because of my public education work. I am not an employee of either company.
- I am a contractor for LinkedIn Learning
- I have created 30 courses on Cloud and Data topics
- Over 4 million students have watched my courses on LI_L or YouTube
- What is your educational background?
- I started college at age 15 (graduated at 19) from University of Minnesota
- I have a degree in German Language/Linguistics
- I studied in Ingolstadt, West Germany as part of my degree program
- I am a life-long learner and learn new languages and concepts continually
- New-to-me languages recently are Scala and Julia
- New-to-me concepts include Calculus which I learned when I was 51 years old (mostly from Khan Academy)
- A few years ago a good friend got cancer, after that I started working with bioinformatics teams. I help build efficient, usable cloud analysis pipelines for genomics research, including for personalized cancer treatment.
- I started college at age 15 (graduated at 19) from University of Minnesota
- What advice do you have for me? I am starting a consulting business.
- Understand work (you get paid) vs. activity (you are doing something)
- Ask clients to pay you market rate or better
- Work only with written contracts
- Start with very short feedback cycles, one week long deliverables is recommended
- What advice do you have for me? I am a career changer.
- Stop watching TV – use that time to learn
- Work with college students on projects for non-profits
- Work on projects you care about. I’ve volunteered on tech projects for…
- Global Education – MONA Foundation
- Electronic Medical Records – Smart Care in Lusaka, Zambia
- Technical Education – TKP Java for middle and high school teachers
- Variant Spark for Genomic Research – CSIRO Bioinformatics in Sydney, Australia
- Which should I learn now?
- Statistics and Machine Learning – 3Blue1Brown is magical
- Cloud data pipelines and security – build working stuff for non-profits to learn
- Serverless, possibly Kubernetes – as above
- Where are you favorite cities and why?
- Sydney – fun people, beautiful city, did I mention fun people?
- Berlin – art, music and multiculturalism
- Santa Barbara – stunning natural beauty, perfect weather
- Oslo – solitude in a major city, jeg snakke lit Norsk også
- Where will you go next and why?
- Glasgow – whiskey and search for my relatives
- Shenzhen – IoT hub and startup center in China
- Perth – must go to anywhere that is nicknamed ‘end of the earth’
- Wellington – was in Auckland, loved it, want more New Zealand
