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?
- Grew up in West Fargo, ND
- Lived in Southern California for over 20 years
- From 2007-2019 traveled globally, some years more than 50%
- Moved to Minneapolis, MN to be closer to my family in 2019
- What do you do? What is your job?
- Independent Cloud Architect, Developer & Educator since 2011
- Doing contract work for clients globally
- Client contracts can run as little as 1 day or as long as 1 year
- 25-50% of my time is non-billable (learning & volunteering).
- I wrote about this -> “Learn | Build | Teach”
- I contribute to Open Source -> on GitHub
- Advisor and board member of CarbonDown.
- Who do you work for? Who do you work with?
- Run my own company. I work for my customers, rather than for any big company
- Many people have asked to work with me. I often hire college students, career changers or others who are new to the technology we are working on.
- About hiring interns -> “Intern with Me”
- About interviewing -> “Tech Anti-Interviewing”
- About collaborating -> “Does Pair Programming Work?”
- Are you an employee of AWS, Google, Linked In, etc…? How many people have watched your courses?
- Was a FTE for Microsoft 2007-2011
- Hold partner awards because of my public education work. I am NOT an employee of any of these companies.
- Am a contractor for LinkedIn Learning
- Created 30 courses on Cloud and Data topics
- Viewership = 4 million+ for my courses on LinkedIn Learning or YouTube
- What is your educational background?
- Started college at age 15 (graduated at 19) from University of Minnesota
- Have a degree in German Language/Linguistics
- Studied in Ingolstadt, West Germany as part of my degree program
- Am a life-long learner and learn new languages & concepts continually
- New-to-me languages recently are WDL & Nextflow
- New-to-me concepts include applied Linear Algebra
- 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.
- 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 (EMR) – Smart Care in Lusaka, Zambia
- Technical Education – TKP Java for middle & high school teachers
- Variant Spark for Genomic Research (ultra-high dimensional data analysis) – CSIRO Bioinformatics in Sydney, Australia
- Which technologies 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
- Functional programming patterns
- 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?
- Canada – I can drive there easily now, lots to see too…
- Glasgow – whiskey and search for my relatives
- Wellington – was in Auckland, loved it, want more New Zealand
- Perth – must go to anywhere that is nicknamed ‘end of the earth’
- (Bonus) What are your hobbies?
