Chase Seibert

Director of Engineering at Dropbox

I’m pleased to announce the first episodes of the Software Engineering Fireside Chat podcast are available for download. Along with my colleagues Scott Lobdell and Jordan Eldredge, we are going to be talking about the tech startup scene in the Bay Area. Instead of making this a purely technical podcast, we are actually going to cover ancillary topics such as how to survive tech busts, how to transition from QA to engineering, the state of hacking bootcamps, etc.

Here is an over-view of the initial episodes:

Episode 0 - Introduction

Scott, Jordan and I introduce ourselves and give an overview of our backgrounds. We talk about how we got into coding in the first place, how we ended up working for a startup, and what kind of projects we work on outside of work.

Episode 1 - Debbie Sterling

We interview Debbie Sterling, engineer and founder of GoldieBlox, a construction toy and book series targeted at young girls. Debbie shares with us how she got started, and some of the challenges along the way.

Episode 2 - Ben Henry

Ben Henry, a director of engineering at Hearsay Social talks about tech bust cycles in the Bay Area. Specifically, we discuss how to limit your exposure to crisis like the original dot-com bust in the early 2000’s, as well as the financial crisis in 2008.

What about future episodes?

We are planning to release one episode a week, on Fridays. If you’re not an iTunes person, or you just love raw RSS, you can visit our podcast page on libsyn.

Call for guests speakers!

If you’re interested in being on the show, drop us a line on Twitter!