This episode features Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup, for a discussion on how to excel in the tech industry, GraphQL, and much more. Questions covered include:

• Intro: background / journey in tech
• It looks like you focus a lot on helping folks in the tech industry excel in their careers or transition to where they want to be. What are some of your main tips around this, and some of the biggest mistakes you see people make?
• You are also a Linkedin Learning instructor, what does that mean?
• You recently spoke about GraphQL - which continues to gain popularity, what have you learned about implementing GraphQL in production?
• Tools / technologies / frameworks that you're really excited about right now or that you have on your list to keep an eye on?

Annyce is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Meetup. At Meetup, she helps create the future of real community where people show up, do things, and actually talk to each other. Shaping what “mobile-first” means for an established company is both challenging and rewarding.

Annyce has specifically been focused on Android applications for the past several years. She's also an Android Google Developer Expert. This means that she spends a lot of time developing videos, blog posts, and conference talks for the Developer Community.

This Select* podcast episode features Ben Matthews, Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, for a discussion on leading an engineering team and the future of software development.

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‍Questions covered include:

• Background / journey in tech, what are you working on now? ‍
• What's it like leading an engineering team at a large company, what are some of the biggest challenges? ‍
• How do you blend engineering and product visions to make sure everyone is working towards the same goal? What are some challenges around cross-team functionality in this sense? ‍
• Tips for devs wanting to climb the ladder or get to a similar role that you're in? Advice you would give your younger self? ‍
• What technology / framework / etc. are you super excited about right now or wanting to dig into? ‍
• Predictions for software development over the next few years?

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Ben Matthews is a Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow with nearly 20 years of experience in developing technology and building high-performance technical teams. He’s passionate about helping people grow in their roles and empowering people to build great things.

This episode features Kelsey Hightower for a discussion across numerous topics. In this special edition, Kelsey is interviewed by HarperDB's Co-Founder, Stephen Goldberg. Questions covered include:

• How did it feel to retire from Google this year, what’s next?
• You have, what some would consider, a non-traditional background when it comes to the software engineering world. How has that shaped your view on the industry? How do you think the industry performs at mentoring/cultivating young engineers, including those from non-CS degree backgrounds?
• What are your thoughts on where distributed vs. monolithic architecture is going? How is “Edge Computing” impacted by this?
• There has been a focus in the cloud provider space of bringing on new locations, trying to put infrastructure in hard to reach places. Eventually this will reach a saturation point, where do you think they will invest next?
• When thinking about building platforms and products, what is your advice on how to make a decision to internalize automation within your product vs. using a framework?
• What are your opinions on running a stateful application that must have data consistency across its replicas, such as a database, on Kubernetes? It comes with a bunch of problems to solve, like auto scaling, data redundancy and replication. It seems that the community is split on whether or not this is a good idea and how to implement it.
• What advice would you give yourself 20 years ago?

Kelsey Hightower is an American software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open-source software, and cloud computing.