Everyday Heroes

And the award for the longest podcast intro goes to checks notes Hayden. (Holy cow... compensating for something?)Ever wondered what happens when you let your childhood menace grow up and give him INTENTIONAL access to things that break? Meet Dave Welch, the guy whose mom literally had to lock away the household tools because he kept disassembling everything and failing to put it back together (spoiler: turns out this is EXACTLY the right background for software engineering).In this

Move over, Python nerds - turns out you CAN teach an old JavaScript dog new AI tricks. Meet Aileen Villanueva, the industrial engineer turned frontend wizard who discovered you don't need to learn an entirely new language just to make robots smarter (looking at you, everyone who panic-enrolled in Python boot camps in 2023).In this episode:How being "strategically located" near the US border accidentally gave her a frontend career superpower (geography: it matters!)The moment she realized

What do you do when you've seen TOO MANY people on their worst day? You find a career where the worst day involves merge conflicts. JD Flynn's journey from paramedic burnout to Drupal powerhouse is the career pivot we didn't know we needed.In this episode:The EXACT moment he realized "maybe I shouldn't be a paramedic anymore" (spoiler: it involves losing empathy for humans, which is generally considered a job requirement)How streaming on Twitch literally kept him from "circling the drain"

Meet the woman who started coding because she was *double takes on notes* the only person at her finance job who actually USED their internal app. (Listen, sometimes being the office overachiever leads to unexpected career pivots.)In this episode:That time her company's dev team was like "Hey, why are you the ONLY ONE using our app?" and she was like "Wait, y'all MADE this?"How going from LiveJournal layouts to NASA's test suite is actually a totally normal career progression (if you're

When most of us were rage-quitting over slow internet, Alejandro Cuba Ruiz was coding in Cuba with ...checks transcript... NO internet access, a Visual Basic compiler, and the sheer audacity to make it work anyway. (Meanwhile, I lose my mind if my VS Code takes more than 3 seconds to load.)In this episode:The absolutely wild journey of learning to code offline - featuring his dad and uncle tag-teaming to teach him BASIC, and Alejandro casually creating video games because WHY NOTThat time

Look, we've all heard people say "just learn to code" like it's some magical career-fixing spell. But AmyJune Hineline took one look at that advice, said "nah," and STILL became an open source legend. How? By realizing that maybe - just MAYBE - the real superpower isn't writing code, but building the communities that make code matter.In this episode:The ACTUAL reason she left hospice nursing (spoiler: it involves questionable elbow substances)How putting "can spell diarrhea" on a resume

Meet Hayden Barnes, the lawyer-turned-tech-wizard who LITERALLY changed careers because Apple's butterfly keyboard was too annoying. (We're not even joking.)In this episode:How despising a keyboard led to pioneering Windows Subsystem for Linux projectsWhy paying for open source software should totally be a thing again (like it's 1999)The creation of Pengwin: the $10 Linux distro that Microsoft accidentally made famousThat time Hayden absolutely CRUSHED our kitchen gadget trivia (we're still

In this premiere episode of Everyday <Heroes/>, we're coming in HOT with JavaScript royalty Jordan Harband - the absolute madlad who maintains 500+ open source projects while somehow finding time to serve on TC39 and train his cat to respect keyboard boundaries.Key Highlights (because we know you're skimming):That time Jordan accidentally landed a TC39 spec change that made Object.assign like 100x faster (NBD)The secret origin story of teaching Excel to teachers...in 8th gradeWhy