Careers Behind the Code with Maoni Stephens

For this month's episode we have Maoni Stephens, the owner for the .NET GC.   She's a deep domain expert in garbage collection for over 15 years and has a lot of interesting learnings to share about building a career towards the architect path.   We discuss everything from getting the most out of of mentors, building learning into a career, the critical skill of debugging others' code, developing confidence and perseverance towards her goals.

[01:37] - Maoni's path to find her GC passion

[04:20] - Trying out the PM path with GC

[05:15] - What it means to be a GC architect and working with customers

[08:40] - Building out tooling to automate her job

[14:55] - Most recent career learning - working with a team instead of one-woman army

[17:39] - How did Maoni know she had found her area and finding a critical mentor?

[22:41] - How did she decide that she needed a change in her job and put her plan into action?

[24:51] - Learning to debug as career accelerator

[29:00] - On persistence and confidence

[32:33] - Finding computers after college

[34:20] - IRC as key career maker in the 90's, AGAIN!

[35:25] - Getting the most out of a great mentor

[39:20] - Mentors for non-technical areas, learning soft skills, influence without authority

[41:10] - Instilling new habits of interactions