technologyApr 19, 201836:56pending

Iheanyi Ekechukwu on education, programming, and managing side projects

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About this episode

Today Joel catches up with Iheanyi Ekechukwu. Iheanyi is a Product Engineer currently working at DigitalOcean. He previously worked at IBM on Watson. They also talk about Iheanyi's education, stack, and side projects

Iheanyi started out majoring in Computer Engineering, but switched to Computer Science after he figured out hardware just wasn't for him. He now lives and works in Brooklyn and spends most of his time coding (though he always brings his design skills to the table).

Iheanyi's design comes from a dual degree program at Notre Dame, the college where he graduated. He noticed a lot of subpar interfaces coming from pure programmers, and he was frustrated with that, so he took his school's opportunity to learn design and apply it to his work. Even if he isn't a designer, he uses his skills daily to communicate with designers and make whatever he works on that much better.

Iheanyi started using Ember back during college. He was frustrated by his school's class search interface, and he set out to improve it. Ember and Rails were like a match made in heaven for him, Ember having been authored by ex-Rails core team member, Yehuda Katz.

Joel discusses with Iheanyi what he's currently using in his work. They get into GO, and how Iheanyi has enjoyed working with a statically typed language when doing back-end work. Not having to worry about full test coverage when refactoring has been great!

Lastly, they talk about the various side projects Iheanyi has going. Such as Interface Lovers, a blog where top designers are interviewed and share their work music playlists. Also, Seeker, a job-board app that allows you to connect your strip account to it and have companies submit jobs.

Transcript

"Iheanyi Ekechukwu on education, programming, and managing side projects" Transcript

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