Karla Gil, JavaScript programmer
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
She was always attracted to coding and pursued her interest while still in the service. Upon getting out, she went to the General Assembly coding school. She spent a year helping someone with their website and then landed a job at a startup in Des Moines, Iowa, which has a worker-safety system, with a badge that workers wear and a cloud service. Karla has a lot to say about resilience, self-confidence, and under-promising and over-delivering. Her story should be an inspiration to anyone who thinks they'd like to get into software but isn't sure they can do it. She did it and maybe you can,...
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Vincent Abruzzo, Marine
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Vincent started programming in the mid-90s when he stumbled across AOL punters and similar tools. At the age of 18, he joined the Marine Corps. His specialty for the Corps was "data network specialist." Vincent spent time in Bahrain and Djibouti, Africa, where he won a Navy and Marine Corps achievement medal for building the first defense message system network in the field. He was honorably discharged at the rank of Sergeant after 4 years. After being discharged Vincent pursued a career in academia. He was awarded a Master’s degree in 2012 in philosophy and cognitive science and went on to...
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Ali Taylor-Cipolla
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Ali Taylor-Cipolla is married to an Air Force vet of 14 years. Among her jobs prior to studying at the Microsoft Military Spouse Training Academy, Ali was the head chef at a fraternity at Mississippi State University, and a cook at a Popeye's on a military base in Germany. She and her future husband drove from London to Ulan Bator in Mongolia, which is 10,000 miles, in a $500 car. She's now learning the Microsoft cloud infrastructure and graduates very soon.
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Seth Lewis, 9 years Air Force
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Seth spent 9 years in the Air Force, flying on transport planes to every continent but Australia. He spent his downtime on the flights studying technology, and after separating, went to Lambda School and then Hack Reactor. He's now applying his skills, especially Docker and Kubernetes, at one of the biggest names in technology. If you've ever wondered what students learn in a code school, Seth explains that in considerable depth.
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Silas Avilez
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Silas enlisted in the Army at age 17, served in logistics, and was deployed to Afghanistan. While he was in, he studied accounting, finance, and investing on his own, and when he separated, he was ready. He enrolled in the Veteran Capital program and built his sales and networking skills, and now he's just starting a new job at Lucid Dream VR in North Carolina.
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Jeff Kenworthy
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Jeff is an Army vet who's had some tough times but he prefers to think about how far he's come. One day after moving into a Salvation Army shelter with his wife and two kids, they found out she was pregnant with twins! But now he's got a job helping victims of ransom attacks and moved his family into their own place. Jeff is also in a degree program with the University of Maryland. (Note: you will hear some background kid noise in spots. This is just Jeff's life right now.)
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Keith Fosmire
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Keith Fosmire spent 10 years in the Air Force as a satellite technician and then volunteered for combat duty in the Army. He got his degree in Computer Science, is married, and now works for CoveyCS in upstate New York. He works with electronics in his spare time and his great ambition is to work in Linux Kernel development!
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Gary Krause
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Gary is an active-duty Navy cryptologic technician, getting out of the Navy in a few months. He's a Chief Petty Officer who is now interning at SIXGEN, which is a company that does all sorts of cybersecurity tasks. Gary has a deep background in cybersecurity and knows Ruby on Rails and Python, and is also fluent in Mandarin! (I test him on this at 4:00)
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Rod Levy, Code Platoon
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Rod Levy and Alicia Boddy of Code Platoon, a code school for veterans, active duties, and military spouses join us for a panel discussion. Kelly Macleod, an Army veteran and Operation Code (OC) member represents the OC community. Code Platoon has recently been certified for VET-TEC, an exciting new program where the student doesn't even have to use their GI Bill benefits! Rod and Alicia tell us all about Code Platoon's history, how the VET-TEC program works, and why hiring veterans is just smart business.
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Josh Carter
Operation Code interviews with vets in tech
Josh Carter Joined with David Molina and others to launch Operation Code. Together they led the campaign to make code schools eligible for GI Bill payments, enabling our vets to train for good, high-paying jobs without college. Josh tells us how that happened, and also traces his career path from art school to the Navy, to a job pulling cable for a telecomm company, to his current roles as entrepreneur and CEO. We also talk about the changing face of software development, and how hiring veterans isn't charity -- it's just smart business.
info_outlineMike Rodriguez is an former Marine who became a Windows XP administrator in the service, and he's stayed with it. He wanted to be a tank crewman, but unfortunately his partial color blindness limited the jobs he could perform inside a tank, so he had to take a different career path, and now here he is! There are all kinds of ways people come to computers. Mike was deployed to Iraq in 2005. Now he works for Teradata as an Application Security Analyst.