From Software Engineer to White Hat Hacker with Suz Hinton [Podcast #126]

On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Suz Hinton. She's a software engineer, security researcher, and one of the first ever people to live-stream her coding on Twitch. We talk about: - How Suz started her career building browser ads in Adobe Flash, working around bandwidth early 2000s limitations. - How she moved to the US from Melbourne to work at Zappos, and then Microsoft and Stripe. - Her love of hardware and embedded development - How she went back to school to study infosec, and launched a second career as a security researcher - How she nearly burned out after 20 years in tech, and what she's doing to recover. Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's a 2015 song from an Australian musician. Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech. Also, I want to thank the 9,331 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate Links we talk about during our conversation: - Suz's article on live coding on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/lessons-from-my-first-year-of-live-coding-on-twitch-41a32e2f41c1/ - NoClip video game development documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/@NoclipDocs - The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Suz says it's "Dense and long, but the best narrative about how computing came to be." https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine - Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known as L0pht Changed the World by Cris Thomas. "A book about the original cult of the dead cow hacking group." https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/space-rogue-cris-thomas/1142912008 Sections: 0:00:00 Introduction and Background 0:09:54 Education and Early Career 0:26:50 Reflections on Advertising and Broad Skill Set 0:30:16 The Impact of Teaching and Working at Zappos 0:44:24 Exploring Hardware Projects and Embedded Development 0:52:42 Challenges of Obtaining a Green Card 0:54:51 The Journey of Live Coding and Open Source 0:57:15 Participating in Capture the Flag Events 1:10:11 The Benefits of Asynchronous and Real-Time Communication in Remote Work 1:24:05 Customizing Software Tools 1:29:17 Balancing Foundations and Practical Skills 1:31:54 Recognizing and Addressing Burnout 1:43:56 Rejuvenating and Staying Connected ❤️ Support for this channel comes from our friends at Scrimba – the coding platform that's reinvented interactive learning: https://scrimba.com/freecodecamp