What is Between the Wires

Between the Wires is an interview series featuring those who are building developer products. Here we hope to spread ideas, encourage innovation, and offer a behind the scenes glance at the creation of developer products.

Who we are

 

Vivian Cromwell

For eight years Vivian Cromwell worked on developer products at Google including Chrome, Cloud, and Social, focusing on developer experience and tools. While at Google, she built several teams from the ground up, alongside world-class engineers. She recently left Google to start a mobile commerce startup (getchop.io) where she is learning first hand what it takes to build something from scratch — both the good and the bad. As a passion project, she also works as an adviser for startups in the developer space as a way to pass along what she has learned. Through her various experiences, she has become increasingly interested in understanding how developer products and projects are built. From this interest came Between the Wires, an interview series to share maker stories with like-minded individuals.

 

Preethi Kasireddy

Preethi Kasireddy is currently a software engineer at Coinbase, though her path to this point has been circuitous. After studying Industrial and Systems engineering in college, Preethi went into investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and later became a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz. While there, she interacted with thousands of developers and founders on an array of products. She was fascinated by what they did, and how they did it. After watching their products change the world, she began to study code so that she too could build something that mattered. What started as a pastime quickly grew into a deep passion for programming. Soon after, she left Andreessen Horowitz to become a full-time coder, and to build the foundation needed to be a maker. Between the Wires is a natural extension of her fascination with makers, and offers a place to collect some of the developer stories she initially found so inspiring.

Why we care

We felt that what the community was missing were the raw details and inside scoop on what it takes to be a maker and build a valuable product from ground-up. We care about questions like:

• What motivates makers to build developer products?
• What lead them to the path they are on today?
• What was their first experience with coding?
• What are the various ways to get funding for the projects?
• Is it possible to work on open source projects in a financially sustainable way?
• Given the rapid pace of innovation in the developer ecosystem, how do they make sure a product stays relevant and useful for years?

Moreover, we also want to focus on some of the harder questions like:

• What are some of the toughest challenges that developers face in running their business?
• Did they fear they would fail? How do they overcome that?

With these questions in mind, we started a series of interviews with makers. Our goal with these interviews is to share experiences that are often hidden behind a product or Github repo so that everyone, including aspiring makers, can learn from it.

We will be releasing the first set of our project starting with the story of Guillermo Rauch, CEO of zeit.co.

We hope this project inspires developers who want to build something. We hope to offer a transparent look into the various challenges and hardships these makers have faced for the sake of their dream. And we hope that it gives others the courage and motivation to do the same.

We would love to hear your feedback. If you have a suggestion for a maker you’d like to hear from, please fill out this form.

A big thank you to our writer Katie Crowley who helped us polish the articles, and to Marc Hemeon who quickly doodled the logo concept for us.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Keep on building.

Vivian & Preethi

This project is made possible with sponsorships from frontendmasters.com, egghead.io and Microsoft Edge.

Our sponsors.

This post was originally published on betweenthewires.org