v0.0.4 - Colin J Lacy

Colin J Lacy started his tech journey in restaurant marketing - spoiler: he was bad at it - and began learning to code instead. He started as a self-taught developer and freelancer with HTML and CSS, then expanded into many languages like JavaScript, WordPress and PHP, Rails, Python, Golang and later moved away from frontend engineering altogether into cloud engineering and he “hasn’t looked back!” There was a need and he was ready to fill it.

Throughout his tenure, continuous learning has been a common theme. Colin has felt “late to the party” with loads and loads of resources for well-established languages and tools and now with the rise of AI, he’s in an “early to the party” learning stage with little to no resources. The experience is different, but also somehow not different at all. 🤔

It still takes time and patience to grasp some of the complicated things. And that is very normal.

In this episode, we’ll talk about the many languages Colin has experience with, cloud engineering/DevOps, continuous learning in the early morning, unique challenges with AI infrastructure and observability, MCP, his YouTube channel, platform engineering alongside data scientists, and open source!

Your call to action? → Start contributing to open source early and often. 🙌

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Colin J Lacy and His Journey

05:40 Transitioning into Cloud Engineering

10:41 The Challenges of Cloud Engineering

15:32 Exploring AI Infrastructure

20:03 Understanding MCP and Its Relevance

28:32 Platform Engineering for Data Scientists

32:43 Final Thoughts and Advice on Open Source Contributions

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All the Good Stuff - Links & More

• LinkedIn

• Colin’s YouTube channel

• projectsveltos (open source project Colin mentioned)

• Curious about the TypeScript moving to Go(lang) comments?

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Thanks & Gratitude 🙏

🎵 The background music in this episode was created by the amazing Sarah Garlock. You can also find Sarah @sarg_makes_beats on Instagram and TikTok!

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Let’s Connect!

🎧 You can find this podcast episode and more at wip-podcast.com or wherever you enjoy your favorite podcasts.

👩‍💻 I also write a Substack newsletter about things I’m learning at codeOutLoud. You can find me on LinkedIn, YouTube, or take a peek at what I’m up to at mindi.omg.lol.

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Want to be - or recommend - a guest for the show?

Fill out or send this short Notion form to a friend to be considered for an upcoming episode! I’m looking for interesting people working ALL across the tech world! 😁