Everyday Heroes

Mar 11 2025 8 ep. 47 mins
Everyday Heroes Podcast artwork

Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast about the unsung heroes of the tech world. From the phone in your pocket to the world's most critical digital infrastructure, open-source software has a hand in it. These free technologies that shape our digital world wouldn't be anything without the Heroes that maintain them, promote them, and evolve them - these are their stories. Everyday Heroes is brought to you by HeroDevs.

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The Last Line of Defense: Unaliving End-of-Life w/ David Welch

Mar 11 2025 54 mins  
And the award for the longest podcast intro goes to checks notes Hayden. (Holy cow... compensating for something?)Ever wondered what happens when you let your childhood menace grow up and give him INTENTIONAL access to things that break? Meet Dave Welch, the guy whose mom literally had to lock away the household tools because he kept disassembling everything and failing to put it b

Coffee, Code & TensorFlow.js: Aileen Villanueva's Journey from Industrial Engineer to AI Advocate

Mar 04 2025 49 mins  
Move over, Python nerds - turns out you CAN teach an old JavaScript dog new AI tricks. Meet Aileen Villanueva, the industrial engineer turned frontend wizard who discovered you don't need to learn an entirely new language just to make robots smarter (looking at you, everyone who panic-enrolled in Python boot camps in 2023).In this episode:How being "strategically located" near the

Stream(ing) of Consciousness: JD Flynn's Journey from Paramedic Burnout to Twitch Coding Therapy

Feb 25 2025 41 mins  
What do you do when you've seen TOO MANY people on their worst day? You find a career where the worst day involves merge conflicts. JD Flynn's journey from paramedic burnout to Drupal powerhouse is the career pivot we didn't know we needed.In this episode:The EXACT moment he realized "maybe I shouldn't be a paramedic anymore" (spoiler: it involves losing empathy for humans, which i

The Power User: How Cecelia Martinez McCrea Went from "Wait, Y'all MADE This?" to "Yeah, I Help NASA Test Their Code"

Feb 18 2025 50 mins  
Meet the woman who started coding because she was *double takes on notes* the only person at her finance job who actually USED their internal app. (Listen, sometimes being the office overachiever leads to unexpected career pivots.)In this episode:That time her company's dev team was like "Hey, why are you the ONLY ONE using our app?" and she was like "Wait, y'all MADE this?"How goi

The Offline Coder: How Alejandro Cuba Ruiz Went from BASIC to Boss Level

Feb 11 2025 59 mins  
When most of us were rage-quitting over slow internet, Alejandro Cuba Ruiz was coding in Cuba with ...checks transcript... NO internet access, a Visual Basic compiler, and the sheer audacity to make it work anyway. (Meanwhile, I lose my mind if my VS Code takes more than 3 seconds to load.)In this episode:The absolutely wild journey of learning to code offline - featuring his dad a

From Hospice to HOSTNAME: AmyJune Hineline's Guide to Hacking the Open Source Career Path (No Code Required)

Feb 04 2025 40 mins  
Look, we've all heard people say "just learn to code" like it's some magical career-fixing spell. But AmyJune Hineline took one look at that advice, said "nah," and STILL became an open source legend. How? By realizing that maybe - just MAYBE - the real superpower isn't writing code, but building the communities that make code matter.In this episode:The ACTUAL reason she left hospi

The Butterfly Effect: How Apple's Worst Keyboard Created a Linux Legend

Jan 28 2025 44 mins  
Meet Hayden Barnes, the lawyer-turned-tech-wizard who LITERALLY changed careers because Apple's butterfly keyboard was too annoying. (We're not even joking.)In this episode:How despising a keyboard led to pioneering Windows Subsystem for Linux projectsWhy paying for open source software should totally be a thing again (like it's 1999)The creation of Pengwin: the $10 Linux distro th

The 500 Club: Jordan Harband on Maintaining ALL THE THINGS (and Training Cats with Air Dusters)

Jan 21 2025 41 mins  
In this premiere episode of Everyday <Heroes/>, we're coming in HOT with JavaScript royalty Jordan Harband - the absolute madlad who maintains 500+ open source projects while somehow finding time to serve on TC39 and train his cat to respect keyboard boundaries.Key Highlights (because we know you're skimming):That time Jordan accidentally landed a TC39 spec change that made O