Chris Lee
Co-Host of Launch School Podcast
Chris started his career in 2002 as a software engineer at IBM working on large enterprise software. He started working with Ruby in 2007 consulting and coding for several startups. Later, he founded his own startup, a video interviewing platform for recruiters and hiring managers. Chris has also been a senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting in its Salesforce practice as a SME (subject matter expert) for Ruby, Heroku and iOS development. Prior to Launch School, Chris was the engineering manager and technical lead in a VC backed startup in San Francisco.
In all, Chris has over 16 years of software engineering, consulting, and various leadership experience. His work experience has ranged from Fortune 100 companies to startups and small businesses. When he's not programming, he enjoys playing basketball and spending time with his wife and poodle.
Chris Lee has hosted 38 Episodes.
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S3E10: Season 3 Final Episode
December 20th, 2021 | Season 3 | 26 mins 49 secs
In today's episode, our podcast hosts Chris, Callie, and Mandy share their end of the year reflections on Season 3, new updates on where Mandy and Callie are going, upcoming ideas for season 4, and ambitious goals for Launch School in the New Year and beyond.
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S3E4: John and Adam Isom -- Skipping College, CS Degree vs Launch School, and Making Six Figures Together
August 13th, 2021 | Season 3 | 57 mins 43 secs
education, programming
John and Adam talk about their journeys working together through Launch School, and their experiences working through a CS degree. John also talks about his decision to skip college to attend Launch School.
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S3E2: An update from Gabe, Arthur, and Ben on friendship and teamwork through Capstone, the Job Hunt, and as professional Software Engineers
July 19th, 2021 | Season 3 | 56 mins 31 secs
Previously in Season 2, Chris talked with Gabe, Ben, and Arthur to share their story on how they, as a group, supported one another through the Core curriculum. That episode highlighted the importance of community and friendship.
In this episode, Gabe, Ben, and Arthur are back with us to share more! They update us about their journey through Capstone, the job hunt, working as software engineers and meeting each other in person for the very first time.
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S2E11: Q&A Capstone, Assessments, DPP, & 2020 Salaries with Chris
May 15th, 2021 | Season 2 | 1 hr 7 mins
In this episode, Staacy and I held a Zoom Q & A. I was happily surprised by the wide-range of topics that we got to dive into. Questions ranged from knowing if you’re on track for Capstone, when and how to get a job, how your age affects a career in tech, how to know if Launch School is for you, and how the Deferred Payment Program works.
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S2E10: Conference on Study Habits by The Social Network with Liz, Jesse, and Katarina
February 14th, 2021 | Season 2 | 1 hr 19 secs
education, learn to code, learning, programming
In this episode, I caught up with Liz, Jesse, and Katarina to chat about another peer-led community group at Launch School called "The Social Network" and the recent conference they put on focused on study habits.
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S2E9: Student Panel Discussion
November 18th, 2020 | Season 2 | 1 hr 1 min
education, programming
This is a slightly different episode in that it’s a recording of a webinar we did a few weeks ago about our Deferred Payment Program. Now why would we include a webinar in the podcast? Well, the reason is because this webinar is actually a panel of Launch School students and the conversation is mostly about their journey through Launch School, so I thought it’d be suitable for the podcast.
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S2E8: Community Learning at The Spot with Leena, Rodney, and Christian
October 31st, 2020 | Season 2 | 44 mins 19 secs
education, learn to code, learning to code, programming
In this episode, I caught up with Leena, Rodney, and Christian who started a peer-based study group within the Launch School community called SPOT, which stands for Study, Practice, Overlearn, and Teach. This is, arguably, one of the most important topics for us as a mastery-based learning program.
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S2E7: Sunny Beatteay on Landing a Dream Job and Getting Promoted
July 23rd, 2020 | Season 2 | 1 hr 8 mins
education, programming
Sunny talks about his job as a Senior Software Engineer at Digital Ocean, how he got there, and how he got promoted so quickly.
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S2E6: Michael Mentele - From Launch School to making $250k at Facebook
May 17th, 2020 | Season 2 | 42 mins 45 secs
In this episode, I asked one of our very first Capstone graduates to share with us what’s been going on a few years removed from graduating Capstone. Michael joined Launch School in 2016, finish Capstone in 2017, and is now making “quarter of a million” at Facebook working on the Oculus VR team.
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S2E5: Nick Calibey on landing a six-figure remote Software Engineer role
April 18th, 2020 | Season 2 | 47 mins 42 secs
education, programming
In this episode I got a chance to speak with Nick Calibey, a Capstone graduate and software engineer at TimescaleDB. We talked about how he went from getting his Masters in Theological Studies to now working on Cloud Infrastructure making 6 figures all working remotely from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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S2E4: Gabe, Arthur, and Ben on the importance of studying together and community
March 28th, 2020 | Season 2 | 44 mins 59 secs
education, learning to code, programming
Gabe, Ben, and Arthur share their story about how they, as a group, are supporting and helping each other through the Core Curriculum and the importance of community.
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S2E3: Sasha Prodan - 3 year journey to software engineering
March 9th, 2020 | Season 2 | 55 mins 10 secs
education, programming
I catch up with Sasha Prodan, who describes her multi-year journey to her high-paying software engineering role. Sasha arrived in the US as an immigrant, worked retail jobs to support herself, and spent 3 years completing her transition to a software engineering role in San Francisco.
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S2E2: Julius Zerwick on path to Software Engineer at DigitalOcean, writing a book, and comparing coding bootcamps
February 7th, 2020 | Season 2 | 48 mins 27 secs
education, programming
Capstone graduate and frequent Launch School Tech Talk speaker, Julius Zerwick comes on the podcast to chat about his Software Engineer job at DigitalOcean, software salaries in NYC, the importance of soft skills, pros/cons of coding bootcamp vs Launch School, and his upcoming book Make Sense of Distributed Systems from Manning.
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S2E1: Tannr Allard - $120k job first, college after
January 19th, 2020 | Season 2 | 42 mins 41 secs
education, programming
In this first episode of Season 2 of the Launch School podcast, I chat with Capstone graduate Tannr Allard about his reflections on going from leaving college to a $120K job to working in blockchain development.
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Meet a Student: Letladi Sebesho
May 7th, 2017 | Season 1 | 22 mins 24 secs
In this episode, we speak with Letladi Sebesho, a South African developer who recently completed all (well, most) of the Launch School courses. He talks about how Launch School compares with his computer science courses, his job hunt process, and also...
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Meet a Student: Jay Shenk
April 1st, 2017 | Season 1 | 29 mins 4 secs
In this episode, Jay Shenk talks about changing career goals from an aspiring clarinetist to a programmer and how he applies what he learned as a trained musician to programming. Jay’s been at Launch School for around a year and shares some advice...