Developer to CTO w/ Azhar Zuberi

We sit down with Azhar Zuberi to discuss his unique professional journey from developer to CTO of a startup.

Segment 1 - Introduce Yourself

Segment 2 - A little backstory

• What would you say was the most important topic or lesson you learned in your schooling when it comes to being a developer?
• How important was your first job as a developer in defining your coding style/knowledge base?
• When first starting out what were the ‘popular’ technologies that you learned (i.e. angular, bootstrap, wordpress etc)

Segment 3 - Our connection

• What was the reason you decided to choose us (Digital Dynasty Design) when we first started working together?
• What is your workflow/process for working with and hiring off site/outsourced developers?
• What are the benefits of having a small development team versus increasing funding and hiring a full staff?
• What are some of the biggest challenges when have a off site/outsourced development team?
• Our current development process has us using a very base Jquery, Bootstrap, JS, HTML and CSS stack. What were some of the reasons behind this vs using a more robust framework i.e. angular or react?

Segment 4 - Running a company

• What are some additional responsibilities that you were not expecting when transitioning to being a CTO
• What do you miss most about being just a contract developer
• As CTO how important was it to have all those technical skills and years of work in a company and as a contractor
• How did you learn the business side of your role as CTO and what is the most challenging part for you?

Web News - Incomplete Ecosystems

• What is an ecosystem?
  
  • A collection of software - typically from the same manufacturer - that all compliment each other
  • A primary example would be iCloud storing all your contacts and other data from your iPhone for use on your Mac, or on a new iPhone if you need to sync them up
• Ecosystems have been a key part of people’s workflow for the past few years
• They’re often a key feature that people look for when they purchasing a device
  • Apple’s ecosystem stands out in this particular example
• There are a lot of ecosystems out there including: productivity, smarthome, etc.
• Examples of incomplete ecosystems (rough notes/points of reference):
  • Samsung has software primarily on the phone, such as Notes, Bixby, Email, etc. but has no clients for PC use, other than things that mirror or use the phone (ie SideSync)
  • Microsoft’s is more focused on productivity (email, contacts, calendar, Cortana), but has no focus on smart home functionality (ie hardware). Windows Phone hardware is basically dead and therefore there is no mobile experience for Windows, with the exception of Android apps (which is a decent solution - but not as integrated as first party)
  • Android has no full desktop experience (A Pixelbook doesn’t have all the pro software that Windows has, Google Assistant is on Google hardware, but not on Windows 10)

You can find Azhar via...

Contentlinq Website - www.contentlinq.com

Contact Email - success@contentlinq.com

LinkedIn - Profile Page

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