#126 How Suz Hinton went from Dev to White Hat Hacker
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2024
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Suz Hinton. She's a software engineer, security researcher, and one of the first ever people to live-stream her coding on Twitch.
We talk about:
- How Suz started her career building browser ads in Adobe Flash, working around bandwidth early 2000s limitations.
- How she moved to the US from Melbourne to work at Zappos, and then Microsoft and Stripe.
- Her love of hardware and embedded development
- How she went back to school to study infosec, and launched a second career as a security researcher
- How she nearly burned out after 20 years in tech, and what she's doing to recover.
Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's a 2015 song from an Australian musician.
Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.
Also, I want to thank the 9,331 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Suz's article on live coding on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/lessons-from-my-first-year-of-live-coding-on-twitch-41a32e2f41c1/
- NoClip video game development documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/@NoclipDocs
- The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Suz says it's "Dense and long, but the best narrative about how computing came to be." https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
- Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known as L0pht Changed the World by Cris Thomas. "A book about the original cult of the dead cow hacking group." https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/space-rogue-cris-thomas/1142912008
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is my 20th year in the industry. |
| 0:03.4 | You know, it would be, sadly, it would be a bit strange if I didn't have a little bit of burnout at this point, right? and the the and the I'm |
| 0:21.6 | the |
| 0:22.6 | I'm |
| 0:23.6 | and |
| 0:24.6 | the |
| 0:25.6 | I'm |
| 0:26.6 | and |
| 0:27.6 | I'm |
| 0:28.6 | so |
| 0:29.6 | and |
| 0:30.6 | and |
| 0:31.6 | I'm |
| 0:32.6 | and |
| 0:33.6 | and |
| 0:34.6 | I don't |
| 0:35.6 | and |
| 0:36.6 | the and and I'm a bit of the Welcome back to the FreeCoke Camp podcast. |
| 0:46.4 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of Freakoke Camp.org. |
| 0:50.5 | Each week we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. |
| 0:55.7 | This week we're joined by Suez Hinton. She's a software engineer, security researcher, |
| 1:01.7 | and she was one of the pioneers of live coding on Twitch. Suz, how's everything going with you? |
... |
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