Welcome to the Coteinubi podcast, where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours.

I'm your host, Saron, and today we're talking about demonstrating curiosity kindly with Matt Newkirk, engineering director at Etsy.

Developers demonstrating curiosity helps them build better things. It also helps in terms of collaboration and communication because so much of the job is about learning and learning from each other.

And part of that is about learning how to ask each other for help

and to ask each other for more insight. And how we demonstrate curiosity is a large part of that.

Matt talks about his coding journey, flunking out of high school and college to then go back

to college and graduate with a computer science degree. He talks about his current role as

engineering director at Etsy and leadership tips he's picked up along the way and currently implements.

After this.

Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

So Matt, you currently have an incredible role as engineering director at Etsy, which sounds very important, very prestigious.

But let's take a step back. I'd love to learn about how you got your start encoding.

Yeah, my dad was a software engineer. Growing up, we had computers around the house, and Apple 2C was the first

computer that I had in the house and did a lot of very basic games on that. And then over time,

I started to do a lot of writing with word processors, and I didn't really understand programming

as a job for me. But when I was a

teenager, I started to play these online games. And I was playing one on AOL. And it was great,

but it was also expensive. And because I was a teenager with no money, I was not able to keep

playing that. But a friend of mine mentioned to me that,

hey, there are these things called muds, multi-user dungeon. And basically, they're free versions of the

game that I've been paying for. And they were made by volunteers, and there's like tons of them.

But I started playing this one mud in particular that was Lord of the Rings based,

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