From Software Engineer to Security Researcher with Suz Hinton [Podcast #126] [Video]

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

Sections:
0:00:00 Introduction and Background
0:09:54 Education and Early Career
0:26:50 Reflections on Advertising and Broad Skill Set
0:30:16 The Impact of Teaching and Working at Zappos
0:44:24 Exploring Hardware Projects and Embedded Development
0:52:42 Challenges of Obtaining a Green Card
0:54:51 The Journey of Live Coding and Open Source
0:57:15 Participating in Capture the Flag Events
1:10:11 The Benefits of Asynchronous and Real-Time Communication in Remote Work
1:24:05 Customizing Software Tools
1:29:17 Balancing Foundations and Practical Skills
1:31:54 Recognizing and Addressing Burnout
1:43:56 Rejuvenating and Staying Connected