Summary: For this month's episode we have Maoni Stephens, the owner for the .NET GC. She's a deep domain expert in garbage collection for over 15 years and has a lot of interesting learnings to share about building a career towards the architect path. We discuss everything from getting the most out of of mentors, building learning into a career, the critical skill of debugging others' code, developing confidence and perseverance towards her goals. [01:37] - Maoni's path to find her GC passion [04:20] - Trying out the PM path with GC [05:15] - What it means to be a GC architect and working with customers [08:40] - Building out tooling to automate her job [14:55] - Most recent career learning - working with a team instead of one-woman army [17:39] - How did Maoni know she had found her area and finding a critical mentor? [22:41] - How did she decide that she needed a change in her job and put her plan into action? [24:51] - Learning to debug as career accelerator [29:00] - On persistence and confidence [32:33] - Finding computers after college [34:20] - IRC as key career maker in the 90's, AGAIN! [35:25] - Getting the most out of a great mentor [39:20] - Mentors for non-technical areas, learning soft skills, influence without authority [41:10] - Instilling new habits of interactions
