The Save File Ep12 - Eric Anderson

Matt Holt is the creator of the wildly successful Caddy web server. He's also a member of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, AKA the Mormon Church. . I am not. Can we both be right? We had a lovely discussion about that, and what anchors his faith. We also spent time discussing the simulation argument, the implications of that worldview, and where, in his opinion, that argument falls short.

Kelvin Beachum is no ordinary athlete. While it is common for athletes to break into tech investing, Kelvin goes where few dare to go: he invests in Open Source tech infrastructure -- and even attended KubeCon.Kelvin is a Christian from birth, and puts God in the center of everything he does.Follow Kelvin: https://x.com/KelvinBeachumJr

My guest today is John Larsen, a software developer from Norway, who enjoys PHP, and doesn’t seem to like Java very much. He was raised into a fringe Christian Church with 8 siblings, and after seeing that Church dissolve, got into his own path to test his faith, landing where he is today.At some point he has read 200 books in a year, with more than 40 in a month. We talked about the Church Fathers, the Didache, and had a very intellectually satisfying discussion about what constitutes belief.

Josh Cirre comes from a creative background, but got into coding from a desire to help his customers. Now he works for Laravel as a Support Engineer and DevRel. We talked about beauty, morality and logic, and how he views them as pointing to God.We talked about a main objection to all of that, which is the existence of the Raccoon, and played a nice thought exercise that illuminated the role faith plays in his life.Follow Josh: https://x.com/joshcirre

My Guest today is Adon Irani. We had a great conversation as his upbringing in a mixed home with a Zoroastrian father and a Baptist mother, how at age11 he dedicated his life to Christ but completely forgot about it, and the important role that faith plays in his life.Follow Adon: https://x.com/AtRiskMedia

Join me today to talk about Java & Jesus with Mary Grygleski. She is the president of the Chicago Java Users Group, a Developer Advocate, and the AI Practice Lead at Callibriti.We discussed her upbringing as a Catholic in Hong Kong, the harsh environment where her family came from, and how she was able to transform her life through 20 years of Eucharist Adoration.

My guest today is Mina Abadir. Mina is the CTO of Flightcontrol, and a member of the Coptic Church. In this episode we talked about growing up in Egypt as part of a minority religion, and how he had his religion inscribed in his national ID. We also discussed how the Coptic Church differs from others, and how his faith helped him in his career.Follow Mina: https://x.com/abadir_

In today's episode, I sat down for a chat with Eric Anderson. A PM from Google turned a successful Venture Capitalist at Scale, where he invested in companies like Datastax, Permit.io, and Honeycomb.io.Eric grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of  Latter-day Saints. We discussed the community-building implications of growing up as a member of a church community, as well as the rational basis upon which his faith rests.

In today's episode, I had the pleasure of talking to Raina. She is a cradle Catholic from Pakistan, and we had a great conversation about how her experience growing up, and how in contrast with the safety we have in the West to profess our faith - or lack thereof - she had to worry about minor nuisances like the Taliban.Raina is now an aerospace engineer that "keeps planes from falling from the sky" (she does not work for Boeing), and shared how she believes the Holy Spirit guided her in her career.

Today, we flip the script: Kent C. Dodds is the host, and I'll be the guest.I had the opportunity to talk about how I was raised in a nominally Catholic environment, but left it at age 14 when I was convinced atheism was the thing smart people do.We also chatted about what brought me back, and why I decided to, among all possible paths, to join the Catholic Church.