Real Technologists: Julie Holdren

Real Technologists

Trac Bannon: When Julie Holdren, co founder of DC based Watering Hole AI joined our call, I immediately noticed stylish designer glasses with a popped collar. That lasted for only a few moments. Julie had a ton of connection and bandwidth issues. So after disconnecting and switching networks, Senior asked Julie and I to talk "cameras off".

I'm glad we had those first few minutes visually... pleasant banter and noticing where my guests are zooming in from gives me additional clues for asking questions. The only clues I could glean is that Julie is very pretty, had her laptop perhaps sitting on her lap, and had what seemed to be naturally serious countenance... I guess inherently resolute.

When prepping to interview a guest for Real Technologists, Senior and I do a very small amount of detective work. I've been a guest before when someone has done a tremendous amount of research and at times, I felt like they were not getting to the real me. And that is why each Real Technologists episode is a journey of discovery; too much research would taint me from asking really interesting questions that just randomly pop up as we chat.

What we learned in our prep investigation about Julie is that she represents the new gig economy, but for executives in technology... a career style born of entrepreneurial culture, globalization, tech advances, and a changing workforce preference... giggers... instead of one role, giggers prefer many roles or jobs instead of just one... tons of gigs.

As a renowned technologist with extensive experience in communications networks, cryptography, mobile technologies, and data science... why did she gravitate towards gigging? I'd say it started when she was a kid growing up in DC!

Julie Holdren: I went to school in Fairfax County at the time. They were teaching Pascal and Basic in high school. So I graduated from high school already programming. and it was an elective. It was easy. It came to me easily. I was, one degree shy of a math major. So at the time, there wasn't code generation tools and debugging tools the way they are today, which makes things a lot faster. So we ended up doing and learning very low level code through high school. I initially got exposed through the DoD in middle school to one of the first computers through my Girl Scout program. And earned a computer badge in middle school. And I think that piqued my interest.