The Journey to Code Mastery | Marqeta's Randy Kern

**Randy Kern** (0:00)
One of the things that's fun about this space or this industry is you can go incredibly deep on many different problems and many different areas, and really sort of lean in heavy to the research and to the science underneath it. And you can also go really broad in sort of how this system of technology and people, and business, and customers, like all of these different areas, collide and interact in really nuanced, interesting ways. This is an industry that has both of those in spades.
From my standpoint, there's always more to learn, and there's always more to play with and experiment and try.

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**Dan Lines** (1:19)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today we're joined by Randy Kern, CTO of Marqeta.
Randy, welcome to the show.

**Randy Kern** (1:30)
Dan, thank you so much for having me today. Looking forward to it.

**Dan Lines** (1:33)
Yeah, awesome to have you on today. A little background, some notes that I have about you. You're a tech veteran, so you have decades of engineering plus leadership experience, which is fantastic.
In particular, you've spent much of your career, I think on the enterprise side. So previously, you served as Chief Customer Technology Officer at Salesforce. And before that, you were at Microsoft, where you worked on Azure and Bing technologies.
And chatting with you, you know, a bit before the show started, it's obvious that you have a real love for the craft of coding. You said something like engineers should go deep, all the way to understanding how the transistors work, because that's not only how you build better systems, it's how you have fun. That's like a pretty cool quote. But before we dive into all of that, you know, our talk is going to be a lot around mastering the craft and becoming an expert. But before we go there, it would be great to know a little bit about you and your career and your background and how you got into tech and what you're all about.

**Randy Kern** (2:48)
That's great, Dan. I think we'll have fun. So I really do care about the craft of programming. You asked how I got here. I think that's frankly a lot of it. As a kid, I got interested in technology and computers. One of the first things I started playing with was my dad's calculator, paper tape calculator. And that was a blast.
I made ham radios, so I burned my fingertips with soldering irons and figure out how transistors and capacitors and everything work. I built amateur radio stuff. I listened to long-range radio.
I had a ham radio license.
Technology of all types was fun. Even things like taking apart a washing machine and putting it back together when I was little was enjoyable. I just always wanted to know how stuff worked.
Somewhere from that kind of hardware has the real world work. I started to find this world of software, whether it was writing this silly lunar landing game on my dad's calculator I was telling you about. I got a TI-994A, an old computer, and actually even before that, an Altair 8080, that old toggle switch thing. And so the thing I loved about that whole space was the software part, right? You could change it, you could teach it to do anything. It was a whole world to figure out that, and it was more malleable than hardware. So that got me into this space, and it was just fun to figure out. I just had a blast.

**Dan Lines** (4:21)
That's awesome. And it feels like that era that you're talking about or the way that you describe it while you were talking, it feels so pure, like no intentions around like money or like, I don't know, I gotta build a social network so like a billion people can like, I don't know, chat on there, look up to me. It just felt more childlike and pure, and that's what I love about the way, the spirit in which you talk about it.
And what about for your professional career? Like how did you evolve in that? Where did you get started? And a little info there.