Meet the Coaching Team
With industry experience at Google, Trainline, Facebook, Monzo, 8th Light and more, check out why we think our coaches are the best in the industry.
Our coaches are the powerhouse behind Makers, providing technical expertise, student feedback and support with job applications. Let’s meet the team.
Simo Tchokni
Simo is a Software Engineering Coach at Makers. A former Google employee, she spent seven years at the company working on different tools including Chrome and Google Calendar where she lead a data engineering and analytics team that built out tracking infrastructure, data pipelines and dashboards to allow better data-driven decision making for Google Calendar.
She later joined Memrise language platform as a senior engineer before joining Makers in January 2021.
Ryan Pierre
Ryan is a brand new member of the Makers team. He studied at Charlton University before starting his career as a software developer.
He’s held a range of technical roles including as a Flash developer, Web Application developer at Flight Hub and a Software Engineer at Wealthsimple.
Eddie Andress
Eddie originally trained as a biologist. Then, after becoming disillusioned with academia, he retrained to become a software developer and worked for several years at the Ministry of Justice, building tools to help make government better.
He says:
“I still love doing the Exercism tracks. Despite already having worked with Ruby on a bunch of different projects, I learn a lot from doing simple exercises and getting high quality feedback — there are always alternative ways to solve a problem.
One of my favourite books on computing is Code by Charles Petzold. It didn’t help me to write better code (it’s not that sort of book) but I really enjoyed taking a deep dive into how computers work at the lowest level.
Another great book to read is Mindset, by Carol Dweck. The term growth mindset is thrown around a lot without, I think, being fully understood. Read the book and, along the way, you’ll gain insight into your own mindset! It’s OK if you don’t have a growth mindset — the most important thing is that you are aware of your mindset and honest with yourself. If you want, you can then try to change it, bit by bit.”
You can see his Linkedin profile here.
Alice Lieutier
Alice started out as a web developer in Buenos Aires, before taking on several roles as a full-stack and front-end developer. She was a software engineer at Facebook in London for several years before joining SheCanCode as CTO and Head & Community.
Her advice for new devs:
“I like freeCodeCamp to learn about web development, and exercism for programming languages. I think it’s more important to find a community of practice than resources though. We often underestimate how much we learn from spending time with other developers. Whatever you want to learn, the resources are out there, but only by spending time with a community will you be able to discern which skills and concepts are important.”
You can see her Linkedin profile here.
Alex Addison
Alex is no stranger to life a a bootcamp student having launched his tech career at FDM.
He’s held several software engineering roles at leading tech teams including Trainline and LexisNexis.
A keen gamer, he set up a Makers gaming community and runs frequent socials for staff and students on Discord.
Ben Furber
Ben worked in digital communications and product management before training at Makers himself. He then went on to be a developer at thoughtbot, where he was working with founders, early stage and growth companies to build amazing products and technology teams.
His advice for new devs:
“It’s amazing how soon you’ll realise there are so many ways to solve a problem. So always thinking ‘how else could I have done this?’ … And be skeptical of anyone claiming to know The One True Way to solve a problem.”
You can see his Linkedin profile here.
Eóin Power
Prior to joining Makers, Eóin worked as an iOS developer at Deloitte Digital, where he worked on banking and life sciences projects for three years. His passion for education comes from working as an instructor at Centre for Talented Youth whilst studying software engineering, and is motivated by the opportunity to provide the type of mentorship he benefitted from most as a junior developer.
His advice for new devs: “Regularly take time to reflect on how much you’ve achieved to date. It’s easy to fixate on and feel overwhelmed by the concepts you haven’t yet grown comfortable with, but taking time to acknowledge your accomplishments can be just the thing you need to get you to the next stage on your developer journey.”
You can see his Linkedin profile here.
Katerina Georgiou
Katerina has a background in education and also spent many years in small startups working as a brand, event and community manager before retraining as a software developer at 8th Light.
She loves thinking about what it means to write high quality code having spent at lot of her time at 8th Light thinking about Test Driven Development, the SOLID principles and clean code.
She loves Ruby as a programming language but also really enjoys Java especially because of its contrast to Ruby.
She says:
“I love teaching. That’s why I’m at Makers. Every time I feel like I’ve had a positive impact on a student, when they’ve understood something, or even if they just come away feeling better about themselves, those are my proudest moments.”
You can follow her on Twitter here and see her Linkedin profile here.
Josué Estévez Fernández
Josué holds a masters degree from the University of Granada in Conference Interpreting. He went on to train at Makers in 2018 before launching his career as a software engineer.
He became a developer at Santander where he worked with technologies including JavaScript , Node, Angular and more.
He recently created and ran our first ever DevOps apprenticeship course.
Léo Hetsch
Leo began his development career back in 2013 through a full stack software engineering internship in Paris. Over the last eight years he went on two work at a range of companies working up to a Senior Software Engineer position at Stuart.
Over the course of his career he’s gained experience with a wide range of technologies including Javascript, Golang, Ruby on Rails, MongoDB and more.
Dana Svoboda
Dana is our Chief Joy Officer, cultivating wholeness and wellbeing in the workplace. As our in-house holistic coach, she coaches individuals and groups helping them to enhance their sense of joy and empowerment in their professional and personal lives.
She runs an emotional intelligence curriculum integrated with the Makers course and also teaches mindfulness meditation and yoga. She has written a book on EQ which you can read here.
You can follow her on Twitter here and see her Linkedin profile here.
