Kicking Off a Tech Career as a Preteen with Alex Zenla

What were you doing at the age of 12? We’d wager to bet you weren’t getting invited to Google I/O. On this episode, Corey chats with Alex Zenla, the founder and CTO of Edera. Only in her mid-20s, Alex already has more than a decade’s worth of professional experience working in the tech industry. They discuss how Alex found her way into programming at a young age, her experiences with open source projects like the Dart Project and Chromium OS, and getting contacted by Google’s lawyers as a preteen. You’ll also get to learn about Alex’s company, Edera, and their creative approaches to Kubernetes container security using Xen hypervisors. Did we forget to mention that there are multiple sidebars about Minecraft in this one? So grab your pick axe, put on your headphones, and a Google legal will be at your door by the time we wrap up this conversation.Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(0:54) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:28) What is Edera?(2:18) Who is the target customer for Edera's product(7:50) Breaking down the overhead makeup of Edera(10:28) How Edera sidesteps the problems with container isolation(13:20) Alex's history working with tech(15:40) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(16:23) How a phone call with a lawyer helped get Alex to Google I/O at the age of 12(18:55) Starting Alex's proper tech career thanks to a Dart library(21:24) The important role of Minecraft in Alex's life and career(23:40) The value of good networking (28:15) What it's been like for Alex to raise a Series A(29:56) Where you can find more from AlexAbout Alex ZenlaAlex Zenla is a technologist that has 10+ years experience in the full-time corporate world who is rebuilding the foundations of infrastructure to be secure-by-design.Alex grew an interest in computers at the age of 7, learning about hypervisors and hardware technologies. At the age of 11, she was inspired by the concept of Chrome OS to get involved in low level systems, where she contributed to the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. This led to being invited to Google I/O 2012 by the Chrome OS team at just the age of 12. Eventually, the Dart programming language came along, and Alex got deeply involved in the ecosystem, contributing to the language and standard library, and building core open source technologies. At the age of 14, she was hired by an IoT company called DGLogik to build an IoT platform that could scale across complex networks, launching my career in IoT. At DGLogik, Alex became deeply involved in Google's IoT technologies across multiple divisions, ultimately ending up working at Google on their IoT platform for their internal Real Estate. In 2024, she retired from the IoT data sphere and started Edera, a company that is making computing secure-by-design.LinksAlex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alex.zenla.ioSponsorThe Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com