S5 Bonus: Kyle Bernhardy, HarperDB

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Episode • Dec 2, 2021 • 42m

Kyle Bernhardy had a less than traditional path to the tech world. He has been in the industry since the late 90's, but it all started when he was growing up, attempting to program text adventures games on his Commodore 64. In High School, he started running and they became a major part of his life - so much so, he went to run for Penn State University. He settled into an exercise and sports science major, so he could stay close to the sport.

Post college - he didn't know what to do with his degree. He worked in a few corporate fitness centers, but didn't enjoy what he was doing and didn't see a path for himself. During that time, he ended up getting a job in tech support. He grew in this role, in his knowledge of DB basics, SQL and supporting database reporting. Once this happened, he moved into the development world.Programming for Kyle is a creative outlet, but not for art... for problem solving. In 2010, he started working for a data center company and met his now co-founder. They would hang out and chat about what it would be like to build something together. While working for a large data aggregation company, he worked through a number of data availability, reliability, and infrastructure around massive data processing. Internally, he thought there must be a better way.

This is the creation story of HarperDB.

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