Tech Done Right

Episode 56: Developer Hiring

February 27th, 2019  |  44 mins 28 secs

career, developer, hiring

Today on the show, we're talking about hiring with Jennifer Tu and Zee Spencer of Cohere, Thayer Prime of Team Prime, and software consultant Matt Patterson. We talk about the entire developer hiring process from how to advertise your company to potential candidates, through coding tests and interviews, and all the way to the final decision process. It's a great conversation with a lot of different perspectives and a lot of good advice. We’d like to hear from you. What do you look for when hiring developers? Let us know at http://techdoneright.io/56 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right

Episode 55: Engineering Management With Allison McMillan

February 13th, 2019  |  38 mins 45 secs

career, developer, management

Today on the show we’re talking about engineering management. Allison McMillan is an engineering manager for the Atom team at GitHub. We talk about what her role is within the team, how she helps her team grow and improve, and how the management role is different from her previous developer jobs. We’d like to hear from you. What makes a great engineering manager? Let us know at techdoneright.io/55 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right

Episode 54: Code Style and Community with Sam Phippen and Justin Searls

January 30th, 2019  |  47 mins 16 secs

code, communication, developer

On this episode, we’ve got Sam Phippen and Justin Searls back for their third round on the show. Both of them have been working on new Ruby tools to better standardize your team’s style and code formatting. We talk about why they’ve decided these tools are important, what their philosophy of coding style is, how coding style relates to the Ruby community, and how they evaluate code when given a code sample to look at.

We’d like to hear from you. How does your team handle differences of opinion in code style? Let us know at techdoneright.io/54 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right

Episode 53: Tribal Knowledge and Onboarding with Annie Sexton

January 16th, 2019  |  36 mins 49 secs

career, communication, management

Developers and teams build up a lot of knowledge about their code and their process which never gets written down and which makes it harder together to get new team members up to speed. Our guest, Annie Sexton, is a support engineer for Heroku and has to deal with not only Heroku’s vast amount of knowledge, but also the unwritten information of many of her support customers. We’ll talk about the practical things Annie recommends to help make this knowledge explicit, and how your team can improve its group memory and team on-boarding. We’d also like to hear from you. Is there something your team has done to write down the things everybody knows? Let us know at http://techdoneright.io/53 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right.

Episode 52: Small, Sharp Developer Tools With Brian Hogan

January 2nd, 2019  |  41 mins 30 secs

career, developer, tools

Developers use a variety of tools other than their programming language to get their jobs done. This week, we talk about those tools with Brian Hogan, a Technical Editor for Digital Ocean. Brian's a prolific technical educator, writer, and editor and he's currently the author of the book Small, Sharp, Software Tools from the Pragmatic Press. We talk about why command line tools in particular are important, what command line tools do well, and why some people including myself often find them opaque and confusing. We talk about our favorite tools and about customizing your workflow to fit your needs.

Episode 51: Becoming a Senior Engineer with Jamey Hampton

December 12th, 2018  |  39 mins 29 secs

career, developer, hiring

On this episode, we're talking about becoming a senior engineer. When you first become a senior engineer, you suddenly have new job responsibilities that aren't coding and they aren't management. It's not clear how to balance your time or evaluate your success. Our guest this week is Jamey Hampton, a panelist on Greater Than Code podcast and a Senior Engineer at Agrilyst. We talk about how to handle the changing responsibilities and perspective that comes from being promoted even when you're still the same person that you were the previous week. We also talk specifically about hiring as a non-coding responsibility.

Episode 50: Your First Open Source Contribution with VM Brasseur

November 28th, 2018  |  39 mins 39 secs

community, developer, open source

The Open Source world is large. It’s also complex and difficult to manage, especially for a novice. Our guest this week is VM Brasseur, who is the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative and the author of a new book from Pragmatic called Forge Your Future With Open Source. We talk how Open Source is different from free software, and how to get started in Open Source, how to pick a project, how to navigate a new project to make your first submission. We’ll also look at it from the other side, and talk about open source projects can make themselves more contributor-friendly. And we talk about the state of Open Source in general. We want to hear from you. What was your first open source experience like? Or, how do you handle new contributors on your project?

Episode 49: Accessibility With Luisa Morales

November 14th, 2018  |  35 mins 1 sec

accessibility, d_and_i, developer

As many as 15 to 25 percent of your site’s potential users may have trouble accessing it due to some kind of disability. How can you design your site to allow your content to be usable by the widest variety of users? My guest today is Luisa Morales, an engineering fellow at the New York City Mayor’s office for Economic Opportunity. We talk about what accessibility means, how to design your site to be accessible, and what guidelines to use to help ensure success. We’ll also talk about a very literal form of accessibility — making your site behave in a way that it is accessible to users with limited bandwidth or older devices. We’d like to hear from you. What issues or successes have you had with accessibility? Let us know at techdoneright.io or on Twitter at @tech_done_right.

Episode 48: Meetings and Inclusion with Katie Gore and Mark Rickmeier

October 27th, 2018  |  38 mins 55 secs

Today we are talking about meetings. Any group software activity is going to have meetings, and we’re going to talk about making them better, where by better we mean more interactive and able to get meaningful contributions from everybody without letting the loudest or most powerful voices dominate. My guests are Mark Rickmeier, the CEO of Table XI, and Katie Gore, of the communication coaching company SpeechIRL. As this podcast comes out, Table XI is running a Kickstarter for a new meeting tool that you can use to improve your meetings. We’ll talk about how we came to develop the tool, how we use it, and why we think it’s effective. We want to hear from you — what’s the problem with your meetings and how have you solved it? Let us know at techdoneright.io/48 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right

Episode 47: Empowering Entry-Level Developers with Mercedes Bernard

October 10th, 2018  |  37 mins 58 secs

career, communication, developer, management

How can your company empower your entry-level developers to grow their skills and advance their careers? If you are an entry-level developer, what are skills that are important for growth? Mercedes Bernard, a Senior Software Engineer at DevMynd, joins Tech Done Right to talk about empowering entry-level developers. We talk about giving people scaffolding to support them in owning larger and larger parts of a software process, and how to align your entire company to support growth.

Episode 46: 20 Years of Web Development with Avdi Grimm and Sarah Mei

September 19th, 2018  |  48 mins 24 secs

career, developer

What has changed in web development in the last 20 years, and what do those changes say about the next 20? I recently realized that Avdi Grimm, the head chef of Ruby Tapas, Sarah Mei, of Ruby Central and Salesforce, and I all began our professional careers within a couple of weeks of each other in August 1998. I wanted to talk to them about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. I was curious as to whether our different career paths led to similar observations. We talk about open source, agile, dynamic languages, distributed systems and how they’ve all changed or haven’t changed the developer’s experience.

Episode 45: Failure Management and Response with Nickolas Means

September 5th, 2018  |  42 mins 44 secs

communication, management

How can you learn from an engineering team's failure? Can you take the examples of how others have dealt with engineering problems to improve your team's day-to-day operations. Our guest is Nickolas Means, a software manager at Muve Health, who is fascinated by engineering failures. We talk about what you can learn from studying disasters, how to create a company culture in calm times that will works smoothly in stressful times, and how a successful engineering team communicates using stories and how they handle mistakes. Along the way, we talk about the recent incident at the Seattle Airport, the CitiCorp building in Manhattan, Three Mile Island and other engineering and team missteps. We have, I hope, a successful show about failure.

Episode 44: Learning Programming Languages and Strategies With Katrina Owen

August 22nd, 2018  |  42 mins 47 secs

career, developer, languages, learning

What's a good way to learn a new programming language that focuses on solving problems and not merely syntax? Katrina Owen is the creator of Exercism, a tool for getting beyond "hello world" in new programing languages. She is also the co-author of 99 Bottles of OOP, and the presenter of a number of outstanding technical talks. We start off by talking about Exercism, how it started, how it evolved and what it’s good at, and then we talk about how the process by which it evolved, and how Katrina learned to analyze the project more strategically, and how that strategic thinking has helped her in other parts of her life and career.

Episode 43: Rubyists in Other Languages with James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik

August 8th, 2018  |  48 mins 51 secs

career, developer, languages, learning

Ruby is great. But it's not the best tool for everything. On this episode, I talk to James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik. Both James and Steve have made substantial contributions to the Ruby and Rails community, and they now both spend lots of time using other languages. We talk about what makes Rust and Elixir interesting for Ruby developers to learn, what some other interesting languages might be.

Episode 42: Technical Speaking with Saron Yitbarek

July 25th, 2018  |  49 mins 3 secs

communication, speaking

Presenting a technical talk can be an important part of a developer's career.
In this episode, we're talking about how to perform a technical talk with Saron Yitbarek. Saron runs the CodeNewbie Podcast, and others, and organizes and coaches speakers for the Codeland Conference. Saron and I both have some thoughts and opinions about how to deliver a good technical talk. This episode has a lot of tips about how to prepare, what to do at the start of a talk, how to engage the audience, and why emoji are better for slides than videos? We'll give advice on how to give the talk that only you can give and how to get the best performance that you can.

Episode 41: Apprenticeship with Megan Tiu, Kara Carrell, and Alyssa Ramsey

July 11th, 2018  |  37 mins 14 secs

apprentice, career, hiring

What is an apprenticeship program, how is it different from an internship, and how can your company benefit from having one? In this episode, we’re talking about technical apprenticeships with Megan Tiu of Women Who Code. Megan and I have both run apprenticeships at various companies. We’re also joined by Table XI’s current apprentice cohort, Kara Carrell and Alyssa Ramsey.