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As we enter into the new year and bid farewell to 2021, the topic of goals and goal-setting seems like an appropriate one to give some attention to.

To celebrate the close of the year, and another year's worth of fun and illuminating conversation on this podcast, we are doing our customary round of editor's picks, where we look at highlights from the last 12 months.

Flow or being in a flow state is something that is defined by Wikipedia as what happens when a “person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”

This week on The Rabbit Hole podcast we are joined by two of our favorite guests, Sophie Creutz and Raymond Lam, to discuss note-taking! When you’re working on software development for eight hours plus, you’re more than likely to lose track of everything you’ve covered and learned.

In today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole, we pose the question: what do you listen to when you are programming? Co-hosts, Micheal Nunez and Sophie Creutz, and returning guest, Raymond Lam, discuss their favorite tunes for different situations; from smooth jazz for solo coding and ambient noise for focusing on the problem at hand to soundtracks for reading and classical piano for relaxing.

Working longer hours does not result in greater or higher quality output. Rather, it is often how we spend our time outside of working hours that plays the biggest role in our performance from nine to five.

Star Trek fans will know that the Prime Directive is the unbreakable mission statement of the Starfleet. It's a guiding principle, deciding the course and tone for whatever the team encounters.

In some respects, we have moved on from the trend to overload web pages with too many features, but it is still worth emphasizing why performance should be at the top of your list of priorities. Today we talk about progressive performance and some interesting ways to approach and think about creating the most user-friendly websites possible.

In today's episode of the Rabbit Hole, we are joined by our friends Sophie Creutz and Raymond Lam to take a shot at unpacking the Agile Manifesto!

In today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole, Dave Anderson and Sophie Creutz attempt to answer the question: when should you pair program and what should you pair on?

In this episode of The Rabbit Hole, we unpack the recent outages of Facebook's servers, looking at why this might have happened, some of the more ludicrous theories that have been offered as explanations, lessons to take away, and why the downtime was worse than just a day of limited social media access for many people.

This episode is the final one in our Aristotle Project series. Over the past few episodes, we have covered psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and last but not least, impact.

In today's episode, we dive into the subject of estimations and pointing. For most teams, there needs to be a way to communicate the size, complexity, and difficulty of any task or project, and the different frameworks that have gained popularity have degrees of utility, strength, and weakness.

Financial security, building working relationships, having a positive impact on the people around you; which of these examples resonates with the way you find meaning in your work? It could be one of them, or all or them, or you may have completely different sources of meaning.

Leading up to today’s discussion, we have talked about the psychological safety, and dependability of the Aristotle Project. Today, we tackle structure and clarity. We discuss a statement that lists understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling them, and knowing the consequences of one’s performance as important pillars for team effectiveness.

Today we continue our exploration of the Aristotle Project, and we are joined by Sophie Creutz to discuss dependability. Dependability is one of the factors that Google found to be most impactful on the success of a team and to kick things off we run through this list again, as well as some of the surprising things that are not correlated to a team's success. With Sophie's help, we look at the efficacy of a Scrum of Scrums, how to balance informative communication with remaining concise enough, prioritizing the team mentality, avoiding the bystander effect, and a whole lot more.

Safety in an office environment might not be something most people think about. Unlike working in a job that requires manual labor, dangers in an office are less visible. That does not make them more serious.

Are premortems as morbid as their name suggests or are they difficult but necessary measures to take for identifying possible future threats? This is the topic we explore today and we have our guest extraordinaire Sophie Creutz back on the show to help us tackle it.

Today we have a really fun episode in which we are joined by our friend Sophie Creutz to discuss the parallels between Dungeons & Dragons and the world of software development! There are clear links and common threads that seem to run between these two worlds and we start off this conversation considering why the game of D&D might immediately appeal to developers.

Welcome back to The Rabbit Hole podcast! This week we’re diving into the subject of deep practice and how to become a better developer. Dave and Michael reflect on how learning to play a musical instrument taught them important lessons about intentional practice and how they’ve applied those lessons to coding.

The transition to remote work in early 2020 was abrupt for everyone, but some found themselves thriving more than others, in many cases, thanks to their personality type. With work-from-home setups becoming the new norm in the age of COVID, many might assume that remote working environments are ideal for introverts, while extroverts are rearing to return to the office but, as you’ll learn from this episode, this isn’t necessarily the case!

As the world slowly reopens after more than a year of COVID-19 shutdowns, coming together is more important than ever. Today’s episode takes a human-centered approach to how to create more meaningful gathering spaces and some simple tips you can follow to do so.

In today’s episode, we get together with our third host William Jeffries, who has been traveling the globe for the past few months, to discuss the pros and cons of living the lifestyle of a digital nomad. We hear from William about the challenges of working in different time zones and how daylight savings time in the US affected his capacity to co-host The Rabbit Hole podcast. William breaks down the difference between being a fast or a slow digital nomad and shares some of the logistical challenges he faced, like finding fast reliable internet in India and building a social network abroad.

In today’s episode, we get together with William Jeffries to ask all our most pressing questions relating to GitOps. Tuning in you’ll hear why GitOps uses a pull-based system instead of a push-based system and how GitOps can facilitate better security practices through an improved threat model. William explains when and how to apply GitOps to your project and why he is so excited about the work being done by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. For all this and much more, tune in today as we get to the bottom of what GitOps means for the future of development!

On a whole, the pandemic has made us, as a society, more anxious about a lot of things, including working in offices with other people where our risk of being exposed to the coronavirus is heightened. Although there are a lot of great tools which have been developed to try to make home offices mirror actual offices, there are various benefits that come from working in the same space as other people which cannot be replicated online. Nevertheless, working from home, at least some of the time, may continue to be part of our reality well into the future.

In today’s episode, we welcome back content creation aficionado, Stephanie Morillo. Stephanie is a technical program manager at Microsoft and specializes in content strategy. She is the author of the acclaimed book The Developer's Guide to Content Creation. In our conversation we discuss the contents of her blog post 7 Common Content Marketing Mistakes Developers Make and How to Avoid Them.