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211. Tuning up your hiring process
There is a lot going down in the world right now. Whether it is because of the pandemic or not we can’t say but people are leaving their jobs in record numbers. However, there is a hidden opportunity lurking in this crisis, both for people to get new jobs and for companies to get new employees. So in today’s episode, we’ll be talking about tuning up your hiring process! We want everyone to have the best hiring process, so we consider how to interview in ways that are appropriate for the skills you're looking for and how to evaluate candidates in a way that is respectful of their time and abilities.
210. Developer Friendly Reminders
What is your ritual for starting the day? Are you starting out by choosing a deliberate practice that can help skyrocket your productivity?  Welcome back to another episode of The Rabbit Hole, co-hosting today with me, Michael Nuñez, is Dave Anderson. Today we are giving you developer-friendly reminders! Things that you can do with your life that will take five minutes that you should be doing, every now and then. So stay tuned as we share some friendly reminders to help you get through your day!
209. Getting Started with Technical Writing with Stephanie Morillo
Many developers harbor dreams of creating content, whether it’s writing a blog, broadcasting on a YouTube channel, or posting on Instagram. In today’s episode, we get together with the esteemed Stephanie Morillo for advice and inspiration. Stephanie works as a technical program manager at Microsoft, but she is also a content strategist by trade who currently specializes in Developer Content Strategy.
208. Build vs. Buy
All developers will understand the difficulty that comes along with deciding whether to build or to buy. In today’s episode, we discuss why it’s so important to think about this decision before you make it; there are so many factors to take into consideration and you don’t want to act hastily.
207. QWAN: Quality Without A Name
In today’s episode, our hosts cover the elusive concept of QWAN: Quality Without A Name. Hear how they first came across the term in The Art of Agile Development: Pragmatic Guide to Agile Software Development and their subsequent quest to disseminate its meaning. Michael and Dave do an impressive pull of a C2 Wiki article that breaks down QWAN’s four attributes: Usability, Readability, Configurability, and Profoundness.
206. Product vs. Developers with Rob O’Brien | Part 2
In today’s episode, we complete the ultimate showdown between product and developer! In this round, it will be the developers who are on the defensive as Dave and Michael account for their faux pas as developers. Rob O'Brien returns to the show with plenty of ammunition.
205. Product vs. Developers with Rob O'Brien
In today’s episode, we have the ultimate showdown between product management and developers. Meet our guest Rob O’Brien. His career started in information science technology, giving him a good grounding in app development. He has since gained extensive experience managing engineering teams as well as coaching product employees and building product teams. O’Brien shares what he believes to be the biggest missteps that product managers can take and illustrates why product managers should be available for feedback throughout the development process.
204. Live Coding with Melissa Wahnish
These days it seems that every Tom, Dick, and trash collector is live streaming. In today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole Podcast, we speak with Melissa Wahnish about her experiences with live coding. Melissa has been live coding for years and even has her own website full of tips and tutorials called Ruby Thursday as well as a YouTube channel of the same name. We talk all about how Melissa got started and the many ways that audience feedback can help you get unstuck when you can’t solve a problem.
203. Definition of Done
Today we are speaking about getting things done! What does it mean when we say something is done and how can you and your team get a better handle on the concept for better products? At times, as developers, we might feel like we are done as soon as the code is written and passed, but in reality, there are more steps in the process, and to get to a real state of being finished we need to formulate a proper framework or checklist for being done!
202. International bootcamps, learning programming, etc. with Alex Oh
While many companies still look for programmers who have CS degrees, there is often a gap between what colleges teach and the skills the industry requires. This is a gap that bootcamps are trying to fill and today we have Alex Oh, founder of Seoul-based bootcamp WCoding, here to share his perspectives on this newer approach to learning code. We start our conversation on the subject of the many paths into programming by sharing pieces of our own code learning journeys.
201. Metrics as Incentives
Many managers assess developer performance as if they were runners, where how many lines of code you write determines how good you are. Instead, developers are like baseball players, where a suite of metrics is needed to measure performance. In today’s episode, we unpack how metrics are used to judge coding performance and how metric incentives can create less than desirable coding behaviors.
200. How to start learning tech with Beege (part 2)
While it may be true that coding is something that anybody can do, that doesn’t take away from how difficult it is to learn. Join us for the second part of our conversation with brilliant software engineer and instructor Bryan Berry as we dive into what it takes to learn to code. Early in our conversation, we focus on the extra non-language-specific skills that you need to pick up to become a fully-fledged developer.
199. How to start learning tech with Beege (part 1)
While everybody who wants to learn how to code will approach this challenge in their own way, most programmers would agree that having the help of a supportive community is hugely beneficial. Today we talk about the process of learning programming with Bryan Berry, AKA ‘Beege’. Bryan started CodeSeoul, an international community dedicated to connecting coders of all levels and backgrounds, and today he shares a bunch of ideas that anybody interested in getting into tech would find very helpful.
198. Bus Factor
How many coders can you afford to lose to a series of inexplicable bus accidents before your project fails? As morbid as it sounds, your bus factor is an important means of measuring how risky your project is. Today we unpack the bus factor while touching on the top ways that you can boost your team’s capabilities while increasing project resilience. While exploring the topic, we look at the benefits of pair programming, documenting your coding journey, temporarily locking team members out of projects, and rotating coding roles so that your team develops a better sense of your codebase.
197. Terraform the Planet
Today we shine the spotlight on our very own William Jeffries to talk about the virtues of Terraforming and why it’s such a smart software tool for coding. Kicking things off we first dive into infrastructure as code and why we use it before we tackle the benefits of using Terraform. We find out that Terraform allows you to use a variety of languages designed for infrastructures like HCL or the HashiCorp language.
196. Can Good Developers Sway Companies From Evil? with Kara Swisher
Many new tech companies have dreams of changing the world. But chasing revenue and market share has led the majority of big tech companies to engage in unethical practices. Today we speak with Kara Swisher, one of Silicon Valley’s “most powerful tech journalists,” about the role that developers play in swaying companies from evil.
195. Continuous Delivery
Building on last week's episode about continuous integration, today we explore the idea of continuous delivery and whether it is the best way forward. We start off with some basics, defining continuous delivery and what can truly fall into this category.
194. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is the peanut butter to the jelly of continuous delivery, and it’s also the topic of today’s episode. We are talking all things CI, including some of the benefits and downsides and a whole lot more. We kick off with a definition of CI, where we discuss how it helps reduce bugs.
193. Senior Engineering Superpowers
Becoming a senior engineer is a defining moment in an IT professional’s career. Yet, this moment might not make itself obvious. Today hosts Michael Nunez and David Anderson talk about when they realized that they had become senior engineers and the traits that come with this increase in status. After sharing some back-and-forth banter about their engineering superpowers, Michael and David discuss when they achieved their seniority and what it felt like.
192. Creating a Lean Software Toolkit
If you find yourself listening to this, and you can relate to having some waste problems in your company, it’s going to be one of seven things. We have called them the seven wastes of software development. To find out more about those, please go back and listen to Episode 82.
191. Boris Strikes Back
Creating a good piece of content is a bit like pair programming, except you get to steer the wheel without ever having to listen to your navigator. With a bunch of hot Udemy courses under his belt and his book Pandas in Action about to hit the shelves, Stride full-stack developer Boris Paskhaver knows a thing or two about creating content, and he joins us today to give us some better tips than the one you just heard!
190. CSS Animation
With Flash set to discontinue from January 12th and the HTML blink tag obsolete, how will we animate our websites from now on? With this issue in mind, we decided to dedicate today’s show to the wonderful topic of animation! We discuss how best to tame this powerful and often misused beast as well as get into the tools at our disposal for doing so in CSS, JavaScript, and by using prebuilt libraries too.
189. Resetting in the New Year
After such a wild year, most of us can understand the need to turn ourselves off and back on again. Today hosts Michael Nunez and David Anderson discuss how you can reset yourself and build positive habits.
188. Why not start a Tech Podcast
As the unusual year of 2020 draws to a close and we celebrate another year of The Rabbit Hole, we thought we would sit down with our friend and podcast coach, Michael Sharkey! Today we will be discussing what it takes to start a successful tech podcast, and in fact, any kind of podcast.
187. Editor Picks of 2020
It’s that time of year, where we reflect on the year gone by, look forward to the holidays, and plan for the year ahead. It’s time for The Rabbit Hole editor picks for 2020! What did we learn this year? What were some of our favorite episodes?
186. 10x vs 1x Developer
What is best, a 10X developer or a 1x developer? And on what would you base the decision of hiring the one versus there other? It seems that a 10X developer is a legend. It's someone out there that has the strength of 10 men, or women. Whereas, a 1X developer is someone that is empathetic about the work that they do and they may not know everything but are willing to Google the solutions for certain things.