Welcome to The Rabbit Hole, the definitive developers podcast. If you are a software developer or technology leader looking to stay on top of the latest news in the software development world, or just want to learn actionable tactics to improve your day-to-day job performance, this podcast is for you.
285. Bus Factor (Replay)
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.
284. Toast to Failure (Replay)
Today we will be talking about toasting to failures. We will get into what a toast to failure is and share some stories that pertain to failing and we will, of course, toast to them. We don’t have any drinks or apple juice in the recording session with us, but we will pretend that we have glasses and we will put them in the air as we toast to our failures. A toast to failure is when one fails at his or her particular task or at their job but it’s celebrated, which we feel is very important. It’s a little counterintuitive and you don’t want to just go out there and fail all the time. So stay tuned as we go over how failures should not only be celebrated, but should also be seen as a learning opportunity so that you and your colleagues can learn from the mistake. All this and more inside today’s episode.
283. Boris Strikes Back (Replay)
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! We start by picking Boris’s brain about just what makes Udemy such a great platform to learn from, and then we dive into the pros and cons of creating content for video versus book formats.
282. Death By a Thousand IFs with Jacob O'Donnell (Replay)
On today’s show, we have the honor of welcoming Jacob O’Donnell as our special guest. Jacob is a consultant at Stride and we are very happy to have such a good friend and experienced programmer join the show this time around.
281. Centering & Entering (Replay)
The reality of the workplace means that entering a new team or having someone enter your team is likely and some of the centering and entering techniques shared in the episode allow for these transitions to be managed smoothly.
280. Vacations (Replay)
Ever wondered whether time away from the screen can lead to any positive outcomes? On today’s episode, we talk about the benefits of vacation, and how they far out way the negatives, while allowing for more productive, alert developers within your team. We touch on all kinds of aspects and kinds of vacation including unlimited vacation, mandatory time off, sabbaticals, and the chaos vacation monkey. Learn how spending time away from work can help your team as much as yourself! Get in touch with us @radiofreerabbit on Twitter and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you guys next time!
279. The Definitive Developers Guide to Career Clarity with Jeff Perry
In today’s world of rapidly-changing technologies and job descriptions, it can be difficult to know which path to pursue. As a result, it often feels simpler to fall into a pattern where we are funneled down the path of least resistance, rather than taking ownership of what we truly want. That’s where career clarity comes in. Today on the show we are joined by the fantastic Jeff Perry, a talented engineer, leadership coach, career coach, and founder of More Than Engineering, a company that helps engineers make intentional career transitions.
278. Stand-up and don't hold the team up. Be quick with 3 simple questions
Whether you call it a Stand-Up, a Daily Scrum, a Huddle, or a Roll Call this daily check-in is a powerful tool you and your team can use to maximize productivity. During today’s episode, you will learn how to do a Stand-Up, what a Stand-Up consists of, and some pitfalls that you may be deterred by along the way. Most importantly, you need to keep a Stand-Up as simple as you can, based on three basic questions. That’s it! Sometimes you’ll include Parking Lots as modifiers. Tune in to hear what that means, along with why there is no reason to ask questions during the Stand-Up. Thanks for tuning in!
277. Spiking Feature work -- Best practices to figure the unknown unknowns
Often, developers will be asked to work on a story, but nobody knows quite how to deal with it. That why, today, we are discussing spiking feature work. We are joined by Rob O’Brien, one of the partners here at Stride, and a self-confessed “strongly opinionated product manager.” Rob was formerly one of the principal product managers involved in building out our product practice, and while he has transitioned into a partner role, he continues to do product management work.
276. How To Stand Out as a Software Engineer? (with Dan and Genesis)
Companies receive a large number of applications during the recruitment process which places extra pressure on candidates to stand out amongst the masses. How do you present your resume professionally while ensuring you catch the attention of recruiters? In today’s conversation, we talk to two people who work in the world of talent acquisition to give us insider knowledge on how to get the attention of recruiters while presenting your worth to the company. Dan Chessin and Genesis Osorio are both involved with talent acquisition at Stride, with many years of experience in the recruiting sector.
275. The Rules of Simplicity - Are you following them when building software
In this episode of The Rabbit Hole, we're talking about The Rules of Simplicity and why you should be following them when building software. We break down the four Rules of Simplicity first laid out in the book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck and discuss how they relate to other rules and principles that we’ve discussed on this podcast in the past. For a quick crash course on The Rules of Simplicity, why you should be practicing them, and how to go about applying them today, don’t miss this episode!
274. Two Websites to Keep in Your Back Pocket for Javascript
Today, we're going to talk about two websites to keep in your back pocket for JavaScript. If you are currently doing JavaScript development in your projects, there are two websites or repositories that can make your life a lot easier. In this episode, you’ll hear all about You-Don’t-Need-Lodash-Underscore and 30 Seconds of Code and some of the many JavaScript functions that you can find on these sites for things like CSS, React, and Python, among others. Tune in for some helpful and time-saving tips!
273. Working Agreements
The remote work landscape calls for conscious congruity amongst teammates, now more than ever. The best way to ensure everyone’s on the same page is to construct a working agreement that everyone is on board with. In this episode, we explain what working agreements are and why you need one! We break down how to optimize your working agreement, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to run a seamless work agreement meeting. Tune in to find out all you need to know about working agreements, from where to find templates to how to handle rule-breaking and more!
272. The Five S's, and How to Start Writing Efficient Software!
According to Wikipedia, the Five S’s are a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words, Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke, to describe how to organize a workspace for efficiency and effectiveness. It does this by helping people to identify and store items used, maintain the area and items, and sustain the new order. In this episode, we are going to delve into what specifically the five S’s are and how you would use them in the workplace. Then we are going to apply these concepts to software developers and agile teams to see how they could be used for writing software more efficiently. Don’t miss it!
271. Niko-Niko — Team Assessments Using Smileys :D
Niko-Niko is a visual calendar tool that can be used to track the emotions of your team members, similar to that of a happiness index or a mood board. It contains a column for your team members’ names and provides them the opportunity to record their emotions at the end of every workday with emoticons and other graphics, allowing you to track patterns and improve the morale of your staff. Tune in today as we discuss all things Niko-Niko: what benefits it may provide to your team, what potential pitfalls may arise from its use, and how it could possibly be improved.