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.
237. Let's talk about Anti-Goals
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. Today we are approaching it from a slightly different direction, looking at the idea of 'anti-goals', and how these might help you in your work and personal life. Simply put, anti-goals are a way to work backward from an undesirable outcome and use these as motivation and an incentive to avoid the actions or circumstances that might facilitate it. In our conversation, we look at the two different methods for coming up with anti-goals that we can think of and also relate these ideas to other goal-setting approaches we have spoken about in the past. Top tips that arise in our chat include the need for specificity, building a diverse toolkit for achieving success, and the need for different approaches in each situation or project. So to hear it all, make sure to come down the rabbit hole with us, today!
236. Editor Picks 2021
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. After the upheavals of 2020, in some ways, 2021 felt a little more settled, and discussions were able to move forward into some exciting and inspiring directions. From the 'bus factor' to 'quality without a name,' we covered some great ground here on the show and we look at all the standout moments, talking about their continued value. We get into the episode we had with Kara Swisher about influencing companies, the benefit we all accrued while discussing our notetaking habits, practices, and processes for improvement and education, our series on Aristotle, and a whole lot more. So, if you enjoyed these episodes as much as we did, or are looking to go back and catch up on some great content, join us today. We look forward to reconnecting with you all in the new year!
235. Flow
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.” Today we are joined by Sophie Creutz and Raymond Lam to discuss flow, a subject quite adjacent to some of the topics we’ve discussed recently on the podcast. In this episode, we talk about what flow is, what being in a flow state feels like, the nine components of flow, and the four different flow profiles. We also discuss how a software developer can achieve flow and some of the different things you can do to help yourself get into that flow state. Tune in for all this and much more!
234. Notetaking
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 our conversation, we discuss our approaches to note-taking and how they support long-term memory integration, lifelong learning, and giving feedback during standup meetings. We discuss the plethora of apps that are available for all your note-taking needs and measure the benefits of different types of note-taking, like physical writing, typing, and even recording voice notes. Hear about the different methods for note-taking, like the Zettelkasten method, Flow-based note-taking, and the Cornell method, and what we love about each of them. Tune in to discover the best options for note-taking, how to keep track of it all, and more!
233.What do you listen to when programming?
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. We also give you the opportunity to share the music that pumps you up while programming on our collaborative Spotify playlist, so stay tuned to find out more!
232. Energized Work
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. These ideas are well captured in the principle of ‘energized work’ found in James Shore’s The Art of Agile. Today on the show we dive into the meaning of energized work and discuss our individual methods of attaining it. We are also lucky enough to have Raymond Lam, Principal Software Engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, join us for the ride! We begin our conversation with the actual definition of energized work as it appears in The Art of Agile. The text also describes the concept in the form of a Haiku poem, and we make sure to include that in our discussion. We move on to speak about how workers laid the foundations for energized work before social distancing and how leaders can manage their teams in ways that encourage it in our current situation. Our conversation draws to a close with Dave, Michael, and Raymond’s personal rituals for winding down, with a highlight being that Dave’s dog does most of his scheduling for him!
231. Prime Directive
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. As you’ll learn in today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole, however, the prime directive is an important concept for software developers too! Michael Nunez, Dave Anderson, and Sophie Creutz dive into Norm Kerth’s Retrospective Prime Directive and break it down phrase-by-phrase to illustrate how it applies to an agile workflow. We also share some of the other prime directive texts that we discovered, including the Team Building and Futurospective Prime Directives, and touch on their focus on psychological safety and bringing people together for a specific cause. All this and more when you tune in today!
230. Progressive Performance
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. To do this, we break down why this is necessary and how to go about it; from tools and tricks to the studies that have shown how users react to load times, and buggy pages. So to hear about how you can get away with slightly slower speeds, and why learning about the tools that you will be using to tackle these issues is so important, make sure you come down the Rabbit Hole with us, today!
229. Agile Manifesto
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! We often speak about the Agile approach and thought we would take it down to the foundational level, speaking about the components of this essential tool for developers and teams.
228. When to Pair Program
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? We apply the basic principles of pair programming to a non-programming task like reading documentation, using an article about learning organizations as an example. Hate pair programming? Well, we also touch on how you can reframe it as deep collaboration and view it as a skill that you can work on. Stay tuned for practical advice and helpful resources, plus so much more!
227. Facebook's DNS Woes with Sophie Creutz
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. With Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram offline for the better part of a day, many small businesses could not function, normal communications were halted for some, and a general air of curiosity spread across the globe. Our friend, Sophie Creutz, joins us to go through the most important points to reflect on, The Five Whys, and how Facebook and smaller companies can learn from mistakes such as this to safeguard against further issues in the future.
226. Aristotle Project - Impact
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. Impact has a variety of ways that it can be defined, which makes for an interesting discussion. Traditionally, profitability has been the main measure of impact, but in today’s world, impact also has strong social and environmental components. Join us as we delve into some of the factors to take into consideration when determining the type of impact that your work is having.
225. Estimations and the different variations of pointing
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. To get to grips with these, we discuss, planning poker, t-shirt sizes, dog breeds, board games, and the interesting case of gummi bears! So to hear all about some ideas that you may find useful, or completely useless, tune into the Rabbit Hole, today!
224. Aristotle Project -- Meaning
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. In today’s episode, my guest, Sophie Creutz, and I, share how we personally find meaning in the work that we do, and why we believe this to be a very important topic. Google recently did some research on the subject too, so we also share some of those findings. Tune in today to hear it all!
223. Aristotle Project - Structure and Clarity
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. We unpack OKR goal setting, how this enables individuals flexibility in choosing how to reach a predetermined goal, how OKRs can add structure and clarity around roles and responsibilities, and how setting team OKRs can create a danger of ‘bike shedding’, which isn’t a problem in individual OKR setting. We close with the suggestion that each person writes their own OKRs in order to create even more structure and clarity around their job expectations. We hope you join us today!