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.
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. From there we weigh the value of a deployment button and the difference that this single step in the process can make. William makes a strong case for why full automation and real continuous delivery is a better approach and how this philosophy will force developers to take up more responsibility and acquire better tools for their part in the process.
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. Today, however, you’ll find out how to solve for each of the seven wastes; more specifically, you’ll learn about creating a lean software toolkit.
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! 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.
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. Animation definitely has a place in UI, but can easily look tacky and overdone, so we start our chat off exploring some best practices for keeping things tasteful and useful. From there, we get into a few of the technicalities of building animations in CSS, highlighting the power of keyframes as well as some of the kinks in this new feature that still need to be worked out. Toward the end of our chat, we speak about the great functionality provided by animation frameworks like React’s Spring library, animate.style, and the Web Animations API. So even though Flash is a thing of the past, there is no need to cry, because there are plenty of tools in CSS and JavaScript that will keep us building beautiful animations on our websites well into the foreseeable future. Tune in to learn more!
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. We dive into the topic after a quick reminder that this is the last week to respond to our listener survey. As we explore how you can reboot your brain, we touch on the benefits of being helpful, exercising, maintaining your social connections, eating more healthily, learning something new, and keeping a consistent sleep routine. We apply this advice to the coding environment, showing why and how these general life tips are relevant to software engineers. Later, we talk about strategies to enact change like starting with small habits and recruiting an accountability buddy. Tune in for more insights on starting 2021 with your best foot forward.
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. We reflect on our journey thus far, with Sharkey, offering some external observations and timely perspectives on the factors that have allowed us to keep going and grow our audience along the way. We discuss format, bringing energy and reigning in the chaos, why disagreement is more interesting than agreement, and the array of benefits that we have accrued from hosting this show.
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? Tune in to hear 2020 wrapped with Michale Nunez, Dave Anderson and – coming to you live from the other side of the world – producer, William Jeffries.
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.
185. Flaky Tests
They’re not quite as exciting as pastries, but flaky tests are an important part of the programming process. Flaky tests are those frustrating tests that both pass and fail periodically without any changes to code, and finding the crux of the problem can be time-consuming, confusing, and sometimes costly. In this episode, we talk with our producer and extraordinaire William Jeffries about all things flaky, diving into a range of different tests and the unique testing methods behind different languages like Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Python, and more.
184. Prototyping Best Practices with Stephen Meriwether
In today’s episode, we’re going to dive straight into some prototyping tips and tricks, what you should do and should not do, and best practices to keep in mind. Of course, we couldn’t have a prototyping episode without our very own, Stephen Meriwether, programmer, and director at product development agency, Sprout Labs.
183. Things in Tech We're Thankful for
While 2020 has been a messy year for all, today we get into the Thanksgiving spirit by celebrating the top things in tech that we’re most grateful for. Show producer William Jeffries opens the conversation by highlighting his love for test-driven development (TDD) — he also talks about how he implements TDD into his coding workflow. A godsend to many, we then discuss GitHub’s squash and merge button and how it takes the frustration out of many projects. Reflecting on how work-from-home has become the new normal, we express our gratitude for remote pair programming software like Tuple. After touching on the joys of listening to music while pair programming, host Michael Nunez discusses his enjoyment of teaching interns his old tips and tricks, and how this forces him to re-examine how he codes.
182. Starting Something - Do you need a single page app with Stephen Meriwether
Can you imagine a world where you can fast-track your idea, turn it into a feature-filled app, and perfect its development with speed and technical finesse? For Stephen Meriwether, that future is now. As today’s guest, Stephen talks to us about single-page apps, prototyping, and how he uses his skills and experience to help small businesses and entrepreneurs build products.
181. Starting Something - Are all the good ideas taken?
It’s the middle of the night and you are lying in bed when you get a lightning-strike idea. You reach for your phone and type your idea into Google only to discover that someone has beat you to it. Today we speak about this common scenario and answer the question — should you start something new when all the good ideas have been taken? As we discuss early on, the existence of Ask Jeeves didn’t stop Larry Page and Sergey Brin from creating Google. After exploring this example, we talk about how discouraging it can be to see that someone else has built a company using your idea.