Serene Yew runs Pixeltree, a software consultancy that focuses on sourcing junior talent and providing them with the mentorship that they need so they can bridge the experience gap and get a job. What better way to incite change than to be that change? You can have a huge influence on someone by taking on a mentorship role. And, not only does mentorship benefit who you're mentoring, but it also benefits you. Serene finds that every single person that she's mentored has changed her in some way fo...
May 19, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Saron Yitbarek started a company called Code Newbie, which started as a Twitter community and grew into a couple of podcasts and a conference. Saron first became interested in technology after she read the Steve Jobs book, it was the first time she got introduced to technology in a way that she could relate to, where tech was talked about through the eyes of design, art, and storytelling. So, she started calling CEOs of startups until she got an internship, which led to a job. Saron wanted to ge...
May 19, 2020•38 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Software development isn't limited to "nerds." During her time at Andreessen Horowitz, Preethi met thousands of entrepreneurs. What she realized was that software engineering is what these entrepreneurs use to change the world. They're able to code the future they believe in using software engineering. A lot of people were surprised that Preethi gave up a promising career in venture capital to become a developer. But, Preethi says that the greatest artists reinvented themselves often. There's so...
May 19, 2020•34 min•Season 3Ep. 9
One of the things Michael loves about React is that it's a lot easier to make a black box of abstraction with iron-clad React components that don't leak. Something that concerns Michael deeply about any technology is when we put too much inside of it. We saw this pretty early on in React, where everyone was taking all manner of state and putting it into Redux. We have to think about the principle of co-location and the fact that the closer you put related things together, the easier it will be t...
May 19, 2020•40 min•Season 3Ep. 8
It was around 2008-2010 when Michael's family's business went under due to the recession. From that point, Michael spent every spare second he had reading whatever he could. He'd be reading Ruby and JavaScript documentation while he pushed his son on the swing. In this episode, Michael talks about what it takes to break into the tech industry. He explains how interviews are a hackable skill and the importance of building relationships in the industry. Homework Sit down for 5 minutes and think ab...
May 19, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Most applications on the backend and the front end get built as a monolith, but you could improve your developer experience and performance if you broke your applications out into microservices. The pros and cons are the same for monorepos and microservices. Microservices is a different paradigm. And so, there's a lot of training that goes involved for different people to understand the various deployment processes. The microservices system is slightly more complex in some ways, but on the pro s...
May 19, 2020•32 min•Season 3Ep. 6
What does it mean to test in production? Simply put, testing in production means testing your features in the environment where your features will live. So what if a feature works in staging, that's great, but you should care if the feature works in production, that's what matters. An excellent tool for testing in production is feature flagging. Feature flagging allows you to separate your code deployment from your feature release. So, when you use a tool like future flagging, you're able to tar...
May 19, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Dr. Michaela Greiler is focused on helping teams make code reviews their superpower! During Dr. Michaela's time at Microsoft, they found that developers were spending six hours a week doing code reviews. You have to ask yourself if that time is really being well spent. How do you ensure that code reviews are worth the time? There is a huge variety of experiences with code review. It can be really good, and it can be really, really horrible as well. There is not a lot of formal training around it...
May 19, 2020•32 min•Season 3Ep. 4
The internet is one of those resources that we have available to us, and it's fantastic at what it does. However, there's a lot of content that isn't super curated and isn't in a format that makes it digestible. Courtney is interested in making the web accessible not only in the way we typically think of accessibility for people with disabilities who need screen readers and other assistive technologies but also for people with mental disabilities or difficulty learning. We can help by improving ...
May 19, 2020•29 min•Season 3Ep. 3
In her free time, Amelia Wattenberger enjoys creating "code sketches." On the surface, they might just look like silly examples, but she's learned concepts or ways of doing things through these tiny code examples. You can learn a lot by playing with something in isolation and then trying to see how you can apply it to a production application later. Amelia then goes on to share her process of creating a blog post. Step one is thinking of the main idea she wants to communicate. Step two is asking...
May 19, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Thorium is the software that space centers use for the computer controls and the flight director controls of simulated space ship experiences! The cool thing about Thorium is that it's entirely web-based. Alex is using React to build Thorium and a 3D universe. The 3D universe is being driven by react-three-fiber by Paul Henschel, which is a fantastic piece of software. Alex says that if you are privileged enough to have the time and the energy and the resources to be able to do side projects, th...
May 19, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Laurie has a tough time saying no, and she ends up trying a lot of different things, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Attempting to learn something new gives you the fresh perspective of a beginner starting from nothing. We get comfortable and take for granted the pieces of knowledge we have on our skills. You have to find a balance, though. It's demotivating to feel dumb all of the time. You need to use the thing you learned for some time, so you advance beyond the beginner phase of the ...
Nov 27, 2019•32 min•Season 2Ep. 12
A lot of times, when people are learning something new, they feel, "Oh, I have to learn this fast and my manager's counting on me to learn this," and everything's super stressful. As software engineers, we continually have to learn new things, and carrying that stress is tough on our mental health, so we must learn how to mitigate it. Don't worry about being an expert. Try to be okay with being a beginner at something. You shouldn't expect more than that from yourself when you start learning som...
Nov 27, 2019•31 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Almost every demo Ken has done at a conference was wildly out of his league technologically. The deadline for the conference pushes him to grow rapidly. Conference-driven development. Elon Musk says, "If it's physically possible, then we can make it happen." Take stock of the situation and ask yourself what the reality of it is, is it possible? If so, then you can accomplish it. It's not possible to take the second step or even the last step unless you've taken that first step. Finding a simple ...
Nov 27, 2019•32 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Erik built the Redux Form library to help manage form states in Redux. He decided to open-source Redux Form, and it exploded and became very, very popular. People kept coming up to Erik with additional use cases, and the form library itself kept growing to the point where the bundle size got out of hand and saying yes to all the requests for features created a monster. So Erik came up with his second form library "final-form." This time he created a plugin architecture to reduce the maintenance ...
Nov 27, 2019•37 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Visual testing is like snapshot testing with images. So when your application is in the state that you want it to be in, you verify this as a human being, and then utilize tools to take a picture of your application in that state. Visual testing isn't a new concept, but the technology was previously flaky. But now, Applitools is using AI and machine learning to be able only to detect the things that we care about as human beings. Visual testing catches issues that your scripts won't detect, and ...
Nov 27, 2019•30 min•Season 2Ep. 8
How do you stay optimistic when being bombarded with negativity every day? Nader reminds us that, statistically, we are living in the safest and most prosperous period in human history. Nader went through a lot of hardship growing up, and it caused him to assume the entire world was that way, but in reality, it wasn't. Try to maintain perspective, and remember that your experiences aren't reflective of the world as a whole. The voice in your head talks about yourself in a way that you'd never tr...
Nov 27, 2019•28 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Kelly got into personal finance while she was struggling financially in grad school. Your very first step to getting your money under control should be to know where your money is going. Sit down and look at the last three months of your bank statements and categorize your purchases. Being able to visualize and measure where your money is going is a fantastic first step for people wanting to at least see if you could make some changes to the way that you're spending your money. After you figure ...
Nov 27, 2019•27 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Jen puts knitting before the fact that she is a senior software engineer when she defines who she is; this doesn't make her a worse engineer than someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes code. With each new thing you learn, whether you're good or bad at it, you'll tend to discover something about it that teaches you something new. With everything Jen learns, she tries to bring it back into the ways she interacts with the world, whether that's through some art medium or programming. Technological p...
Nov 27, 2019•29 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Henry Zhu's transition from a programing role to a more managerial role as Babel's maintainer has been hard. As programmers, we tend to value our work based on the number of commits or pushing features. When you are a manager, you're not writing much code anymore. There's still an expectation that maintainers should be writing code. Still, maintainers also have to triage and merge things, release process, onboard, market, write documentation, test, make videos, and give talks. Because of all thi...
Nov 27, 2019•33 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Jenn has been working with React since 0.13. She has a background in creative writing, and it melded well with React. One of her big early mistakes with React was focusing too hard on making components reusable. When you try to make your component one-hundred percent reusable, you end up with a massive stack of props. In our effort to make things reusable, we end up making it harder for ourselves and others. Sometimes it even makes sense to duplicate the component, change its name, and add your ...
Nov 27, 2019•30 min•Season 2Ep. 3
We're all really busy but we are also ambitious and have goals, but a lot of the time those goals aren't defined so well. It's important that our goals are well defined and manageable, we're hard on ourselves when we aren't making progress towards them. You want to expend your energy on the things that are providing you with value, and when you expend your energy beating yourself up, it's worse than wasted energy because it's energy directed at making life worse for you. Bianca started Code and ...
Nov 27, 2019•33 min•Season 2Ep. 2
When Lindsey started, she didn't know what accessibility even meant. She would see that there was an "accessibility error" and fix it, but she didn't understand why she was fixing it. A11y clicked for her when she realized that the point of accessibility was to make the web usable for people with disabilities. Code, at its core, is about people, and it allows people to use and purchase products. Ultimately we code to make people's lives better, and if you aren't making your site accessible, then...
Nov 27, 2019•31 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Shirley Wu has been freelancer since 2016, creating data visualizations for her clients. In this episode, Shirley talks about the four projects that had the most significant impact on her. In 2017 Shirley created an interactive visualization of the musical, Hamilton. It blew up on the internet. It was the first time a project of her's had a significant response. It made her realize that code could be beautiful, colorful, and inspiring. The audience might not remember the figures or the writeup, ...
Aug 05, 2019•40 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Suz started streaming because she wanted to show people that hardware coding is just like regular everyday coding, it's just for smaller, dumber computers. It's been two and a half years since she started streaming and her reasons have changed since then. Suz has a community of fourteen thousand that gathers around her stream now. Despite her now much busier schedule these days this community motivates her to keep coming back and getting open source work done. Suz talks about how you need to be ...
Aug 05, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 13
You can learn in private, or you can learn in public. 99% of developers work and learn privately in the shadows, so why shouldn't you? Something magical happened when Shawn started creating resources and sharing what he learned in public. More advanced people began to help him by correcting him when he was wrong. By learning publically, he was able to both teach and learn at the same time! "You can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego." If you keep your identity small...
Aug 05, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Getting involved in the world of open-source isn't trivial, especially when we are new to this industry and don't a lot of technical experience. Those of us with the privilege of knowledge and expertise should lend it to others. Lift others, and one day they may do the same. Scott Hanselman talks about how he isn't a "transactional networker," he doesn't keep score or expect something in return for helping others. Living this way is freeing and fulfilling, even if at times you get burned by some...
Aug 05, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 11
When something is easy for us, it more than likely is just familiar to us. It's easy to forget how challenging it was to learn what we know. When we tell someone who is still learning that something is easy, it diminishes the accomplishment of learning something new. People who are good at things put in the time and the practice to get where they are, there isn't a shortcut to experience. We can gain experience by building things. But what do you build? In this episode, Sara Vieira talks about h...
Aug 05, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Peggy Rayzis is the engineering manager at Apollo, where she leads the developer experience team. Peggy talks about how Apollo touches every layer of development. There are a lot of ways that you can implement GraphQL in your application. It's incredibly flexible. You can even have GraphQL running entirely on the front-end! Peggy recommends that you implement it in your existing application by creating a GraphQL layer that sits between your front-end and underlying services. Why would it be wort...
Aug 05, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Lin Clark and Till Schneidereit from Mozilla discuss where WebAssembly came from and where it's going. WebAssembly was inspired by asm.js, a subset of JavaScript that could be compiled from a language such as C++. WebAssembly can take the idea further since it doesn't have the same limitations that JavaScript does. Lin and Till talk about why even a front-end developer would use WebAssembly, which leads to a discussion on one of the primary use cases of WebAssembly, performance optimization. The...
Aug 05, 2019•36 min•Season 1Ep. 8
