Developer Tea - podcast cover

Developer Tea

Jonathan Cutrellwww.developertea.com
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence. With over 13 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell), co-founder of Spec and Director of Engineering at PBS. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Twitter: @developertea :: Email: [email protected]

Episodes

4 Reasons You Will Never Pick the "Right Tool For the Job"

Tools are not a solution to a problem, but people are. In today's episode, we're talking about how choosing the right tool for the job can limit us to uncovering a better solution to the problems we're trying to solve. How can we choose a tool best suited for the operator doing the job? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Su...

Mar 09, 202012 minEp. 805

Four Questions for the Weekend

Happy Saturday! In today's episode, we're asking four questions that cause us to pause and reflect in order to answer. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware and be a better developer so you can have a positive impact on the ...

Mar 07, 202015 minEp. 804

Breaking Your Own Rules Accelerates Bad Habit Formation

Whenever you take action, there will be feedback. Today we're talking about when to break your own rules and solve a problem. There are functional reasons to break rules, but what are the possible long-term repercussions of our decisions and how can we regulate our incentives to break rules better? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters t...

Mar 04, 202014 minEp. 803

Redefine Your Career Search Rules

Searching for a job is hard for both the people looking for a new job and a company looking for the perfect candidate to fill a position. In today's episode, we're talking about a different way to approach your next job search. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge...

Mar 02, 202011 minEp. 802

Functional Autonomy and Finding Meaning in the Small Things Today

Think about the mundane tasks that you're going through today. In today's episode we're talking about finding joy in even the small things that we do on a daily or weekly basis. How are the small things we do, connected to a larger goal? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily...

Feb 28, 20209 minEp. 801

Your Influence is Catalyzed By What is Influencing You

Studies show strong-willed friends, greatly influence your choices. In today's episode, we're talking about the experiences and relationships that influence our personal drive and behavior. The things that influence you are the things that teach you, and the people you surround yourself with influence your behaviors and reactions through learned habits. How does the team you'er on influence your career development? 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed help y...

Feb 26, 20205 minEp. 800

Your Time is An Account With An Unknown Balance

Today we're talking about time as a resource of abundance. We'll cover self-care as an investment, work as something that you can enjoy more consistently and free-time as something you can learn and grow from. Today's challenge will be to enjoy your life, no matter where you're at. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware and be a better developer so you can have a positive impact on the people around you. Check it out and give it...

Feb 25, 202013 minEp. 799

Don't Make the Problem Fit the Model

A model is not the pure picture of the truth. If we think about road maps as we use them today, they are almost always slightly out of date. In what way can a map be useful as they relate to developers? In today's episode, we're talking about how we can easily abuse a model by changing a problem to fit a model that a team relies on and the repercussions of broken models in our code and our career as software developers. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the conten...

Feb 21, 202012 minEp. 798

Implicit Models and Processes

We often hear the term, "process", and this carries a lot of baggage. It's easy to believe that processes are one concept that we apply to something we do. In today's episode, we're talking about implicit processes that we follow without realizing it. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break C...

Feb 19, 20208 minEp. 797

Measuring Freedom to Change

The freedom we want to create as managers is the freedom to disagree and solve problems towards a goal. In today's episode we're talking about freedom and autonomy among a team and offering different ways managers can provide as much freedom and autonomy as possible to their team. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscrib...

Feb 17, 202011 minEp. 796

Embracing Confusion

What does it mean to be confused? In today's episode, we're talking about confusion and how we manage and learn from points of professional confusion. We'd dig into the perception of confusion in the workplace and offer tips to embrace confusion both in ourselves and with our co-workers. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 S...

Feb 14, 20207 minEp. 795

Thought Experiment - Rejecting Your Intuitive Solution

Take a problem that you expect to face - one that you haven't solved yet or taken action on but have an ideal of how you would take action. Today's thought experiment is to imagine rejecting your proposed solution and forced to think of an alternative solution. What exactly are you solving? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. �...

Feb 12, 20206 minEp. 794

You Don't Have to Be a Slave to Self-Improvement

When we allow surrounding cultures to drive our goals, we fall back to the systems and goals that the people around us have created. Where do our goals come from and how does it make our lives dysfunctional? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed help you b...

Feb 10, 202013 minEp. 793

Getting Stacked Value From your Daily Activities

The amount of time in a day is the same but the amount of margin you have in your day can vary. In today's episode, we're talking about some heuristics for choosing the best activities for your time and value output. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed h...

Feb 07, 202013 minEp. 792

Defining Your Reference Points

When was the last time you asked a question in a meeting? Questions are an invitation to collaboration, especially in our jobs as developers. In today's episode we're talking about the questions we've been asked that change the way we think. This episode will challenge you to be vulnerable and ask more questions for the sake of your code and professional growth. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other d...

Feb 05, 202010 minEp. 791

Engineering Your Habits Like Interfaces

In today's episode we're talking about the idea of interfaces as some kind of expected way to interact with our code and how to take that frame of mind to our day-to-day lives. Being explicit about what we need to make our days successful can be rare but it might make sense to imagine each day as it's own function and the outputs that you want for each day. What kind of outputs do you want to happen today and what do you need to make that possible? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show a...

Feb 03, 20209 minEp. 790

Plans Should Be Functions, Not Documents

We expect things to go one way, but often, they go in another way. In today's episode, we're talking about plans and how to stay agile when the plans we make, don't necessarily go the way we expect. This episode especially applies to timelines that we sign our names to when attempting to accomplish a development goal and how we can developer a better strategy when things don't go the way we're expecting. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to i...

Jan 31, 202015 minEp. 788

What Are your Fundamentals?

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a developer is to overcomplicate whatever you're doing. This comes all the way down to every line of code you write. In today's episode, we're talking about simplicity, complexity and value of our work. At what point does complexity devalue our code? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you...

Jan 29, 20207 minEp. 789

Getting On The Right Level When Solving Problems Collaboratively

Often as a developer you'll find yourself either too far in the weeds of solving a problem or too far up in the clouds. In today's episode, we're talking about the levels in which we choose to contribute to solving a problem and tips to identifying roles our teammates can play help us solve a problem we're all facing. How do we solve the relational issues that a team is facing and how can we support each other in solving problems we are faced with? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show a...

Jan 27, 20209 minEp. 787

Management Anti-Pattern - Detail Abstraction

The anti-patterns we are talking about today are details. Who manages the details and when is management getting too involved or not getting involved sooner in the details of a project? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea Break Challenge This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware ...

Jan 24, 202011 minEp. 786

Management Anti-Patterns - False Homogeneity

Focus is perhaps the one superpower that's common in successful people. In today's episode, we're talking about a management anti-pattern that totally destroys focus and provide a solution to get focus back for you and if you manage a team, for them as well. This episode is not just for managers of teams but general personal time management. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover th...

Jan 22, 202013 minEp. 785

Management Anti-Patterns - Implicit Assignment of Responsibility

There are so many ways to be wrong as a manager and this week, we're talking about management anti-patterns. One thing we all do is assign responsibility to ourselves and possibly to others around us. In today's episode, we're talking about our relationship with assigning responsibility. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 S...

Jan 20, 202010 minEp. 784

Two Biases that Can Affect Your Work and Relationships

We carry our minds with us through our careers. Our perceptions of the world around us are based on our biases or predispositions. In today's episode we're talking about models of thinking and how we can identify biases that affect our working habits and relationships. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 Subscribe to the Tea...

Jan 17, 202017 minEp. 783

You'll Never Have All of the Information

Today, we're talking about gathering information as part of the developer's job. We'll dive into what it means to use the information we have to translate or create a solution to problems we're solving on a daily basis. What is the function of the information we're trying to gather and how does this information translate to a usable solution? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover t...

Jan 16, 202012 minEp. 782

Productivity Isn't About How Much You Get done

Productivity is an endless hill. How can you increase the output of you or your team as an engineer? In today's episode, we're zooming out to explore how individuals contribute to the productivity of a team as a whole. What is the least amount of work that's necessary to reach your goal? 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. 🍵 S...

Jan 13, 20207 minEp. 781

3 Guidelines for Happier Work with Designers

Clarity is hard to find when things are ambiguous. In today's episode, we're talking about solutions in uncharted territories and coming to conclusions from our own point of view. Specifically, we'll be exploring opportunities to strengthen relationships between designers and developers when our opinions to solutions collide. 🧡 Leave a Review If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review ! It helps other developers discover the show and keep ...

Jan 10, 202023 minEp. 780

Connecting Tasks to Operating Modes

The work that you do and actions you take have outcomes. In today's episode, we're talking about finding better outputs through the actions and effort that we put into our day. What tasks deserve more effort and what tasks don't require as much effort to complete and how can we identify the level of effort an event needs quickly? Sponsored by: Pathrise Pathrise is an online mentorship program that gets you a job at a top tech company. You receive unlimited weekly 1-on-1’s until you get hired, al...

Jan 09, 202011 minEp. 779

Success and Cumulative Advantage

What are the common systems of successful people? In today's episode, we're talking about the common systems of successful people, and how we could incorporate some of those systems in our daily lives to help us improve our own personal and professional success. Sponsored by: Pathrise Pathrise is an online mentorship program that gets you a job at a top tech company. You receive unlimited weekly 1-on-1’s until you get hired, along with workshops, small groups, support over email and text, and ot...

Jan 06, 202011 minEp. 778

A Key Misconception About Resolutions

Happy New Year to everyone listening to this show! In today's episode we're focusing on automating as much of our daily life as we can and one misconception of habit forming and how we can better shape our lives to make habit building easier. Sponsored by: Pathrise Pathrise is an online mentorship program that gets you a job at a top tech company. You receive unlimited weekly 1-on-1’s until you get hired, along with workshops, small groups, support over email and text, and other types of support...

Jan 03, 202011 minEp. 777

Holiday Re-Air: Interview w/ Gabriel Weinberg (part 2)

Today's guest, Gabriel Weinberg , the CEO of DuckDuckGo uses connections to help steer the company. What we're talking about today with Gabriel are mental models for building a team and business. In part 2 of this interview, we dive deeper into Gabriel's mental models specifically for engineers. His book, Super Thinking, which we base the discussion on can be found here: Super Thinking . Get in touch If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or...

Dec 27, 201934 minEp. 776