In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rich Mironov about the current trends in product development Why listen to this podcast: • There is nothing more wasteful in the world than beautifully building a product that no one wants to buy • Everywhere in the world engineering teams are similar to other engineering teams and sales teams are similar to other sales teams and the two groups are completely opposite to each other • Dropping time and funding allocated to ...
Feb 12, 2018•27 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Cahlan Sharp about the DevMountain schools that teach software development skills in intensive “bootcamp” programs. Why listen to this podcast: • A lot of formal education is very theory based rather than teaching hands-on development skills • A Stack-Overflow survey in which 60% of respondents describe themselves as self-taught developers • A high-pressure, high performance environment where students learn by doing result...
Feb 05, 2018•15 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Linda Rising about her talk at Agile 2017 in which she explores her own reaction to the politics in the USA and how it triggered her to research morality and values. Why listen to this podcast: • The inclusiveness, openness, learning and joy that characterises the agile community • Exploring her own reactions to people with different political viewpoints and finding research into morality which helps explain them • There are ...
Jan 22, 2018•17 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Wendy Closson about her journey of recovery from contracting a rare, deadly form of cancer to leading to the Optimize You track at QCon New York Why listen to this podcast: • The impact of contracting a rare form of cancer • The combination of things that together make a difference to survival rates • The five things that will impact your life for the better: Change the way you speak, think, feel, actions and attitude • Th...
Jan 15, 2018•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Ramon Harrington of Vistaprint about his QCon New York talk on Rapid Prototyping. Why listen to this podcast: • Putting engineers in front of customers and having conversations results in far better understanding and empathy for the customer’s needs • Be prepared to launch before you’ve built everything you think the product needs in order to avoid building features people don’t want • In engineering there is often a “righ...
Jan 02, 2018•19 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Conal Scanlon about his talk at QCon New York on Monte Carlo Simulation for forecasting feature development Why listen to this podcast: • Knowledge work is inherently variable, and estimates are inevitably incorrect • Monte Carlo simulation projects likely completion based on past history rather than future guesses • A small...
Dec 19, 2017•17 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting them • The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain...
Dec 11, 2017•19 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kent McDonald and Heather Mylan-Mains on their talk at Agile 2017 about Socratic Questioning Why listen to this podcast: - Socratic questioning n approach to learning which is based on getting to answers through a question-based dialogue - Frequently what is presented at the beginning of a product investigation is a proposed solution rather than exploring the real need - There are six categories of questions to expose assu...
Dec 06, 2017•18 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud about the adoption of DevOps, containers and microservices and the dangers of vanity metrics. Why listen to this podcast: - Adoption of containers is increasing – one survey indicated 42% of organizations surveyed are using them for something - Container orchestration platforms are good at managing the challenges around scaling and resilience - Architecture is a significant challenge ...
Nov 28, 2017•28 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jason Yip about removing friction in the developer experience and DevOps at Spotify Why listen to this podcast: • Friction is the feeling that your environment is fighting you – examples include poorly named variables in code, editors configured incorrectly, access to environments etc • These things often seem small individually, but together they significantly and slow down development activities • Cultivate refined annoy...
Nov 22, 2017•23 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Josh Evans, former engineering manager at Netflix on how Netflix does DevOps and the freedom and responsibility culture that undermines their way of working. Why listen to this podcast: • There are many interpretations of the term DevOps, it is a useful shorthand for a wide variety of technologies and approaches • “You build it, you run it” is the concrete application of the freedom and responsibility culture • When buildi...
Nov 13, 2017•29 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Sean Dunn and Chris Edwards about professionalism, licensing and ethics in software engineering Why listen to this podcast: • Situations where software development intersects with the public interest are widening and software can impact the health and wellbeing of society • The distinguishing characteristic of a profession is holding paramount the public interest • Unlike the failure of a bridge unethical results from soft...
Nov 06, 2017•22 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Don Denoncourt about remaining an engineer as one ages. Why listen to this podcast: • Looking back over history and programming language changes since the early 1980’s • The importance of lifelong learning and putting your personal time into remaining relevant and up to date with new development platforms • New graduates get to work on new things because they have just learned about them and they are prepared to take the l...
Oct 30, 2017•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Andrea Goulet & M. Scott Ford about their journey working together as a married couple and business partners, learning to collaborate and communicate despite having vastly different communication styles and viewpoints. Why listen to this podcast: - Effective communication is a competitive advantage - The system that you produce will only be as good as the communication structure you have in place while you build it - The i...
Oct 23, 2017•36 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, Pavneet Saund about his ideas on making empathy a superpower and effective team leadership Why listen to this podcast: - Showing and receiving empathy is truly life-changing - The need to assume good intent when communicating using chat and written words - Leadership is a different set of skills from technology and these need to be l...
Oct 16, 2017•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Lee Cunningham of VersionOne about the results from the State of Agile Survey Why listen to this podcast: • Agile is not just something that developers do – it’s an enabler of business outcomes • The emergence of multi-modal organisations where there are multiple different approaches being used simultaneously which holds them back from progressing effectively • Some organisations are adopting a Taylorism approach to agile ado...
Oct 09, 2017•38 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman and Mike Grifiths about the joint PMI & Agile Alliance initiative to produce the Agile Practice Guide. Why listen to this podcast: - There is nothing in the PMBOK that says you have to use a waterfall project delivery model - If we want to influence the people who hold the hearts and minds of senior management, there is no better way than to collaborate with them - The guide reflects the State of the Practi...
Oct 03, 2017•24 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks, about their recent report on the need for Courageous Leadership and her forthcoming book on Evolutionary Architecture. Why listen to this podcast: - Courageous leadership enables organisations to solve enterprise-scale problems while still allowing empowered development teams to produce software in an agile fashion - The importance of making the link between technology advances and wha...
Sep 25, 2017•19 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Joshua Kerievsky CEO of Industrial Logic and Heidi Helfand Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies and author of the book Dynamic Reteaming about their talk High Performance via Psychological Safety Why listen to this podcast: • You cannot have a high performing team unless you have psychological safety • Creating a safe environment is hard, and it must go beyond just lip service • Take the time to have ...
Sep 18, 2017•24 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Denise Jacobs about her keynote talk on Banishing your Inner Critic. Why listen to this podcast: • Imposter syndrome is a real thing and it has many manifestations • Getting into a flow state results in massive productivity increases and is highly rewarding • Creativity is a practice and needs to be exercised • Creativity Denial is rife in the tech industry – “I’m not creative”, whereas many technical skills require highly...
Sep 11, 2017•27 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David Marquet about his keynote talk at the recent Agile 2017 conference and his book – Turn the Ship Around. Why listen to this podcast: - Create organizations for the future that have the right balance of thinking (blue-work) and doing (red-work) - The person doing the work has much more contextual information about the si...
Sep 04, 2017•17 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jez Humble about his Agile 2017 Keynote talk in which he refuted many of the common excuses why “continuous delivery won’t work here”. He also gave a scathing response to the “Manifestbro” controversy which recently unfolded at Google. Why listen to this podcast: Key takeaways about DevOps: - There are many reasons cited for not adopting DevOps – the real reasons are cultural and architectural issues - It takes commitment ...
Aug 14, 2017•28 min
This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Patrick Kua from ThoughtWorks on growing technical leadership and evolutionary architecture Why listen to this podcast: - There is a significant gap in technical leadership capability in teams and across the industry as a whole - Your experience as a developer doesn’t prepare you for a tech lead roleRecognize that the skills...
Aug 07, 2017•26 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Larry Cooper about the Agility Series – a collection of books and other resources which explore what agility means in many different dimensions. Why reading to this podcast: - Value management is about doing the right thing, rather than doing lots of stuff, right - The reason for doing something should always trace back to an organisational strategic goal, and if it doesn’t then we’re wasting the organisation’s money - Int...
Jul 31, 2017•36 min
In this podcast recorded at QCon New York 2017 Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Debbie Madden, CEO of Stride on communication advice and techniques for technical teams and what it takes for build truly great teams. Why listen to this podcast: - The most effective teams have a true advantage in today’s organisations - The danger of coddling “rock star” performers - Create working environments that are flexible, welcoming and diverse - The value of healthy conflict - havin...
Jul 24, 2017•20 min
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Alex Qin following on from her QCon London talk “Shaving My Head Made Me A Better Programmer”. Why listen to this podcast: - Casual discrimination and unconscious bias is rife in society, and very prevalent in tech - The need to have many more people in the field who don’t fit the preconceived mould of a programmer - The complexity of the overall system means we need to tackle discrimination at many levels in many differen...
Jul 10, 2017•24 min
In this podcast recorded in London Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Colart Miles about leading towards innovative cultures and running startup weekends. Why listen to this podcast: - It’s not about rank or status – it’s about the value you bring to the team environment - Identifying a process for bringing an idea from inception to market and sharing that with others through Startup Weekends - Startup Weekend events in 160 countries, over 500000 people have particip...
Jun 26, 2017•22 min
In this podcast recorded in London Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke Colin Breck, an Egineer from Tesla about using quality views to expose and prioritize technical debt. Why listen to this podcast: • When systems are not customer facing, quality is not directly obvious and is frequently overlooked • Quality views provide a visual way of exposing quality in a system block diagram • Quality is a subjective – the value is in the conversations rather than the numbers • Qu...
Jun 20, 2017•13 min
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to Alanna Brown Director of Technical Product Marketing at Puppet and Nicole Forsgren, PhD in Management Information Systems and CEO at DORA, on the State of DevOps Report 2017. Why listen to this podcast: - Three new areas of research in 2017: leadership, automation and organizational performance for non-financial organizations. - Transformational leaders have a clear business vision and communicate in an inspiring way, and provide intellectual s...
Jun 12, 2017•32 min
Manuel Pais, InfoQ Lead Editor for DevOps, talks to John Willis, Director of Ecosystem Development for Docker and co-author of the "DevOps Handbook", on DevOps evolution, leadership and burnout. Why listen to this podcast: - DevOps got watered down along the way, but its principles and practices will stay. - People can learn the technical side of DevOps with training but they need to follow up on case studies from organizations that went through similar journeys. - Still early days to be able to...
Jun 05, 2017•35 min
