Felienne is always learning. In exploring her PhD dissertation and her public speaking experience it's clear that she has no intent on stopping! Most recently she's been exploring a large corpus of Scratch programs looking for Code Smells. How do children learn how to code, and when they do, does their code "smell?" Is there something we can do when teaching to promote cleaner, more maintainable code?
Aug 26, 2016•32 min•Ep. 542
Scott sits down with Dan Driscoll to talk bots. What happened in 2016 that made bots more intelligent and more relevant than ever before? Why now, and what can YOU do with your own bot written in Node.js, .NET, or using their REST API?
Aug 19, 2016•32 min•Ep. 541
Stephanie Hurlburt and her co-founder at Binomial see a problem with how graphics and assets make their way from the CPU to the GPU and on to your screen. Now they're creating a new texture compressor and GPU Transcoder that will improve how your games look and play!
Aug 12, 2016•31 min•Ep. 540
Andrea Goulet and her business partner Scott Ford love legacy code. No one is supposed to LIKE legacy code, right? Andrea and the team at CorgiBytes believes people are more than just makers - they are also menders. So how does one approach an old code base?
Aug 05, 2016•33 min•Ep. 539
Frank Krueger is well known for his popular iOS applications like iCircuit and Calca. Frank creates his apps with Xamarin and C# or F#. But why not write these apps for the iPad *on the iPad?* Frank just released the incredible new apps Continuous for iOS. You CAN write .NET on an iPad, productively. Today. Scott asks Frank how he did it!
Jul 29, 2016•36 min•Ep. 538
Rachel Simone Weil thinks in 6502 Assembly and loves to program on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Yes, that's the NES and yes, it's 2016! She's created a number of amazing NEW apps including the world's first connected Twitter client for NES.
Jul 22, 2016•37 min•Ep. 537
The open source Orleans project is behind some massive systems including Halo itself. Is the virtual actor model the revolution it appears to be? How does this relate to the models of the best, as well as things like Akka and Service Fabric? Richard Astbury does his best to set Scott straight in this episode.
Jul 15, 2016•34 min•Ep. 536
Andy Kitchen is a consultant and researcher in machine learning specializing in neural networks. He sits down with Scott and explains why Machine Learning matters, and why you and I should start learning it ourselves, right away, with TensorFlow!
Jul 08, 2016•34 min•Ep. 535
Jessica Lord works at GitHub on the Electron framework. Is Electron "just Chrome in a frame" or is it so much more? Jessica sets Scott on the right path and explains exactly where the Electron platform fits into your development world.
Jul 01, 2016•32 min•Ep. 534
Karolina has often been on remote teams. Whether it's working from Europe or Australia, working 10 time zones away or just a few, she's developed a number of tips and tricks for surviving (and thriving!) while working remote. Can we build our tech teams "remote-first?"
Jun 24, 2016•33 min•Ep. 533
With all this talk of Big Data, this episode we go smaller. Oz du Soleil has built his career on Excel. He feels that there isn't enough data literacy in our industry. While you're writing SQL queries, do you know where you data comes from? Is it clean and is it valid? Where does Excel and tools like it fit into the data-focused world of 2016?
Jun 17, 2016•34 min•Ep. 532
Gina Marie Maini is a functional programer. She's the most totally amped functional programmer I've ever met, and she told me that OCaml was wonderful. Today Gina tries to get me to accept OCaml and functional programming as the way and the light.
Jun 10, 2016•37 min•Ep. 531
NativeScript lets you build truly native iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps with Javascript and CSS. How is it different from Xamarin? What about Cordova? How can we tell what's "native" and what's not, and honestly, when should we care? Scott talks to Jen Looper about the NativeScript OSS project.
Jun 03, 2016•32 min•Ep. 530
Aniyia L. Williams saw a gap in the market and a product that needed to be created. Tinsel creates tech jewelry to ensure that fashion-savvy women can enjoy technology without sacrificing their style. How did Aniyia bootstrap her hardware startup? She explains the concept, funding, prototypes, development, and manufacturing on this episode.
May 27, 2016•34 min•Ep. 529
Rob Eisenberg is the creator of the Aurelia JavaScript framework. This open source framework is a reimagining of how we create rich apps in the browser. Is this the framework that you were looking for? How does it compare to others?
May 20, 2016•36 min•Ep. 528
There's so much talk about containers as it's clearly the buzzword today. Rather than doing a deep dive into container tech, Scott talks to Aja Hammerly about what containers really means to us as developers. How do containers change our workflow? Is the promise of cloud portability real?
May 13, 2016•32 min•Ep. 527
Scott sits down with software developer and development manager Louise Elliott about her ideas around "Punishment Driven Development." Why is this such a common way to run a project? Does it work and is it ever appropriate?
May 06, 2016•29 min•Ep. 526
Former VC Nadia Eghbal is exploring the world of open source and how tech gets funded. Her investigative work is currently supported by The Ford Foundation as she explores the way that the public infrastructure of the Internet gets built. She talks with Scott about how Open Source Software gets funded!
Apr 29, 2016•34 min•Ep. 525
Arlan Hamilton is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a seed investment fund that backs high-potential, underrepresented startup founders. She talks to Scott about how starting a fund works, how much money one needs to invest, and demystifies many of the buzzwords around investing in tech today!
Apr 22, 2016•35 min•Ep. 524
Nick Farmer is best known for developing the Belter constructed language (conlang) for Syfy’s The Expanse. What's involved in creating a convincing constructed language? How real are these languages?
Apr 15, 2016•36 min•Ep. 523
Scott talks to web developer and entrepreneur Kronda Adair about her business and her recent failure. How do projects fail and what do we do with that failure? Can failure be a motivator or does it slow us down? How can we turn lemons into lemonade as technologists?
Apr 08, 2016•34 min•Ep. 522
Scott sits down and talks with Lyza Gardner, CTO of Cloud Four and long-time web expert, about her recent explorations into hardware using the Johnny-Five Framework. You can control Arduinos and other devices and make robots with brains written with Node.js and JavaScript! Is this the framework we've been waiting for?
Apr 01, 2016•34 min•Ep. 521
Erin Tomson left Pixar after 13 years to pursue something totally new! Her hardware startup called "Modulo" brings plug and play flexibility to the world of microcontrollers like Arduino and Particle. How did she get started and make the move from 3D software to modular hardware?
Mar 25, 2016•34 min•Ep. 520
This week Scott talks to to electrical engineer Laura Hughes from Arrow.com. Laura specializes in lighting and power supply design and can solve pretty much any problem with an LED. Laura schools Scott on a number of electrical issues and they come up with an epic new project idea!
Mar 18, 2016•31 min•Ep. 519
Simone Giertz is a Maker, a robotics enthusiast and surprisingly (her words!) a non-engineer. She's become somewhat of an expert in sh*tty robots and we love her for it. Also, she happens to be Swedish but sounds totally American just to confuse us. Scott talks about how she gets her inspiration and how she got started!
Mar 11, 2016•34 min•Ep. 518
Captain Brent Chapman has a BS from the West Point, an MS in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon, and has been tearing electronics apart since he was four. Today, Cpt Chapman works for the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) at Moffett Field and puts those skills to work. In his spare time, he tinkers, creates, and helps others do the same.
Mar 04, 2016•34 min•Ep. 517
Scott talks to Lauren Tan, a Senior Developer at Dockyard, about her excitement with the Ember Framework. Her talk on "Ambitious UX for Ambitious Apps" covers new techniques like Reactive UX that are made easy with the Ember.js framework.
Feb 26, 2016•33 min•Ep. 516
Afua Richardson joins Scott for this creative episode. Afua is a comic artist who has worked for Marvel, Image Comics, Top Cow, and many more. Her work on "Genius" was nominated for a Glyph Award. She's also a singer/songwriter and an accomplished musician. Afua and Scott explore how comics are made, who owns them, and how creators can express themselves in the digital age.
Feb 19, 2016•42 min•Ep. 515
Scott sits with fellow Type 1 Diabetic Dana M. Lewis about the Open Artificial Pancreas System that she and her husband Scott Leibrand created. As other commercial entities race to "close the loop" for diabetics, how did two regular folks control diabetes with off-the-shelf parts? Dana demystifies the technology behind this software-managed diabetes solution.
Feb 12, 2016•34 min•Ep. 514
What's it like building and scaling a mobile game to millions of users and billions of transactions? Does the cloud really allow you to "not worry about scaling" and just focus on the game? We'll hear from Kalle Hiitola, the CTO of Next Games, about their experience scaling The Walking Dead, an app that got over a million downloads in its launch weekend!
Feb 05, 2016•32 min•Ep. 513
