Are you wondering how to take your product to the next level? Do you want to seize the opportunities that are out there? Are you aware of what your customers really want? The days of gathering requirements from business stakeholders and documenting them in long product requirements documents are vanishing. Instead, high-performant teams are experimenting towards solutions that will lead to the outcomes they desire. Helping us doing just this is Teresa Torres. She recently published Continuous Di...
Jul 06, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Will switching to the latest version of your libraries *really* make your development go faster? Is it worth investing a lot of time in research while there is a tried-and-true, production hardened solution readily available? How do new shiny things for developers help your product gain a competitive advantage? To be fair, even e-mail was considered bleeding edge at one point, which has of course become a staple in our means of communication. Some people would even argue that e-mail is old fashi...
Jun 29, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 29
When dealing with a big challenge, is it always good to break it up into small chunks? What if you cannot solve a problem by finding it's root cause? How can you get, and, more importantly: understand the bigger picture? W. Edwards Deming has said that 95% of variation in the performance of a system is caused by the system itself and only 5% is caused by the people. Organizations can be considered systems, so in a way it is amazing that a lot of time and effort is spent in improving individual p...
Jun 22, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Do you want to work in the system or work the system? Can you have leadership without leaders? Do you need annual plannings, budgets and individual bonuses? Are you ready to break the chains of command and control? There are two kinds of work. One is to Work in the System: you are a cog in the machine. Which is necessary, of course, but by itself not enough to sustain organizations in an ever-changing world. To make organizations fit for the present and the future, we must also Work the System. ...
Jun 15, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 27
What does the future of education look like? Are students taught the right skillset to be able to make an impact on the job market? Some universities literally date back to the middle ages, such as Oxford university which has been teaching as far back as 1096. Naturally this means, in general, education is quite classic and slow to change. On contrary, especially in IT, things do change fairly rapidly and companies are looking for specific skillsets that might not match the educations on offer. ...
Jun 08, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Why do teams always want to build the next best thing without focusing on the fundamentals like a simple address change or login page? Should you implement blockchain in your product or should you just improve the user experience? Are Product Owners managing a team, or are they part of the team? These questions and more are the focus of this episode of Roasting Marshmallows. Our guest is Niels Talens, Chief Product Owner at Simply Deliver A.I., and he will share his views, frustrations and best ...
Jun 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 25
How do you get hired by right company? More importantly, how do you prepare for such an interview? What about negotiations? And what do these companies have to do to reel you in? On this episode, a senior technical recruiter from a Big Tech company is willing to give up all secrets, tips and tricks for engineers and companies alike! His name is Jordan Philips, and he has spent 7 years working across larger big tech like Google, but also startups like Wayve autonomous driving. At Google, he acted...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 24
How do you develop a side project and transform it into your own startup? It is the dream of many software engineers to develop something, maybe as a side project, and then see that project gain traction. It gets adopted, downloaded a bunch of times, and maybe you even get to speak on it during conventions. For our guest today this has happened, and many more things since then as well. He built a framework which enables teams to develop applications using Domain Driven Design, Event Sourcing and...
May 18, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Change is good, but transitioning can be arduous. What do you do when you feel stuck at your current job? You have been trying to grow and develop but you get nowhere? Your job is not fulfilling? You know you can do better, and you know you can earn more. You are in a career that is not a good match or you have outgrown it? Or maybe, you have been fired and are forced to make a transition. Today we are talking with Clayton Dewey about his transitioning into IT. More often we see people from vari...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Does your IT-department not deliver? Are there always new bugs introduced with each release? Have you missed opportunities because your software is too old to support new features? If this sounds familiar, you are probably looking to fix your IT-department. Maybe you're looking to hire an extra manager to ensure all processes are being followed. Before you do that though, listen to this episode of scoutcast, where we discuss the pain points described above, and how to tackle those! Hint: Not by ...
May 04, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Are you feeling SAFe? What riches can you find when you crack the combination of SAFe? SAFe is a framework that empowers complex organizations to scale up agile practices across the enterprise. SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework, and it's being used by hundreds of the world’s largest organizations. It promises to sustain and drive faster time-to-market, dramatic increases in productivity and quality, and improvement in employee engagement. The experience we as FourScouts have with SAFe has n...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 20
For the longest time, more cost effective labor in other countries has always attracted companies to try and manufacture their products there for a more economic way of doing things. This is no different for software development. However, especially among developers, there was and still is some resistance with hiring outside help. But currently, due to corona, everyone is working remotely, so what does it matter if you are situated in a different country? And this is what we are talking about on...
Apr 20, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Do you feel satisfied with your accomplishments in life? Are you where you want to be? A surprising amount of people will say “no” to these questions — and you might be one of them. People who haven’t made satisfactory progress in life often fail to reach their goals — because they’re stuck inside their comfort zones. What are the good and bad things about being in the comfort zone? On this episode of roasting marshmallows, we will talk about how we sometimes find ourselves stuck in the comfort ...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Many teams that develop a product nowadays feel like it's a bit like building a space ship only for it to be launched in a black hole. All this work is done to build something awesome, but they never really know if it is of value to the customer. Are they building The Right Thing, and are they building it Right? What does a modern software development company look like and what do they do? Spoiler alert : it's not about the programming language, tabs versus spaces, or Subversion versus git: it's...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Do your people know what business your company really is into? What is it that you do? And who does what exactly? The answers might scare you. There are a lot of things that can (and frequently do) go wrong inside of a business. Sales fall through, products don't work, team members get frustrated, and clients get upset. Often, these things happen due to a single reason: lack of organizational clarity.In this episode of Roasting Marshmallows, we are navigating the organizational clutter with Mich...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Everyone wants their team to be high performant. The idea of one cohesive unit, working in harmony with one another, that are highly focused on their goals and deliver superior business value is of course very appealing. But what does it take to cultivate a high-performance team? One of the foundations is trust and respect . Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we will share with you our experiences in building this trust and respect with you. We do this, among other things, by getting naked with eac...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Have you ever wondered why your team is taking so long delivering new features? They are all behind their screen, headphones on, wired in, focused, programming. Why are they taking so long? Turns out, parallelising the work that needs to be done might not be so productive at all. Enter mob programming: a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer. Today on Roasting Marshmallows, we are sitting down wit...
Mar 09, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 13
What do you get when you put a Brazilian, Macedonian, Indian and Dutch person together and let them have a conversation about their cultures for an hour? Culture shock, culture clash but also melting pot material! Which culture is the best? Is there even such a thing? Surely one culture must have the best food!? At FourScouts we already have a diverse representation of different cultures, but for todays episode we have invited someone from India, currently living in Amsterdam. Anikta Sahni is jo...
Mar 02, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Have you ever considered going freelancing? Or does being part of something greater than yourself sound more appealing? Today we roasting marshmallows with Michiel Rook , a passionate and pragmatic freelance IT consultant. In the past, Michiel has joined several companies, including FourScouts, so he has seen his fair share of both freelancing and working at a company. Today, we will discuss with him the pros and cons of being a freelancer, and why he chose freelancing over being part of a compa...
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if everyone working in a company were paid the same salary, regardless of position and level of experience? What if there's no envy, no competition, no stressful negotiations? Everyone, regardless of role, makes the same amount of money. This way, people can focus on their job rather than their compensation. At FourScouts, we decided to do an experiment and try just that! What do we think are the pros and cons? Does it actually matter? Find out on thi...
Feb 15, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 10
How does one find the right person for the job? And once found, what other steps do you need to take, such as for example relocating this person and maybe his or her family? That is what we are talking about on this episode: recruitment, and we are roasting these marshmallows with Dominika Sawa . By day she's a Recruiter & Partner at Van Storm, a recruiting & contracting company founded by a group of like-minded enthusiasts who believe that recruitment can be stress-free and fun! She rec...
Feb 09, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 9
While this podcast is being recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic, many people are confined to their homes working remote. There has been a group of people who took this remote work to the next level, even before Covid-19, and they live the dream that many people may have: a nomadic lifestyle of traveling to beautiful parts of the world, earning their money online. These people are called digital nomads: someone who desires the freedom to work and live anywhere and uses technology to make this d...
Feb 02, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 8
A few episodes ago, we had Patrick de Veer of Greenaumatic as our guest to talk about his view on sustainability and his throw at becoming the minister of New Economy in the Netherlands. Today we are talking the same subjects but with a different guest: Bart Joling. Bart Joling is a cofounder of TenStripes , a marketing agency in the Netherlands, specialised in providing strategy and execution for sustainable organisations. A committed believer in telling stories through data. Initiator of the I...
Jan 28, 2021•48 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Are you looking to make an impact? Disrupt the market with your product or service? Starting a startup is exciting, fun and maybe also a little bit scary. How do you go about starting a startup? On today's episode of Scoutcast - Roasting Marshmallows, we have invited Manuel Cayre of ParkNow (known in the Netherlands as Parkmobile ), an app that helps people pay for parking, to share with you his experience on starting up a startup. In the past, Manuel has co-founded MobyPark , a peer2peer parkin...
Jan 23, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Are estimates a necessary evil? Is it just good business? Are you able to predict the future based on the past? Or is it just an enormous waste of time? The #noestimates movement started with the No Estimate Programming Series on Woody Zuill's blog. Since then the #noestimates hashtag on twitter has seen a vast amount of discussion, and today's episode of Roasting Marshmallows probably won't be an exception. We will talk about both sides of the discussion: Why estimates are important and how the...
Jan 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min
On this episode of Scoutcast - Roasting Marshmallows we are having an interview with Patrick de Veer of Greenaumatic about sustainability and the misuse and misunderstandings that revolve around this term. Has it become just a buzzword? We will also talk about how Greenaumatic can help companies gain insight about the environmental impact their spending has. This way companies will know if they are helping making the world a better place or if they are contributing to its destruction. 🧠Are you ...
Jan 05, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Should your boss be very visible? Are the best bosses the ones that don't bother you? How much responsibility can you handle? On this episode of Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows, we will try to answer these very questions, and who better to ask these questions then our own boss: Silvester van der Bijl, founder & CEO of FourScouts. How much feedback can he handle? At the end of the episode, the point is proven. Silvester does what bosses tend to do 😉 Take a listen! 🧠Are you looking to expa...
Dec 23, 2020•47 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Should you speak Dutch in the Netherlands? Today we are talking about if you should speak Dutch for foreigners living and working in the Netherlands. Our guests today is an expat that has learned the language, and one that after 10 years still cannot speak Dutch. What are their insights about not speaking the native language? Did they encounter any embarrassing situations and missed business opportunities because of it? Find out today on Scoutcast - Roasting marshmallows! 🧠Are you looking to ex...
Dec 11, 2020•46 min•Season 1Ep. 2
🧠Are you looking to expand your mind? 🤺Do you like to challenge and be challenged? 🤝Do you want to improve yourself and share your experiences both personally and professionally? Today on Scoutcast - Roasting marshmellows we will discuss a list of most heard excuses we've encountered not only in our work as software engineers, but also in our day to day lives. More importantly, we discuss how to take away these excuses and actually move forward in a productive way. Join us in our journey for ...
Nov 30, 2020•40 min•Season 1Ep. 1
