Chantal and Kenneth talk to Grant Ongers and Mike Davis about infosec and the local BSides conference in Cape Town.Grant and Mike are part of the organizing team behind BSides in Cape Town, and both love working in the infosec space. BSides here is based on, and supported by, the BSides conference in Las Vegas. BSides originated as a community event in Las Vegas and has been running for many years. It happens close to the popular Defcon conference.BSides CT is looking to be a great event, with s...
Nov 21, 2017•1 hr
We chat to Louise Perold about testing as a means to improve the overall quality of software, and the upcoming Let's Test conferenceKenneth & Len chat to Louise Perold about the art & practice of software testing. Louise reframes testing in a wonderful light, and how testers compliment and support the existing software development efforts. There are many things that simply cannot be tested reliably with automated techniques, and we explore why.Louise has been helping teams write better s...
Sep 13, 2017•48 min
We chat to Inez, Ridhwana & Lara about the Ladies that UX communities in Cape Town, and as of today Johannesburg.Chantal, Kenneth & Kevin are joined by the dynamic trio of Inez Patel, Ridhwana Khan & Lara Pietersen to talk about UX and the local Ladies that UX meetups in Cape Town and now Johannesburg.User Experience (UX) is an integral part of design, be it in the physical world or the digital world. It is the practice of putting the user first, creating empathy for the users of you...
Aug 31, 2017•1 hr 12 min
We chat to Jade Abbott from Retro Rabbit about artificial intelligence, broadly and more specifically about NLP and what that means for us.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk to Jade about natural language processing, commonly referred to as NLP. What does it take to get a machine to understand what we're saying as people?Jade has always had a fascination with smart machines, from trying to build robots in school and now teaching machines to understand what we're saying. Jade takes a fairly complex ...
Aug 30, 2017•1 hr 11 min
We talk to Ruddy Riba about her career as a women in tech, and Pink-IT and what they are doing to help women in tech find a supportive community and grow their networks.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk to Ruddy about some of the challenges woman in technology face, and what she and her partners in Pink-IT are doing to help get women into tech.Ruddy shares with us the story of growing up far from Johannesburg, getting into university and seeing the immense drop-off rate of young women in just the ...
Aug 29, 2017•1 hr 17 min
We talk to Clarice Bouwer about imposter syndrome, what it is and how to overcome it. Join us as we learn about this and other issues around the often overlooked topics of mental well-being.Chantal & Kenneth talk to Clarice Bouwer. Clarice started the Corporate Programmer blog as a survival guide for her work in a big corporate environment, and has written over 50 great posts. It turns out surviving in a big corporate is all out people & relationships!Inspired by Scott Hanselman's "I'm a...
Aug 28, 2017•1 hr 1 min
We talk to Gail Shaw about data, in all its shapes and sizes. Gail is a 10 year Microsoft MVP, and has tamed many a database in her career and shares some great insights with us.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk data with Gail Shaw. From Gail's first 8086 PC, dual majoring in physics & computer science and printed Oracle error codes we join Gail on her journey into the realm SQL Server and how she's conquered it.We get some advice for squeezing a little more performance out of your production ...
Aug 24, 2017•1 hr 9 min
We talk to Tim Haak about playing with wifi networks covering large parts of Gauteng, and running Docker in production, and how to sanely get started with conquering containers.Kenneth & Kevin chat to Tim about Docker, what it is, how its evolving and how to sanely start packaging your apps in containers for shipping.Heads up! There were some audio syncing issues during post production, but the content is still great! Also, this show was recorded in 2016 and the content held up quite nicely!...
Aug 09, 2017•1 hr 10 min
We talk to Lance Gleason of Polyglot Programming about the software, embeddable devices, biltong and how the local community stacks up against the rest of the world.Chantal, Kenneth & Kevin chat to Lance about his involvement with the South African tech community. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Lance has definitely made a name for himself in various local communities as a very involved member and connector. It was thanks to Lance that we met and invited Rebecca Franks for [episode 39](/39/), and...
Jun 28, 2017•1 hr 13 min
We talk to Quentin Harley, the "crazy inventor" behind the locally built Morgan 3D PrintersThis episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers interview requests with upfront salary info. For developers it’s completely free to signup and use. In fact, you get R5000 if you take a job through them. Vis...
May 17, 2017•59 min
We talk to Kevin Trethewey about his history and building up Driven Alliance and putting people before technology.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers interview requests with upfront salary info. For developers it’s completely free to signup and use. In fact, you get R5000 if you take ...
May 10, 2017•1 hr 2 min
Live from DevConf 2017! Four conversations on the day.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers interview requests with upfront salary info. For developers it’s completely free to signup and use. In fact, you get R5000 if you take a job through them. Visit offerzen.com to sign up.Kenneth &a...
Apr 04, 2017•48 min
We venture out into Python country only to discover a healthy, diverse and growing community.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers interview requests with upfront salary info. For developers it’s completely free to signup and use. In fact, you get R5000 if you take a job through them. V...
Mar 29, 2017•1 hr 3 min
From the importance of pet projects to organizing conferences, come join us as we learn a metric ton from a friend of many developers.Chantal, Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Simon Stewart for a journey through his career as a developer. Simon is a respected and loved figure in many tech communities and arguably best known for organizing the fantastic [JSinSA](http://jsinsa.com) conference.How did Simon get here? We start at beginning in Cape Town, travel to Port Elizabeth, jump to Durban...
Oct 05, 2016•1 hr 6 min
What can we teach machines? And what can they teach us?Chantal, Kenneth & Len are joined by Guillaume Belrose to chat broadly about machine learning. Guillaume is currently living in Johannesburg, but hails from the Caribbean. After having studied in France he went onto an internship at HP in Bristol, before moving to Durban and finally up to the city of gold. Guillaume is very involved in the community, being a regular attendee at meetups and having presented at local conferences like Devco...
Sep 28, 2016•1 hr 3 min
Join us for a walk down memory lane as we retrace the start of the Ruby community in Johannesburg and end up on the trails of the Aosta Valley.Kenneth & Kevin chat with Armand du Plessis, a long-time Rubyist about his journey from classic ASP to being the CTO of Hornet. We get a small glimpse into life before .net and building applications for Symbian, and a whirlwind tour of building various systems in the mobile money space.Armand has always been a keen early adopter, building an OpenID br...
Sep 15, 2016•55 min
In this age of containers and virtualization, are we losing touch with hardware and the raw performance available to us?Kenneth chats to Kevin & Len about our current understanding of hardware performance and if it matters in this age of containers and virtualization.Spawned by an article on Non-uniform Memory Access in modern multi-CPU architectures, Kenneth realizes that it has been years since he racked up a server or cared about the bare metal at all. How disconnected has he become in th...
Sep 07, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Thinking of a bootcamp as "a series of long conversations" and other gems from teaching software craftsmanship.Kenneth & Len are joined by Mike Hewitson for a talk on the developer bootcamps that Mike helps to facilitate at Investec.Mike shares with us his journey from the army, to the railways, and how he got onto the financial services line. He has had several stops along the way in various insurers and supporting businesses, with some great stories from each stop along the way.One of the ...
Aug 10, 2016•1 hr 3 min
We reach over the proverbial cubicle wall and chat with the testers!Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Janco Wolmarans and Oz Chihwayi to talk about their experiences of having software testers integrated into a multi-functional software delivery team.Oz shares with us how he went from running batch processes during the graveyard shift to become a software tester and a key member of his team. Janco tells us the most difficult thing he's done in his career is choose a title on LinkedIn!The id...
Jul 28, 2016•1 hr 5 min
We turn 50!Frolicking (verb) - to gambol merrily; to play in a frisky, light-spirited manner. From the Dutch, vrolijk.Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by former panelists Steven McDonald and Pieter Germishuys for a look back at the origin of the podcast, the past 50 episodes and the future of our founding team.From the humble beginnings of just "recording our frequent Skype calls", Steven & Pieter recount the early days of the podcast and the pain of recording Skype calls. Each panelist s...
Jul 20, 2016•1 hr 7 min
What poor development practices get under your skin?In the episode Kenneth, Kevin & Len unpack a few poor software development practices that they've seen over and over again.More or less in order they tackled long-lived branches in version control, having too many automated tests, being too reliant on your IDE, copying the first answer from StackOverflow and not questioning enough.Each topic yielded some interesting insights and counterpoints! We hope you enjoy the episode and would love to...
Jul 15, 2016•1 hr 3 min
What happens when your database is part of your application?Kenneth & Len are joined once again by Robert Stuttaford from Cognician to talk about Datomic. According to the Datomic website, Datomic is a distributed database designed to enable scalable, flexible and intelligent applications, running on next-generation cloud architectures.Robert shares with us how Datomic became a natural choice for them after switch to Clojure. Before Clojure, ClojureScript and Datomic their site was written i...
Jul 06, 2016•1 hr 11 min
Join us for a tale of conquering software development as we follow one young star on his journey to taming React.Tonight Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Taariq Isaacs to talk about his journey as a software developer and how he tamed React. Taariq started off his journey at CPUT in their Mechatronics course, a branch of electrical engineering. Not satisfied he started teaching himself through Code Academy and quickly started at codeX where he discovered the joys of programming. One of the...
Jun 30, 2016•53 min
We're joined again by Rishal Hurbans to chat about his Prolific Idea initiative, how it came to be, what it currently does and where it's going.We talk about the X-Prize Learning Challenge and the importance of letting kids learn while they're having fun. Kevin and Kenneth reminisce about Sesame Street, Cartoon Network and learning numeracy in computer labs in primary school. Participating in the X-Prize was what lead Rishal to formalise Prolific Idea into a business.The weekly Code Offs that Ri...
Jun 22, 2016•55 min
Join us as we look into our crystal ball to see what is coming in the next major release of the popular Angular framework.Kenneth & Len are joined by Mike Geyser from BBD to talk about the upcoming Angular 2 release. Mike has been a web developer for many years, having uploaded websites to Geocities back in the day! The web has changed a lot since the good old days of "single page websites" and "under construction" GIF's, and in this show we look at Angular 2.This major new version has stirr...
Jun 16, 2016•49 min
Taking a hard look at accessibility and learning about the principles of inclusive design.Kenneth & Len are joined by Steve Barnett and Justin Slack to talk about building accessible frontends. We quickly learn that building an accessible website doesn't always mean catering for people with permanent disabilities. We learn about inclusive design as well, thinking about temporary impedances to using websites, color blindness and even catering for slow internet connections and HTML email.Steve...
Jun 08, 2016•52 min
Shall we play a game? We dive into artificial intelligence and bots, and their battle for the the ultimate prize.Kenneth & Kevin are joined by Tomislav Ravic, Rishal Hurbans & Hennie Brink from Entelect to talk about the Entelect Challenge and artificial intelligence. The Entelect Challenge is the annual AI vs AI bot challenge. Players can win their share of R200,000 in prize money whilst having fun learning about AI and writing their own bots.We talk about the goals of the challenge, th...
Jun 01, 2016•44 min
We're having another chat about computing education in the country, this time with a special guest from Durban who is looking to help change the country for the better.Kenneth & Kevin are joined by Riaz Moola from HyperionDev and the Computer Science Association of South Africa (CSASA) to talk about teaching programming online. Riaz is an accomplished young man, sporting two international masters degrees and the leadership skills to tackle the thorny issue of improving the education in the c...
May 25, 2016•32 min
Does infrastructure as code pave the way for repeatable, reliable, consistent and testable infrastructure? Join us as we found out.Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Charlene Tshitoka from ThoughtWorks for a talk about infrastructure as code. Charlene has often gravitated towards the infrastructure of software projects, and after having worked on a distributed devops project she was propelled head first into thinking about infrastructure as code and how that can be leveraged to build more re...
May 18, 2016•55 min
Kevin and Len are joined by Simon Stewart to discuss the Swift programming language from Apple. Swift is a modern object oriented programming language intended to supersede Objective-C as the standard language in an Apple developer's toolbox.We talk about some of the quirks in Apple's developer ecosystem before unpacking some of the interesting language features Swift has to offer. We discuss topics such as tuples, pattern matching, generics, error handling and semicolons. There has also been ta...
May 04, 2016•56 min
