I'm in New York this week checking in with Joel Spolsky from StackExchange/StackOverflow. Big things are happening in Joel's world. They've just hired Anil Dash to be the CEO of FogCreek and launched a new product. What's it like to be Joel and what's it like to NOT suck at Excel?
Nolan Lawson sparked a niche debate with his statement "In 2016, it’s okay to build a website that doesn’t work without JavaScript." In this show Nolan explains what he meant by this, and dissects the concept of Progressive Enhancement in web apps today. Where will the next billion web surfers come from and what do their apps look like?
Angie Jones is a Consulting Automation Engineer who advises several agile teams on automation strategies and has developed automation frameworks for countless software products. She challenges us to consider including Automation earlier in the product development cycle. Is Automation included in your company's "Definition of Done?"
Dr. Henry Segerman works at Oklahoma State University in the Department of Mathematics. He's looking at interesting ways to visualize mathmatics using 3D printing! Is this a new idea or a new take on an old one? Is tactile 3D math easier to pick up and understand?
Una Kravets is front-end developer who works at Digital Ocean, has worked for IBM, spoken all over, and likes to rethink things. She's written about rethinking everything from JavaScript to Responsive Design to Harry Potter! She also wonders if we need JavaScript! She educates Scott in this episode about all things webby.
You may know Amir from his #1 AppStore Game "A Dark Room." Amir is a programmer who has learned (and continues to learn) multiple programming languages. Is being a polyglot programmer a good idea for all programmers? Which languages should you start with?
Does the tech industry have an alcohol problem? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Does the alcohol have a place on the job? At parties? How far does one go? Scott talks to Victor Yocco about a way to think about drinking in the workplace.
Scott talks to Data Scientist Safia Abdalla about the rise of python notebooks and new ways to think about interactive computing, both online and off. What is "interactive literate coding" and how does it change computing for both the technical and not-quite-technical user? All this and Safia teaches Scott about the "nteract" project.
You've pair programmed but have you tried Mob Programming? Woody Zuill and his team "discovered" programming as a group and it changed their whole process. Woody joins Scott and explains how they stumbled on this, how they refined it, and how Mob Programming may make your programming life better.
Sandi Metz and Scott explore the art and science of teaching. How to people learn? How can we be better teachers? When presenting information, what's the best way to get it from your brain into the students? Why am I phrasing everything like a question? All this and more on this week's episode.
Iheanyi Ekechukwu is a Product Engineer with Digital Ocean. He has a background in both design and development. Are such people unicorns? How closely should designers work with developers? Are these truly separate practices...and how separate?
What is Infrastructuralism and how can it help you think differently about software and large problems? Scott sits down with Everett Harper, CEO of Truss. They talk about how applying some old ideas in new ways helped them fix healthcare.gov.
We first interviewed Paul Stovell a few years back when he started a micro-ISV he was calling "Octopus Deploy." Now it's a fully formed and successful company whose flagship product Octopus Deploy is used all over. Damian Brady joins Scott and explains why deployment is more subtle then you think.
Patrik Svensson had an idea in 2014 for a build automation system that had C# at its heart. Fast-forward to 2016 and Cake Build has a thriving group of core contributors, a large group of "contrib" plugins, and it's joined the .NET Foundation. How does Cake work, and how does one build an open source project into a success?
Linda Liukas is a Finnish computer programmer, children's writer and programming instructor. In 2014, her Hello Ruby coding book for children raised $380,000 on Kickstarter becoming the platform's most highly funded children's book. She talks to Scott about how it all started and where teaching coding to kids is going!
Scott Anderson works at Funomena on Virtual Reality games. He's currently working on Luna, a unique tactile VR puzzle game. Do you need many thousands of dollars and a super-powered computer to experience VR? Scott Anderson gives us a tour from Google Cardboard to Oculus and beyond.
Luvvie Ajayi has been writing. She's been writing for YEARS. She has been blogging for 13 years! She's a noted humorist, techie, digital strategist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She's spoken all over (including The White House!) and taught classes worldwide. Today she joins Scott to talk about her brand, her tech, and her hilarious new book "I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual"
Jason Scott is the internet's historian and archivist. He is the creator and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. In 2011 he proposed that the MAME arcade emulator be ported to JavaScript and the next half decade changed how we think about old software and hardware on the internet.
Daphne Chong has had a great year. While she's been a professional developer for many years, this year she's organized user groups, spoken at a number of conferences, and generally pushed herself out of her comfort zone. How did she do it?
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?
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?
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!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?"
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?
