Poornima Vijayashanker was a founding engineer at Mint.com and now is building an education company called Femgineer. Her new book "Present! The Techie's Guide to Engaging an Audience" speaks to the importance of speaking up. Poornima talks to Scott about why speaking up and improving your communication skills can revitalize your career in tech.
Nov 13, 2015•31 min•Ep 501•Transcript available on Metacast Kyle Simpson, aka @getify, is the Curriculum Manager for MakerSquare and has created a series of books called You Don't Know JS. You can read the You Don't Know JS book series for free on GitHub, but we know you'll want to buy them after you hear this interview. Kyle sets Scott straight and explains why Scott doesn't know JavaScript. It's true, he really doesn't...at least not as well as he thought!
Nov 06, 2015•34 min•Ep 500•Transcript available on Metacast Monica Dinculescu works on Polymer and Chrome for Google. In this episode she teaches Scott all about Web Components and the Polymer Project. Are Web Components the future of the web, and why? Where does Polymer fit in, and what should YOU use if you are starting a project today?
Oct 30, 2015•32 min•Ep 499•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Matthew Cannon about the musical revolution that happened the eighties and early 90s in video game soundtracks. Matthew worked at Ocean Software and composed music for games like Navy Seals, Batman: The Movie, Elf, and many more. Matthew worked on C64, Amiga, SNES, Megadrive, and other systems. How did these systems work and what can they teach us about computing today?
Oct 23, 2015•32 min•Ep 498•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks with former Googler Kenton Varda about his startup Sandstorm.io. Sandstorm makes it easy to run and manage your own server by simplifying application deployment and security. How does it work and how does it relate to Docker? How is a "personal cloud" different from "a server under the stairs?"
Oct 16, 2015•33 min•Ep 497•Transcript available on Metacast There's lots of discussion around assistive technology on the web, but what about technologies that aren't all about the browser? There are a number of conditions that have made it easier to develop assistive technology (social media, crowdfunding, rapid prototyping tools,etc.) Scott talks to Sylvia Richardson, an accessibility coordinator for Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina about some of the many innovations in this space.
Oct 09, 2015•32 min•Ep 496•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks with coder, tinkerer, and occasional adjunct professor Dawn C Hayes about the intersection of physical computing and creating coding. As we write code more, we have to ask ourselves "but are we improving our world? The community? Our culture?" The advent of wearables, augmented games, and networked objects has the potential to take computing out of the garage and into the collective consciousness. Dawn teaches Scott about how these objects can combine with new thinking arou...
Oct 02, 2015•37 min•Ep 495•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Jet.com's Rachel Reese about how Jet uses F#, Azure, and lots more to scale to new heights. What's it like to build a massive system on a functional language? How does using .NET but NOT using C# change how you recruit?
Sep 25, 2015•34 min•Ep 494•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Jacob Krall from Fog Creek Software about how his team used the open source C# Roslyn compiler to bring their ancient VBScript-style language called "Wasabi" into the 21st century. They solved real-world problems in a systematic way with smart decisions and computer science.
Sep 18, 2015•32 min•Ep 493•Transcript available on Metacast Abby Covert is an independent Information Architect and also the President of the Information Architecture Institute. She's the author of "How to Make Sense of Any Mess" and spends her life trying to make the unclear be clear. In this episode, she explains the difference between UX and IA, and sets Scott straight about some common misconceptions about information architecture.
Sep 11, 2015•35 min•Ep 492•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Developer and Designer Catt Small from SoundCloud. When you're a designer AND a front-end developer, where does one half of your personality end and the other half begin? Should prototypes be written in JavaScript and HTML or in a visual prototyping application?
Sep 04, 2015•32 min•Ep 491•Transcript available on Metacast Kaya Thomas is an undergraduate in Computer Science at Dartmouth and is interning this summer at Intuit on the Mint iOS team. She's also a Code2040 fellow and has both a YouTube channel with tech tutorials and a book resource app called We Read Too in the iOS App Store. She and Scott talk about the difference between coding in school vs. the real world.
Aug 28, 2015•33 min•Ep 490•Transcript available on Metacast As open source thinking and open source software goes more mainstream, it heads to the Enterprise. What does that mean for a popular framework like node.js? What features does Node need to thrive in a larger company? Scott talks to NodeSource's Kevin Stewart to explore these questions.
Aug 21, 2015•36 min•Ep 489•Transcript available on Metacast PhD Candidate Omoju Miller is a Computer Scientist who is working to unlock the joys of Natural Language Processing as applied to rap lyrics. She is finishing her PhD in Computer Science Education and has big ideas about where the field should go. How should we change Computer Science 101 for the next generation of developers?
Aug 14, 2015•32 min•Ep 488•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Dominick Baier about identity on the web and in ASP.NET. Dominick and Brock Allen have a great series of open source products in the form of Identity Manager, Identity Server, and Identity Model. What does auth on today's web look like? How does Open ID Connect and OAuth work and how can you set it up in your websites today?
Aug 07, 2015•34 min•Ep 487•Transcript available on Metacast Adrienne Porter Felt, Ph.D. is a security and privacy researcher at Google. Her current focus is on designing and building usable security. Scott talks to her about how modern application platforms think about permissions, how users react to the "lock" icon, what we think about HTTPs, and much more!
Jul 31, 2015•34 min•Ep 486•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Johnson is a time nerd. He has contributed with the Noda Time project and is helping with making time, dates, and timezones easier to use with .NET and .NET Core. Most of what we think is intuitive about time, isn't!
Jul 24, 2015•32 min•Ep 485•Transcript available on Metacast Kishau Rogers is the Founder and CEO of Websmith Group. She's a twenty-year programming veteran. She talks to Scott about the importance of teaching "Systems Thinking" over just Learning to Code. How do our solutions change when we better understand how they fit into the big picture?
Jul 17, 2015•34 min•Ep 484•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to expert Windows debugger Mario Hewardt about what it takes to be a good debugger. How does the .NET managed heap and garbage collector work and when should you just let it do its job?
Jul 10, 2015•36 min•Ep 483•Transcript available on Metacast Scott sits down with Technical Project Manager and Conference Speaker Anjuan Simmons to talk about the rise of "Nerdland" and fan culture, the difficulties raised when Geeks marry Normals, and how we pass our fandom on to our kids.
Jul 03, 2015•34 min•Ep 482•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Tessel's Kelsey Breseman about the Tessel 2 and now this little $35 board makes making even more accessible! If you know JavaScript, you already know how to program a Tessel.
Jun 25, 2015•33 min•Ep 481•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to former Unity developer and current Githubber Andreia Gaita about Virtual Reality. Why is it so compelling? Why do we want so badly to live in "Snow Crash?" Andreia talks about her first experience in an Oculus Rift VR system and when she thinks off the shelf VR will be available.
Jun 19, 2015•38 min•Ep 480•Transcript available on Metacast Jono Bacon wrote the book on Community with "The Art of Community" and worked at Canonical on Ubuntu's community for years. Now he's headed to the XPRIZE organization to help build their community. How do you create a community around robots on the moon and tricoders?
Jun 12, 2015•37 min•Ep 479•Transcript available on Metacast This episode of Hanselminutiae LIVE 16 with Richard Campbell was recorded on Google Hangouts! You can check it out at Scott's YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/shanselman
Jun 05, 2015•37 min•Ep 478•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to web developer Sara Soueidan about the state of SVG on the web today. Is SVG mainstream and ready for you to use in your web apps today? Sara is the author of the Codrops CSS Reference, and a co-author of the Smashing Book #5 - a book that covers time-saving, practical techniques for crafting fast, maintainable, and scalable responsive websites.
May 29, 2015•37 min•Ep 477•Transcript available on Metacast Today we talk to Kassandra Perch from Bocoup about the state of node-based robotics and wearables in 2015. Back in episode 391, we talked to Raquel Vélez about controlling robots with Node.js. Nodebots have blown up and it's easier than ever to jump in and make your own!
May 22, 2015•36 min•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to accessibility advocate Steve Lee about today's accessible web. We've all added alt tags around images (or we should) but what does a modern AND accessible application require? Steve educates Scott on ARIA, WCAG, WAI and other TLAs (three letter acronyms) and gives us practical actionable advice on how we can make the web available to everyone.
May 15, 2015•37 min•Ep 475•Transcript available on Metacast Bletchley Park is where brilliant people worked tirelessly to break the German Enigma code, and others. More importantly, it wasn't just Alan Turing. In fact, thousands of people, 80 percent of them women, worked at Bletchley Park. Scott talks to Dr. Sue Black, who used social media to raise awareness of the current state of Bletchley Park and help return the site to solvency.
May 08, 2015•32 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast Scott talks to Dr. Matthew Tesch of Carnegie Mellon University about StaffPad, an new music notation application for Windows that he developed with composer David William Hearn. StaffPadd is for pen-and-touch based Windows 8 tablets like the Surface Pro and written largely in C#.
May 01, 2015•36 min•Ep 473•Transcript available on Metacast Akka.NET is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications on .NET & Mono. This community-driven port brings C# & F# developers the capabilities of the original Akka framework in Java/Scala. Scott talks to co-founder Aaron Stannard about the project, the Actor model, and distributed development in .NET.
Apr 23, 2015•34 min•Ep 472•Transcript available on Metacast