In this episode, I talk to Felienne Hermans, who is an associate professor at the University of Leiden and researches how developers think and learn.

We talk about:
- why it is so hard to read and understand code,
- her book "The developer's brain",
- how we can learn easier to program,
- techniques to understand complex code quicker,
- how a shared vocabulary can help teams, not only during code reviews
- and her process to write a book developers will love.

How Programmers Think and Learn with Prof. Felienne Hermans

In this show, I open you the doors to companies and thought leaders around the world. With my guests, I discuss software engineering best practices and pitfalls, and how they strive to build software people love.

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Tech News

Podcasting

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Software How-To

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K-12

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Self-Improvement

In this episode, Abi Noda explains how to measure developer experience and why a good developer experience matters.
We also talk about:
What factors influence developer experience
What developer experience has to do with productivity, performance and even job retention
The SPACE framework, and how to use it to measure productivity

Measuring and improving developer experience

Luca Galante runs a vibrant and fast-growing community around platform engineering and today he shares with us why every organization should invest in a platform engineering team.

We also talk about:
- what is platform engineering
- the difference between platform engineering and DevOps
- what developer productivity has to do with platform engineering
- why self-service for developers is so important

From DevOps to Platform Engineering

Nadia Zhuk shares how to build a career as a self-taught programmer successfully. She learned to program all by herself and changed her career from being an English teacher to a full-stack developer.

We also talk about:
- teaching yourself programming
- starting your developer career as a self-taught developer
- getting your foot into tech
- changing your career by teaching yourself how to program
- moving countries and taking chances for a better life
- how feature flags are used at Intercom
- how mentoring, pair programming, code reviews, and also the concept of a buddy can help you ramp up your coding career.

From English teacher to dev in 9 month: A self-taught developer journey

Alexander Serebrenik gives us an overview of his exciting research on emotions and social aspects of software engineering.

We also talk about:

social aspects of software engineering,
what software productivity has to do with your emotions and how you feel,
problems such as confusion or frustration in code reviews,
how to give respectful, yet candid code review feedback, and
how ageism, sexism, and more lead to negative consequences such as drug abuse in software engineering.

Do code reviews frustrate developers?

Especially in recent years, several attacks on the software supply chain, like the SolarWinds attack or the ongoing Log4j vulnerability, made it clear that our complex software ecosystems are hard to understand and even harder to keep secure. The software bill of material aims at solving this problem. In this episode, Barak Brudo explains what a software bill of material is and why they are important for security and to reduce vulnerabilities. I also question if we are ever going to be able to reach a state where SBOMs are part of every software or library.

We also talk about:
- security and software regulations like the software bill of materials
- software license poisoning
- what to do when you face a security breach
- human engineering attacks like 2FA fatigue

How Programmers Think and Learn with Prof. Felienne Hermans

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