Beyond Coding

After seeing the title, you might wonder: "What is MLOps?". That's also what I was thinking... But no worries, Roman and Julian explain exactly what it is! On top of that, we go over how to bring your machine learning model to production, the right way, and some of the challenges you might face along the way. 

This episode was recorded live in collaboration with GoDataFest: Festival of Data Technology, and Club Cloud: Global Cloud Festival!

Because it was recorded live, the intro is slightly different than what you're used to :)

Enjoy!

You might've heard of this new-ish kid on the block: Kotlin!

And like all programming languages, it's a tool to get the job done. There is no "right" pick, just pros and cons, and Kotlin is no exception. However, the pros of Kotlin certainly make it sound appealing. One of the main benefits that stood out to me from this conversation is very simple: code clarity.

If the use of Kotlin as a language creates clarity for the engineers and teams that use it, it's a very powerful tool that contributes to their productivity.

Enjoy!

Pull requests (PRs), the standard way to collaborate in codebases to ensure quality (among other things).. It turns out that they're actually slowing down software development. But how? 

Dragan explains how the problem lies in the way it's structured: it's asynchronous. There's a lot of time that passes before the code is merged, and the value is delivered. Large PRs are hard to review and course correct, and small PRs can introduce lots of context switches.

However there are ways around this, to have both speed and quality. These ways lie in co-creation: Pair and Mob programming

The idea of a "10x engineer" is popular in Silicon Valley and is used to refer to a rare engineer who can achieve 10 times more than an average developer.

We invited Chris Laffra on to discuss this idea, and as you might've guessed, it has to do with making other people more productive. But before doing that, you'll need to focus on your individual productivity and impact, and maximise that to a certain degree. 

Sounds interesting? Listen in to find out more!

PS: Chris gave me a copy of his book: Communication for Engineers, and in there he wrote: "To be happy, make other people happy".

As you might know, not every software engineer comes from a computer science background. But why is that?

Well.. if you want to learn how to program, there’s not a lot that’s stopping you. Especially nowadays, there’s a lot of content, or even courses and companies, that’ll help you along the way.

And as more and more jobs (or parts of jobs) get automated, it might be help to learn about how that automation works in the first place. Just like how we learned to do a lot of math before using a calculator.

Caught your interest? Listen in!

Today we talk about mentorship in tech. One of the best things about mentorship is that it's a clear win-win. It helps the mentee gain clarity on specific situations or career questions. And it helps the mentor in mastering active listening and giving non-biased advice.

Hope you like it! Enjoy :)

There's a lot going on over at bol.com, especially behind the scenes. Today Mirko van Ede (director of engineering) and Rogier Lommers (tech lead) join us to discuss one of their biggest ongoing projects: migrating to the cloud. 

Enjoy!

One of my favourite things as a software developer is interacting with the community. It's a community that's about learning, sharing, collaborating, and paying it forward. All you have to do to be part of it is to engage with other people.

Brian Vermeer is a person that has given back to the community so much so that he became Java champion. 

Enjoy!

It takes great skill to turn an idea into a product. Especially when you're starting from scratch.

Erwin did just that, and shares how he and his team built an app that could improve how kids are treated for anxiety. 

Enjoy!

One of the key takeaways from this conversation is that we should favour progress over perfection. Especially as software developers, perfection is something that'll never come. Instead we should focus on progression and let the fear of the unknown drive us forward. 

This is what drives Mahdi and how he got to his current position. He shares how he became tech lead, and what skills you should focus on to become one as well. 

Enjoy!