Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast

When you think of Kubernetes or Docker, I bet empathy is not the first word that comes to mind. Today, I am joined by, Kelsey Hightower whose passion it is to bring empathy to work everyday and we talk about how to reframe our approach to building tools for humans, learning from the physical world, config management, containerization and more.

Kelsey earned his CompTIA A+ certification and began his career working at BellSouth installing DSL. He has worked at Puppet Labs, Monsoon Commerce (where he wrote his open source config management library Conf’d ), and currently he is a Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud.  He is a leading expert and advocate in Kubernetes and is known in the tech community as the explainer and chief of Kubernetes having spoken at many many conferences and even co-founding the Kubernetes-focused KubeCon conference. He is also a published co-author of the book Kubernetes: Up & Running.

He likes to say he is a SysAdmin who can code and a big part of his day is spent elevating people. Enjoy our conversation!

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

What is your tech stack of choice these days? Have you tried the HOWL stack? Do you have front end clients that are bloated, have huge bundle sizes and have complicated tooling? Are you having to write business logic on the server AND the front end? The HOWL stack might be just for you. The HOWL stack is Hypermedia On Whatever (backend) you’d Like.

Hypertext you say? Yeah you know like text displayed on a computer screen that has references to other text. Sound familiar? It should, the most popular way to view hypertext today is via the World Wide Web which is itself the canonical hypermedia system. Today we are joined by Carson Gross to discuss what Hypermedia systems are, concepts like Representational State Transfer (REST), Hypermedia As The Engine of Application State (HATEOS), and his library, HTMX, which is in direct response to how complicated web development has become.

Carson has been the software industry for over 20 years and has his Masters of Computer Science from Stanford. He started programming in grade school in Apple Basic and then, later, with HyperCard and has worked in many languages like Java, Ruby on Rails and Python. He is very active in the open source community responsible for projects like intercooler.js, hyperscript and the main library of discussion today, HTMX. He also teaches part time at Montana State University, is writing a book on Hypermedia systems, and currently runs his own software development shop, Big Sky Software, which finds hot, new industry trends and then builds the opposite of that.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

There are so many different types of career paths in the world of software, how do you know which path to take? Would you like wearing many hats (not just software), working for yourself and being exposed to lots of different types of tech? If so, maybe software consulting is the right path. In today’s episode we are joined by a React Native Mobile consultant who will answer questions like, how do you put yourself out there to become a consultant? How do I know I have the skills necessary? What skills should those be? And much more.

Our guest today, Matthew Holland is a long time friend of mine and just an all around stand up guy. We met in coding bootcamp at the University of Texas at Austin and immediately connected through our love for music. He is a big advocate for people experimenting and gaining experience through internships and hands-on experience and is currently a Senior React Native Mobile Consultant working for himself. Previously, he has worked as an engineer for companies like Sam’s Club, EverlyWell, and the Sumo Group. He has also helped to build mobile apps for companies such as Pella Corporation, Univision, and Downtowner.

He grew up playing classical piano and is now exploring the realms of jazz. When he is not helping teams solve their technical problems or playing piano he is often battling through a MADabolic workout class, learning to cook a new Thai dish, reading nonfiction, or traveling.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

The tech landscape is exploding with AI tools to help you automate all sorts of workflows like code completion with Github Copilot or personal assistants like Chat GPT. But what about if you are a content creator with hours of recorded video content, what tools exist for you? “Content is King” so you have to be putting out diverse content continuously. What if you had a tool that automagically creates blogs and tutorials from already recorded video? Well you are in luck because we have just the tool for you…enter Contenda. Today we have the dynamic, inspiring, multi hat wearing founder and CEO of Contenda to tell us all about how it works and ways it can help you automate your content pipeline.

Our guest, Lilly Chen, confounded the Colorado College Esports where her team won the first ever NCAA Division 3 championship and she built a retention product for twitch streamers at a hackathon that went viral and helped a Twitch streamer break a Guinness world record for most subscribers to a stream. She was a software engineer at Midgame building voice assistants for gaming which was acquired by Facebook, she has built machine learning infrastructure for Facebook Reality Labs, is a Member on the Board of Trustees at Colorado College and now runs an AI startup.

On paper her career trajectory might seem straightforward but she has had her share of adversity. Off paper her story is one of struggle, self reflection, perseverance, triumph and inspirational to all. From dropping out of high school, to becoming a Buddhist monk, to a college graduate, to a startup founder, our guest is trailblazing the AI world so hit play to hear her amazing journey.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

When you design and build a web application for scale, you need to make a lot of decisions and small details can add up to create massive impact. So when you build a web application how do you know what framework to use, which cloud provider to choose or database solution to use? Relational, Document, Graph? You may also need users to login to your site but how do you authenticate them? Do you use sessions, JWTs, or third party authentication? How do you scale and support millions of users?  We are joined today by an engineer whose passion it is to solve these exact questions and come up with solutions for designing scalable software systems.

Our guest today loves tinkering and building products from scratch. Growing up he was fascinated with Leonardo DaVinci and the machines he built, watching many history episodes on the topic. His love for software started over 10 years back when he took a web dev course on HTML, CSS and VB script where he built a website that helped others create websites, it was a “create your own website” type website. He went on to earn his degree in computer science from University of Pune in India. He started off as a UX engineer, after which he switched to exploring the Data Science domain for a brief period and slowly migrated to designing scalable systems for startups and other companies. Currently he is working as a Software Consultant at a company named Sahaj.ai

When our guest  is not designing software or architecting solutions he is traveling, reading, watching movies, playing soccer and cooking. He is a big foodie and his favorite meal to make is Biriyani (a rice dish). In his words he was born a nomad and wants to explore the world.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

As a developer have you ever worked on an API endpoint but you can’t easily find the documentation for the API to see how pieces work, or can’t find the specific sequence diagram on how your domains interact, or how about using some clunky outdated internal tool that you have to use to compile your code, well your user experience is suffering, more specifically your developer experience is poor. The term “developer experience” or DX is becoming more and more pervasive in the tech industry as companies realize how important it is for the success of their businesses. But what is DX you ask? Well, in today’s episode I am joined by a very special guest to answer that question and explore the realm of DX engineering and how you can help yourself and your team become more productive and build the experience you deserve.

Our guest today, Cassidy Williams, spreads the joy of tech through her contagious positivity and accessible content. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Iowa State University and is a startup advisor and investor and developer experience expert. Currently, she is the CTO at Contenda, an AI content generation platform. Previously, she was the Director of Developer Experience at Netlify and has also worked at a variety of large and small companies like Remote, React Training, CodePen, Amazon and Venmo.  She's active in the developer community, has given hundreds of talks around the world, and also co-hosts the Stack overflow podcast and The Dev Morning Show (at night) podcast. She is one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under.  She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be.

When Cassidy is not inspiring the next generation of coders she is playing music, singing karaoke, creating memes, building mechanical keyboards, and hanging out with her sister.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

TypeScript here, TypeScript there, everywhere a little TypeScript! Grab your cloak and wand and join us on this wizarding journey!! That’s right today’s episode is all things TypeScript. We dive into TypeScript and uncover its true power of catching errors early, running anywhere javascript does, and giving you type inference all with the help form a true master of the language. We also touch on different ways to think about imposter syndrome and ways to grow your audience as a content creator.

Our guest today, Matt Pocock, hails from the greater Oxford area in England and is an educator, content creator, software engineer and a Typescript Wizard. He has a Master of Arts in Practice of Voice and Singing from the Guildford School of Acting and was a public speaking coach and British Accent trainer prior to his software career. He has built a voice training app called VoiceHacker Accents available for Android and a VSCODE extension to help learn Typescript.  With his deep study of the English language it is no wonder he has taken to the deep study and teachings of TypeScript. He has held many developer jobs over the years and his most recent was as a developer advocate at Vercel (the company behind Next.js). Currently, he is a full time TypeScript instructor working on Total TypeScript, the most comprehensive TypeScript course available on the web.

When Matt is not teaching the world how to wield the TypeScript wand he is big football fan and playing board game

“Expecto patronum”!! Summon the Patronus Charm of hope and happiness and TypeScript here we come!!

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Fun phrases you may have heard and their American equivalent:

Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

How long does it take to get your code into the hands of your customers? Do you manually copy your files to a production server? If you answered longer than a day and yes then the code deployment product, Semaphore, is what you need. Today, we chat with, Marko Anastasov, the co-founder of Semaphore, a code integration and delivery platform, about the inception, creation, and his team’s learning journey building Semaphore. His story is riddled with encounters of monoliths and microservices, tales of building a learning culture, and reflections around the human factors in building tech products, like why do we make the technical decisions we make?

Marko is a product guy and a programmer guy and has been a maker since he was a kid. He earned a Masters of Science in computer science from University of Novi Sad in Serbia. Currently, he is a founding partner of Rendered Text, a remote Rails consulting shop and the co-founder of Semaphore. When Marko is not helping companies ship code faster, he is exercising and spending time with his wife and 4 year old daughter.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Production is down!! Faulty code was released!! Users are losing your trust by the second!! Ugh, how did this happen and how could this have been prevented? By writing the right tests! Today, Jedi test master, Kent C. Dodds, joins us as we discuss all things testing, from the types of tests in your tool belt, how to write the right tests, when to run them, tools you can and should use, and ways to ensure your tests are performant.

Kent is a world renowned speaker, educator, a beacon of inspiration in the tech community and has written an entire course focused solely on Testing Javascript. He graduated from BYU with a Master of Science in Information Systems, and has worked at companies like Domo, Alianza and PayPal. He is a Google Developer Expert and an instructor on egghead.io and Frontend Masters.  He is actively involved in the open source community as a maintainer of projects like Glamorous, Downshift and Testing Library, and is a contributor to hundreds of popular npm packages. Prior to his current role, he co-founded Remix and worked as the Director of Developer Experience. Presently, our guest is a Software Engineer Educator working for himself and working on what he calls his magnum opus - EpicReact.Dev.

When Kent is not teaching the world about software or spending time with his family he is cruising around on his onewheel or snowboarding.  Prepare to become a Jedi test master!!

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

In today’s digital world you must have an online presence to be effective. Not only a presence but a unified, beautiful, and fast user experience. How do companies achieve consistency across thousands of pages? How do different stakeholders across the organization gain visibility into the capabilities of a system? One way is through a single design system which essentially is a set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns. Today we are joined by a guest who has first hand experience at crafting such a system for the financial giant Intuit. Join us as we dive into the importance and complexities of building such systems, the journey of our guest and how she found  the role that straddles multiple worlds to bring unification across an organization.

Our guest today, Kelly Harrop, has held positions as both a designer and an engineer for companies like Intuit, Fossil, USAA and Tekzenit, giving her a unique perspective into the technical creation process. Her journey into tech is anything but ordinary, she has been a professional Guitar Hero player and a video game model. Currently, she is a Principal UX engineer at Intuit crafting design system solutions for complex frameworks.

When Kelly is not designing beautiful experiences and building usable systems she is playing video games including her current favorites, Overwatch and Elden Ring, and drinking cold brew.

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Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at [email protected]

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.