"Tok Tok! Tok! Is this thing still on?"

As you might have noticed, we took an extended break for a while and dealt with life and things.

In this episode the team is finally back in the recording studio (as always remotely...) to catch up with the audience and warm up for a new season of content.

This episode doesn't have a particular theme and we ended up chatting about our life changes and other news since the previous episode, including random tech topics like UPSs, backends and solar panels.

"Mathematics. Oh?" 

Yeah... math. Remember? That subject from back in school and/or uni that you loved or hated or maybe just got along with ok-ish. And mathematics for developers - what is this? This episode is actually Kai's fault. He clearly likes mathematics and even studied it full time at university.

We start as usual by going through a few things we've found online and talk about what we've been doing over the last few days and weeks. There's some exciting stuff in there, but you'll need to listen to the episode to get all these details.

We launch into the actual topic by talking about how we feel about mathematics and how we use it in our lives. That varies from day-to-day arithmetic up to work usage to solve some types of problems.

We talk about how you learn mathematics in school and how that progresses into university mathematics. One key component of enjoying mathematics and developing an interest in the topic seems to be teachers and their ways of knowledge transfer.

Learning mathematics at university seems to be a very different experience: Lectures on the blackboard, hard to follow and understand and totally geared towards an academic career and not towards practical applications.

But how do you learn math in a better way - or how do you get back into mathematics after some years of not using it? And how does that apply to development work?

One way of looking at mathematics can be by trying to identify building blocks after you have picked a practical application. Let's say you want to work on some piece of code to animate a 2- or 3D object.

Sure, you can just use a library. But if you want to understand the math behind it, you'd have to learn about rotation matrices. That leads you into having to understand a bit more about matrices and trigonometrical functions. Matrices are Linear Algebra, then there's some aspects of Geometry involved and functions are covered in Calculus. 

The interesting thing is that a lot of practical applications reduce to a limited amount of these building blocks. They act as reusable sets of knowledge that will help you to understand a variety of different topics across mathematics and computer science: Data Analysis, Machine Learning, Animations and more.

We have some resources for you to help you get going.

Video-based learning:

Khan Academy 

Domain of Science

Mathematics for Machine Learning

Data Mining with Weka

Tools and online communities:

GeoGebra Community

Wolfram Alpha

Paul Dawkins' Online Notes

Octave

R

TeX/LaTeX

Books:

Jeremy Kun - A programmer’s introduction to mathematics

John Stillwell - From Euclid to Goedel

In this episode we talk about mechanical keyboards. A lot. We love mechanical keyboards!

But before we get into the depths of how they work and why we like them so much, we introduce two new sections to our podcast: "Personal News" and "Community News". The first one should be self-explanatory and in the community news section we specifically want to talk about recent developments and news in the Android, Flutter and CFML communities - the places were we mostly hang out.

When we eventually launch into the topic, we start off by talking about different keyboard technologies: rubber domes and membranes, butterflies and scissors and the mighty mechanical switches. If you always wanted to know what the difference between blue, red or brown switches is, you will learn that - and some other things - today. We even recorded their sound for you! 

A big draw of mechanical keyboards is the huge range of options how you can customise them. Mechanical keyboards come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, from full size keyboard down to what's called a "40% keyboard". And did we mention that you can swap the key caps and make a keyboard truly yours? Yes, you can do that. And Lara has some experience with that to share! Also, it turns out that Lara learned how to property 10-finger-type at school. WOAW! 

Join us for fun and entertaining 84 mins talking about the joy of owning one or multiple mechanical keyboards!

Some of the links we mentioned in the episode:

In this episode we talk about CVs in tech with our friend Raquel Moss. She's is a software engineer from New Zealand, currently living in Krakow in Poland. She works for ConvertKit, mostly on web applications with Ruby and Javascript and is a very avid knitter.

The hiring process in the tech industry regularly gets pushed into the spotlight for inappropriate processes, inconsistent interview standards, whiteboard interviews or recruiters who only look for keywords in a CV without looking at the person behind the application. It's probably fair to say that these complaints are quite often being raised rightfully.

As part of her job, Raquel has seen quite a few CVs (she reckons about 1000 or so) and we obviously have been at either or even both sides of the table at some stage in our careers. So, we all have opinions and spent a bit of time discussing tech CVs the other day. We're pleased to share the outcome with you as Episode 13 of this podcast.

We cover a wide range of topics:

• Local/Regional variations of CVs

Last, but not least: Raquel's newest side-project launches this week. It's an email series on teaching developers better and more structured debugging. You should totally sign up for it!

In this fourth and final episode of our mini-series on public speaking we're covering the final few meters on your road to a successful first conference talk: creating your slide deck and delivering the talk itself.

We start with talking about the slides and how to create the content of your talk. There are a few fundamental rules such as avoiding walls of text and just reading everything that's on your slides. But outside these extreme situations, the content and structure of your slides depends a lot on your personal style and the content and type of the talk.

It also seems that slide decks have changed over time. 10-15 years ago you'd generally have seen more text-heavy slides at conferences because the audio and video recording of talks was less common so that slide decks were the only reference people could have a look at after the event.

We also talk about some of the common theme slides in a slide deck: Title, Agenda, About me and a closing slide. Which of them do you need? Which of them do we like or dislike in talks and most importantly: what should you put on them?

The second part of this episode is about actually doing the talk. Practice a lot, try to warm-up on the day and have fun. Well, there's more - but you need to listen to the episode to hear that.

Finally, here are all the links to the previous episodes of this mini-series in correct listening order:

1. Getting Started

In the third part of our mini-series on public speaking we're talking about coming up with an idea, a title and actually writing an abstract for your talk. The common problem first-time speakers and submitters face is: "Where do I even start?". 

It turns out that you don't necessarily start with a title. Often ideas are born out of some experience. You might have struggled with some tech, you might have learned a new framework or want to share something else you're passionate about. From an idea, sometimes you will progress to a working title. But don't worry: most likely it will change over the time you're spending on writing the abstract. Regardless, we have some general thoughts on titles like: try to avoid political slogans, swear words and titles that diminish other technology.

The abstract itself should ideally consist of some paragraphs of plain text. Miquel's approach is a 3 paragraph formula: 

1. Introduce a problem or the idea

We all agree that this is commonly a very good approach to structure your abstract. Obviously it still needs to adhere to the conference's requirements. A side-benefit is that going through a structured process like this is that you have a very good starting point for writing your talk, should it be accepted.

We close with a few additional tips on where and how you could get additional help and support with your first response to a Call For Papers.

In the the next (and last) episode of this mini-series you will learn about writing the talk and holding your presentation!

Here are all the links to the previous episodes of this mini-series in correct listening order:

1. Getting Started

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

This is the second part of our mini-series on public speaking and we're talking about the selection process. All three of us have been on both sides of the table. We've submitted talks to a lot of conferences ourselves, but we also have been part of the selection processes of tech conferences.

When it comes to being a speaker, we're covering the typical steps of a submission process. What is a call for papers (or proposals)? How do you deal with submission systems? What can and should you expect from an event and what are potential red flags? But we also want to raise awareness about what happens behind the scenes. It's important to understand the challenges around selecting talks and building an agenda from an organiser's or content committee's point of view. How do they operate and what are the typical ways a group of people tackles a pool of a few hundred talk submissions.

In the next (and probably last) episode of our mini-series we're going to look into the actual process of ideation around a talk and give you some tips for writing an abstract that hopefully gets accepted at the conference of your desire.

If you want to go back to the first episode of this mini-series, this is the link: Getting Started

Welcome back to Code Cafeteria. We decided to take a few weeks off, but are now back with a new episode. This week we're launching into a mini-series on public speaking and how to get into public speaking. This first of a couple of planned episodes around the topic is about how we got started, what appeals to us about preparing and delivering technical talks and some fundamental ideas that might help you to get out there yourself: 

• Your first talk doesn't have to be a 60 minutes slot at a global event - start with a local meetup.

For more ideas, listen to the episode...

Next time, we'll look into in more detail into deciding on a topic, coming up with an abstract for your idea and then submitting it to conference.

We're back from our Bunny Day break (to stay in Animal Crossing New Horizons lingo) and talked about (perceived) dead technologies.

We recorded this episode already about a week ago and it was due to me (Kai) stressing around giving a virtual conference talk and then getting on with life in general that it just is being published now, sorry for that, peeps!

Why did we decide to talk about what people perceived as dead tech? The topic got kind of triggered by the recent demand in COBOL developers due to a wide range of changes in countries' social security or tax systems all over the world. It turns out that many of these environments run on mainframe systems that were originally built in the 1960s-1980s.

After a brief look at the language we talk about the variety of risk environments organisations operate in. Consumer products get iterated over much more rapidly than bank or government systems dealing with fundamental societal infrastructure and that's part of the reason why we still find a lot of COBOL-based mainframe applications in these kind of organisations.

But there are many other technologies that are perceived dead. One of them is ColdFusion - a commercial web application back end platform (nowadays owned by Adobe), which is a very unusual business model for web app back end technology in 2020. Kai has, among other technologies, been using CFML (the language behind ColdFusion) since the late 1990s and Miguel talks about his personal recent experiences (the good AND the bad) with CFML. He was using Lucee though, an LGPL-based and open-source CFML spec implementation. CFML is certainly a niche language and has still a place for product development in certain environments.

From there we move on to talk about a bunch of other things: Prolog, Visual Basic and also about Java. Will Java ever be perceived dead? In Android-circles it certainly already is and nearly everyone has moved on to using Kotlin. But part of the problem there is that Android's supported Java version is Java 8, which actually lacks of lot of useful and expected features these days. 

Many things to consider and we hope you enjoy us talking about some of these considerations.

There's a new Nintendo Switch game that is keeping our minds busy in these difficult times. A game that couldn’t have come at a better time. Of course we are still talking about Animal Crossing! 

Today’s episode 7A is the second episode about this game. This time we tried doing something different though: We invited a whole lot of our friends that also play the game to an online meeting room and we had a bit of chat about their experiences with the game and cover some extra topics like the bunny day event, sharing an island or using Animal Crossing Amiibos and Amiibo cards.

So, we got together with:

Switch friend codes in round brackets.  

Jen talks about playing on the same island with her husband. Turns out that the first player on the island becomes responsible for everything the Nooks want to get done while the other players can happily do their own thing... :)

Diane and Nick introduce us to the concepts and the use of Animal Crossing Amiibo cards and Diane elaborates on her struggle to invite her favourite cat Rosie to the island. 

It was lots of fun for us getting together with our friends and we hope you enjoy this episode, too!

Also: if you were wondering what the Animal Crossing clown sheep character looks like...