CTO Think Podcast

We speak with Griffin Caprio of Dante32 about his experiences building trust and psychological safety, accepting failure in a positive way, and creating a learning-based culture on teams from the top-down.

We talk about Alexa development, the strong developer ecosystem Amazon is investing for it, some of the privacy problems it's facing, and a few quips about Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Samsung.

We lament about the recent GDPR hullabaloo, our initial reactions to the new regulations, and how we approach projects that we don't have any business handling in the first place, but still fall onto our shoulders.

We talk about Firebase as a new backend tool for a few projects we're working on and cover many of its features, what is weird about it, and why this seems to be a product in which Google is making a big investment.

Hint: It's about the Person, er, people!

April Wensel started a company named Compassionate Coding, which aims to "humanize the tech industry." We discuss why she started the firm and how she goes about making the tech industry a better place to work. We also learn that using the term "soft skills" is not the right way to talk about the people side of things if you want to earn buy-in towards change.

In another installment related to the Chasms app, we discuss errors with the prototype, finding the right balance of customer/product fit, and the need to brainstorm without adding requirements to the ideas.

We talk about meetings, the negative vibe the tech industry has taken against them, how to best run meetings, or finding ways to communicate without wasting so much time.

Listen as Don and Randy begin a new side project together from problem/solution explanation, planning, and build approach. We aim to reduce the product scope and target a quicker launch of the prototype.

People (and ourselves) have been asking: Why are you all doing this? What is motivating you to podcast? In this episode, we discuss our motivations for podcasting, our side projects, and why we're doing multiple challenges at the same time.

Would you hire Kanye West if he was a great programmer, despite his social media presence? This week, we talk about social media quality control, public personas, and the challenge of being inclusive while trying to maintain a steady team dynamic. We also somehow bring up Pink, Tim Tebow, and James Damore into the conversation.