CTO Think Podcast

When a CTO is juggling multiple responsibilities, people, and projects, what is the best use of their time? Randy, once again, tells Don to put down the keyboard and quit coding stuff!

This week, we shall rant! The term "Clean Code" is a vague and irresponsible phrase to use regarding programming and Randy will have nothing of it. It's time Uncle Bob's cute money-making catch phrase was put to pasture.

In honor of the second week of the college football season, Randy and Don discuss three programs, UCLA, Tennessee, and FSU, falling into disaster scenarios and compare each with CTO failures at technology firms. We keep the football/sportsball strategy discussion to a minimum, but we do eventually call out Tennessee as the "Steve Ballmer" of college football schools. Go Rocky Top?

Following a tweet from Ben Hong @bencodezen about whether people need to master JavaScript before using a framework, Don and Randy discuss how they have used, shipped, and been paid to use framework and applications many times without knowing the base language beforehand.

A recent blog post by Philip Thomas of Moonlight titled "Startups Should Not Hire a CTO" sparked a conversation about why blanket statements like "Startups Should Not Do X" that are clickbait and should probably be avoided as good advice. Instead, we discuss letting your needs to drive your hires, instead, and the kinds of people you probably do want to hire to lead technical efforts. Randy's cats don't like anything about the recording, in addition to the article.

Don and Randy discuss the changes that ageing has on their development skills and focus, how to combat it (or adapt to it), and stay somewhat off the "old person joke" train... sort of.

With hacking stories dropping on a seemingly daily basis, the question keeps coming up about application security: Should you build your own user authentication or use an external service? This week, Don and Randy discuss the Buy vs Build debate around auth, and whether the high costs of outsourcing outweigh the high risks of rolling your own.

Randy reacts to a Tweetstorm about Lambda School using his former experiences as a bootcamp teacher to add some perspective

Randy starts his new position and Go (or Golang) is one of the main languages used there. He reviews what he's learned so far and what's ahead.

In reaction to a Twitterstorm about the concept of a 10x engineer being important for any startup, we discuss the downfalls of such a thing and what positives exist.