CTO Think Podcast

Randy is about to start a new job and has a number of opinions about the job search, hiring, negotiation process he recently went through. Don tries to play Devil's Advocate as the employer/hiring side, but Randy's not hearing any of it! Don uses coconuts as the example of currency and Randy somehow manages to quadruple the asking price for labor in the Hawaiian produce marketplace Don tried to set up.

Randy and Megan recently worked on a Single Page App and Megan learned how to use Cypress for integration/acceptance testing. Don and Randy discuss how Cypress works vs the old stalwarts, like Selenium. Automated testing for the win!

The show begins discussing setting up a product roadmap for AspirEdu, but things devolve when Don mentions he is considering swapping Wordpress for the marketing website with a static site builder. Randy thinks adding more developer dependencies is a bad idea and coins the term "Free-time Driven Development" (tm) and can't wait to make T-Shirts and Medium posts promoting the brand.

Don and Randy discuss the "New Microsoft" and how a change in leadership has led to a completely different experience with one of the largest technology firms in the World. We also take a road trip back to the early days of developing on the MS platform and laugh about how badly Steve Ballmer did with predicting the future. Bonus: Clippy gets a mention!

We have an exceptional guest for our 50th episode in Jess Szmajda, CTO of Axios, and we cover a whole lotta ground:

From building "horrible PHP sites", to constructing retail tech teams from scratch, we then tackle the subject of taking on the role of CTO of a fast-growing media firm, being a trans CTO, and promoting a more diverse community in technology. Whew!

We start out discussing the difference between a CTO and Director/VP of Engineering, title creep, and whether the idea of a "software architect" has any relevance at all. We then cover wider ground with managing small vs large teams, the adoption of Spotify squads/pods in team management, and adding new business (TV) that is vastly different than the core company product (online publishing).

The subject matter covers a vast amount of ground, but it's all valuable in today's tech community.

Don and Randy discuss the latest installment of the Chasms app saga. Don heads out to Denver for a sales conference loaded with potential customers of the Chasms text-to-chat system, but finds no takers. Further research finds a well-funded competitor, named after a dubious fruit. Is the Chasms project dead on arrival?

This week we review an old, but good, blog post by Andy Skipper named "Looking at the life of the CTO through the stages." We discuss our own experiences across these stages and the ones we haven't reached, yet. Randy also continues his rant on tech developer/manager hiring practices, so no surprise there!

After years of testing with Ruby on Rails and rspec, Randy never had quite the flow with testing on the JavaScript and Node side of things... until now. We discuss the value of testing with Node, Express, and in the context of Firebase Functions and why Randy is happier with TDD, or at least, Test Something, Sometime, Somehow development.

Over the past two decades of working in tech, the use of Continuous Integration (or CI) has become a mainstream approach to product development. Randy and Don discuss the systems they used before (or lack thereof), what they use now, and why Continuous Integration meets the hype.

Randy is working with a client that uses Pantheon for Drupal hosting and he loves the tools. After spending a good decade using cPanel on cheap hosts, the stability that WPEngine and Pantheon gives PHP developers the best hosting options around. The conversation moves into discussion of Heroku, as well.