CTO Think Podcast

How do you get things back on track when everything from the engine to the caboose is falling off? We discuss steps to take when everything and anything is spiraling downward on a tech project.

After giving birth to her fourth child, and suffering a serious medical issue in the process, Bekah Hawrot Weigel coped by finding a new path in life as a software developer. We talk about how she joined Moms Can: Code, founded by Erica Peterson, and began a new career as both a mother and a developer. We discuss how she got started with Etherium, Solidity, and coaching other folks to follow her path.

We discuss the various types of stakeholders that a technology leader may need to deal as being part of a company or a particular product. We discuss the various motivations and communication techniques necessary across Executives, Investors, Regulators, Managers, Engineers, Current Users, and Potential Users.

We discuss the asynchronous nature of JavaScript, the old-person method of callbacks, the evolution to Promises, and then the shiny new car of Async/Await. We whine about the learning curve of all three approaches and try to figure out why so many blog posts teach it all wrong.

What are the considerations do you need to make regarding third-party services and software? We talk about relying on Github after the Microsoft purchase, using AWS or Firebase, and the world of JavaScript, Node, and NPM. And Randy talks about his pet peeve of co-located servers sitting under an upstairs office kitchen.

We yell at document datastores to get off our lawns! We talk about the joys of SQL and 50-year-old relational databases we grew up with, trying to make sense of why MongoDB, Firestore, and Dynamo are necessary, and Randy's unhealthy love for Materialized Views. In addition, Lotus 1-2-3 is a database, no matter what Don says.

We yell at document datastores to get off our lawns! We talk about the joys of SQL and 50-year-old relational databases we grew up with, trying to make sense of why MongoDB, Firestore, and Dynamo are necessary, and Randy's unhealthy love for Materialized Views. In addition, Lotus 1-2-3 is a database, no matter what Don says.

What are the considerations do you need to make regarding third-party services and software? We talk about relying on Github after the Microsoft purchase, using AWS or Firebase, and the world of JavaScript, Node, and NPM. And Randy talks about his pet peeve of co-located servers sitting under an upstairs office kitchen.

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 discuss our prototype of Chasms as it's used in the wild, successfully supporting a real business.