hexdevs

Learn how to develop a habit of learning in public, writing daily, and helping your audience. Chris Bongers has been sharing software development tips every day for the past 250 days on his blog Daily Dev Tips and on twitter.

Here's what we talked about:

• How Chris got started with writing
• How he wrote more than 250 articles during lockdown
• Which daily tips were the most popular
• How he comes up with ideas for Daily Dev Tips. Spoiler alert: by working in public, he gets lots of suggestions from his followers. Win-win!
• The benefits of learning in public and writing every day for Daily Dev Tips
• How he manages his energy levels and productivity, and avoids burnout
• What helped him grow his audience
• SEO and blogging tips for beginners
• Where should you share your blog posts: on Hashnode or dev.to?
• How hiking is the best activity for writers

Thanks to our sponsors:

• VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!

Links:

• Daily Dev Tips
• Chris Bongers on Twitter
• Blogging for Devs Community
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Visit the hexdevs blog

Dmitrii Pashtuskii is a digital nomad living in Bali, and recently quit his job so he could travel and build a business.

This episode will be a little different: Dimitrii will be asking us questions about moving to Canada because he wants to apply for a visa very soon. In a future episode we will talk more about his projects and the life of a digital nomad.

If you ever wanted to move to Canada, this is the time. Canada is planning on bringing more than 1 million immigrants in the next 3 years!

We thought it would be the great opportunity for us to share our story and help others. We are also thinking of writing a short guide with more information, documents and resources we used in our visa process. In case you are interested, you can sign up for the wait list.

Here's what we discussed:

• Why we moved to Vancouver, Canada
• How VanHack helped Thiago get a job in Canada
• Why Dmitrii is planning to get a visa and settle down in Canada after living the nomad life
• How long did it take us to get our Permanent Residency through the BCPNP program
• How Express Entry works
• The tech community in Vancouver
• Life in Vancouver: Are people friendly? Is it easy to make new friends?
• Getting a Canadian Citizenship

Follow our podcast and sign up for our newsletter to get updates when we launch new episodes.

Thanks to our sponsors:

• VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!

Links from this episode:

• Moving to Canada -  A guide for developers to move to Canada - join the wait list if you're interested :)
• Dmitrii's Twitter
• 12xstartup.com
• Learning Story - The community for people who learn in public
• Global Skills Strategy Visa
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Visit the hexdevs blog

Does that ring a bell?

Our guest, Raymond Huang, told us how Shape Up helped his team get the right balance between long term and short-term planning and deliver better software.

As a developer, you know that estimates are hard, and you can't know everything ahead of time while planning. You also know that some of the 'agile' tools are not really helping. You've tried Scrum, but you are doing Kanban instead. The team struggles to ship and misses the deadline and we see all the failed goals on the sprint chart. Shape Up was written to help with that problem.

Shape Up is the latest book from Basecamp. It's a guide on how they do Product Strategy.

In this episode, we learned how Raymond applied the ideas from Shape Up at Unbounce.

We asked questions such as:

• Would Shape Up work in my company?
• How do I convince my team to try it?
• How to start adopting Shape Up?
• Do I need to follow all the steps described in the book?
• If I had to choose only one takeaway from Shape Up, which one would it be?
• How do I shape a cycle?
• Will I finally get rid of my team's Tech Debt Backlog?

If you enjoyed this episode, let Raymond now. Don't forget to follow our podcast and sign up for our newsletter to get updates when we launch new episodes.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!

Links from this episode:

Raymond Huang Linkedin

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Check out our new website. We have a blog now!

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!

Kenny is an expert in product-market fit and market validation and has been mentoring startup founders for many, many years.
 
After creating his own startup, raising money, building a product, launching it and seeing it fail because of a lack of product-market fit, Kenny spent loads of energy trying to reflect on those mistakes so he could understand the causes of startup failure and the tactical and strategic frameworks and practices that will improve the chances of business success.

He identified very common types of cognitive biases that early-stage founders will face, such as a lack of product-market fit, false positives, and not knowing what problem you're trying to solve or who you're trying to help. These things lead to errors of judgment that will surely kill a startup.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to act like a scientist/private investigator, find the right problems, experiment and learn from customers before you write any line of code or build anything. This will improve your chances of being a successful startup founder.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Kenny MacKenzie on Linkedin
Find Better Problems Worth Solving - Ash Maurya
The Mom Test Book - Rob Fitzpatrick
The Value Proposition Canvas - strategyzer
Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice - Anthony Ulwick
Outcome Driven Innovation - Anthony Ulwick
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!

This is the second part of our interview with Fabiano where we talk about his new job in Munich - Germany, and also about the visa process, working in Europe, and the challenges he's facing now, like learning the German language.

Fabiano decided to move abroad after being the CTO of Magnetis for many years. He now works as a Senior Fullstack Engineer for Shore -  the leading provider of cloud-based business solutions for small and medium-sized companies.

He gave some tips for people who want to find a job and move to Germany, and talked about his new life in Munich.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to tell Fabiano about it. We are sure he would love to hear from our listeners. And if you want to move to Germany to work with Fabiano, Shore is hiring, so check out this episode to learn more about their relocation package and their engineering culture.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Fabiano's Twitter

Fabiano Beselga is our first guest for 2020!

He co-founded Magnetis, one of the most successful fintech startups in Brazil, and served as the CTO for over 7 years. Magnetis is a robot advisor startup who grew 200% every year over the past few years, and now has more than 10 thousand clients, USD$90M under management and 90 people on the team. Widely recognized as one of the best places to work, Magnetis is a great example of a company that successfully adopted a remote work culture.

Fabiano built the engineering team from scratch and all the processes and culture around it, making sure to create a diverse team composed of people coming from different backgrounds and having different levels of experience. We talked about creating and managing a fast-growing team while also scaling the business and driving innovation. He always believed that establishing a good culture would lead to a great team and a great product, and the success of his team is a reflection of that. He also thinks that CTOs should focus on building the culture from the start.

If you want to become a C-Level executive or become a better leader, check out this episode. Fabiano shared a lot of great advice on how to make sure you are giving the support your team needs and how to establish good practices, deliver better products, and how to hire well.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Fabiano's Twitter
Smart and Getting Things Done
Magnetis Backstage Blog
Guru-SP Meetup

This short episode contains a couple of special notes. We just wanted to thank you for all your support this year! We hope we can continue learning together in 2020. Happy Holidays!

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!

Amed Rodriguez is a Senior Software Engineer who has extensive experience with lean startup and has developed software for many startups in San Francisco. He is originally from Mexico and is now living in Vancouver.

After leading a Lean Startup product development company for many years, he co-founded a startup in the health sector which got an interview with Y-Combinator (W15). After not getting accepted into YC, he started working as an engineer for companies in the Bay Area.

We talked about his experience of trying to get a work permit to be able to live in the US, and why he eventually decided to immigrate to Canada instead. He also shared some tips on how to get more startup clients and projects when you're working as a freelancer and how he's found jobs in the US and Canada.

We also talked about the main differences between living and working as a developer in Monterrey,  San Francisco and Vancouver, and the challenges of working onsite after many years of remote work.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Amed's Linkedin
Lendesk is hiring in Vancouver, BC!

Have you ever thought about contributing to open-source projects but don't know where to start or which project to choose? Gui Vieira has been the maintainer of the popular 'shoulda-matchers' gem since 2017.

We talked about the job of being an open-source maintainer. not only that, but we also discussed TDD, as well as his entrepreneurship journey in the past, and the process of moving to Canada.

Thanks to our sponsors:

VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.

Links from this episode

Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
shoulda-matchers gem
Open Source Friday
Lendesk is hiring in Vancouver, BC!