Summary

Ben Day, Pluralsight author and consultant talks about dev ops in the Microsoft world and how to introduce it in your organization.

Details

Dev ops will solve everything. definition is hard to pin down. Three questions, 1) how long from checkin to deployment, 2) what are the steps to get code deployed, 3) how much time is spent on production support issues. Why do we need dev ops. Who takes on the role of dev ops. What Microsoft offers. All the way from local dev to release. Do dev teams get dev ops members. People don't like change. Dev ops "levels of awesomeness". Seeing it really work. Continuous release with Microsoft, Ben's Pluralsight course, how quickly can we move code from dev to production.

Summary

Rachel Roumeliotis of O'Reilly Media spoke to me about technology and development trends for 2017.

Details

Who she is and what she does. Upcoming conferences, OSCON and Fluent. Rachel and I discuss tech trends for 2017: open source, the big players, can every company do it? Code is not the only value, customer lock-in. "All businesses are software businesses", how common is that perception, is dev over valued sometimes. "Infrastructure changes", very hard to keep up, big companies telling small companies that they are doing things wrong. "The year of AI", again; AI silos, no overarching system. Keeping the customer in mind when working with tech.

Summary

Michael Biercuk, director of the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney talks to me about quantum computing and the future it will lead to.

Details

Who he is, what he does. Quick overview of quantum computing. How traditional computers work, transistors, charge etc. Moore's law, transistor size, nanometer size, tunneling. When quantum effects start to cause problems. What problems can only quantum computing solve; quantum supremacy. Can quantum computing crack ssl certs; decoherence is the big problem and how to delay it; finding a catalyst for the Haber process. Why is quantum computing faster. Programming a quantum computer. Bits, qbits and 1 & 0 at same time ; if...else with qbits. Current state of the art, academic, industrial and small commercial/startup. What will unlocking quantum computing do for us; computing is advancing every field; if we get to 300 qbits! Michael thinks harnessing quantum computing will transform society.

Summary

Steve Ellmore, co-founder and president of Disbelief tells me that games are a collaborative effort and how game dev differs from other dev.

Details

Who he is. What he does. His first games was in BASIC. What Disbelief does. "A game is a piece of art that can move". Game dev is iterative and never the vision of one person, why it is thought to be that way. The visionary is more of a guide, deciding what to include and exclude. Hundreds of people involved. Using game engines. Prototyping, "made four games and shipped one". Avoiding "group think". Sequels are common, holding back features. Sharing ideas between devs and companies. What happens after prototyping - playing end to end, the doldrums, getting it back together, closing stages, technical debt, making a product. How long a game takes to make. Specialized work of Disbelief, frame rates, VR. Disbelief is hiring in Boston and Chicago.

Summary

Ben Day, Plualsight author, coach and trainer talks to me about real world agile and scrum.

Details

Who he is, what he does, Pluralsight, how long it takes to make a course; what agile and scrum are, agile is abstract, scrum is concrete; why daily standups are boring, shortening the cycle between dev and qa; Bryan doesn't think you need the meetings if the project is going well, Ben explains why you do; scrum masters should not be project managers, scrum masters are coaches, scrum masters are not leaders; Ben doesn't like the three common stand up questions; scrum should provide a framework; "multitasking is death"; people don't like being screamed at, how to deal with unrealistic expectations; software development vs software delivery; agile and scrum forget that people are involved, "Ben Day - Therapist for Teams"; it's all about people, leave ego out of it, Difficult Conversations; Ben's scrum courses on Pluralsight.

Summary

Mads Torgersen, program manager for C# at Microsoft, talks to me about the upcoming release of C# 7.

Details

Who he is, being the C# program manager; the favorite features he introduced as PM - linq and async, why linq was added, does the C# increment big features, was async as much of a success, complications are too well hidden, Stephen Toub blog; Mads won't tell me when C# 7 is coming out, new features, tuples + deconstruction, pattern matching; how Mads manages C#, boundaries and disagreements with other teams; who makes decisions – being a "reluctant dictator"; managing resources at Microsoft; Microsoft and the C# standards bodies, why have the standards when Microsoft can do what they want; C# and the open source community, drawbacks of open source; final notes.

Summary

Rachel Appel talks to me about accessibility and how a more accessible website makes a better website.

Details

Who she is, what she does; the Rachii; assistive technology, what they are, examples of tech; standards bodies; simple changes that help; why make a site more accessible, skip links, screen readers - NVDA, ads cause lots of problems; more easy changes that help; webaim.org; even more easy changes to a site; what to do if you can't change the site yourself, a11y.

Summary

Jimmy Bogard talks about AutoMapper, why and how he built, and recent performance improvements.

Details

Who he is, what he does; how AutoMapper started, what it is; projections, what that are, how they work, expression trees; early mistakes, inspired by Structure Map, performance problems, difficulties with projections, rewrite, how Jimmy uses AutoMapper vs how other people use it, learning from other mappers, improving performance, expression trees are hard to debug; upcoming conferences.

Summary

Samantha Stone, author and CMO of the Marketing Advisory Network talks me about tech product launches, marketing and sales.

Details

Who she is, what she does; her book; complex sales process, what it is and how it differs from a simple process; launching and positioning a tech product, going to market, don't build for the largest audience; engineers might not have the skills needed to target a product; how to prioritize the right product for development; focus on differentiation but pick the right ones, four steps; differences between sales and marketing, when to hire those roles, pivoting is not always a good thing, marketing comes before sales.

Summary

This is part two of my interview with Jon Skeet, we continue from part 1 with some more on C# before discussing the Google Cloud Platform.

Details

.Net Core; is C# Jon's second language? starting on Spectrum, BBC Micro, writing his own language, c, Java was first professional language, took up C# in 2001, "Java is not that bad a language"; Google Cloud Platform, what differentiates Google from the other cloud platforms, Jon aims to make the best c# libraries; Stackoverflow "this could be my next form of addiction"; listener questions - why so many languages; keep it simple when learning and learn one thing at time; how Jon divides his time, work life balance, "don't do anything you don't enjoy or believe to be beneficial to the world".