Polyglot

Stephon Parker of Formstack talks to host, Aaron Bassett, about the difference between leadership and management, learning how to say no, the importance of maintaining creative connections with your team, and prioritizing your own mental health – ESPECIALLY now, more than ever, during the pandemic. 

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.

Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, JT Kaufman talks with host, Kirk Haines about why she loves working in Python, how portfolio building landed her a job while she’s still in school for software development, and why if she could wave a magic wand, she’d go back and do more work with a study group to get rid of the isolation and the lack of structure that can be an issue when learning on your own. 

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.

Thomas Powell, Senior Engineering Manager at Appriss Health, talks about learning seven languages in seven weeks and that each one opens the door for a deeper understanding of the possibilities in your home language if you have a primary language that you work with. 

Ruby is Thomas’s home language. He talks about what it is about Ruby that feels like home to him, why people should pay close attention to the communities they're cultivating, his vast experience in spoken languages, and his career path to working in a leadership position.

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.

In this episode, Damien Burke, software entrepreneur and creator of EarlyWords.io, Neverbust, and Neighborhood Council Management System, talks about how in working in so many different industries over the years, it all comes down to User Experience. It doesn't matter who you’re building software for, it needs to be clear on what it does, it needs to provide a benefit, and it needs to make it easy for users to see what that benefit is.

Damien also has an interesting definition of God Objects, which he shares with Relicans host Ali Finkelstein, and gives advice to engineers that he wishes somebody would have told him 20 years ago: write ugly code. Write the ugly code and then make it better. It's so much easier to make code better than it is to initially worry about writing good code.

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.

In this episode, Sarah Withee, senior software engineer, treasurer of the board of directors for Prototype PGH, and organizer of Code & Supply talks about Code Thesaurus: her polyglot developer reference tool and language reference cheat sheet that compares language components from languages you know and don't know.

Sarah also talks about approaching problems differently in different languages, right code vs. performant code, and the ineffectiveness of trash-talking and prematurely labeling things as “dead”.

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.

In this episode, developer and symmathecist, Jessica Kerr talks about how the beauty of being on a team means that you don't need to know everything as an individual, that you too can become an expert by declaring your intention to be an expert on a thing and then going and doing said thing, the importance of designing programming languages to make them easier for humans to use, the concept of symmathesy, and how getting better at learning is appreciating feeling stupid and appreciating being wrong in order to become ultimately wiser.

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at [email protected]. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.