Social Engineering with James Lai

Our workstations are our de-facto tools of the trade. Yet many engineers spend little time investing in or improving their workstations. Having a great workstation can make you more productive, enjoy your time at your workstation, and even create connection with your peers. In this episode, I review what I prioritize in my workstation and the factors that are important to me for every piece so you can get a head start on making a fantastic workstation for yourself.

No one tends to think twice about their "company values". They tend to be meaningless words posted on the website or on a poster hung on the wall. They don't inform nor tell you anything about how your company operates. However, your company does actually have values, they're just not the ones they talk about, and knowing how to reveal those values and what they actually are can help us as engineers understand the tradeoffs we need to make, and how to be generally more successful in our organization.

Pull requests are something we'll make thousands of times in our careers, but it's easy for them to go off the rails. Problems can emerge from the code, to the review comments, to the very concept of the pull request itself, turning what should have been a moment of celebration into a moment of dread and frustration for all. In this episode, I detail an extensive list of strategies for both authors and reviewers to ensure everyone can have a good pull request.

Agile, when properly implemented, can be an exceedingly powerful philosophy on software development. But gone wrong, it can often hinder and harm more than it helps. In this episode, I discuss common agile implementation failures and pitfalls across a wide spectrum of concerns, and discuss what implementations of agile I have personally enjoyed and found effective.

Most companies proclaim to "be Agile", but what does that even mean? Are they? Is that a good thing? And what are all these other terms we hear about, like Scrum and Kanban? Are we Agile because we have standups and use Jira? In this episode, we take some time to understand what Agile actually is (and is not) so we have a solid foundation for fixing our Agile processes.

This is a bonus Event Loop episode keeping you in the loop regarding current events. Amazon just announced they are laying off around 14,000 employees. Was it due to AI? Does this represent the beginning of the end for our field? And how should we all respond around the industry?

Burnout is unfortunately something that happens to a lot of us in our industry, and it can be an absolutely debilitating experience. In this episode, I review what burnout is, warning signs of approaching burnout, what makes our industry specifically susceptible to it, and most importantly, I review a large variety of tips and strategies you can implement today to prevent burnout.

We are often tempted to rewrite software - who doesn't like a new greenfield project? With all the promise of cleaner code, architecture, and fixing every problem in the past, they can be tempting to recommend. But here, there be dragons. Rewrites are often not the right answer and represent a unreasonable risk to yourself, your team, and your business.

We are notoriously bad at software estimation, yet we will be asked to do it hundreds if not thousands of times in our careers. Why are we so inaccurate? Can software estimation ever be accurate? Are we just doing something wrong?

As engineers, we are often faced with the question if we should build or buy a piece of software. In this episode, I attempt to provide a framework for thinking about and ultimately answering this question.