Software Engineering Unlocked

In this episode of the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast, hosted by Dr. McKayla, we delve into the critical aspects of code reviews in software development. Dr. McKayla returns to the airwaves to explore how interpersonal relationships influence the outcomes of code reviews. The discussion highlights that nearly 70% of developers feel that their relationship with reviewers affects the review process, impacting the rigor and tone of the feedback.

In this episode, Abi Noda explains how to measure developer experience and why a good developer experience matters.

We also talk about:

What factors influence developer experience

What developer experience has to do with productivity, performance and even job retention

The SPACE framework, and how to use it to measure productivity

Luca Galante runs a vibrant and fast-growing community around platform engineering and today he shares with us why every organization should invest in a platform engineering team.

We also talk about:

- what is platform engineering

- the difference between platform engineering and DevOps

- what developer productivity has to do with platform engineering

- why self-service for developers is so important

Nadia Zhuk shares how to build a career as a self-taught programmer successfully. She learned to program all by herself and changed her career from being an English teacher to a full-stack developer.

We also talk about:

- teaching yourself programming

- starting your developer career as a self-taught developer

- getting your foot into tech

- changing your career by teaching yourself how to program

- moving countries and taking chances for a better life

- how feature flags are used at Intercom

- how mentoring, pair programming, code reviews, and also the concept of a buddy can help you ramp up your coding career.

Alexander Serebrenik gives us an overview of his exciting research on emotions and social aspects of software engineering.

We also talk about:

social aspects of software engineering,

what software productivity has to do with your emotions and how you feel,

problems such as confusion or frustration in code reviews,

how to give respectful, yet candid code review feedback, and

how ageism, sexism, and more lead to negative consequences such as drug abuse in software engineering.

Especially in recent years, several attacks on the software supply chain, like the SolarWinds attack or the ongoing Log4j vulnerability, made it clear that our complex software ecosystems are hard to understand and even harder to keep secure. The software bill of material aims at solving this problem. In this episode, Barak Brudo explains what a software bill of material is and why they are important for security and to reduce vulnerabilities. I also question if we are ever going to be able to reach a state where SBOMs are part of every software or library.

We also talk about:

- security and software regulations like the software bill of materials

- software license poisoning

- what to do when you face a security breach

- human engineering attacks like 2FA fatigue

Heather Reid shares her difficult job search journey and how she overcame self-doubt and kept trying until she found the perfect job. Although Heather had been active in the testing community for over a decade, when she was searching for her newest role, she heard ‌she wasn’t a tester and that she had been gone too long gone.

We also talk about:

- bad interview experiences

- why she was seen as "too long gone" in testing

- how to handle job rejections

- how she proved everyone that rejected her during job interviews wrong

- advice for job seekers and people interviewing in tech.

Let's revisit the top 5 interviews in 2022, which gives us all the opportunity to listen to some episodes you might have already forgotten or missed.

Episode Chapters:

0:00 Intro

01:21 Making money with open source

09:08 Profitable small bets

24:15 Career growth and mindset

35:12 Writing tests that find bugs

45:15 Drawbacks of being an engineering manager

55:50 Wrap-up and support the podcast

57:25 Closing song

Michael Lynch shares what he learned by writing code at Microsoft and Google, and how that differs from the software practices that he embraces in his own software company.

We also talk about:

- what is the root cause when code reviews are evil

- how to establish a great code review practice

- software engineering practices at Google and Microsoft,

- how to balance code quality, time to market, and paying back technical debt

- writing software as a bootstrapped business

- his lessons learned building tiny pilot, including scaling customer support, software testing.

Lauren Peate shares how engineering metrics can be ethical with Multitudes.

We also talk about:

- what are ethical developer metrics?

- how to best measure developer productivity?

- ensuring engineering metrics can not be misused

- do developer metrics lead to gaming the system?

- how can DORA metrics be used to improve team performance?