Software Engineering Unlocked

What does it take to foster a workplace culture where employees, specifically coders, have the

liberty to learn without feeling punished for it by the system? Innovation is impossible without

failure, but most work cultures suffocate creativity without realizing it.

We talk about:

- how she deviated away from a traditional path of a researcher to start her company, Catharsis Consulting,

- how to foster a learning culture within your engineering team

- what learning debt is and

- how learning debt hinders software engineering teams from reaching their full potential.

In this episode, I talk to Bekah Weigel, who runs the virtual coffee community about community building.

Bekah graduated from a Bootcamp in 2019 and quickly created a striving and very special developer community in just under two years.

We talk about:

- how she kick-started the developer community virtual coffee

- what it takes to run the community

- how sponsorships make it possible to be sustainable, and

- how community members take over a large part of running the community.

Daniel Vassallo left his cushy job at Amazon, where he made over half a million per year, to start his own business.

We talk about:

- anxiety when start-up attempts do not work out as planned

- how he overcame failure

- his strategy of small bets to reduce uncertainty

- and all the little products that provide him with an average of 23K USD of profit per month.

Alvaro Trigo is a web developer who could quit his full-time job due to his popular open-source software FullPage.js.

We talk about:

- how to use open source to make a living

- how long it took him to build software people want to buy

- what he does against fraud

- and his advice for developers that also want to go independent with open-source software.

Let’s look at some research studies together to see whether “happy developers are more productive”. I will let you know my take on it, and how it relates to the study I did on developer experience.

We talk about:

- whether happy developers are more productive

- what makes developers happier at work

- with which negative consequences do you have to reckon if developers are unhappy

- and what are the most important factors that make developers more satisfied at work.

Dr. Mauricio Aniche explains how developers can write tests that find bugs. Writing effective test cases that bring confidence is not that easy. Many developers are familiar with testing frameworks and regularly write automated software tests. Yet, often they don’t test systematically. That’s why Mauricio writes a book called “Effective Software Testing” which shows practical approaches to systematically test software. You can win a digital copy of the Effective Software Testing book, when you like and retweet this episode’s link, which you can find here.

We talk about:

- the difference between effective and not effective test cases,

- how domain-based testing helps to write good test cases,

- how you can use coverage reports to get an idea of which scenarios you haven’t tested yet,

- and how to write testable and maintainable code.

Learn how crystal clear engineering values can help you and your team to build a strong engineering culture.

We deep dive into why well-defined, explicit engineering values are a competitive advantage for your engineer teams.

We will also look at how engineering values:

- help everyone to make decisions that are aligned with your company goals and values;

- how they help newcomers understand what your team expects from them;

- and how they help potential candidates to evaluate whether they would strive in your engineering team.

But knowing your engineering core values form also the basis for being able to answer the hard questions every engineering team should ask themselves, like:

- what does high-quality code mean to us,

- how much testing do we need,

- or when is a code change ready for release?

Dr. Storey explains how to best use the SPACE framework to measure the productivity of software engineering teams. Dr. Storey is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria and a distinguished expert in empirical software engineering.

We talk about:

- Productivity metrics for software developer

- Developer experience as a different mindset to improve developer performance

- The SPACE framework, which focuses on giving a well-rounded understanding of developer productivity.

In this special episode (50th) I’ll tell you a bit about the research on developer experience and developer productivity that kept me so busy this year.

You will learn about:

- some history of productivity-focused thinking

- new productivity research like the Space Framework that helps understand and measure developer productivity

- the difference to the Developer Experience framework that I co-created

- why (IMHO) metrics and a productivity-driven mindset can be problematic for your culture and long-term success

- and what you should focus on instead.

In this episode, I talk to Florin Pop. Florin is a web developer that started building websites in 2013 and worked many years as a successful freelancer. I know Florin from his super-popular YouTube channel and his funny and inspiring Twitter stream. In this episode, he explains how content creation became a lucrative career path for him.

We talk about:

- how he turned from developing software as a freelancer to a successful content creator

- his recipe of success through failure and smart goals (e.g. specific and measurable goals)

- his journey to more than 100K YouTube followers.