Software Engineering Unlocked

In this episode, I talk to Jenn Creighton. Jenn is a Senior Staff Engineer at Apollo. Jenn specialized in frontend-end development is currently working on the open-source work for Apollo GraphQL.

She also is a frequent conference speaker, an authoritative voice in tech, and recently started her own podcast called single-threaded

We talk about:

- what a senior staff engineer does, and which responsibilities this title entail,

- why she needed to frequently change her job in order to advance her career,

- how gaslighting, bias, and being underrepresented, underpaid, undervalued is part of her decades-long experience as a developer

- and how she makes sure she is helping others to enter tech and have a better experience.

In this episode, I talk to Natalie Davis. Natalie is a recent Bootcamp graduate that managed to get hired quickly after graduating. She is vividly sharing her knowledge on Twitter and started to make real waves in the dev community within just one and a half years in tech.

We talk about:

- her experience at a developer Bootcamp, 

- how she managed to quickly get hired after graduating,

- how she keeps up with all the stuff she has to learn,

- how she decides to adopt best practices,

- and how to overcome rejections by staying positive and focusing on growth.

In this episode, I talk to Felienne Hermans, who is an associate professor at the University of Leiden and researches how developers think and learn.

We talk about:

- why it is so hard to read and understand code,

- her book "The developer's brain",

- how we can learn easier to program,

- techniques to understand complex code quicker,

- how a shared vocabulary can help teams, not only during code reviews

- and her process to write a book developers will love.

In this episode, I talk with Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security. Luta Security specializes in helping businesses and governments work with hackers and security researchers to better defend themselves from digital attacks. Katie is also an expert when it comes to bug bounty programs and how to successfully prepare organizations to implement a vulnerability disclosure program.

We talk about:

- vulnerability disclosure,

- the security challenges faced by military and government organizations,

- her entrepreneurial path,

- how to establish yourself as a hacker or security expert,

- and how to build security in your software development process.

In this episode, I talk to Alex Schladebeck, a testing expert, and a powerful voice in the tech community. Alex is the CEO of Bredex, a dev shop that offers tailor-made IT solutions but also specializes in quality assurance and testing.

A decade ago, Alex graduated in linguistic and came into tech by accident. So, I obviously have to ask her about her career transition, and testing.

What we talk about:

- transitioning into tech from a non-traditional background

- what it takes to get from an intern position to becoming the CEO

- which role testing plays at Bredex

- how mob or ensemble programming is used to facilitate learning

- how to lead remote software teams

In this episode, I talk to Nader Dabit. Nader is a web and mobile developer, who specializes in building cross-platform and cloud-enabled applications. Right now, he works at Amazon Web Services, where he develops features in the client team and improves developer experience. Before, he founded his own training company, specializing in React Native, and trained engineers from organizations such as Microsoft, Amazon, the US Army, and many more.

We talk about:

- how he managed to build a following on almost every popular social platform,

- how he got started with his own training company focusing on React Native

- what serverless means, and why you should care about it,

- how to build an MVP using a serverless-first mindset,

- and how frontend developers can leverage serverless technologies to become a full-stack developer.

In this episode, I talk to Tomasz Łakomy, a senior frontend engineer at OLX Group. Tomasz is fascinated about teaching everything he knows and has over 170 video tutorials.

We talk about:

- how they develop, test, and reviews software at OLX group,

- what war rooms are and how they help to combat technical debt,

- how he managed to create over 170 video tutorials about software engineering,

- why he is AWS certified as a front-end engineer, and

- how skydiving helped him to be a better software developer.

In this episode, I talk to Ben Lesh. Ben is a Senior Software engineer at Citadel Securities. Before that, Ben worked amongst other companies, at Google and Netflix. Ben is also the Project Lead for RxJS. RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences.

We talk about:

- how he got into several FAANG companies without a CS degree,

- the importance of building relationships, and an online brand,

- the benefits of being helpful and kind to others,

- the differences in engineering practices at Google, Netflix, and Citadel Securities, and

- what RX.js is and why you might need it.

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library.

Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React.

We talk about:

- Why you should not mock your software system during testing,

- how "testing library" helps create more meaningful and maintainable tests,

- if and how manual testing is still needed to increase your confidence in the software system.

In this episode, I talk to Diana Mounter, the Director of Design Infrastructure at GitHub. Diana traveled the world and lived in many different countries – even continents. She started as a print designer and spent some time in government before she got into web and design. Now, she leads the design systems at GitHub.

We talk about:

- what design systems are and why we need them,

- how GitHub deals with legacy code and refactoring,

- how the designer role interplays with other roles at GitHub,

- how and why designers do code reviews,

- and how GitHub strives for inclusive designs that make everyone feel like an expert.