Tech Done Right

TableXI offers training for developers and product teams! For more info, visit http://tablexi.com.workshops or email [email protected].

Brian P. Hogan: Editorial Manager for DigitalOcean, Author of Small, Sharp, Software Tools: Harness the Combinatoric Power of Command-Line Tools and Utilities, teacher, student, and musician. More info at bphogan.com.

Developers use a variety of tools other than their programming language to get their jobs done. This week, we talk about those tools with Brian Hogan, an Editorial Manager for DigitalOcean. Brian's a prolific technical educator, writer, and editor and he's currently the author of the book Small, Sharp, Software Tools from the Pragmatic Press. We talk about why command line tools in particular are important, what command line tools do well, and why some people including myself often find them opaque and confusing. We talk about our favorite tools and about customizing your workflow to fit your needs.

02:33 - Benefits to being comfortable on the Command Line Interface (CLI)

09:43 - Concepts that people struggle with and don’t internalize

11:13 - ‘awk’ and ‘sed’ defined

14:48 - The Ethos of Cargo Culting Information

20:02 - Reminding Yourself to Use Tools and Shortcuts

27:31 - Benefit to Setup/Cost Ratio

30:28 - Differences in Tools on Different Machines and Operating Systems

32:52 - Tools You Should Know Better

37:29 - Practice as Continuous Improvement

Special Guest: Brian Hogan.

TableXI offers training for developers and product teams! For more info, visit http://tablexi.com/workshops or email us at [email protected].

Jamey Hampton: Senior Software Dev at Agrilyst and panelist on Greater Than Code. Blogs at jamey-alea.com.

On this episode, we're talking about becoming a senior engineer. When you first become a senior engineer, you suddenly have new job responsibilities that aren't coding and they aren't management. It's not clear how to balance your time or evaluate your success. Our guest this week is Jamey Hampton, a panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast and a Senior Engineer at Agrilyst. We talk about how to handle the changing responsibilities and perspective that comes from being promoted even when you're still the same person that you were the previous week. We also talk specifically about hiring as a non-coding responsibility.

02:00 - Taking on New Responsibilities as a Senior Developer

07:20 - Evaluating Productivity

11:05 - Seeing Victory on an Abstract Level

17:26 - Client Meetings and Talking to Non-Technical Clients

23:21 - Hiring and Conducting Interviews

33:10 - Keeping Up With Coding and Other Skills

Special Guest: Jamey Hampton.

TableXI offers training for developers and product teams! For more info, email [email protected] or go to http://tablexi.com/workshops.

VM Brasseur: Open Source consultant, Vice President of Open Source Initiative, and Author of Forge Your Future with Open Source. vmbrasseur.com.

The Open Source world is large. It’s also complex and difficult to manage, especially for a novice. Our guest this week is VM Brasseur, who is the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative and the author of a new book from Pragmatic called Forge Your Future With Open Source. We talk how Open Source is different from free software, and how to get started in Open Source, how to pick a project, how to navigate a new project to make your first submission. We’ll also look at it from the other side, and talk about open source projects can make themselves more contributor-friendly. And we talk about the state of Open Source in general. We want to hear from you. What was your first open source experience like? Or, how do you handle new contributors on your project?

03:40 - Misconceptions Keeping People From Contributing to Free and Open Source Software

05:27 - Overcoming Impostor Syndrome

08:27 - Why Contribute to Open Source?

10:15 - What Project Do I Start With?

12:32 - Why NOT To Start With Documentation

14:24 - Getting Started With Your First Contribution

20:20 - Advice For Navigating the Open Source Community

22:40 - The Importance Codes of Conduct

24:44 - The Evolution of Open Source

35:29 - Join VM at the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference on November 9th & 10th!

36:33 - Advice For Maintainers Wanting to Make Projects Welcoming

Special Guest: VM Brasseur.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email [email protected] or see our offerings at http://tablexi.com/workshops.

The Table XI inclusive meeting Kickstarter is ongoing as this episode is released, see http://tablexi.com/kickstarter for more information.

Luisa M. Morales, luisam.com.

As many as 15 to 25 percent of your site’s potential users may have trouble accessing it due to some kind of disability. How can you design your site to allow your content to be usable by the widest variety of users? My guest today is Luisa Morales, an engineering fellow at the New York City Mayor’s office for Economic Opportunity. We talk about what accessibility means, how to design your site to be accessible, and what guidelines to use to help ensure success. We’ll also talk about a very literal form of accessibility — making your site behave in a way that it is accessible to users with limited bandwidth or older devices. We’d like to hear from you. What issues or successes have you had with accessibility? Let us know at techdoneright.io or on Twitter at @tech_done_right.

02:15 - Defining “Accessibility” and the Population Who May Be Affected

05:00 - What Web Devs Can Do To Makes Sites Accessible

07:30 - ARIA

09:55 - How Screen Readers Work

12:45 - How To Build in Accessibility

17:36 - Approaching Page Design

20:23 - Auditing Accessibility Issues

22:20 - Accessibility Based on Access

26:49 - Accessibility, JavaScript, Single-page Apps and Site Simulation

32:04 - Accessibility is for everyone: Reasons You Should Care

Special Guest: Luisa Morales.

The inclusion card deck discussed in this episode is now live on Kickstarter. Go to https://www.tablexi.com/kickstarter to get your deck.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, got to http://tablexi.com/workshops or email [email protected].

Today we are talking about meetings. Any group software activity is going to have meetings, and we’re going to talk about making them better, where by better we mean more interactive and able to get meaningful contributions from everybody without letting the loudest or most powerful voices dominate. My guests are Mark Rickmeier, the CEO of Table XI, and Katie Gore, of the communication coaching company SpeechIRL. As this podcast comes out, Table XI is running a Kickstarter for a new meeting tool that you can use to improve your meetings. We’ll talk about how we came to develop the tool, how we use it, and why we think it’s effective. We want to hear from you — what’s the problem with your meetings and how have you solved it? Let us know at techdoneright.io/48 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right

02:25 - What are the problems with meetings that we are trying to solve?

08:40 - Remote Meetings and Communication Styles and Tactics

13:28 - Creating Cards and Gamifying Meetings: “Wicked Meetings”

24:00 - What kinds of meetings do these work best at?

27:24 - Table XI’s Inclusion Card Kickstarter!

29:23 - How can people and companies get started implementing something like this?

Special Guests: Katie Gore and Mark Rickmeier.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email go to http://tablexi.com/workshops.

Mercedes Bernard: Senior Software Engineer at DevMynd. mercedesbernard.com.

How can your company empower your entry-level developers to grow their skills and advance their careers? If you are an entry-level developer, what are skills that are important for growth. Mercedes Bernard, a Senior Software Engineer at DevMynd, joins Tech Done Right to talk about empowering entry-level developers. We talk about giving people scaffolding to support them in owning larger and larger parts of a software process, and how to align your entire company to support growth.

02:15 - Misconceptions About What it Takes to Level Up and The Best Ways to Start Making That Journey

04:17 - On Being a “Domain Expert” or a “Sponsor”

07:52 - Job Switching, Career Advancement, and Promotion

13:48 - Determining Levels and Providing Support

20:17 - Scaffolding

21:59 - Entry-Level Struggles: Confidence and Time Management

27:55 - Mentorship

31:01 - Giving Support to Entry Level Teammates: Feedback

33:44 - Signs People Need Support

35:06 - The Importance of Hiring Junior Developers

Special Guest: Mercedes Bernard.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, visit http://tablexi.com/workshops.

What has changed in web development in the last 20 years, and what do those changes say about the next 20? I recently realized that Avdi Grimm, the head chef of Ruby Tapas, Sarah Mei, of Ruby Central and Salesforce, and I all began our professional careers within a couple of weeks of each other in August 1998. I wanted to talk to them about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. I was curious as to whether our different career paths led to similar observations. We talk about open source, agile, dynamic languages, distributed systems and how they’ve all changed or haven’t changed the developer’s experience.

02:19 - First Software Job Education and Experiences

09:25 - What has changed? What is easier/harder?

20:16 - What has changed in Product Management?

27:22 - Processor Speed

32:24 - What has stayed the same?

40:20 - Typed Languages

42:48 - What is going to change over the next 5-10 years?

Special Guests: Avdi Grimm and Sarah Mei.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email [email protected].

Nickolas Means | nickol.as | VP of Engineering at MuveHealth

How can you learn from an engineering team's failure? Can you take the examples of how others have dealt with engineering problems to improve your team's day-to-day operations. Our guest is Nickolas Means, a software manager at Muve Health, who is fascinated by engineering failures. We talk about what you can learn from studying disasters, how to create a company culture in calm times that will works smoothly in stressful times, and how a successful engineering team communicates using stories and how they handle mistakes. Along the way, we talk about the recent incident at the Seattle Airport, the CitiCorp building in Manhattan, Three Mile Island and other engineering and team missteps. We have, I hope, a successful show about failure.

02:12 - Learning From Engineering Team Failure

04:49 - Self-Reporting of Near Accidents

06:54 - First Story/Second Story

08:46 - How the Airline Worker Who Stole a Plane in Seattle Exposed a Security Risk

13:44 - The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper

16:33 - Focusing on Blamelessness and Building a Learning Culture on a Team

21:04 - Overpaging Engineering Teams

25:21 - Story Communication

29:44 - Helping Team Members Make Better Decisions

34:29 - How to Behave When Things Go Wrong

Special Guest: Nickolas Means.

Table XI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email [email protected] or go to http://www.tablexi.com/workshops

Katrina Owen: Blog | Katrina’s Talks

What's a good way to learn a new programming language that focuses on solving problems and not merely syntax? Katrina Owen is the creator of Exercism, a tool for getting beyond "hello world" in new programing languages. She is also the co-author of 99 Bottles of OOP, and the presenter of a number of outstanding technical talks. We start off by talking about Exercism, how it started, how it evolved and what it’s good at, and then we talk about how the process by which it evolved, and how Katrina learned to analyze the project more strategically, and how that strategic thinking has helped her in other parts of her life and career.

02:14 - Exercism

03:37 - Solving Programming Language Learning

06:15 - Redesigning Exercism: Conceptually and Logistically

17:41 - Exercism Language Communities

23:45 - Gaining Control of an Open Source Community/Project

27:37 - Strategy and Priority

32:54 - Strategy vs. Tactics

Special Guest: Katrina Owen.

TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email [email protected].

Ruby is great. But it's not the best tool for everything. On this episode, I talk to James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik. Both James and Steve have made substantial contributions to the Ruby and Rails community, and they now both spend lots of time using other languages. We talk about what makes Rust and Elixir interesting for Ruby developers to learn, what some other interesting languages might be.

01:48 - Moving Towards Other Programming Languages from Ruby: Why?

03:39 - Rust

17:54 - Other Cool Programming Languages for Rubyists

29:22 - Elixir

Special Guests: James Edward Gray II and Steve Klabnik.