Tech Done Right

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Nadia Odunayo, nadiaodunayo.com, Co-host of Ruby Book Club, director at Ignition Works.

Do you have interactions with co-workers where one or both of you get angry and defensive, and everybody ends up frustrated? Today we talk to Nadia Odunayo about "Nonviolent Communication", a way to communicate that honestly addresses issues, explaining how you feel without harming the other person, and getting everybody to the point where they feel better about the situation and have a clear path to move forward. Nadia gives examples of how she uses nonviolent communication in her day-to-day life, and she tries to coach me to improve my own skills. By focusing on communication your needs and not assuming anything about others, you can make difficult discussions less difficult.

01:47 - Nonviolent Communication

03:16 - A Concrete Example of Violent and Nonviolent Communication: A Code Review

07:08 - How should a manager communicate nonviolently?

11:01 - Judging and Assuming People’s Character Subconsciously

18:11 - How has nonviolent communication affected your day-to-day interactions?

24:14 - Self-Empathy: Being Non-Violent with Yourself

28:32 - Transparency and Vulnerability

32:15 - Nonviolent Communication and Being Nice/Kind

36:17 - Screaming Nonviolently

Special Guest: Nadia Odunayo.

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Betsy Haibel or betsyhaibel.com, co-founder of Cohere

Any profession that requires you to hit a budget and a deadline while balancing the project vision with practical logistics has a lot to say to software architects and project managers. Betsy Haibel was a professional theatrical set designer before becoming a software developer and architect, and we talk about how set design is like and not like software design. Not only do we talk about favorite shows, we also give you practical advice for designing your project.

01:24 - Creative Work as a Set Designer and it’s Relation to Software Architecture

11:13 - Software Architecture Metaphors

15:11 - Approaching Software Design as Set Design

17:22 - Designing For Flexibility/Keeping Design Open

27:13 - Scalability in a Smaller vs Larger Environments

30:44 - Communication

36:12 - Approaching Purity and Reality

Special Guest: Betsy Haibel.

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How do people learn computing? Who learns best from traditional computer science education and who from bootcamps? How can we teach people who are not developers but who need to learn some programming to do their jobs? Jeff Casimir, the founder of Turing academy, and Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial, one of the founders of the International Computing Education Research conference, join Noel to answer these questions and also explain why Excel is both the best and the worst thing in the world.

01:45 - “Computing Education”

05:27 - Teaching Developers at The Turing School

09:53 - Measuring the Quality of Education

14:05 - The Graduation Rate of Women and Underrepresented Groups

16:19 - Skills Acquisition

20:20 - Why not Fix Traditional Computer Science?

24:05 - Computing and Contextualized Computer Education

41:00 - Why Do Bootcamps Close?

46:11 - Success Rates Between People Who Have Had a Career First vs People Who Skip College and Enter Bootcamps

Special Guests: Jeff Casimir and Mark Guzdial.

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How do professional JavaScript programmers choose new tools or evaluate frameworks? What are the most important concepts in JavaScript development these days? This panel discussion was recorded live on Aug 24, 2017 with Zach Briggs, Trek Glowacki, Melanie Sumner, and Marques Woodson. Learn about their biggest JavaScript career battles and what resources they use to keep up to date.

01:29 - Introductions & Getting Started in JavaScript + Frontend Tools Used

03:51 - Pros of Working in JavaScript

06:09 - Components and Isolation

13:30 - State Management

21:55 - Dealing with JavaScript Churn and Choosing New Tools

31:22 - JavaScript Design and Style; HTML & CSS Fundamentals

34:58 - What is exciting right now? What is up and coming? What do we need to focus on in JavaScript?

42:00 - WebAssembly

43:12 - What does “Functional” mean?

46:56 - Are there libraries that auto generate forms based on a Rust data model?

47:31 - What’s the biggest fight you got in over JavaScript?

53:56 - Is the State Management Pattern settled as a one-object God object store or per component?

57:31 - What do you like to pair frontend JavaScript with on the backend?

59:53 - Resources to Keep Sharp

Special Guests: Marques Woodson, Melanie Sumner, Trek Glowacki, and Zach Briggs.

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Jeff Patton: Author of User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product and owner of Jeff Patton & Associates.

Yana Carstens: Senior User Experience Designer at TableXI.

Agile practices help you build software. UX design helps you build the right software. Teams often struggle integrating UX design into agile practice. In this episode, Jeff Patton, author of User Story Mapping, and UX Designer Yana Carstens talk about the importance of bringing UX design together with development and how to bring your team from unconscious competence to conscious competence.

01:47 - Jeff’s Involvement with Company Product Development

03:31 - The History of Agile Software Development

05:37 - The Role and Integration of the UX Designer

09:00 - Creating Products Without a Design Process

12:21 - Consciousness and Competency

16:08 - Advice for Newbies Striving to Reach the Competence Level in UX

19:11 - Deciding Design Cadences Within Cycles

23:20 - When Designers are Sprinting Ahead of Developers; Lean User Experience

28:48 - Inceptions and Product Strategy Workshops to Integrate Design Into Agile Development

31:16 - Team Development: The Benefits of Hiring Experienced Professionals and Upscaling the People You’ve Got

34:38 - UX Practices in the 90's vs 2010's

Special Guests: Jeff Patton and Yana Carstens.

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Corey Haines: CTO of Hearken, creator of code retreats, and author of Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design.

Want to build great front-end apps without having to deal with the entire JavaScript ecosystem? Corey Haines joins the show to talk about Elm, a front-end language and framework that is type safe, has great build tools, and a full-fledged MVC framework to create client interactions with less hassle. Corey has been using Elm to build the site for his company, Hearken, and talks about why he picked it, and what has made Elm a success for them.

We've got a blog post relating to the code examples in this episode, you can find it at https://medium.com/table-xi/union-types-in-elm-fb6a974ec427.

02:25 - What is Hearken?

05:14 - The Elm Programming Language

08:06 - The Type System and The Compiler

21:27 - Elm as a Framework

26:16 - Deciding to use Elm

28:37 - Elm: Gotchas and Technical Limitations?

32:37 - Styling and Working with Designers

35:45 - The Elm Community

37:14 - Getting Started with Elm

Special Guest: Corey Haines.

Sponsored By:

• Table XI: A trusted UX design + software development company. We are 35 meticulous and curious minds in Chicago with a 15 year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Our partners trust us to create innovative solutions that drive their businesses forward.

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Nadia Eghbal: Works on Open Source Initiatives at GitHub, Author of Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure; Read her essays on Open Source on Medium

The Internet runs on Open Source. Open Source runs on maintainers and contributors. Is that sustainable? We talk to Nadia Eghbal about her work documenting and analyzing the Open Source ecosystem. How did we get here, and how did GitHub change Open Source? Nadia answers why Open Source makes economic sense, and discusses what can make projects more sustainable (hint: it's not just money).

01:22 - Researching the Open Source Community

03:14 - How the Relationship Between Open Source and the Rest of Technology Changed in the Mid-2000s

07:22 - Where is Open Source going? How will it evolve?

09:28 - What do successful projects do that others can learn from?

12:34 - Standardization of Funding

13:33 - As Projects Mature

17:26 - The Open Source Ecosystem: Excludable and Non-Excludable

21:42 - The Reputational Economy

25:20 - “Worse is Better”: Sharing Between Ecosystems; Fragmentation

30:03 - Diversity and Being New in the Open Source Community

34:16 - Hopes for the Future: Better Tooling for Maintainers, Shared Understanding of Best Practices, Supporting Open Source

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Doc Norton: Co-Founder and CEO of CTO2.

Claire Podulka: Project Manager at Table XI.

How can you tell whether an agile software team is successful? Many teams use a single measure: velocity. Doc Norton, author of Escape Velocity, and Claire Podulka join the show to discuss why velocity is not a useful measure: it doesn't explain the problems with an unsuccessful team, and successful teams probably don't need it. We discuss the problems with velocity, what to use instead, and get on soapboxes for our least favorite agile anti-patterns.

02:48 - Metrics for Agile Teams: Velocity

06:15 - Using Velocity

07:49 - Problems When Relying Solely on Velocity and Estimation

12:35 - Theory of Flow

15:17 - Body Weight Analogy

17:17 - Assessing Team Health

18:37 - Team Temperature (Joy)

21:51 - Lead Time and Cycle Time

30:04 - Managing Estimation and Team Metrics When Teams and Scope Change

33:17 - Using Metrics: Large Organizations vs Small Organizations

39:18 - Breaking Down Team Velocity at the Individual Level

Special Guests: Claire Podulka and Doc Norton.

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Maci Peterson: Co-founder and CEO of On Second Thought.

Alicia Drucker: Director of Software Delivery at Table XI

How does an idea become a pitch become a company? Join Maci Peterson, founder of the startup On Second Thought, and Alicia Drucker, from Table XI, to discuss how a bad text can lead to a good pitch and then a funded startup. How hard is it to break into Silicon Valley if you don't match the expected image of an entrepreneur? Maci discusses how diversity and inclusivity improved her startup business.

We had an unusually high number of audio quality issues this time around, we're sorry.

01:39 - Starting On Second Thought

03:26 - Pitch Competitions

04:53 - From Idea To Company

07:04 - Sending a Bad Text To Getting To SXSW

09:05 - Taking a Leap of Faith and Starting a Tech Company

10:46 - Funding the Company

12:30 - Breaking Into Silicon Valley

18:46 - Diversity and Inclusivity

27:05 - Encouraging Inclusivity While Leveraging a Product

31:14 - Speaking Up and Sharing Stories

36:39 - Taking Action After Speaking Up

We got cut off before we could give Maci's contact information, you can find her on Twitter at @macipeterson and On Second Thought at https://www.onsecondthought.co and @onsecondthought

Special Guests: Alicia Drucker and Maci Patterson.

Sponsored By:

• Table XI: A trusted UX design + software development company. We are 35 meticulous and curious minds in Chicago with a 15 year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Our partners trust us to create innovative solutions that drive their businesses forward.

Follow us on Twitter! @tech_done_right, leave us a review on iTunes, and please sign up for our newsletter!

Sarah Mei: Founder of RailsBridge, Director of Ruby Central, Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software.

Is your code the kind of cluttered house you might find on a reality TV show? Or the kind of sleek, minimalist house you might find in a architectural magazine. Neither one sounds like a place you could comfortably live. Sarah Mei joins the podcast to talk about Livable Code, what makes a codebase livable, how to negotiate tension between junior and senior developers and how Rails deals with developer happiness.

01:33 - What is meant by “Livable Code”?

04:25 - Where does codebase abstraction go wrong?

05:41 - What makes a codebase livable?

09:16 - Calibrating the Right Level for Your Team: Retrospective Meetings

12:22 - Principles of a Codebase

18:21 - Alleviating Tension Between Junior and Senior Developers

22:57 - The Goal of Career Development

26:42 - Guiding Architecture Choices on a Team

30:37 - Does testing help?

34:23 - Programmer Happiness

37:42 - The Attitude Toward JavaScript

39:01 - The Right Design For Your Codebase is Subjective

Special Guest: Sarah Mei.

Sponsored By:

• Table XI: A trusted UX design + software development company. We are 35 meticulous and curious minds in Chicago with a 15 year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Our partners trust us to create innovative solutions that drive their businesses forward.

Links:

• Confreaks TV | How to be a Better Junior Developer - RailsConf 2014