Tech Done Right

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Claire Lew: CEO of Know Your Company

Dan Hodos: Table XI’s Director of Operations

How can you get honest feedback from co-workers, even when you are their manager? How can you support your team's career growth and support them as they improve their skills? Claire Lew, the CEO of Know your Company, and Dan Hodos, Table XI's Director of Operations, join Noel to discuss why listening is the most important thing you can do when getting feedback, how specific questions can break the "fine" reflex, how sticky notes can help with career growth, and the one thing you should never do in a one-on-one meeting.

01:33 - Why One-on-One Meetings Are Important

03:16 - Creating a Safe Space for Employees: Make Empathy Your Mission

05:03 - Active Listening and Asking Questions

07:15 - How often should these meetings occur?

08:58 - Sponsorship and Career Mentoring

10:19 - Table XI’s “Sticky Note Game”

12:56 - What are the things you shouldn’t do during a one-on-one?

15:18 - Receiving Feedback

19:41 - Favorite Questions

21:03 - Balancing Natural Conversation with Asking Tough Questions

24:12 - Conducting Remote One-on-Ones

25:29 - Investing in Your Mentees

29:17 - Surprising Revelations Learned While Building Know Your Company

32:24 - Creating Environments for Employees to Flourish

Claire:

Dan:

Noel:

Special Guests: Claire Lew and Dan Hodos.

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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Michael Feathers: Author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code; r7krecon.com

What makes a code base go bad and become "Legacy Code"? Can teams avoid writing bad code? Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively With Legacy Code joins Tech Done Right to talk about technical debt, how communication can prevent bad coding practices, why coding problems are never just about code, and what it's like to go around the world seeing the worst code messes ever written.

02:36 - The Definition of “Legacy Code”

04:25 - What makes code bases go bad?

07:26 - Working as a Team to Avoid Technical Debt and Other Problems

09:49 - Tools and Techniques That Have Changed Since the Book was Written

12:38 - Lack of Institutional Memory

15:24 - What creates technical debt?

22:50 - “Symbiotic Design”

25:38 - Test-Driven Development

31:44 - Fads in Codebases

36:58 - Error Handling in Applications (in Relation to Conway’s Law)

Special Guest: Michael Feathers.

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:

• Working Effectively With Legacy Code
• michaelfeathers/scythe: A tool for detecting barely used code in production

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Kai Haley: Interaction Designer on Google’s Design Relations Team, leads the Sprint Master Academy

Zeke Binion: Former Director of Design for Table XI and runs Code for Designers

Do you have a product that needs improvement, or a process to define? Is your team looking for a way to generate and test new ideas quickly? The Design Sprint process, created at Google, is a structured way to explore a problem, create a solution, and get user feedback, all in five days or less. Join Kai Haley, who teaches sprint facilitation at Google, and Zeke Binion, who has run many sprints, as they show Noel Rappin how to use Design Sprints.

01:24 - What is a “Design Sprint?” Who should use them? What are they good for?

04:08 - The Sprint Book: Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five

06:49 - Implementing Sprints Into a Team and High-level Goals

10:47 - Facilitating Design Sprints; or “Being a Sprint Master”

16:40 - “How Might We…?” Brainstorming Sessions

19:32 - Journey Mapping and User Experience Mapping

23:45 - Success Metrics

25:18 - Sketching, Comparison, and Presenting Ideas

32:12 - The Deciding Stage: aka Prototyping

36:29 - User Interviews / Usability Studies

40:36 - Learning to Facilitate Design Sprints

Special Guests: Kai Haley and Zeke Binion.

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.

Want to start speaking at conferences? We go over how to get your first conference acceptance, then how to become a better speaker over time. For conference organizers, we also discuss how to find the best speakers from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. Carina C. Zona (@cczona) and Mark Yoon (@wimyoon) join Noel Rappin (@noelrap) on this episode of Tech Done Right.

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Carina C. Zona: Longtime developer and advocate in the tech community, certified sex educator, founder of @CallbackWomen

Mark Yoon: Developer and Director of Talent at Table XI

01:12 - @CallbackWomen: What it is and How it Came to Be

05:45 - Questions You Should Ask as a First-time Speaker and Speaker Outreach

10:06 - The Goal and Mission of @CallbackWomen

15:24 - Advice for Conference Organizers to Make Conferences Accessible to Everyone; Internal and External Barriers for Potential Speakers

23:29 - Everyone Has Something Valuable to Contribute and Talk About: Approaching Talk Proposals

32:28 - Getting a Talk Accepted

38:38 - Benefits and Impacts of Speaking at a Conference

Special Guests: Carina C. Zona and Mark Yoon.

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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Coraline Ada Ehmke: Open Source Advocate, Creator of The Contributor Covenant, Founding Panelist of Greater Than Code, Senior Engineer on the Community and Safety Team at GitHub

Yana Carstens: Senior User Experience Designer at Table XI

How can you manage a social media site to maximize community and make all contributors feel safe? Coraline Ada Ehmke (@CoralineAda), from GitHub's Community and Safety Team, and Yana Carstens (@YanaCarstens), a Senior UX designer with Table XI, join Noel on this episode of Tech Done Right. We discuss tools for allowing users more control over their social media environment and community, and how to use personas in design as a way to understand user's goals and guide them toward positive community actions.

02:59 - GitHub’s Community Management and Anti-Harassment Tools Team and the Problems that They Are Trying to Solve

06:47 - Exposing Anti-Harassment Features and Making Them Prominent, Improving User Experience, and Identifying Harassers

15:10 - Throwing Friction to “Jerkfaces”; Block Functionality

19:13 - Sentiment Analysis

26:38 - Working Together with Other Social Platforms

30:38 - What does success look like? “Social Coding”

33:05 - Visibility and Flagging of Comments

Special Guests: Coraline Ada Ehmke and Yana Carstens.

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 or leave us a review on iTunes!

How does the Rails core team work? How are new features planned and implemented? How can I contribute? What should I do if I find a security issue in Rails? Our guest is the newest Rails core team member Eileen Uchitelle (@eileencodes) joins Table Xi senior developer Andrew Horner and host Noel Rappin (@noelrap) to discuss Rails, the new testing features in Rails 5.1, and the Rails Core Team.

Eileen Uchitelle: Senior Systems Engineer at GitHub on the Platform Systems Team; Member of The Rails Core Team and the Rails Security Team

Andrew Horner: Senior Developer at TableXI

01:12 - Eileen: Getting Started as a Developer and Getting Involved with The Rails Core Team

03:29 - How Rails Governs Itself Internally

05:52 - The Role of the Release Manager

07:32 - Feature Discussions and Prioritization

08:46 - Requesting Features and Raising Issues as a Non-core Team Member

17:52 - Backporting

21:44 - System Testing

27:13 - Potential Future Features in 5.1

32:12 - User Expectations

36:12 - Getting Involved in Rails

Special Guests: Andrew Horner and Eileen M. Uchitelle .

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.

Andy Slavitt: Ran Medicare, Medicaid & ACA for President Obama

How can we use software to build better countries? Our guest, Andy Slavitt (@aslavitt), helps us answer by telling us what he learned leading the recovery effort on Healthcare.gov in 2013 and 2014. Andy will talk about the 6,000 defect backlog he inherited when he took over the system, how it got worse before it got better and why it took a culture shift to really improve things. Even if you can't call the White House to berate underperforming contractors, you'll be able to learn how to run a rescue project under monumental pressure.

Episode 006: Using Software to Create Better Countries: Recovering Healthcare.gov with Andy Slavitt

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02:58 - Healthcare.gov

07:28 - The Launch Process and Software Project Coordination

17:20 - Solving Trust Issues Over Architecture

23:20 - Speaking Up About Problems

27:06 - Turning The Culture Around

30:46 - Focusing on Architecture

34:17 - Taking Risks

Special Guest: Andy Slavitt.

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 or leave us a review on iTunes!

Dave Copleand (@davetron5000) and Zach Briggs (@theotherzach) join Noel Rappin (@noelrap) for a Tech Done Right discussion of JavaScript practices. When does it makes sense to build single page JavaScript app? How can your JavaScript and Rails interact? Is it an island of interactivity or a sprinkle of JavaScript? Which frameworks are handling community management well (hint: not Angular)? And how do you test any of this?

Dave Copeland: Author of Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap

Zach Briggs: JavaScript Practice Lead at Table XI

02:15 - Reasons to Build a Single-Page App

09:37 - The Ease of Building Web Over Single-Page Apps

11:30 - Tooling; Navigating Good Choices vs Bad Choices

14:31 - Setup

16:30 - Combining a Rails App and a JavaScript App

18:34 - AngularJS; 1 vs 2

33:05 - Testing

35:35 - TypeScript

Dave: Check out Test Double.

Zach: As a developer, don’t feel forced into choosing between a single-page app and a non-single-page app on the first day of development. There are infinite points in between when it comes to interactivity.

Noel: Read about frameworkless JavaScript in Noel’s book Master Space and Time With JavaScript.

Special Guests: Dave Copeland and Zach Briggs.

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.

Episode 004: Testing

Sam Phippen, Justin Searls, and Noel Rappin spend this episode talking about the value of test-driven development (TDD) as well as its cost. They discuss the kinds of problems that developers are likely to have after they learn TDD and attempt to apply it to a large application. Learn why Rails is both great and terrible for automated testing, and how testing can influence the structure of your code.

Sam Phippen: Engineer at Digital Ocean and member of the RSpec Core Team

Justin Searls: Writes bad code effortlessly and cofounder of Test Double. Maintainer of several testing tools, and frequent speaker on test related topics.

Find some little problem and instead of implementing it in a Rails app, type bundle.gem and then make up a name and then practice and invent your own way of organizing code and tests so you can break things down.

As you’re trying to test stuff, really try to focus on going back and forth between the tests and the code more rapidly than you’re probably doing so right now.

Special Guests: Justin Searls and Penelope Phippen.

Allison McMillan (@allie_p) and Bradley Schaefer (@soulcutter) talk about remote work in the age of Slack. What makes a good remote worker, or a good remote working team? How can you support more junior team members who want to work remotely? How do you email cake to remote workers on launch celebration day? How can you improve code review for remote workers?

Allison: Schedule weekly pairing sessions and make it a goal to ask questions.

Zach Holman: Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly

SheNomads

Bradley: Try to find pairing tools that work well for you.

Remote: Office Not Required

Special Guests: Allison McMillan and Bradley Schaefer.

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.