Tech Team Weekly

Hello dear audience!  In the wrap-up to a shorter season 2 we explain what's been going on and why we haven't been able to meet up and record as frequently.  We're going on hiatus for a while and hope to be back later in the year!

Ever had one of those days, weeks or years? Have you thought, even briefly, about giving up the tech life and pursuing another career dream? Spurred on by a recent Reddit discussion, Sanj, Gwen and Neil look into the reasons why people might occasionally be tempted, and share their own half-baked alternate career plans. Learn which of your hosts was once a trainee electrician, who'd love to be a mile-high dentist, who took a crash-course in pub ownership, and who just wants to be paid to be on the beach.

In the stand-up, everyone's still hiring, everyone's waiting for shiny new toys to arrive, and two of our crew go cold turkey on caffeine (one more deliberately than the other). 

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:

Kia EV6

Sticker Mule

Reddit: Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber/electrician/brickie?

Lisa Crispin: I'm independent!

Touchstone

The Guardian: 'Relentless calls and constant abuse': why Britain's vets are in crisis

With inflation skyrocketing and energy bills about to go through the roof, the governer of the Bank of England has this week warned against workers asking for substantial pay rises, asking everybody to deal with the "pain" of the rising cost-of-living, whilst simultaneously taking home over £500,000 a year. We get deep into when and how we should ask for a pay rise, whether cost-of-living increases should be a given, how companies can better support employees during tough financial times, and Sanj declares some strong feelings which may lead to our Patreon earnings being diverted into legal fees.

In the wonderful world of our stand-up section, we've got busy hiring times, scary talks, Xbox dev kits and EV research. Plus, the world's shortest news quiz! 

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:

Lara Hogan - Resilient Management

Humans Plus Tech podcast

Ecologi

TechTree

YouTube: Uncharted movie trailer

BBC News: Charles met Queen two days before testing positive

BBC News: Don't ask for a big pay rise, warns Bank of England boss

Money Saving Expert: What is the Energy Price Cap?

The Guardian: Bank of England boss urged to shadow care worker for a day amid low pay row

The Guardian: The definition of levelling down: the Bank of England calling for wage 'restraint'

Bloomberg: Boris Johnson Rebukes Bank of England’s Bailey Over Wages Remark

LinkedIn: CEO of RSL Renewables covering staff energy bills

What do we tell people when things go wrong in our organisations? This week, there have been a couple of write-ups of recent high-profile outages at Roblox and Mozilla, which - when paired with the well-documented outage at Facebook that we discussed last season - gives us a fascinating glimpse into other companies' incident processes, on-call rotas and war rooms. Sanj, Gwen and Neil share their surprising love of being knee-deep in an incident, bringing some of their own recent experiences to the podcast.

In our workplace updates, there's lots of hiring, lots of shipping new features, everybody tries to coax Sanj into management, and Neil totally isn't doing any money laundering.

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: 

Elucidat careers page

YouTube: Ozark Season 1 Trailer

LeadDev

Glean careers page

Greg McKeown - Effortless

Facebook Engineering: Update about the October 4th outage

Roblox Return to Service 10/28-10/31 2021

Mozilla Hacks: Retrospective and Technical Details on the recent Firefox Outage

Vox: Pokémon Go launched in 26 countries, and then its servers crashed

Down Detector

Down For Everyone Or Just Me

It's that time of year where everybody's talking about goal-setting, but are goals the correct form of measurement? This week, the TTW crew are talking about goals and habits, and their experiences with how effective they are at modifying behaviours. Naturally, this leads to a number of conversational rabbit-holes (even in our new shortened format), so expect to hear tales of driving lessons, toothbrush etiquette and Ted Lasso.

Plus we give our weekly workplace updates, which includes conference chat, one of the biggest first-world problems ever, and praise for one of Neil's favourite TV shows.

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: 

The Independent: Storm Malik: Met Office issues severe weather warning for Scotland and northern England

Agile on the Beach

LeadDev Together

YouTube: Parasite Trailer

YouTube: Mr Robot Season 1 Trailer

IGN: Steam Deck Gets an Official Release Date, First Units to Ship in February

Sticker Mule

FS Blog: Habits vs Goals

YouTube: Conquer Driving: Why smart goals don't work on driving lessons

GoodToKnow: Can you exercise with Covid?

Shawn Achor: The Happiness Advantage

TED Talks: Shawn Achor - The happy secret to better work

Freedom

Netflix: The Social Dilemma

The Times: Outcry over energy-sucking Facebook data centre that threatens Dutch green targets

Get Money Rich: Robert Kiyosaki's "Pay Yourself First" idea

MindTools: Daniel Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose Framework

Entrepeneurial Operating System (EOS)

James Clear: How Long Does it Actually Take to Form a New Habit? (Backed by Science)

YouTube: Ted Lasso Season 1 Trailer

We're back for our second season! We're starting off with a dicussion about how we use open source software in our workplaces, after a couple of  major recent scares and outages. How do you keep track of what you're incorporating into your software, and how can we make sure that authors are rewarded for their efforts?

Plus, we update you on everything that's happened over our Christmas break: find out who caught COVID, who completed Red Dead Redemption 2, who's been won over by Microsoft Teams, and who's been donating to Wikipedia.

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: 

Martin Fowler: Strangler Pattern

Google Support: Pixel 6 Pro rattling noise from camera

Entrepreneurial Operating System

Scaling Leaders

Herman Miller

TechCrunch: Open source developers, who work for free, are discovering they have power

Reddit: Author of Faker.js deletes the entire repo 

Lawfare: What's the Deal with the Log4Shell Security Nightmare?

The Register: Open source isn't the security problem – misusing it is

Buy Me A Coffee

GitHub: Danny Dainton - Newman Reporter HTMLExtra

Tech Times: Developer Gets Suspended After Intentionally Sabotaging GitHub and Other Open-Source Libraries

NBC New York: New Details in Case of Man Charged After NYC Fire, Potential Bomb-Making Materials Found

Google AMP

It's the end of our first season, so Gwen, Sanj and Neil are having a podcast retrospective. We chat about what's worked (and what hasn't), sharing some behind-the-scenes nuggets along the way, and propose some subtle but potentially exciting changes for season two, with Gwen deciding that we need a higher "threat level".

There's all of the usual stand-up discussions, this week featuring musicals, overpriced energy drinks, and rowdy pensioners. Plus, as 'tis the season, there's a six-way exchange of Secret Santa gifts which is sure to make this the best episode so far for ASMR fans.

We'll be back for season two on 24th January 2022! We wish you all the best for a peaceful festive season and new year, and we'll see you all again in the year which is sure to go down in history as "not as bad as the previous two".

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As promised, this week we're showcasing all of the parts of our working lives that we normally have to rush through. It's the first (and probably not the last) Stand-Up Special! Gwen shares some exciting professional developments and hopes for 2022, while recovering from a sourdough-inflicted ailment. Sanj (or Super-Sanj as he is now known after his boosters) finally spends some time in the testing and documentation camp. And Neil finally shares his big news, though gets significantly distracted by ranting about his Pixel 6 annoyances. Plus, all three hosts reach quick agreement on their least favourite household appliance.

Next week is our final episode of the year, where we'll be running a Season 1 retrospective: what's gone well, and what we might change for Season 2. We'd love to include your thoughts, so please get in touch via any of the usual channels!

TIMESTAMPS:

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Elucidat

Rapid Software Testing

Android Police: Notifications feeling sluggish? This popular Android game may be to blame

The Verge: Google explains why the Pixel 6’s fingerprint scanner may be sluggish

Digital Spy: Spider-Man: No Way Home is currently fighting a no-win battle

Godot Engine

LeadDev New York 2022

We Got This Covered: Can Optimus Prime save us from the Omicron variant? The Internet thinks so

Rands Leadership Slack

Pat Kua

YouTube: Arcane trailer

Squarespace

Bubble.io

YouTube: Mr Robot season 1 trailer

YouTube: Futureman season 1 trailer

M+ Museum

We've spoken in recent episodes about the volatility of the current job market, and how "The Great Resignation" is offering great opportunities for those who choose to change companies. But what about those who choose to stay? This week, we talk about the challenges of remaining motivated and thriving when those around you are moving on. 

Next week, we're doing an epic All Stand-Up episode, where we'll be focusing entirely on what's going on in our working lives - and we'd love to hear from you! Drop us a message/DM on Twitter, or leave us a voice message - we'll try to incorporate as many into our episode as possible!

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LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK: 

Ministry of Testing Cambridge: How Testers Can Shape The Next Normal

Gizmodo: Star Trek: Discovery Is Lost to Most of the World Days Before Its Season 4 Premiere

9to5Google: You can now pre-order the 2nd-gen Pixel Stand from Google, ships next month

BBC Sport: English cricket 'institutionally' racist - Rafiq

Fawcett Society: The Fawcett Society announces date of Equal Pay Day 2021

BBC News: The day Iceland's women went on strike

The Guardian: Genshin Impact players say Chinese game censors "Taiwan" and "Hong Kong" chat

YouTube: "Let's Go Brandon" video

New York Post: Peloton accused of banning anti-Biden "Let’s Go Brandon" on platform

EuroNews: Portugal makes it illegal for your boss to text you after work in 'game changer' remote work law

Amazon: Michael C. Feathers - Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Martin Fowler: The strangler pattern

Arria careers page (or reach out to Maribel Ayala on LinkedIn)

The Guardian: Staying power! How to thrive in the great resignation if you don’t want to quit

The Register: Thousands of Firefox users accidentally commit login cookies on GitHub

9to5Mac: Apple secretly buying ads for their apps, say big developers – and they aren’t happy about it

ArsTechnica: Apple will finally let devs tell users about non-App Store purchase options

Wikipedia: Epic Games v Apple

Solving complex problems with software is, unsurprisingly, complex in itself. But what can we do about it? We weigh up the pros and cons of microservices, containers and external libraries as we analyse whether we're guilty of exchanging short-term convenience for long-term headaches. Plus, there's a bonus mini-discussion during The Stand-Up about knowing when to change roles and how to negotiate salary changes.

In a busy work week, there are plenty of extra-curricular distractions too, as Neil has Star Trek frustrations, Sanj finds an excuse to not shave, and Gwen makes the quickest ever U-turn on buying a piece of tech.

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Genshin Impact

YouTube: Home Sweet Home Alone trailer

InfoWorld: Complexity is killing software developers

YouTube: Sam Newman & Martin Fowler - When To Use Microservices (And When Not To)

The Verge: Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings

Wired: These Parents Built a School App. Then the City Called the Cops

YouTube: Martin Sumner - Replacing the big NHS computer

BBC News: Twitter poll calls on Elon Musk to sell 10% stake in Tesla

CNBC: Elon Musk sells around $5 billion of Tesla stock

Business Insider: Kimbal Musk cashed out $109 million of Tesla stock just before Elon's tweets whacked the share price