Tech Team Weekly

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!

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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

It's been a week dominated by COP26, so we're turning our attention to some of the latest developments in climate tech, looking at whether green tech startups could be the key to saving the planet, and discussing how an individual's contributions stack up against companies who aren't doing their bit. 

We've also got our usual stand-up updates (although they're heavy on things that we can't talk about yet) and our News Bytes section, where we discuss the chip shortage and we ask an AI bot to solve some of the podcast's longest-running philosophical problems. 

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK: 

CNBC: Peloton shares collapse 35% as momentum for its at-home fitness equipment slows

BBC News: First pill to treat Covid gets approval in UK  

Jesper Ottosen: Using MTTR to Understand When to Test  

LinkedIn: Senior Test Manager - easyJet Holidays vacancy  

Gov.UK: World leaders join UK’s Glasgow Breakthroughs to speed up affordable clean tech worldwide  

UK Tech News: These startups are fuelling London’s climate tech startup boom  

The Engineer: Reaction Engines spin-out launches green ammonia solution  

Fodors Travel: Blimp Travel Might Be Making a Comeback Soon. Seriously.  

The Guardian: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook  

Wired: Stop Telling Kids They'll Die From Climate Change  

Ars Technica: No end in sight for chip shortage as supply chain problems pile up  

Allen Insitute for AI: Ask Delphi  

The Verge: The AI oracle of Delphi uses the problems of Reddit to offer dubious moral advice  

The Guardian: ‘Is it OK to …’: the bot that gives you an instant moral judgment  

The Verge: Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day 

First, there was the stand-up. Then, we remotely discovered the asynchronous catch-up. But is there something better? This week, we discuss the blog post from Honeycomb about their "meandering team sync", designed to decrease frustrations, improve team bonding, and set themselves up for a productive day.

In this week's distractions, Neil gets embroiled in a small-scale GDPR breach, Sanj adapts to working life, and Gwen wants tips for surviving an eight-hour meeting.

Sometimes we're not sure whether or not to flag an episode as explicit, but this week Gwen has purchased a rad new office chair, so I think you can guess whether or not there'll be any fruity material this time around.

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Herman Miller: Mirra 2 Chairs

Ministry of Testing Cambridge virtual meetup: How Testers Can Shape The Next Normal (25th November)

YouTube: Pixel 6 Magic Eraser Demo

Honeycomb blog: Stand-up Meetings Are Dead (and What To Do Instead)

Twitter: Owl Trousers 

YouTube: Stephanie Ockerman: The Daily Scrum Is NOT a Status Meeting

Coding Font

Retool: How I Created a Coding Font Game with Low Code

Vice: Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company

Is the idea of a four-day working week too good to be true? Is it all just spin and wishful thinking? Atlassian have crunched the numbers by having a team run a nine-week experiment over the summer, and their results make for interesting reading. We'll be recapping what they uncovered, and compare it with our own experiences (past and hopeful future) to see whether it may lead to happier workers and a surprising uptick in productivity.

It's another surprisingly tightly paced episode, especially considering the number of random diversions this week, involving deep dives on topics as far-reaching as bidets, spiders, wasps, and 2024 US Presidential Election predictions. (Although nobody notices Neil's Paw Patrol mug.) 

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Hornminster Edge Services

Ministry of Testing - Test.bash(); 2021 (Thursday 28th October)

YouTube: Postman livestream archive: A Busy Developer's Guide To Testing

Atlassian: The data doesn’t lie: what we learned when we tried a 4-day workweek

Wikipedia: Parkinson's Law

YouTube: Atlassian: The 4-day workweek experiment

GOV.UK: New ten-year plan to make the UK a global AI superpower

BBC News: Trump to launch new social media platform TRUTH Social

In an episode which we promise is considerably more entertaining than the subject matter might suggest, the TWW crew take a look at the rise of digital monitoring software within schools and the workplace. We discuss the trade-offs between safety and snooping, the challenges of verifying the success of such tooling, and propose some possibly less alarming ways to help protect children online.

Plus: Sanj finally manages to refuel, Neil shares how he almost lost his job because of Google Analytics, and we get to the bottom of what Gwen would be willing to sacrifice for quicker software updates.

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

YouTube: Postman livestream: A Busy Developer's Guide To Testing (Thursday 21st October, 7pm BST)

Black Tech Fest (19th-21st October)

State Of The Browser (30th October)

The Guardian: A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn’t realize his school’s Gaggle software was watching

The 74: New Research: Most Parents and Teachers Have Accepted Student Surveillance As a Safety Tool — But See the Potential For Serious Harm

Gaggle (PDF link): The State of Student Safety 2020/21

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Schools Are Spying on Students – But Students Can Fight Back

Vox: The hidden racism of school discipline, in 7 charts

TechCrunch: Aware raises $60M for tech that monitors internal messaging platforms for legal compliance, sentiment analysis and more

UK Council for Internet Safety

Internet Matters

Peloton Reddit: Update on User Flair

Pen Test Partners: Free BrewDog beer with a side order of shareholder PII?

TechRadar: Tesla’s driver safety scoring system could be a game-changer for car insurance

This week, we've got basically no choice other than to cover everything that's been happening during a chaotic week at Facebook. There's been downtime, whistleblower revelations, and rumours of a reversal of the company's "WFH Forever" policy (which has been denied since we recorded). Meanwhile, Neil battles through a horrible bout of flu in order to have a dig at the Tories.

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains some discussion of eating disorders.

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Facebook Engineering: More details about the October 4 outage

The Guardian: Facebook and Instagram say issues now fixed after second outage in a week

The Guardian: Facebook aware of Instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals

TechRadar: Facebook denies end to 'WFH forever' rule in wake of mega outage

The Guardian: "I might delete it": Facebook's problem with younger users

Haystack: Facebook Outage Increased Developer Throughput By 32%

BBC News: Conservative conference: Get off your Pelotons and back to work, says Oliver Dowden

Faced with a tight deadline, the team finally manage to deliver an episode of about the desired length! This week, Gwen, Neil and Sanj are looking at the explosion of new digital players in the 'Buy Now Pay Later' market, looking at the ethics of building features which can generate profit from the vulnerable, and asking whether employers are doing enough to encourage discussions about prudent financial behaviour. There's also discussion about loot boxes and other forms of gambling, during which Gwen gets mad at a fake casino.

There's still enough time for all three hosts to pick scarily similar stories in News Bytes - if you're interested in overpaying for novelty tech, this week is the episode for you (apart from Sanj's story, which could get you arrested if you're a careless Australian).

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LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

YouTube: #LeadDev - Marco Rogers - Creating a career ladder for engineers

YouTube: Postman - The Busy Developer's Guide to Testing (21st October livestream)

CNBC: British fintechs are jumping into the booming buy now, pay later market

Mastercard: Mastercard reinvents installments to give consumers more payment choices wherever they shop

Money Saving Expert: First-ever financial education textbook lands in schools

Polygon: EA calls its loot boxes "surprise mechanics", says they’re used ethically 

Citizens Advice Bureau

StepChange debt charity

The Guardian: An0m - the inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history

Stack Overflow: No joke - you can buy our copy/paste keyboard right now

Digital Undivided: supporting Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs

The Independent: Amazon's new Astro robot is a "privacy nightmare"

Twitter: @DimaKrotov - the stranded Roomba