The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

Admitting that you don’t know something can often be a bitter pill to swallow. Rather than beating yourself up about it, why not see it as an opportunity to learn something new? So rather than saying, “I don’t know,” choose to say, “I don’t know YET.” This way you can remain open to delving deeper into a subject, no matter how experienced you are.

When it comes to making changes and updates to software, there is one of two options: either you make incremental changes or you roll out a large update in a big bang fashion. But we’re not talking about life-or-death software like pacemakers or massive impact ones related to rocket launches—of course, those need to be treated with extra care and come with a host of regulations! We’re talking about your everyday applications like Slack, for example. Companies like Facebook have made the mistake of suddenly making big changes to their platforms, creating a sink or swim experience for users, which, as you well know, they raged at. It’s is in our human nature to resist change, so how does a software engineer go about implementing much-needed updates without offending the heck out of users? In this episode, we unpack the advantages and disadvantages of doing big bang rollouts versus smaller, systematic changes that people hardly notice, pointing out the considerations for each approach and giving you pointers for getting it right. 

We are very excited to welcome the amazing and wonderful Sandi Metz as our guest on this episode of The Rabbit Hole! We are going to be talking to Sandi about her book 99 Bottles of OOP and the new edition that is currently in the works. This new edition will take the ideas that Sandi had written about for Ruby and expand them to other programming languages. Thus our conversation takes the form of comparing the differences, strengths and weaknesses of the languages in question.

It’s Tuesday morning at the Google Design Sprint. We all have our Crocs, our snacks, and our playlists... For part two of our series on the Google Design Sprint, we had Kirsten Nordine and Stephen Meriwether join us again to share all their experiences about day two, three and four!  We discuss how all the participants were introduced to each other's ideas on Tuesday morning using Post-it Notes and a dot voting process. From there we get into the way the winning idea was chosen and then fleshed out using a storyboarding process.

If you’re like us, and just hearing the word ‘sprint’ is enough to break you out into a cold sweat, you’re not alone. Luckily today, we’re not talking about a physical sprint. Instead, we're unpacking the Google Design Sprint, which sounds about as energy-consuming as a running sprint, only more exciting and less painful.

Dave recently used Golang for a project he was working on, and today he shares his experience of interfaces and design patterns in the language. We kick off the show by talking about the Gang of Four, where Mike reveals what we have long suspected – he’s not a real developer after all! We then talk about how Go is different from other languages in that you have to explicitly define the interface and then you have a file with an interface in it. This means that when you write the code that implements the interface, you don’t explicitly say what it’s doing. It's all a big secret!

You don’t need servers, you don’t need roads, but you still need pants though, even though everybody is working from home now. You probably need roads too. Really though, serverless is the future and so today we’ll be talking about serverless architecture, what it is and why you would want to use it! Michael has been spending a lot of time developing in AWS recently and speaks about all of the cool things that can be done in Lambda.

We all get stuck in ruts sometimes and now and then learning a new language can help switch things up. Or maybe we have to just learn one so that we can keep our jobs. Either way, there are some cool languages out there, one of which is Go Lang, which is the topic of today’s episode. Dave recently had to learn Go for a job, so he’s here giving the low down. In this show, we find out more about Go’s history and why it’s still a baby in the language landscape. Dave also sheds light on what the Go community is like.

Welcome back to the Rabbit Hole Podcast where we are practicing our social distancing. We have been working from home for about a week now since COVID-19 started spreading. In this episode, we check in from our homes with the latest facts we’ve learned, how we’ve been adjusting to remote work, and what our best tips and tricks are for keeping a level head while working remotely. To hear all about how we are experiencing the COVID-19 and give us your feedback!

Today's episode is the first of a three-part Pragmatic Folks series and we are joined by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt to talk about the 20th-anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This new edition was not only an opportunity for them to revise the material but also to revisit their thinking and see how ideas have changed over the course of twenty years. Their seminal publication codified processes that people had been doing without having a vocabulary for it. An example of this is what they call rubber ducking, which is a useful technique to use for problem-solving.