The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

Welcome back to the last episode of the year! Today on the show we are recapping our top picks for 2019. But first off, we just want to say Happy Holidays to all of your listeners out there and thank you for the incredible year that we’ve had. We also want to thank all our special and regular guests for making this podcast the success that it is.

Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. If you’ve ever worked in part of a pair programming duo, you’ll know that it can easily be equated to the intimacy of spooning or child-rearing. Pair programming can be an intensive, illuminating, and challenging partnership that at some point in your career, you’re going to experience.

Today’s topic of conversation on The Rabbit Hole Podcast is pair programming! We decided to dig it up again since we last spoke about it because we have better mics and a bigger budget now, and Mike forgot what it is so we’re going to remind him. After beginning with some quick definitions, we then get into the different ways to set up a pair programming scenario (see the spooning video in the show notes).

The popular term “work-life balance” is starting to rack-up a whole set of new names: work-life fit, work-life integration, work-life interface, and even work-life sway! A lot of the time, work is seen on one side of us, and our lives on the other.

As much as we hate breaking bad news to you, we have no choice today. If you think gathering requirements is a user story, you are wrong and we’ll tell you why. William, who is especially fired up about the topic, gets us started by explaining that usually gathering requirements is conflated with other components, such as a spike, task or research and there are also often delusions about what stories are.

Welcome to this episode of The Rabbit Hole where we get into the pros and cons of importing libraries versus rolling them yourself! Opting to import a library is a common choice due to its pre-written functionality, but sometimes we import huge ones, just so they can perform a few functions. We then get left with bloated code containing a bunch of unnecessary scripts. In those instances, it can be very helpful to roll your own, but that can also turn nasty quickly as problem piles on problem, most of which have probably already been solved by a pre-existing library somewhere in any case!

Welcome to this episode of The Rabbit Hole, in which we pick each other’s brains about the best (and worst) music to code to. We don’t just talk music though, but podcasts too, and even the sounds of the outside world set to the tempo of a metronome. Michael feels that the easier the coding problem, the more he can handle lyrics.

Today on The Rabbit Hole we are talking about strongly typed and loosely typed languages. There is very little industry consensus about what these terms mean and it is not uncommon to find often contradictory definitions, so we take it upon ourselves to uncover the truth and what we find is rather surprising! Languages that we initially thought of as strong proved not to be as iron-clad as we thought and our previous thinking about loosely typed language also had some holes.

Today on the show, we are discussing risk and it's role in any company. The conversation contemplates the balance of risk versus safety and how this push and pull can be managed in the best possible way.

In today’s episode, we are talking about motivation — what keeps us up at night and what gets us out of bed every single day? We are joined by a special return guest and friend of the show, Kevin Thomas. Kevin is a Principal Consultant and Director at Stride. There are some obvious motivating factors, such as money as well as less obvious ones such as purpose and autonomy.