The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

Meetup is one of the most popular platforms for bringing people in the tech industry together in real life for networking, sharing information and having fun times. All of us at the Rabbit Hole enjoy going to tech meetups, but many of our coworkers (and surely some of you) have wondered what it would take to start something new!

Sarah Cassidy is a community specialist with Meetup.com. At Meetup, she is focused on community development, helping regular folks create the best possible meetups every day.

Sarah coaches us through the process of creating a meetup, from the very first step of choosing the scope of your meetup, finding a venue and getting people to show up all the way to growing your meetup and avoiding the worst case scenarios. Whether you’re into Elixir or Ruby, are agoraphobic or under 5’7”, we hope you find something helpful in this episode to get out there and just start a new gathering of like minded techies today.

Meetup is one of the most popular platforms for bringing people in the tech industry together in real life for networking, sharing information and having fun times. All of us at the Rabbit Hole enjoy going to tech meetups, but many of our coworkers (and surely some of you) have wondered what it would take to start something new!

Sarah Cassidy is a community specialist with Meetup.com. At Meetup, she is focused on community development, helping regular folks create the best possible meetups every day.

Sarah coaches us through the process of creating a meetup, from the very first step of choosing the scope of your meetup, finding a venue and getting people to show up all the way to growing your meetup and avoiding the worst case scenarios. Whether you’re into Elixir or Ruby, are agoraphobic or under 5’7”, we hope you find something helpful in this episode to get out there and just start a new gathering of like minded techies today.

In this episode of the Rabbit Hole podcast, we talk about software development books and literature. We talk about tow of our favorites in some detail, but also discuss the concepts of software development books more broadly (in the sense of what they can offer and why people might choose to read them).

In general, these books (such as Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer by Sandi Metz) offer insight that encourages you to rethink your overall approach, technique, and mindset. Learning transferrable concepts, skills, and ideas is a strong motivator behind reading programming books, since there are other resources for simple references. One example of a book that offers this is The Phoenix Project, a novel that one of the panelists compares to being like Ayn Rand’s works in terms of being allegorical and a teaching tool.

In the episode, we also talk about hard skills versus soft skills. “Soft” doesn’t mean “weak” in this context,and soft skills have great value. This is summed up in a Portuguese expression, “água mole em pedra dura tanto bate até que fura.”

We finish things up with a teach-and-learn moment about RSpec Bisect, and a toast to failure involving vcr. Tune in to learn more and to hear our thoughts on a couple of great books!