The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

In today’s episode, we have the ultimate showdown between product management and developers. Meet our guest Rob O’Brien. His career started in information science technology, giving him a good grounding in app development. He has since gained extensive experience managing engineering teams as well as coaching product employees and building product teams. O’Brien shares what he believes to be the biggest missteps that product managers can take and illustrates why product managers should be available for feedback throughout the development process. Hear why it’s important to have good communication between product management and developers and why the entire team should be present during stakeholder feedback. We also discuss how to identify what should be the company’s top priority at any given time, and how you can use the RICE or MoSCoW methods to objectively determine what to pursue at a particular point in time without conjecture. Join us for an energetic discussion on all things development, product management, and teamwork!

We had so much fun last time out talking about programming idioms that we thought it was worth revisiting the topic and exploring a few more. To kick things off we talk about the idea of 'bike shedding', the supposed history of the term, and how it can apply to various situations in which something trivial is more engaging than an important matter. From there, we turn to the more common idiom of the hammer and everything appearing to be a nail. We see this problem arising when programmers tend to lean into their own expertise or method, which is not always the most appropriate. We also cover the overuse of refactoring, the detrimental effects this can have, and why rubber duck debugging can be such a satisfying experience. Tune in to hear it all! 

Each programming language has its own set of idioms or patterns of code used to express some standard kind of computation. Today on The Rabbit Hole, we’re talking about the programming idioms or expressions that we use on the regular; which are not to be confused with idiomatic programming or regular expressions! Tune in to learn what it means to shave a yak, boil the ocean, and grok a concept, as well as the difference between FUBAR and foobar, what turtles have to do with the problem of infinite regress, and so much more!

Today, we’ll be talking about psychological safety. We’ll go into what is psychological safety and how important is it in the work space. Having a team that has more cohesive and safe environment is actually more important for performance of the team as a whole than having those 10x developers really cranking out code.

Vacations help developers stay energized at work and avoid burn out, but sometimes it's hard to pull ourselves away from our computers for even a weekend away.

On the final episode of our three-part series with Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, we discuss the nuanced nature of programming and why the idea of a “best practice” is often idealistic and not equally relevant to everyone.

Today's episode is the second of a three-part Pragmatic Folks series and we are joined again by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, to talk more in-depth about how you are in control of your own destiny even when it seems like you’re not.

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.