The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

What is your ritual for starting the day? Are you starting out by choosing a deliberate practice that can help skyrocket your productivity?  Welcome back to another episode of The Rabbit Hole, co-hosting today with me, Michael Nuñez, is Dave Anderson. Today we are giving you developer-friendly reminders! Things that you can do with your life that will take five minutes that you should be doing, every now and then. So stay tuned as we share some friendly reminders to help you get through your day! 

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.

Today, we’ll be talking about whether comments are considered harmful or helpful. We’re pretty sure that there are many different comments you may have run into in your careers. Comments are something that is really common to every programmer, everyone can relate to them – whether they’ve been tormented or blessed by them. We’ve come across some pretty funny comments in the past like, “Holy crap, WTF is this?” or “Drunk, will fix later,” or “Magic, do not touch,” or just the standard, “I’m sorry.” Aside from their entertainment value, comments can be useful for a multiple of other reasons – such as documentation and setting to do reminders for a team. But how can we utilize comments most effectively to avoid the shame game? In this episode, we discuss how best to use comments for to-tasks, writing tests, the value of user stories, the dangers of tech debt and the almighty perils of the copypasta driven development boys. In addition, we will also discover how scout’s honor applies to code (as well as to developers from the Bronx), why a comment is the only code that can lie to you and how you can quite simply avoid comments altogether.

Everybody knows one of those senior dev gatekeepers for codebase who just swat PRs away and block every code review that comes through. Today we talk about some healthier ways to deal with the gauntlet of approvers and the benefits of mob programming code reviews. Tuning in you’ll hear about the pros and cons of code review posses, the problem of people who just approve code without really looking at it, and the question of how nitpicky we should be. Our hosts also discuss personal code styles versus agreed-upon code practices and explain the reasons why they will block a PR. To discover the benefits of mob programming, tune in today!

There are a lot of ways pair programming can go wrong. Thankfully, it’s possible to pair well simply by avoiding pairing poorly and, by steering clear of some of the common mistakes that we outline in this episode, you’ll automatically up your chances of success! Today, on The Rabbit Hole, Michael Nunez, Sophie Creutz, and Dave Anderson talk pair programming antipatterns, from multiple disruptions to over-philosophizing, from keyboard hogging to decision fatigue. For some simple tips on how to make pair programming a great tool for knowledge sharing and team building rather than a chore, tune in today!