In this episode I'm talking to Naomi Freeman, two time nominated Woman of Influence for Royal Bank of Canada's Women Entrepreneur award. Naomi has been an engineer, team lead, CTO and founder. Naomi is also an instructor for Treehouse and LinkedIn Learning and she actively takes a mentoring role in Rails Girls and Coder Dojo.

Naomi is passionate about using Software to better the world and is currently co-authoring a book on Software and Empathy with a working title of The Compassionate Coder. In this episode we talk about Naomi's journey from a Philosophy and Creative Writing degree to software development, diversity in the software workplace, Naomi's work with RailsGirls and CoderDojo and of course, empathy in software development.

Naomi gives us an excellent book recommendation, besides her own, of The Black Box Society by Frank Pasquale.

I think you'll enjoy this one!

Links:

• Naomi's website - https://www.naomifreeman.com/
• Compassionate Coder - https://compassionatecoder.com/
• Treehouse - https://teamtreehouse.com/
• LinkedIn Learning - https://www.linkedin.com/learning
• RailsGirls - http://railsgirls.com/
• CoderDojo - https://coderdojo.com/
• The Black Box Society - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Box-Society-Algorithms-Information/dp/0674970845/ref=sr_1_1

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Hey Everyone, in this episode I'm talking to Will McGreal, a technical recruitment team lead with Morgan McKinley, who specialises in the recruitment of senior technical appointments.

Will and I talk about the differing aspects of the relationship that recruiters have with Software Engineers, from the person who is a candidate for a role, to the engineer who is the interviewer. This brings up some interesting scope on how professionalism is understood from a recruiters point of view, and how the software engineer takes two different perspectives for a recruiter.

We talk about honesty on both sides of the table, whether being too flexible is a drawback, putting candidates at ease, how not to arrive for an interview, and how the importance of the technical interview is waning.

Will also gives us our most laid back book recommendation yet in Tyson Fury: Behind The Mask. A book that really opens up our thoughts about mental health. 

As always, I hope you enjoy the show and if so, do please subscribe. 

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In this episode I'm chatting to Suhaib Naseem, a Site Reliability Engineer for Bloomberg PolarLake here in Dublin.

Suhaib comes from a background in Object Oriented Programming and as such has a good prespective on the relationship and collaboration needed between software developers and SRE's.

In this episode we chat about what exactly is an SRE. How does their job depend on the software developer? The joys of monolith releases, why testing is so important, why you should be involved in outage retrospectives and how should the SRE work coincide with the product development work.

And Suhaib gives us a nice book recommendation for anyone wondering about the SRE world.
Real-World SRE by Nat Welsh

I hope you enjoy the show and if so, do please subscribe. 

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Happy New Year.

In this episode I'm chatting to Raul Portales, a Senior Android Engineer in Workday, here in Dublin.

Raul and I talk about commit messaging how to make it usable. We talk about the use of comments and why you should be trying not to use them!! We discuss working with the product team and how ultimately they are nice people who would look for honesty from engineers. And we talk about the value of saying No!!

We also have a discussion around whether software developers should be writing QA Automation code or not.

Raul also kindly gives us two books recommendations, one which is as old as him!

The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks and Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. 

I hope you enjoy the show and if so, do please subscribe. 

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In this episode I'm chatting with Andrew Sunderland, an Engineering Manager at Ritual.co in Toronto, Canada.

Andrew and I talk about Software Craftsmanship, what that means, how it can be achieved, and what exactly does it give us. We discuss the importance of tests and testable code and how this affects handling legacy code. Andrew mentions that for successful legacy code refactoring, engineers should really read Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers.

We talk about the necessity for continuing to learn and to maintain pace with the speed of change in the Technology sector. We discuss engineering creativity and why engineering companies provide facilities like pool tables and games rooms. We chat about team morale building and how much that should be dependent on a manager or should that be coming from the team itself.

We also find out exactly what Andrew is looking for when hiring team members and touch on how important soft skills are in the engineering world.

Being an Uncle Bob fan, Andrew gives us a recommendation for his latest book release Clean Agile.  

I hope you enjoy the show and Happy Christmas!!

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In this episode I'm chatting with Jos van der Linden, a Programme Manager at Infocare Healthcare.

Jos and I talk about the stand-out attributes of a professional software developer. Agile methodologies and how deep a software developers knowledge should be. Teams and their skillsets and how teams with differing skillsets thrive. Communication methods and the downfall of some of those methods. 

And with Jos being a Programme Manager we talk about estimations, planning and how reliable are those estimations. 

Added to all this, Jos gives us a multitude of book recommendations and even one podcast recommendation!

• The Tim Ferriss Show by Tim Ferriss
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eli Goldratt. 
• Measure What Matters: OKRs by John Doerr
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• IT4IT Reference Architecture by The Open Group 

Enjoy!

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Welcome to Episode 4 of The Rules of Software Development. In this episode I'm chatting with Roger Heim, Mobile Engineering Manager in Verizon Media.

Roger and I talk about leading mobile teams and the challenges with two different engineering platforms. Roger is looking for engineers with a Passion for what they do and their chosen platform. We discuss how often mobile engineers can have a better understanding of the design principles for their chosen platform than some UX Designers.

We also talk about commit messaging, how to hand Pull Request updates, the value of ownership and collaboration across teams.

Roger gives us a great website and book recommendation.
Software Lead Weekly, is a weekly newsletter for leaders in software who care about people, culture and leadership. 

Leading Snowflakes by Oren Ellenbogan, is an Engineering Managers Handbook which gives practical tools and techniques for programmers who want to lead. 

Enjoy!!

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Welcome to Episode 3 of The Rules of Software Development. In this episode I'm chatting with Bryce Barrand, Senior Director of Product Management at Control4.

Bryce talks about how to be a Missionary, not a Mercenary within software development. We look at the importance of having the software engineers as much involved in the product decisions as anyone, and Bryce talks about how he took his development team on a full day offsite to work with the Product team in the initial phases of product ideation.

Bryce also talks about working with Charles Kindel at Control4 and that we should all be reading his blog: https://ceklog.kindel.com/

And of course, we get a great Book Recommendation from Bryce:
INSPRIED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love By Marty Cagan

Enjoy!

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In this episode, I am chatting to Karolina Kurdybacha, currently a Product Owner in Viasat Ireland. Karolina will give her perspective on what makes a professional software developer from the Product Owners viewpoint. 

We’ll talk about being honest with your product owner, understanding the full product end to end, knowing why there is an Agile process and how you can influence it. 

Also, we’ll discuss the need for developers to be engaged and proud of what they are building and why they should feel confident to raise concerns, whether technical or user based, to their Product Owner. 

I also quiz Karolina on how she feels about tech debt build-up and whether she believes we should be prioritising tests. 

Karolina also gives her book recommendation in Simon Sinek’s 'Start with Why' and we also mention The Phoenix Project during our discussion. Both books are linked below. 

As always if you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review. 

Books:

The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps and Helping Your Business Win By Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

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Welcome to The Rules of Software Development podcast.

I am Andrew Woods, a software development manager with 14 years experience in software. I have worked as a Java developer building out GSM messaging systems, a front-end developer using JSP, JavaScript and Struts, and later became an Android specialist. I've worked in the big companies and the smaller companies. I've worked with teams of 20 people, 5 people and as a sole developer, and recently I've been thinking about software professionalism and how it affects the development of a software product.

This show is aimed at talking to different guests from different areas of the software industry about what, in their opinion, makes a professional software developer.

This episode will introduce the show and we will talk to Alvaro Pereda, a technical lead at Infocare, an e-Health Startup in Dublin, on how he views professionalism in software. 

Alvaro has over 15 years experience working in software. He has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry and has projected his career from the Java developer to a mobile expert to leading and managing teams.
Alvaro is the man who introduced me to Clean Code, TDD and many of the software principles that allow the development of scalable, testable and maintainable systems. As such, Alvaro is the perfect guest for the first episode of this show. 

During the episode we will discuss many topics, like:

• OKR's
• The Pomodoro Technique
• Working with different personalities
• and a whole lot more

Alvaro also gives us a book recommendation that he feels everyone should read: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Micheal Feathers

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