Developer Side Quests: The Podcast

Guest Bio Joe Zack is a Druid of the Moon, able to take the shape of the animal that best suits the needs of the moment. Sometimes that animal is a newt, and sometimes it's a Giant Octopus but either way Joe is always ready to lend a tentacle, or whatever. What was the quest? I love to learn via listening, so I wanted an app where I could search for podcast episodes by topic. I launched a little proof of concept and was surprised to see that there were other people interested in the project, so it's been a collaborative effort. There have been some challenges, but ultimately it's been very rewarding because of the product https://qit.cloud, but mostly because of the people I got to know while working together on the project. Links: - Website:  https://www.codingblocks.net/ - Twitter:  https://twitter.com/codingblocks - YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/codingblocks Special Guest: Joe Zack.

Guest Bio Erik Onarheim is a web development ranger that dabbles in druidic devops tradition. He spends his time in Minneapolis being chaotic good on the web using TypeScript, JavaScript, and .NET core. He makes web games for fun, is a part time bard, and scribbles drawings on parchment. You can find him in the twitterverse @ErikOnarheim What was the quest? Excalibur is a simple, free game engine written in TypeScript for making 2D games in HTML5 canvas. Our goal is to make it incredibly simple to create 2D HTML/JS games, for folks new to game development as well as experienced game developers. We take care of all of the boilerplate engine code, cross-platform targeting (using browserstack

Guest Bio A male, human, force, or a FoMar. His go-to spell for quests is C#. Mainly because he's spent the most time studying C#. Also dabbling in C, C++, and Haskell. He also decided to become a Force because he likes having the power to bring computers to their knees and have them do what he says. A level 6 back-end spellcaster. Darren can do some front-end spells when a major quest needs him to. But usually he sticks with the back-end spells. This does not mean Darren can't do front-end spells. He just chooses to learn more about back-end magic because he's better at it than front-end magic. What was the quest? Learning Haskell. I wanted to learn different languages to improve my coding skills and to make myself more marketable. I decided to learn Haskell because 1. Learning Functional Programming I heard would help my programming because of the practices FP makes you follow. 2. To prove to other people that learning Hasekll is hard and that is okay. Too many people want to learn something "right now", or, they quit when something gets too hard. Links: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/activefireball  - Twitch: http://twitch.tv/ThatProgrammingGuy - Youtube: Haskell Practice Makes Better (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu4llcYxMkXEuPGqmxD1cyw/featured) - Website: http://www.ThatProgrammingGuy.com - Book: Mazes for Programmers (http://www.mazesforprogrammers.com/) - Book: Learn you haskell for good (http://learnyouahaskell.com/) - Tool: Stack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(Haskell)) Special Guest: Daren Hoehna.

Guest Bio Lee Warrick is a multitasking bard with many feathers in his cap. Truly a jack-of-all trades and master of none, Lee has worked as a firefighter and nurse before changing jobs to web development where he now works as a Front-end Developer, using his Bardic charms to enchant his audience with sizzling CSS and jumping JavaScript tunes. Not satisfied with focusing only on his own quest as a developer, Lee formed a guild for fledgling developers in the form of the Project Codex Meetup in Orlando, FL, where he works tirelessly to support the membership with inspirational and educational talks and workshops. To extend that support even further beyond Orlando, Lee teamed up with Eddie Otero to spin epic yarns coding quests they've tackled, as well as those of other developers on the Tech Jr podcast.  What was the quest? I wrote leewarrick.com/Goaler as my own personal todo app over last winter break in React/Firebase. I've been slowly adding tweaks and updates as my own use cases change. Basically I wanted a no-nonsense todo app with that I could braindump all the stuff I have to do instead of keeping it in my head. Then I wanted to keep myself accountable so I assigned a countdown time to each task. It sorts tasks by due time or by last added. Beyond that I added functionality to group tasks under multi-step goals, since some things are too complex to be handled in one step. Links: - Twitter: @leewarrickjr, @TechJrPodcast - E-Mail: leewarrickjr@gmail.com - Websites: - https://leewarrick.com - https://techjr.dev - https://leewarrick.com/goaler - https://leewarrick.com/babelfish - Meetup: https://meetup.com/project-code-experience - "Create React App" tool: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app - Wes Bos: https://wesbos.com/ Special Guest: Lee Warrick.

Guest Bio Jay is a hybrid class monk (meaning he does a lot of things, but does them for the journey) with a passion for productivity, automation, and community. His quest has been to create a business by helping developers and other tech folks with Marketing Services, Editing Services, and Productivity Coaching so he can escape cubicle captivity. What was the quest? Create a business around my fascinations with Automation, Productivity, and Content Creation. Links: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/kjaymiller - Getting Things Done (GTD) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done) - Book: How to Be Everything (http://howtobeeverything.com/) - Productivity in Tech (https://productivityintech.com/) Special Guest: Jay Miller.

Guest Bio Antony is a chaotic good thief trying to figure out the limit of today’s security in apps we all use. His day time role is to figure out security issues with popular CMSs and apps, while he gets out to write or solve security challenges during his free time, even though the authors of these apps might not expect them to be targeted. Security is a very vast domain, starting by lockpicking, passing through hacking websites and other applications and ending up with cryptography, the weird arcane magic of mathematics. Recently, he found himself writing about his findings, while hacking the platform he used to write his posts. You can find him on Twitter at AntoGarand, or read his posts on dev.to/antogarand What was the quest? Hacking companies I want to get into (Eg: disclose a vulnerability and send my resume). Making side money by hacking apps I was using. Generally testing the apps I am using for security flaws Links: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/AntoGarand - Dev.to : https://dev.to/AntoGarand - Burp Suite: https://portswigger.net/burp - Ring 0 CTF: https://ringzer0ctf.com/ Special Guest: Antony Garand.

Guest Bio Jamie Taylor is a sneaky rogue spending most of his time creating and learning as much about .NET and web technolgies as he can, but has recently started learning to use Hugo, flexbox grid, and doing as much as possible without using the arcane and potentially self-destructive JavaScript. When not working or learning, he can be found giving talks or creating podcasts - he's a serial podcast creator. His podcasts "The .NET Core Show", "The Waffling Taylors", and "Ask a Brit" can be found on all major podcatching services, and you can find him on Twitter @dotnetcoreshow What was the quest? So I started out wanting to learn as much about .NET Core as I could, right? This was a previously closed source, Windows only stack primarily targetting enterprise. But now it runs anywhere, like literally anywhere. You can run an app on your desktop, your phone, your watch, your server, your fridge, your TV: all the same code. Crazy, right? But then I found Netlify, static site generators, and the JAM stack. I haven't been able to do much with the JAM stack yet... well, other than creating the simplest possible sites. But static sites combined with my passion for making incredibly small, efficient, secure web applications is where I wanted to be. This meant going away and learning a number of different static site generators. I'm from a .NET background, but I wanted to step way out of my comfort zone because I love a challenge. I really like Markdown, so I start with that: I needed a static site generator which could work with Markdown. Turns out that there are a whole bunch of them. StaticGen (https://www.staticgen.com) is a great site which lists them all. For arbitrary reasons, I picked Gatsby and Hugo. Gatsby because I wanted to level up my JavaScript knowledge, and Hugo because I've wanted to mess around with Go for the longest time. Within a few evenings of futzing around with both, I had a few static sites being generated. Then I decided to look into hosting, and it turns out that Netlify are great at hosting static sites. You can point it at a repo, and it'll pick up any changes, build the site, and serve it for you... all for free. A week or so later, and I had a number of static sites up and running. Then it was time to make them faster, smaller, and more secure. It turns out that you can apply things like HTTP headers with a single config file, and Netlify will take care of configuring everything for you. Links: - https://about.me/thejamietaylor - https://github.com/GaProgMan/OwaspHeaders.Core - Podcasts - https://www.wafflingtaylors.rocks/ - https://dotnetcore.show/ Special Guest: Jamie Taylor.

Guest Bio The beach walk is one of the activities Roberta Barbosa does to unwind. The breeze renews her energy and gives the motivation to develop web applications and inspiration for new business ideas. Additionally, she has been in the IT industry for 28 years, from systems operation to help desk support to systems/firewall administration to software development/ technical project management and entrepreneurship. Currently, she works as a senior software architect/project manager for an investment services company in West Palm Beach and has a part-time online gift business. You can contact her through Twitter @bertabarbosa, Facebook Page @rbrtbarbosa, and LinkedIn. What was the quest? My quest is a blog engine whose goal is to build a platform to help my business and personal brand. I started this project as a way to level up my skills using Microsoft ASP.Net Web Forms a few years ago. Now, since I shifted my mindset to use my technical knowledge to help my business ideas and create a personal brand, I converted this engine to ASP.Core 3 Preview. Also, it is using Entity Framework Core 2.2 for MS SQL and MySql databases, MVC with summernote open source text editor, xUnit Test, and Web Driver Test for Edge. Once Microsoft has the final release of the ASP.Core 3, I will be deploying it to the Godaddy Web Hosting Services: for my personal brand, I will be using the Economy plan, and for my business, I will be using the Deluxe plan. After the deployment, I plan to implement AI, if applicable as well. Perhaps, one of the ideas is to add a chatbot using Language Understanding (LUIS) API. Links: - www.indulgentgifts.com - https://summernote.org/ Special Guest: Roberta Barbosa.

Guest Bio Vincent Tang is a Dwarven Elementalist that spends his days building tools to make his life easier. His full-time role now is developing water fortress design contract wizardry (water park design contract software), but previous he worked as an architect, ran a tool store, and did research in great metal foundries. As any dwarf, he’s good with any tools but as an Elementalist he likes to think outside the box. He likes to min-max his buildset and focus mostly in wisdom stat tree, so sometimes he spends too much time overthinking things. He writes things about new techniques he learns on vincentntang.com What was the quest? Vincent doesn’t believe in working harder than he has too. So he’s been building little wizardry components, some used by hundreds of Elementalists, to improve stat gains. That’s how Vincent became a self-taught Elementalist. Links: * Vincent's Blog (VincentnTang.com) * Link to Flashnotes github repo (https://github.com/vincentntang/flashnotes-react) * Alternative To Site (https://alternativeto.net/) * Mozilla's Conditional Operator Docs (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Conditional_Operator) Special Guest: Vincent Tang.

Guest Bio Spencer Oberstadt is a Gnome Priest who gets to build with Ruby on Rails for his day job, but writes JavaScript when no-one is looking. Over the last few years, he has attempted to develop journeyman skills in Electrical Engineering, but only has the attention span to learn through short recipes. What was the quest? Spencer set out to remove as many physical switches from his house as possible using low level enchantments (and wifi). Links: * Link to github repo (https://github.com/soberstadt/homeassistant-config/) * Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) Special Guest: Spencer Oberstadt.

Guest Bio Jason Westbrook is a level 43 mimic that appears on the outside to be a competent developer. With a masters degree in Computer Science he spends his nights thinking of grand apologies to his wife. He's also been trained by his dachound rescue to how to be the best dog servant he can be. Links: - Luhn Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhnalgorithm - Sheep Dip computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepdip_(computing) Special Guest: Jason Westbrook.

Guest Bio Jared Porcenaluk is a warlock alchemist who bides his time by mixing software development and DevOps to create magical panaceas for all sorts of development process ailments. Lately, he's been delving into clairvoyance by way of the Internet of Things, gathering information from far off lands without even needing to be there. As many alchemists do, he swings between believing he's Level 1 and Level 20, depending on whether his latest potions succeed or fail. He writes, prolifically, on ancient scrolls, as well as Twitter @jporcenaluk and on his blog at jaredporcenaluk.com. What was the quest? I've been searching for a way to better understand my noble steed from anywhere in the four corners of this ancient kingdom. It is a Bronco with the power of more than a hundred average horses, specifically, it is a 1988 Ford Bronco II. He had been vexed with a spell that made it impossible to understand what his internal coolant temperature was, and so by mixing a Temperature Sensor elixir and, strangely enough, a raspberry pi, I was able to achieve a sort of second sight into the inner workings of the beast. Now I'm able to read the temperature of the coolant from anywhere, and most importantly, it is accurate. Blog: https://jaredporcenaluk.com Ford Bronco Blog: https://jaredporcenaluk.com/category/smart-bronco/ Special Guest: Jared Porcenaluk.

Guest Bio Heather Wilde is a noble high elf spending most of her time using her charisma wherever possible and has leveled up her leadership skills to get the job done as a CTO. Most recently she has been leveling up her AWS Lambda skills and fine tuning her Beat Saber skills on the PSVR. You can find her hosting the Entrepreneurial Revolution column at Inc Magazine, and on Twitter @heathriel. What was the quest? As a recent quest, I began working on a psychographic matching algorithm. I ended up writing a patent as a result of the work, and turned it into a successful side business. AntarctiConf: https://antarcticonf.com/ Psychographic Segmentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographic_segmentation Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/author/heather-wilde Special Guest: Heather Wilde.