POPULARITY
21 episodes with hanselminutes
25 episodes with hanselminutes
2 episodes with hanselminutes
2 episodes with hanselminutes
2 episodes with hanselminutes
4 episodes with hanselminutes
In this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott sits down with AI/ML & Robotics leader Jasmine Lawrence Campbell to explore the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and robotics. Jasmine shares insights on how AI is shaping the future of robotics, the challenges of integrating AI into robotic systems, and why she believes there's a place for everyone in AI. Whether you're a developer, researcher, or simply curious about the intersection of AI and robotics, this conversation offers fresh perspectives on the technology driving automation forward.https://www.jasminelawrence.com
In this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott Hanselman sits down with the visionary Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Openwater. Dr. Jepsen shares her groundbreaking work in developing advanced imaging technologies that have the potential to revolutionize medical diagnostics and treatment. From her journey through big tech companies like Google and Facebook to her pioneering efforts at Openwater, Dr. Jepsen discusses how her team is leveraging red light and ultrasound to create affordable, wearable devices that can see into the human body with unprecedented clarity. In association with the ACM ByteCast.
In this episode of Hanselminutes, Dr. Michael Hansen from Nabu Casa joins Scott Hanselman to discuss the exciting advancements in open-source voice technology. They delve into the integration of Rhasspy and Home Assistant Voice, exploring how these tools can enhance privacy and local processing for voice assistants. Dr. Hansen shares insights on the future of voice technology, including the Wyoming protocol and the potential for supporting underrepresented languages. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
In this episode of Maintainable, Robby welcomes Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft and host of the Hanselminutes Podcast, to discuss the emotional side of maintainable software. Scott shares his thoughts on fear as a common thread in poorly maintained software, the importance of building a team culture of trust, and how finding a good work-life balance helps create better software.The Role of Fear in Technical DebtScott believes that if you fear the software you work on, it's a tell-tale sign that it has maintainability issues.Technical debt is rooted in fear--either fear of making a change that will break something or fear of being unable to change something when needed.He encourages teams to talk openly about their fears and anxieties regarding the software and to consider what things give them confidence in the codebase.Building a Team Culture of ConfidenceScott emphasizes the importance of empathy in overcoming technical debt and making software more maintainable.Senior engineers and team leads have a responsibility to make junior developers feel safe enough to speak up and ask questions.He advocates for providing new hires with small, achievable tasks to build their confidence and trust in the software.Scott encourages teams to use "inner loop" and "outer loop" thinking.Inner loop - The cycle of making a change, hitting f5, and seeing changes immediately.Outer loop - Things like deploying the codebase, getting it tested, ensuring production stability.Both experienced and junior engineers have their own inner and outer loops as individuals, and continuous improvement at all levels is key.Overcoming Fear, Embracing Maintainability, and Finding BalanceScott shares stories about Microsoft's journey with open-source software and how that process has shaped the company's culture around maintainable code.He talks about the importance of striking a balance between source-opened and open-source software and finding the sweet spot for a project or organization.Scott warns against the trap of striving for unattainable perfection. Aiming for good, solid repeatable work over perfection ultimately yields better results.He uses his own projects, like the Hanselminutes podcast, as examples of focusing on consistent outputs and utilizing a simple workflow.Scott advocates for using AI tools to transcribe coding sessions, freeing up developers from extensive note-taking.Book Recommendation:The Daily Stoic By Ryan HolidayScott Hanselman - Personal WebsiteHanselminutes Podcast.NET Open Source History: .NET Core | Microsoft LearnHelpful Links:Scott Hanselman - Personal WebsiteHanselminutes Podcast.NET Open Source History: .NET Core | Microsoft LearnThanks to Our Sponsor!Turn hours of debugging into just minutes! AppSignal is a performance monitoring and error tracking tool designed for Ruby, Elixir, Python, Node.js, Javascript, and soon, other frameworks. It offers six powerful features with one simple interface, providing developers with real-time insights into the performance and health of web applications. Keep your coding cool and error-free, one line at a time! Check them out! Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.
In this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott Hanselman talks to Davin Jackson, the founder and CEO of Alpha Esports Tech, a company that provides a platform for kids to learn and compete in esports. Davin shares his vision of creating a safe, fun, and educational environment for the next generation of gamers, and how he leverages technology, partnerships, and community to achieve his goals. Davin also discusses the benefits and challenges of running an esports business, and what he thinks the future of esports will look like.
In this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott Hanselman talks to Jose Tejada (JOTEGO), a passionate retro gaming enthusiast and FPGA developer. Jose shares his journey of creating FPGA cores for classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Galaga, and Out Run, and how he distributes them through the MiSTer and Analogue Pocket platforms. Jose also explains the benefits and challenges of FPGA development, and why he thinks FPGA is the future of retro gaming preservation and emulation.
This week we're talking Vision Pro reviews, the good, the bad and the ugly! Also, we have some details on iOS 17.4 — and did Vanity Fair leak an image of the new iPad? This episode supported by: Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. If you like fresh tech, check out Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes wherever you get your podcasts! Scott finds fresh tech and fresh faces and shares them with you, like clockwork, every week. It's like NPR's Fresh Air for the tech set. CultCloth will keep your Mac Studio, Studio Display, iPhone 15 Pro, guitars, glasses and lenses sparkling clean! For a limited time use code CULTCAST at checkout to score a two free CarryCloths with any order $20+ at CultCloth.co This week's stories: Vision Pro review roundup: ‘Magic' and ‘a revolution,' but definitely unfinished The first reviews of Apple's Vision Pro gush compliments on the augmented-reality headset, with one reviewer calling it “mind-blowing” and another “stunning.”However, there's also plenty of criticism for the high price, weight and slim collection of software available when the product launches later this week.Vanity Fair: Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision ProApple Vision Pro's biggest problem: It's highly addictive! Win a rugged and waterproof Apple Watch sport band [Cult of Mac giveaway] You might win a super-cool and rugged new Lululook Waterproof FKM Sport Band. We're giving away one orange band and one blue one, and anyone in the world can enter to win. iOS 17.4 beta 1: All the new features and changes The first beta of iOS 17.4 is here, and it packs several big changes. The beta build arrived just days after Apple released iOS 17.3 to the public.Auto-generated transcripts coming to Apple Podcasts Is this an unannounced iPad in a press photo? Some people think the first picture of Tim Cook wearing a Vision Pro also has a surprise: an iPad that Apple hasn't released yet. But no. The tablet looks a bit odd, but that's not because it's a future one with a new design.Post by John SiracusaEdited image by David Schaub
This week: The Supreme Court is forcing big changes on the App Store, we have Apple's Plan B to keep selling Apple Watches, last-minute Vision Pro details (are we ordering one?) and finally, 9 cool things you can do with an old iPhone! This episode supported by: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, entirely online. Visit BetterHelp.com/CultCast to get 10% off your first month. Songfinch creates a totally original song inspired by your story, written and recorded by a professional artist. Go to songfinch.com/CULTCAST to get your song added to Spotify Streaming for free, a $50 value, with your purchase. If you like fresh tech, check out Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes wherever you get your podcasts! Scott finds fresh tech and fresh faces and shares them with you, like clockwork, every week. It's like NPR's Fresh Air for the tech set. This week's stories: Supreme Court decision means major iPhone app change is on the way The U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld a lower court's ruling that Apple must allow third-party iPhone app developers to point customers to their websites when making purchases. This means the company is forced to drop its “anti-steering” rule for such applications — a major change. AppleInsider: Apple bills Epic Games $73 million in legal costs Following the end of the Epic Games vs Apple case, the "Fortnite" developer will be required to pay Apple over $73 million in legal fees. Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 without blood oxygen feature go on sale in US Apple is not making any hardware tweaks to the wearables. Instead, it will turn off the blood oxygen sensor feature through software. Win a Pitaka iPhone 15 case that's colorful, thin and incredibly durable [Cult of Mac giveaway] Time's running out on our latest giveaway: We're giving away four iPhone 15 cases from Pitaka. Winners will get either a Sunset or Moonrise case. Apple Vision Pro's Lengthy Sales Pitch Will Include 25-Minute Demo Apple Inc. is facing one of the toughest marketing challenges in its history: pitching customers on a $3,499 headset with limited battery life, an unwieldy design and no killer app. MacRumors: Kuo: Apple Will Only Produce Up to 80,000 Vision Pro Headsets for Launch, Sellout Likely Gurman on Vision Pro Keyboard Apple Vision Pro's killer feature might be neck pain 9 cool things you can do with an old iPhone YouTube Video There are a lot of things you can do with old iPhones. In fact, it might be worth keeping them around rather than trading them in. There are all kinds of things you can use an old iPhone for.
asas Sponsor: Partnerhero! To waive set up fees, go to http://partnerhero.com/hanselminutes and mention “Hanselminutes” during onboarding!
Sponsor: Partnerhero! To waive set up fees, go to http://partnerhero.com/hanselminutes and mention “Hanselminutes” during onboarding!
Dr. Noriko Arai is a Japanese researcher in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence and a professor in the information and society research division of the National Institute of Informatics. Her project pitting an AI against the University of Tokyo entrance examination got her thinking about how well young students are able to read. She started researching a new test to assess reading ability and draw attention to those junior high and high school students who cannot read well enough to understand their textbooks. Scott chats Dr Arai about AI, the future, and her experiences as a woman researcher in Japan.This episode of Hanselminutes is done in warm collaboration with our friends at the ACM ByteCast and is coproduced and published with the ACM.
Phil Haack is a co-founder and CTO of A Serious Business, Inc. building serious products for serious people. Very serious. We are the creators of Abbot, a Copilot for Customer Success automation.Phil has over twenty years of experience in the software industry. Prior to A Serious Business, Inc., he was a director of engineering at GitHub and helped make GitHub friendly to developers on the Microsoft platform.Prior to GitHub, he was a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, among other projects. These products had permissive open source licenses and ushered in Microsoft's Open Source era.Phil is a co-author of GitHub for Dummies as well as the popular Professional ASP.NET MVC series and regularly speaks at conferences around the world. He's also made several appearances on technology podcasts such as .NET Rocks, Hanselminutes, Herding Code, and The Official jQuery Podcast. You can find Phil Haack on the following sites: Twitter Mastodon Threads Here are some links provided by Phil Haack: Abbot PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST Spotify: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-spotify Apple Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-apple Google Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-google RSS: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-rss You can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.com Coffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin (https://twitter.com/isaacrlevin) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeandopensource/support
This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/HANSELMINUTES and get on your way to being your best self
Jason Zander, executive vice president of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure's history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:13 - Jason's history at Microsoft 08:25 - Microsoft's evolution 10:44 - Cloud before the cloud 19:38 - Developers as execs 23:03 - Azure today 25:25 - Looking forward 30:33 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Hanselminutes Podcast 63 - Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on Silverlight New Team, New Challenges (Jason Zander's blog) Getting Started with Windows Azure, the SDK, and Visual Studio Microsoft Quantum Create a free account (Azure)
Jason Zander, executive vice president of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure's history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:13 - Jason's history at Microsoft 08:25 - Microsoft's evolution 10:44 - Cloud before the cloud 19:38 - Developers as execs 23:03 - Azure today 25:25 - Looking forward 30:33 - Wrap-up Recommended resources Hanselminutes Podcast 63 - Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on Silverlight New Team, New Challenges (Jason Zander's blog) Getting Started with Windows Azure, the SDK, and Visual Studio Microsoft Quantum Create a free account (Azure)
Jason Zander, executive vice president of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure's history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe.[0:00:00]– Introduction[0:01:13]– Jason's history at Microsoft[0:08:25]– Microsoft's evolution[0:10:44]– Cloud before the cloud [0:19:38]– Developers as execs[0:23:03]– Azure today[0:25:25]– Looking forward[0:30:33]– Wrap-upHanselminutes Podcast 63 - Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on SilverlightNew Team, New Challenges (Jason Zander's blog)Getting Started with Windows Azure, the SDK, and Visual StudioMicrosoft QuantumCreate a free account (Azure)
Jason Zander, executive vice president of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure's history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe.[0:00:00]– Introduction[0:01:13]– Jason's history at Microsoft[0:08:25]– Microsoft's evolution[0:10:44]– Cloud before the cloud [0:19:38]– Developers as execs[0:23:03]– Azure today[0:25:25]– Looking forward[0:30:33]– Wrap-upHanselminutes Podcast 63 - Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on SilverlightNew Team, New Challenges (Jason Zander's blog)Getting Started with Windows Azure, the SDK, and Visual StudioMicrosoft QuantumCreate a free account (Azure)
Jason Zander, executive vice president of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure's history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe.[0:00:00]– Introduction[0:01:13]– Jason's history at Microsoft[0:08:25]– Microsoft's evolution[0:10:44]– Cloud before the cloud [0:19:38]– Developers as execs[0:23:03]– Azure today[0:25:25]– Looking forward[0:30:33]– Wrap-upHanselminutes Podcast 63 - Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on SilverlightNew Team, New Challenges (Jason Zander's blog)Getting Started with Windows Azure, the SDK, and Visual StudioMicrosoft QuantumCreate a free account (Azure)
Jason Zander, EVP of the Azure Team joins Scott Hanselman to celebrate the 8th anniversary of Azure Friday. In this special crossover episode with Hanselminutes, they reflect on Azure history and Jason's career at Microsoft during that timeframe.http://www.azurefriday.com
In this special episode of Hanselminutes, co-produced in partnership with ACM ByteCast we welcome Jelani Nelson, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Theory Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Research Scientist at Google. Among his honors, he won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.Jelani and Scott discuss his journey from learning HTML when he was 12 to becoming a theoretical computer scientist. They talk about the spectrum between software engineering and theory and how even theoretical CS research can have an impact on industry practice; teaching his Introduction to Algorithms course of more than 700 students; running a highly successful algorithmic boot camp for students in Ethiopia to learn coding; the times he feels most accomplished in his work; and the importance of creating access and awareness of computing opportunities for students.
About ScottScott is a web developer who has been blogging at https://hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon. Scott has three podcasts, http://hanselminutes.com for tech talk, http://thisdeveloperslife.com on developers' lives and loves, and http://ratchetandthegeek.com for pop culture and tech media. He's written a number of books and spoken in person to almost a half million developers worldwide.Links: Hanselminutes Podcast: https://www.hanselminutes.com/ Personal website: https://hanselman.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Scott Hanselman of Microsoft. He calls himself a partner program manager—or is called a partner program manager. But that feels like it's barely scraping the surface of who and what he is. Scott, thank you for joining me.Scott: [laugh]. Thank you for the introduction. I think my boss calls me that. It's just one of those HR titles; it doesn't really mean—you know, ‘program manager,' what does it even mean?Corey: I figure it means you do an awful lot of programming. One of the hardest questions is, you start doing different things—and Lord knows you do a lot of them—is that awful question that you wind up getting at cocktail parties of, “So, what is it you do exactly?” How do you answer that?Scott: Yeah, it's almost like, if you spent any time on Clubhouse recently, there was a wonderful comedian named Spunky Brewster on Instagram who had a whole thing where she talked about the introductions at the beginning of a Clubhouse thing, where it's like, you're a multi-hyphenate sandwich artist slash skydiver slash programmers slash whatever. One doesn't want to get too full of one's selves. I would say that I have for the last 30 years been a teacher and a professional enthusiast around computing and getting people excited about computing. And everything that I do, whether it be writing software, shipping software, or building community, hangs off of the fact that I'm an enthusiastic teacher.Corey: You really are. And you're also very hard to pin down. I mean, it's pretty clear to basically the worst half of the internet, that you're clearly a shill. The problem is defining exactly what you're a shill for. You're obviously paid by Microsoft, so clearly you push them well beyond the point when it would make sense to.You have a podcast that has been on for over 800 episodes—which puts this one to shame—called Hanselminutes, and that is, of course, something where you're shilling for your own podcast. You've recently started on TikTok, which I can only assume is what the kids are into these days. You're involved in so many different things and taking so many different positions, that it's very hard to pin down what is the stuff you're passionate about.Scott: I'm going to gently push back and say—Corey: Please do.Scott: That if one were to care to look at it holistically, I am selling enthusiasm around free and open-source software on primarily the Windows platform that I'm excited about, and I am selling empowerment for the next generation of people who want to do computing. Before I went to Microsoft, my blog and my podcast existed, and I was consistent in my, “Hey, have you heard the news?” Message to anyone who would listen. And I taught at both Portland Community College and Oregon Institute of Technology, teaching web services and history of the web and C# and all that kind of stuff. So, I'm one of those people where if you touch on a topic that I'm interested in, I'll be like, “Oh, my goodness, let's”—and I'll just like, you know, knock everything off the desk and I'm going to be like, “Okay, let's build a model, a working model of the solar system here, now. The orange is the sun.”And it's like, suddenly now we're talking about science, like Hank Green or whatever. My family will ask me, “Why isn't the remote control working?” And then I've taken it apart and I'm explaining to them how the infrared LED inside works. And, you know, how can you not be excited about all these things? And that's my whole thing about computing and the power that being able to program computers represents to me.Corey: I would agree with that. I'd say that one thing that is universal about everything you're involved in is the expression I heard that I love and am going to recapture has been, “Sending the elevator back down.”Scott: Oh, yeah. Throwing ladders, ropes, elevators. I am very blessed to have made it out of my neighborhood, and I am very hopeful that anyone who is in a situation that they do not want to be in could potentially use coding, programming, IT, computing as the great equalizer and that I can I could somehow lend my privilege to them to get the things done and solve the problems that they want to solve with computers.Corey: I'm sure that you've been asked ad nauseum about—you work in free and open-source software. You've been an advocate for this, effectively, for your entire career; did no one tell you you work at Microsoft? But that's old Microsoft in many respects. That's something that we've covered with a bunch of different guests previously from Microsoft, and it's honestly a little—it's becoming a bit of a tired trope. It was a really interesting conversation a few years back that, oh, it's clearly all just for show.Well, that is less and less obvious, and more tired and frankly bad take as time progresses. So, I want to go back a bit further into my own personal journey because it turns out that the number one reason to reach out to you for anything is tech support on various things. I don't talk about this often, but I started my career moonlighting as a Windows admin, back in the Windows 2003 server days; and it was an experience, and licensing was a colossal pain, and I finally had enough of it one day, in 2006, switched over to Unix administration on BSD, and got a Mac laptop, and that was really the last time that I used Windows in anger. Now, it's been 15 years since that happened, and I haven't really been tracking the Windows ecosystem. What have I missed?Scott: [laugh]. There's a lot there that you just said. So first, different people have their religions and they're excited about them, and I encourage everyone to be excited about the religion that they're excited about. It's great to be excited about your thing, but it's also really not cool to be a zealot about your thing. So hey, be excited about Windows, be excited about Linux, be excited about Mac.Just don't tell me that I'm going to heck because I didn't share your enthusiasm. Let's just be excited together and we can be friends together. I've worked on Linux at Nike, I've worked on Mac, I've worked on Windows, you know, I've been there before these things existed and I'll be there afterwards.Corey: Exactly. At some point being a zealot for a technology just sort of means you haven't been around the block enough to understand how it's going to break, how it's going to fail, how it's going to evolve, and it doesn't lead to a positive outcome for anyone. It fundamentally becomes a form of gatekeeping more than anything else, and I just don't have the stomach for it.Scott: Yeah. And ultimately, we're just looking for—you know, we got these smart rocks that we taught how to think with lightning, and they're running for loops for us. And maybe they're running them in the cloud, maybe they're running locally. So, I'm not really too worried about it. Windows is my thing of choice, but just, you know, one person's Honda is another person's Toyota; you get excited about the brand that you start out with.So, that's that. Currently, though, Windows has gone, at least in the last maybe 20 years, from one of those things where there's generational pain, and, like, “Microsoft killed my Pappy, and I'll never forgive you.” And it's like, yeah, there was some dumb stuff in the '90s with Internet Explorer, but as a somewhat highly placed middle manager at Microsoft, I've never been in an active mustache-twirling situation where I was behind closed doors and anyone thought anything nefarious. There's only a true, “What's the right thing for the customer? What is the right thing for the people?”My whole thing is to make it so developers can develop more easily on Windows, so I'm very fortunate to be helping some folks in a partnership between the Windows division and the developer division that I work in to make Windows kick butt when it comes to dev. Historically, the Windows terminal, or what's called cmd.exe which is run by a thing called the console host has sucked; it has lagged behind. So, if you drop out to the command line, you've got the, you know, the old, kind of, quote-unquote, “DOS shell” with a cmd processor—it's not really DOS—running in an old console host. And it's been there for gosh, probably early '90s. That sucks.But then you got PowerShell. And again, I want to juxtapose the difference between a console—or a terminal—and a shell. They're different things. There's lots of great third-party terminals in the ecosystem. There's lots of shells to choose from, whether it be PowerShell, PowerShell Core—now PowerShell 7.0—or the cmd, as well as bash, and Cygwin, and zsh, and fish.But the actual thing that paints the text on Windows has historically not been awesome. So, the new open-source Windows terminal has been the big thing. If you're a Machead and you use iTerm2, or Hyper, or things like that, you'll find it very comfortable. It's a tabbed terminal, split-screen, ripping fast, written in, you know, DirectX, C++ et cetera, et cetera, all open-source, and then it lets you do transparency, and background colors, and ligature fonts, and all the things that a great modern terminal would want to do. That is kind of the linchpin of making Windows awesome for developers, then gets even awesomer when you add in the ability that we're now shipping an actual Linux kernel, and I can run N number of Linuxes side-by-side, in multiple panes, all within the terminal.This getting to the point about juxtaposing the difference between a terminal and a console and a shell. So, I've got, on the machine, I'm talking to you on right now, on my third monitor, I've got Windows terminal open with PowerShell on Windows on the left, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the right, with the fish shell. And then I've got another Ubuntu 20.04 with bash, a standard bash shell.And I'm going and testing stuff in Docker, and running .NET in Docker, and getting ready to deploy my own podcast website up into Azure. And I'm doing it in a totally organic way. It's not like, “Oh, I'm just running a virtual machine.” No, it's integrated. That's what I think you'd be impressed with.Corey: That right there is the reason that I generally tended to shy away from getting back into the Windows ecosystem for the longest time—and this is not a slam on Windows, by any stretch of the—Scott: No of course. Sure, sure, sure.Corey: —imagination—my belief has always been that you operate within the environment as it's intended to be operated within, and it felt at the time, “Oh, install Cygwin, and get all this other stuff going, and run a VM to do it.” It felt like I was fighting upstream in some respects.Scott: Oh, yeah, that's a great point. Let's talk about that for a second. So—Corey: Let's do it.Scott: So, Cygwin is the GNU utilities that are written in a very nice portable C, but they are written against the Windows kernel. So, the example I like to use is ls, you type ls, you list out your directory, right? So, ls and dir are the same thing for this conversation. Which means that someone has to then call a system call—syscall in Linux, Windows kernel call in Windows—and say, “Hey, would you please enumerate these files, and then give me information about them, and check the metadata?” And that has to call the file system and then it's turtles all the way down.Cygwin isn't Linux. It's the bash and GNU utilities recompiled and compiled against the Windows stuff. So, it's basically putting a bash skin on Windows, but it's not Linux; it's bash. Okay? But WSL is actually Linux, and rather than firing up a big 30 gig Hyper-V, or VirtualBox, or Parallels virtual machine, which is, like, a moment—“I'm firing up the VM; call me in an hour when it comes back up.”—and when the VM comes up, it's, like, a square on your screen and now you're dealing with another thing to manage.The WSL stuff is actually a utility virtual machine built on a lower subsystem, the virtualization platform, and it starts in less than a second. You can start it faster than you can say, one one-thousand. And it goes instantly up, it automatically allocates and deallocates memory so that it's smart about memory, and it's running the actual Linux kernel, so it's not pretending to be Linux. So, if your goal is a Linux environment and you're a Linux developer, the time of Linux on the desktop is happening, in this case, on the Windows desktop. Where you get interesting stuff, and where I think your brain might explode is, imagine you're in the terminal, you're at the Linux file system at the bash prompt, and you type ‘notepad.exe.' What would you expect to happen? You'd expect it to try to find it in a Linux path and fail.Corey: Right. And then you're trying to figure out, am I in this environm—because you generally tend to run these things in the same-looking terminal, but then all the syntax changes as soon as you go back into the Windows native environment, you're having to deal with line-ending issues on a constant basis, and you just—Scott: Oh, yeah. All that stuff, where.Corey: And as soon as you ask for help because back in those days, I was looking primarily into using freenode as my primary source of support because I network staff on the network for the better part of a decade, and the answer is, “I'm having some trouble with Linux,” and the response is, “Oh, you're doing this within a Windows environment? Get a real computer, kid.” Because it's still IRC, and being condescending and rude to anyone who makes different choices than you do is apparently the way that was done back then.Scott: Well, today in 2020 because we don't want to just have light integration with Windows—and by light integration, like, I don't know if you remember firing up a virtual machine on Windows and then, like, copy-pasting a file, and we were all going like, “Oh, my God, that's amazing.” I drug the file in and then it did a little bit of magic and then moved the file from Windows into Linux. What we want is to blur the lines between the two so you can move comfortably. When you type explorer.exe or notepad.txt in Linux on Windows, Linux says no, and then Windows gets the chance, fires it up, and can access the Linux file system.And since Notepad now understands line endings, just happily, you can open up your .profile, your bash_profile, your csh file in Notepad, or—here's where it gets interesting—Visual Studio Code, and comfortably run your Windows apps, talking to your Linux file system, or in the—coming soon, and we've blogged about this and announced it at Build last year, run Linux GUI apps seamlessly so that I could have two browsers up, two Chromes, one Windows and one Linux, side-by-side, which is going to make web testing even that much easier. And I'm moving seamlessly between the two. Even cooler, I can type explorer.exe and then pass in dot, which represents the current folder, and if the current folder is the Linux file system, we seamlessly have a Plan 9 server—basically a file server that lets you access your Linux file system—from—Corey: Is it actually running Plan 9?Scott: It is a Plan 9 server.Corey: That is amazing. I'm sorry, that is a blast from the past.Scott: I'm glad. And we can run N number of Linuxes; this isn't just one Linux. I've got Kali Linux, two different Ubuntus, and I could tar up the user mode files on mine, zip them up, give them to you, and you could go and type ‘wsl–import,' and then have my Linux file system. Which means that we could make a custom Screaming in the Cloud distro, put it in the Windows Store, put it up on GitHub, build our own, and then the company could standardize on our Linux distro and run it on Windows.Corey: That is almost as terrible an idea as using a DNS service as a database.Scott: [laugh].Corey: I love it. I'm totally there for it.Scott: It's really nice because it's extremely—the point is, it has to have no friction, right? So, if you think about it this way, I just moved—I blogged about this; if people want to go and learn about it—I just moved my blog of 20 years off of a Windows Server 2008 server running under someone's desk at a host, into Azure. This is a multi-month-long migration. My blog, my main site, kind of the whole Hanselman ecosystem moved up in Azure. So, I had a couple things to deal with.Am I going to go from Windows to Linux? Am I going to go from a physical machine to a virtual machine? Am I going to go from a physical machine to a virtual machine to a Platform as a Service? And when I do that, well, how is that going to change the way that I write software? I was opening it in Visual Studio, pressing F5, and running it in IIS—the Internet Information Server for Windows—for the last 15, 20 years.How do I change that experience? Well, I like Visual Studio; I like pressing F5; I like interactive debugging sessions. But I also like saving money running Linux in the cloud, so how can I have the best of all those worlds? Because I wrote the thing in .NET, I moved into .NET 5, which runs everywhere, put together a Docker file, got full support for that in Visual Studio, moved it over into WSL so I can test it on both Windows and Linux.I can go into my folder on my WSL, my Windows subsystem for Linux, type code dot, open up Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code splits in half. The Windows client of Visual Studio Code runs on Windows; the server, the Visual Studio Code server, runs in WSL providing the bridge between the two worlds, and I can press F5 and have interactive debugging and now I'm a Linux developer even though I've never left Windows. Then I can right-click publish in Visual Studio to GitHub Actions, which will then throw it into the cloud, and I moved everything over into Azure, saved 30%, and everything's awesome. I'm still a Windows developer using Visual Studio. So, it's pretty much I don't know, non-denominational; kind of mixing the streams here.Corey: It is. And let me take it a step further. When I'm on the road, the only computer I bring with me these days—well, in the before times, let's be very realistic. Now, when ‘I'm on the road,' that means going to the kitchen for a snack—the only computer I bring with me is my iPad Pro, which means that everything I do has a distinct application. For when I want to get into my development environment, historically it was, use some terminal app—I'm a fan of Blink, but everyone has their own; don't email me.And everything else I tended to use looked an awful lot like a web app. If there wasn't a dedicated iOS app, it was certainly available via a web browser. Which leads me to the suspicion that we're almost approaching a post-operating-system world where the future development operating system begins to look an awful lot—and people are going to yell at me for this—Visual Studio Code.Scott: Mmm.Corey: It supports a bunch of remote activities now that GitHub Codespaces is available—at least to my account; I don't know if it's generally available yet—but I've been using it; I love it; everything it winds up doing is hosted remotely in Azure; I don't have to think about managing the infrastructure; it's just another tab within GitHub, and it works. My big problem is that I'm trying to shake, effectively, 20 years of muscle memory of wrestling with Vim, and it takes a little bit of a leap in order to become comfortable with something that's a more visually-oriented IDE.Scott: Why don't you use the VsVim, Jared Parsons Vim plugin for Visual Studio?Corey: I've never yet found a plugin that I like for something else to make it behave like Vim. Vimperator is a browser extension, all of it just tends to be unfortunate and annoying in different ways. For whatever reason, the way that I'm configured or built, it doesn't work for me in the same way. And it goes back to our previous conversation about using the native offering as it comes, rather than trying to make it look like something else.Scott: Okay. I would just offer to you and for other Vim people who might be listening, that VS Code Vim does have 2.5 million installs, over 2 million people happily using that. And they are—Corey: Come to find it only has 200,000 actual users; there was an installation bug and one person just kept trying over and over and over. I kid, I kid.Scott: No, seriously though, these are actual Vim-heads and Jared Parsons is a developer at Microsoft who is like, out of his cold dead hands you'll pull his Vim. So, there's solutions; whether you're Vim or Emacs, you know, we welcome all comers. But to your point, the Visual Studio, once it got split in half, where the language services, those services that provide context to Python, Ruby, C# C++ et cetera, once those extensions can be remoted, they can run on Windows, they can run on Linux, they can run on the cloud. So, VS Code being split in half as a client-server application has really made it shine. And for me, that means that I don't notice a difference, whether I'm running VS Code on Windows or running VS Code to a remote Linux install, or even using SSH and coding on Windows remotely to a Raspberry Pi.Corey: I love the idea. I've seen people do this, in some respects, back in the days of Code Server being a project on GitHub, and it took a fair bit of wrangling to get that to work in a way that wasn't scarily insecure and reliable. But once it was up and running, you could effectively plug a Raspberry Pi in underneath your iPad and effectively have a portable computer on the go that did local development. I'm looking at this and realizing the future doesn't look at all like what I thought it was going to, and it's really still kind of neat.Scott: Mm-hm.Corey: There's a lot of value in being able to make things like this more accessible, and the reason I'm excited about a lot of this, too, is that aligned with a generous free tier opportunity, which I don't know final pricing for things like GitHub Codespaces, suddenly the only real requirement is something that can render a browser and connect to the internet for an awful lot of folks to get started. It doesn't require a fancy local overpowered development machine the way a lot of things used to. And yes, I know; there are certain kinds of development that are changing in that respect, but it still feels to me like it has never been easier to get started with all of this technology than ever before, with a counterargument that there's so many different directions to go in. “Oh, I want to get started using Visual Studio Code or learning to write JavaScript. Great. How do I do this? Let me find a tutorial.” And you find 20 million tutorials, and then you're frozen with indecision. How do you get past that?Scott: Yeah, there is and always will be, unfortunately, a certain amount of analysis paralysis that occurs. I started a TikTok recently to try to help people to get involved in coding, and the number one question I get—and I mean, thousands and thousands of them—are like, “Where do I start?” Because everyone seems to think that if they pick the wrong language, that will be a huge mistake. And I can't think of a wrong language, you know? Like, what human language should I learn?You know, English, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese. Pick one and then learn another one if you can. Learn a couple. But I don't think there's a wrong language to learn because the basics of computer science are the basics of computer science. I think what we need to do is remind people that computers are computers no matter whether they're an Android phone or a Windows laptop, and that any forward motion at all is a good thing. I think a lot of people have analysis paralysis, and they're just afraid to pick stuff.Corey: I agree with what you're saying, but I'm also going to push back gently on what you're saying, as well. If someone who is new to the field was asking me what language to learn, I would be hard-pressed to recommend a language that was not JavaScript. I want to be clear, I do not understand or know JavaScript at all, but it's clear from what I'm seeing, that is, in many ways, the language of the future. It is how frontend is being interacted with; there are projects from every cloud provider that wind up managing infrastructure via JavaScript primitives. There are so many on-ramps for this, and the user experience for new folks is phenomenal compared to any language that I've worked with in my career. Would you agree with that or disagree with that assessment?Scott: So, I've written blog posts on this topic, and my answer is a little more ‘it depends.' I say that people should always learn JavaScript and one other language, preferably a systems language, which also may be JavaScript. But rather than thinking about things language-first, we think about things solutions-first. If someone says, “I want to do a lot of data science,” you don't learn JavaScript. If someone says, “I want to go and write an Android app,” yeah, you could do that in JavaScript, but JavaScript is not the answer to all questions.Just as the English language, while it may be the lingua franca, no pun intended, it is not the only language one should pick. I usually say, “Well, what do you want to do?” “Well, I want to write a video game for the Xbox.” Okay, well, you're probably not going to do that in JavaScript. “Oh, I want to do data science. I want to write an iPhone app.” JavaScript is the language you should learn if you're going to be doing things on the web, yes, but if you're going to be writing the backend for WhatsApp, then you're not going to do that JavaScript.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Yeah, I think you're right. It comes down to what is the problem you're trying to solve for? Taking the analogy back to human languages, well, what is your goal? Is it just to say that you've learned a language and to understand, get a glimpse at another culture through its language? Yeah, there is no wrong answer. If it's that you want to go live in France one day and participate in French business discussions, I have a recommendation for you, and it's probably not Sanskrit.At some point, you have to align with what people want to do and the direction they're going in with the language selection. What I like about JavaScript is, frankly, it's incredible versatility as far as problems to which it can be applied. And without it, I think you're going to struggle as you enter the space. My first language was crappy Perl—slash bash because everyone does bash when you're a systems administrator—and then it has later evolved now to crappy Python as my language of choice. But I'm not going to be able to effectively do any frontend work in Python, nor would I attempt to do so.My way of handling frontend work now is to have the good sense to pay a professional. But if you're getting started today and you're not sure what you want to do in your career, my opinion has always been that if you think you know what you want to do in your career, there's a great chance you're going to be wrong, but pursuing the thing that you think you want to do will open other opportunities and doors, and present things to you that will catch your interest in a way you might not be able to anticipate. So, especially early on in careers, I like biasing for things that give increased options, that boost my optionality as far as what I'm going to be able to do.Scott: Okay. I think that's fair. I think that no one ever got fired for picking IBM; [laugh] no one ever jeopardized their career by choosing JavaScript. I do think it's a little more nuanced, as I mentioned.Corey: It absolutely is. I am absolutely willing to have a disagreement with you on that front. I think the thing that we're aligned on is that whatever you pick, make sure it's something you're interested in. Don't do it just for—like, “Well, I'm told I can make a lot of money doing X.” That feels like it's the worst reason to do things, in isolation.Scott: That's a tough one. I used to think that, too, but I am thinking that it's important to note and recognize that it is a valid reason to get into tech, not for the passion because for no other reason that I want to make a lot of money.Corey: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more, and that is… something I've gotten wrong in the past.Scott: Yeah. And I have been a fan of saying, you know, “Be passionate and work on these things on the side,” and all that kind of stuff. But all of those things involve a lot of assumptions and a lot of privileges that, you know, people have: that you have spare time and that you have a place to work on these things. I work on stuff on the side because it feeds my spirit. If you work on woodworking, or drones, or gardening on the side, you know, not everything you work on the side has to be steeped in hustle culture and having a startup, or something that you're doing on the side.Corey: Absolutely. If you're looking at a position of wanting to get into technology because it leads to a better financial outcome for you and that is what motivates you, you're not wrong.Scott: Exactly.Corey: The idea that, “Oh, you have to love it or you'll never succeed.” I think that some of the worst advice we ever wind up giving folks early in their career—particularly young people—is, ‘follow your passion.' That can be incredibly destructive advice in some contexts, depending upon what it is you want to do and what you want your life to look like.Scott: Yeah, exactly.Corey: One of the things that I've always been appreciative of from afar with Microsoft has been there's an entire developer ecosystem, and historically, it's focused on languages I can barely understand: ASP.NET, the C# is deep in that space, F#, I think, is now a thing as well. There's an entire ecosystem around this with Visual Studio the original, not Visual Studio Code—turns out naming is one of those things that no tech companies seems to get right—but it feels almost like there's an entire ecosystem there for those of us who spent significant time—and I'm speaking for myself here, not you—in the open-source community talking about things like Perl and whatnot, I never got much exposure to stuff like that. I would also classify Enterprise Java as being in that direction as well. Is there a bifurcation there that I'm not seeing, or was I just never talking to the right people? All the above? Maybe I was just—maybe I had blinders on; didn't realize it.Scott: There was a time when the Microsoft developer ecosystem meant write things for Windows, do things on Windows, use languages that Microsoft made and created. And now, with the rise of the cloud and with the rise of Software as a Service, Microsoft is a much simpler company, which is a funny thing to say for such a complicated company. Microsoft would love to run your for loop in the cloud for money. We don't care what language you use; we want you to use the language that makes you happy. Somewhere around five to seven years ago, in the developer division, we started optimizing for developer happiness.And that's why you can write Ruby, and Perl, and Python, and C, and C++ and C# and all those different things. Even C# now, and .NET, is owned by the .NET Foundation and not by Microsoft. Microsoft, of course, is one of the primary users, but we've got a lot of—Samsung is a huge contributor, Google is a huge contributor, Amazon Web Services is a big contributor to .NET.So, Microsoft's own zealotry towards—and bias towards our own languages has, kind of, gone away because Office is on iPhone, right? Like, anywhere that you are, we'll go there. So, we're really going where the customer is rather than trying to funnel the customer into where we want them to be, which is a really an inverted way of doing things over the way it was done 20, 30 years ago. In my opinion.Corey: This gets back to the idea of the Microsoft cultural transformation. It hasn't just been an internal transform; it's been something that is involved with how it's engaging with its customers, how it's engaging with the community, how it's becoming available in different ways to different folks. It's hard to tell where a lot of these things start and where a lot of these things stop. I don't pretend to be a Microsoft “fanboy,” quote-unquote, but I believe it is impossible to look at what has happened, especially in the world of cloud, and not at the very least respect what Microsoft has been able to achieve.Scott: Well, I came here to open source stuff. I'm surely not responsible for the transformation, I'm just a cog in the machine, but I can speak for the things that I own, like .NET and Visual Studio Community, and I think one of the things that we have gotten right is we are trying to create zero-distance products. You could be using Visual Studio Code, find a bug, suggest a feature, have a conversation in public with the PMs and devs that own the thing, get an insider's build a few days later, and see that promoted to production within a week or two. There is zero distance between you the consumer and the creator of the thing.And if you wanted to even fix the bug yourself, submit a pull request, and see that go into production, you could do that as well. You know, some of our best C# compiler folks are not working for Microsoft and they are giving improvements, they are making the product better. So, zero-distance in many ways, if you look at the other products at Microsoft, like PowerToys is a great thing, which is [unintelligible 00:32:06] an incubator for Windows features. We're adding stuff to the PowerToys open-source project like launchers, and a thing called FancyZones that is a window tiling manager, you know, features that prosumers and enthusiasts always wished Windows could have, they can now participate in, thereby creating a zero-distance product in Windows itself.Corey: And I want to point out as well that you are still Microsoft. You, the collective you. I suppose you personally; that is where your email address ends. But you're still Microsoft. This is still languages, and tools, and SDKs, and frameworks used by the largest companies in the world. This zero-distance approach is being done on things that service banks, who are famously not the earliest adopters of some code that I wrote last night; it's probably fine.Scott: Do you know what my job was before I came here?Corey: Tell me.Scott: I was the chief architect at a finance company that created software for banks. I was responsible for a quarter of the retail online banking systems in North America, built on .NET and open-source software. [laugh].Corey: So, you've lived that world. You've been that customer.Scott: Trying to convince a bank that open-source was a good idea in the early 2000s was non-trivial. You know, sitting around in 2003, 2004, talking about Agile, and you know, continuous integration, and build servers, and then going and saying, “Hey, you should use the software,” trying to deal with lawyers and explain to them the difference between the MIT, Apache, and GPL licenses and what it means to their bank was definitely a challenge. And working through those issues, it has been challenging. But open-source software now pervades. Just go and look at the license.txt in the Visual Studio Program Files folder to see all of the open-source software that is consumed by Visual Studio.Corey: One last topic that I want to get to before we call it a show is that you've spent a significant portion of your career, at least recently, focusing on, more or less, where the next generation of engineers, developers, et cetera, come from. And to that end, you've also started recently with TikTok, the social media platform. Are those two things related, first off, or am I making a giant pile of unwarranted assumption?Scott: [laugh]. I think that is a fair assumption. So, what's going on is I want to make sure that as I fade away and I leave the software industry in the next, you know, N number of years, that I'm setting up as many people as possible for success. That's where my career started when I was a professor, and that's hopefully where my career will end when I am a professor again. Hopefully, my retirement gig will have me teaching at some university somewhere.And in doing that, I want to find the next million developers, right? Where are they, the next 10 million developers? They're probably not on Twitter. They might be a lot of different places: they might be on Discord, they might be on Reddit, they might be on forums that I haven't found yet. But I have found, on TikTok, a very creative and for the most part kind and inclusive community.And both myself and also recently, the Visual Studio Code team have been hanging out there, and sharing our creativity, and having really interesting conversations about how you the listener can if not be a programmer, be a person that knows better the tools that are available to you to solve problems.Corey: So, I absolutely appreciate and enjoy the direction that you're going in, but again, people invite you to things and then spring technical support questions on you. Can you explain what TikTok is? I'm still trying to wrap my head around it because I turned around and discovered I was middle-aged one day.Scott: Sure. Well, I mean, I am an old man on TikTok, to be clear. TikTok, like Twitter, revels in its constraints. If you recall, there was a big controversy when Twitter went from 140 characters to 280 because people thought it was just letting the constraint that we were so excited about—which was artificial because it was the length of a standard message service text—Corey: I'm one of those people who bitterly protested it. I was completely wrong.Scott: Right? But the idea that something is constrained, that TikTok is either 15 seconds, or less than 60, it's similar to Vine in that it is a tiny video; what can I do in one minute? Additionally, before they allowed uploading of videos, everything was constrained within the TikTok editor, so people would do amazing and intricate 30 and 40 shot transitions within a 60 second period of time. But one of the things I find most unique about TikTok is you can reply to a text comment with a video. So, I make a video—maybe I do 60 seconds on how to be a software engineer—somebody replies in text, I can then reply to that text with a video, and then a TikTok creator can do what's called a stitch and reply to my video with a video.So, I could take 15 seconds of yours, a comment that you made, and say, “Oh, this is a great comment. Here's my thoughts on that comment.” Or we could even do a duet where you record a video and then I record one, side-by-side. And we either simulate that we're actually having a conversation, or I react to your video as well. Once you start teaching TikTok about yourself by liking things, you curate a very positive place for yourself.You might get on TikTok, not logged in, and it's dancing, and you might find some inappropriate things that you don't necessarily want to see, or you're not interested in, but one of the things that I've noticed as I talk about my home network and coding is people will say, “Oh, I finally found adjective TikTok; I finally found coding TikTok I finally found IT TikTok. Oh, I'm going to comment on your post because I want to stay on networking TikTok.” And then your feed isn't just a feed of the people that you follow, but it's a feed of all the things that TikTok thinks you're excited about. So, I am on this wonderful TikTok of linguistics and languages, and I'm learning about cultures, and I'm on indigenous TikTok, and I'm on networking TikTok. And the mix of creativity and the constraint of just 60 seconds has been, really, a joy. And I've only been there for about a month and I've blessed to have 80,000 people hanging out with me there.Corey: It sounds like you're quite the fan of the platform, which alone in isolation, is enough to get me to look at it in more depth.Scott: I am a fan of creativity. I would also say though, it's very addictive once you find your people. I've had to put screen time limits on my own phone to keep me from burning time there.Corey: That is all of tempting, provocative, and disturbing. I—Scott: You should hang out with me on YouTube, then. I just got my 100,000 YouTube Silver Play Button in the mail. That's where I spend my time doing my long-form. I just did, actually, 17 minutes on WSL and how to use Linux. That might be a good starter for you.Corey: It very well might. So, if people want to learn more about what you're up to, and how you think about the wide variety of things you're interested in, where can they find you?Scott: They should start at my last name dot com: Hanselman.com. They used to be able to Google for Scott, and I was in an epic battle with Scott brand toilet paper tissue, and then they trademarked the name Scott and now I'm somewhere in the distant second or third page. It was a tragedy. But as an early comer—Corey: Oh, my condolences.Scott: Yeah, oh my God. As an early comer to the internet, it was me and Scott Fly Rods on the first page, for many, many years. And then—Corey: If it helps, you and Scott Fly Rods are both on page two.Scott: Oh. Well, the tyranny of the Scott toilet paper conspiracy against me has been problematic.Corey: Exactly.Scott: [laugh].Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Scott: It's my pleasure.Corey: Scott Hanselman, partner program manager at Microsoft and so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a crappy comment that starts with a comment that gatekeeps a programming language so we know to ignore it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
In this collaboration with ACM ByteCast and Hanselminutes, Scott welcomes 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Leslie Lamport of Microsoft Research, best known for his seminal work in distributed and concurrent systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual. Among his many honors and recognitions, Lamport is a Fellow of ACM and has received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, the Dijkstra Prize, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.Leslie shares his journey into computing, which started out as something he only did in his spare time as a mathematician. Scott and Leslie discuss the differences and similarities between computer science and software engineering, the math involved in Leslie’s high-level temporal logic of actions (TLA), which can help solve the famous Byzantine Generals Problem, and the algorithms Leslie himself has created. He also reflects on how the building of distributed systems has changes since the 60s and 70s.Subscribe to the ACM ByteCast at https://learning.acm.org/bytecast Time-Clocks Paperhttp://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf Bakery Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport%27s_bakery_algorithm Mutual Exclusion Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport%27s_distributed_mutual_exclusion_algorithm
In this special episode of Hanselminutes, Scott shares a discussion with Jim McKelvey, a glassblower and also the co-founder of Square! This conversation was previously published as a episode of Microsoft's internal interview series "Outside In." Jim's team and our friends at Microsoft have encouraged us to share the episode where we discuss innovation and entrepreneurship.Read Jim McKelvey's book The Innovation Stack
Pluralsight author Barry Luijbregts speaks with developer Scott Hanselman about becoming an impactful teacher, the importance of humor in presenting, and much more. This episode originally aired on The Developer Weekly Podcast. Scott's website and blog The Hanselminutes podcast Scott's YouTube channel
In this episode, we talk about the new normal for developers with Scott Hanselman, partner program manager at Microsoft, author of several books, and the host of the Hanselminutes podcast, and the YouTube channel, Computer Stuff They Didn’t Teach You. Show Notes DevNews (sponsor) Triplebyte (sponsor) CodeNewbie (sponsor) RudderStack (sponsor) Pluralsight (sponsor) Hanselminutes Technology Podcast Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You C# .NET Azure Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio Code GitHub Codespaces Visual Studio Live Share hanselman.com Git Keys Left Microsoft Teams JavaScript Node.js TypeScript Microsoft Build Microsoft Ignite CES CodeLand OBS Project Tye Kubernetes
Shipping product is hard. Kickstarting hardware products is hard. Scott talks to Palo Alto Innovation's Alex Tramiel whose team is shipping the Sandman Doppler Alarm Clock. How does a new product go from concept to your nightstand? What's inside a smart alarm clock like the Sandman Doppler? How does one make a decision like USB-C or not, when a product has a multi-year development cycle? All this and more, this week on Hanselminutes!https://www.sandmanclocks.com/pages/doppler
Scott talks with Joe Karlsson about Document Databases like MongoDB and how they differ from classic Table-based (ER) databases. Can this next generation of WebAPI and JSON-powered cloud DB allow more beginners to get into programming? Is this the death of select * from table?NOTE: Scott met Joe while speaking at Codeland. While Mongo is a sponsor of Hanselminutes, this interview isn't related to that sponsorship in any way. Hanselminutes doesn't do "sponsored guests," only awesome guests.
Scott talks to Engineering Manager Kate Reading from Asana about her experiences as a new remote worker during the pandemic. How do you manage standups, checkins, 1:1s, and onboarding? All this plus "Team User Manuals" on this episode of Hanselminutes
I spoke with Scott Hanselman. I must admit, I felt I was not in my best. I was nervous, self-conscious, and excited all at the same time during our conversation and that made me ramble more than usual. All my rambling was removed during the editing of this episode. If you code with Microsoft technologies, you should have come across his name before. If not, here is an intro: Scott works at Microsoft. He manages outreach and community for .NET, ASP.NET, IIS, Azure, and Visual Studio. I have known Scott from afar for over a decade. He is a reference to me. He has a very popular weekly podcast with over 700 episodes called Hanselminutes. How can I not be self-conscious? He is a sought-after keynote speaker. I have seen in-person keynotes delivered by him over the years. He can really engage a live audience, and I think he would have a shot in standup comedy. He has been blogging since 2002 at least twice a week on various topics technology related. Scott was very generous and patient with me during our chat, giving me a lot of feedback and suggestions as we went through. I have removed them from the final cut to make sure the episode was short and to the point. I hope I was able to extract some of the habits and processes that Scott has so that you can decided if you want to apply them yourself. I want to thank Luca Gobbi for providing one of the questions I asked Scott. After the longest intro so far and without further ado, enjoy the chat! Full show notes and links: https://SoloCoder.com/41
Jurgen Appelo on Agile Toolkit, Amitai Schleier on Mob Mentality, Colleen Bordeaux on Coaching For Leaders, Scott Hanselman on Hanselminutes, and Buster Benson on Lead From The Heart. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 2, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JURGEN APPELO ON AGILE TOOLKIT The Agile Toolkit podcast featured Jurgen Appelo with host Bob Payne. Jurgen says that companies go through several stages in their lifecycle and investors make investment decisions based on what stage they think a company is in. Some investors, for example, wait until a company has achieved product-market fit before investing. At first, budgets are small because the risks are higher. Then, as more evidence is accumulated and the weaker companies have failed, the remaining companies get the bigger budgets. This is called an innovation funnel. Seeing how well this works in startup funding, Jurgen started to see the benefit that this could have if adopted inside organizations. Corporations tend to invest in projects by predicting what ideas will succeed. Instead, they could create an ecosystem where all the ideas can participate and they would go through stages like a startup where they need to find product-solution fit, product-market fit, and those that make it to the end get the biggest funding. They talked about business agility and Jurgen says that it is more important to focus on innovation and you will achieve business agility as part of the package. Bob pointed out that organizations are setting up skunkworks and innovation labs but, unless they can integrate their innovations with the core business, they will end up like Xerox Parc and other companies will exploit their innovations and disrupt them. Jurgen says that this innovator’s dilemma, as described by Clayton Christensen, requires you to switch to the mindset that your products and services don’t have eternal life. This is normal for any organism, but a species can live forever. The innovator’s dilemma, he says, was solved millions of years ago in nature. We need to borrow this regeneration capability from nature and say that the innovation is not the product or service; it is the system for generating products and services. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jurgen-appelo-startup-scaleup-screwum-lean-agile-dc-2019/id78532866?i=1000465296924 Website link: https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/2/d/3/2d3a6b2936031059/leanAndAgileDC2019_Jurgen_Appelo.mp3?c_id=64647230&cs_id=64647230&expiration=1582618595&hwt=2e7c8bfffbafc47eef3a10950edf34ae AMITAI SCHLEIER ON MOB MENTALITY The Mob Mentality podcast featured Amitai Schleier with hosts Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick. As a technical Agile coach, Amitai likes to sit with programmers and program, sit with testers and test, and sit with managers and manage. He loves to put things in terms of cost and risk and one of his areas of specialty is legacy code. When Amitai tried to make a career change from being a developer to being a technical Agile coach, he believed that if he could just say the right words in the right order with the right tone of voice, people would have to agree with him and behavior change would occur. This didn’t work. He realized that getting the words right is important, but you need to earn people’s trust first. He pair-coached with Llewellyn Falco and this taught him about the synergy between mobbing and coaching. One example of that synergy is in how you know whether the coaching is working. You measure by observing whether the new behaviors the coach introduced continue to be practiced when the coach isn’t around. An expensive way to test this is, after a year of coaching them, go away for a year and come back and see what still gets practiced. A cheaper and more Agile way is to have an iteration with a feedback cycle where you visit just long enough for the team to form a new habit and go away long enough to see if the habit sticks. Chris asked Amitai to talk about teams that he introduced to mobbing. Amitai described a team that had problems working together. Amitai had the program manager say to the team that, in the next iteration, if the team didn’t get fewer stories done, the manager would be disappointed because the team wasn’t trying hard enough to learn something. In practice, teams that start mobbing don’t slow down that much, but they need to hear that they’re allowed to. As a result of the switch to mobbing, the person who had been keeping decision-making for himself started talking people through what he knew, people who had previously been uninvolved started to engage with the problem-solving process, and the whole team was energized by it. Amitai doesn’t love that he had to force it on them the way he did and prefers to invite people to change their behavior, but sometimes, he says, you have to manufacture the willingness. Chris asked about the benefits and difficulties of mob programming with legacy code. First, Amitai said, mob programming is more extreme than Extreme Programming. If we were defining XP today, we would skip pairing and go straight to mobbing. Legacy code, or, valuable code we are afraid to change, is a kind of nexus of extremes as well. The cognitive challenges of software development are turned up all the way and mob programming is a great way to deal with these greater cognitive challenges. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/amitai-schleier-on-the-synergy-of-mobbing-and-coaching/id1485950034?i=1000463210922 Website link: https://mobmentalityshow.podbean.com/e/amitai-schleier-on-the-synergy-of-mobbing-and-coaching/ COLLEEN BORDEAUX ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Colleen Bordeaux with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave started by asking about a quote from Colleen’s book, “Am I Doing This Right?” The Charles Jones quote says, “You are the same today that you’re going to be in five years except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.” Colleen says that when she looks at the people from whom she has learned the most and the people who helped her become who she is today, she finds that they all credit their success to the relationships they’ve cultivated and the books they’ve read. They spoke about the health implications of loneliness. Colleen says that our purpose and fulfillment in life and work is connected deeply to the relationships we cultivate and our ability to cultivate relationships is about being able to show up as ourselves. To Colleen, authenticity means being open to connecting with people and sharing your real experiences, who you are, and the challenges you’ve had so that it gives others permission to do the same. People are craving real human connection and we need to a better job of facilitating it. When Colleen was most lonely and isolated it was when she was in high school and her older brother became addicted to drugs, putting her family through an upheaval. Her high school and community had a culture of perfectionism and her family struggled not only with her brother’s addiction but also a fear of judgement from other people. Colleen felt she couldn’t share her feelings of loneliness with her friends or teachers because she didn’t know anyone who would receive it without judging her family. As she grew up and her family worked through it, she started to share her feelings and realized that the people in her network had their own struggles in their own families and were also afraid to share. They talked about how the negative relationships in our lives can make us into destructive thinkers rather than productive thinkers. Colleen described a time when she fell victim to this. She was insecure, negative, gossipy, super-judgmental, and someone who would get jealous or envious when she saw people around her succeeding and happy. The root cause, she says, was that she was not introspective and had no control over her own mindset. She says you have to look at yourself and consider, “Am I a net-positive in the lives of the people who I surround myself with? Am I somebody who encourages, supports, and gives positivity and light to the people around me or am I somebody who is quick to judge, quick to shut down, and somebody who struggles to nip my negative impulses in the bud?” When Colleen helped herself evolve from a crab to a magnanimous thinker, her relationships blossomed. She told a story about being on a huge project that involved constant travel and little autonomy. Instead of trying to fix the situation, she allowed her negativity to run rampant. She decided the problem was everybody else and the firm itself, so she went looking for a new job. She got an offer and she told one of her mentors. This mentor said, “Colleen, you can go ahead and take this job, but eventually you’re going to end up in the same situation. What are you going to do then?” She says that this hit her like a ton of bricks. Changing her circumstances might momentarily have distracted her, but it was her own thinking that was the real problem. Her mentor’s advice was that running away from things doesn’t move you forward. You are better off staying put, focusing on what you can control, and seeking what truly excites and energizes you to the point where you can’t stop thinking about it and you want to run towards it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/455-how-to-create-great-relationships-colleen-bordeaux/id458827716?i=1000465792556 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/great-relationships-colleen-bordeaux/ SCOTT HANSELMAN ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Scott Hanselman with host Jeff Fritz. For the first time in about 700 episodes, Scott Hanselman was the guest on Hanselminutes. This episode came from an interview he did with the Live Coders who write code live in front of an audience on Twitch. Jeff asked first about Scott’s longevity. Scott’s blog has been going on for seventeen years and the podcast has been going on for fourteen years. The reason he has been able to do it consistently for that long is because he is not doing it five days a week. Scott says you need to set up systems by which your community can be self-sustaining and not require you to show up every single day. The next question came from community member roberttables. He asked how Scott delegates responsibilities for aspects of a community when community mentorship is not part of your role. Scott says that one of the things he finds communities don’t do is they don’t express what their long term goals are. He compared it to a couple getting married and having wedding vows but no mission statement. He and his wife wrote a business plan for the community of two that they were creating. When you put together a community, he says, whether it is a marriage or a community of fifty live coders, you set a tone. You have to make sure that 80 to 90% of the people are 100% behind the goals. Then, if a troll shows up, they are overwhelmed by the positivity of the group. That’s how you scale. It starts with two people agreeing on what they are doing. As an example of doing this wrong, he talked about how Reddit communities have problems because Reddit wasn’t founded with the agreement that we would all be nice to each other. Now they are trying to retcon niceness into the community. Scott says, “You can’t retcon nice.” The next question was from rockzombie2, who wanted to know how Scott grew his following. Scott says consistency is king. He asked, “How often have you visited someone’s blog and the very last blog post is a rededication of themselves to blogging?” That’s because people set up failure systems. Instead, it’s got to be something that you can’t ever stop. The interval between blog posts should be large enough that you start to miss it but not so large that coming back to it is a chore. You also need to have an internal check-in where you ask yourself, “Does this feed my spirit? Is this the thing that makes me happy?” If you feel you need a blog to grow, then that’s the wrong attitude. Michael Jolley, aka, BaldBeardedBuilder, asked how Scott manages the various kinds of content he produces. Scott says he keeps a backlog of ideas that are so good that they can write themselves. If he gets excited about something, he will both blog about it and reach out to someone related to the thing that has him excited and schedule a podcast. KymPhillpotts asked about resources for improving interviewing techniques. Scott believes interviewing is similar to improv. Just as you would in improv, you want to use the concept of “Yes, and...” He also recommended listening to early Terry Gross interviews from the mid-nineties. He recommends ignoring the content and instead studying how she conducts the interview. He says that people seem to think that you can just turn on the mic and start interviewing people and it is going to go well. He argues that you need deliberate practice. You need to listen to yourself and watch yourself on video and learn what you need to do better. Being charming is an art. You can practice it and become better at it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/myself-its-not-weird-at-all/id117488860?i=1000462813484 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/myself-not-weird-at-all-HZclNwEe BUSTER BENSON ON LEAD FROM THE HEART The Lead From The Heart podcast featured Buster Benson with host Mark C. Crowley. Buster has written a book called “Why Are We Yelling? The Art Of Productive Disagreement”. Buster started out by saying that disagreements as battles has been a useful tool for us as a species before we had institutions of reason and science. It was how you claimed your spot on the hill. While “might makes right” continues to be what we fall back to when everything else falls apart, it is no longer the most productive way to think about disagreement. The kinds of problems we face today and the arena that we’re having conversations in have changed. Before, it was about keeping the tribe together. Now, it is about creating relationships and collaborating across tribes. We need to train ourselves to become great collaborators and see disagreement as an opportunity and as a skill we can practice. Mark brought up a statistic from Buster’s book that says nine in ten of us feel that arguments are almost always an unproductive venture. As a result, we steer clear of them. He asked Buster what he has learned about why having disagreements is so highly supportive of having healthy relationships. Buster says that if you think about a disagreement as a milestone or landmark of something important that is currently in a stuck state and ask what, long term, is going to best guarantee the success of this relationship, it is about becoming high-functioning in terms of addressing and facing problems and resolving them. This is difficult because avoidance is natural. When you are thrown into an arena where you don’t have the skills to operate in it successfully, you naturally run away. Buster talked about anxiety debt. These are the things you have not been able to face with confidence and they end up wearing you down, decreasing your happiness, and making you less healthy. Just as there is never an urgent need to clean up tech debt until it threatens the success of your company, anxiety debt in your relationships can be neglected and become harder and harder to address as it accumulates over time. Mark asked how to get yourself centered so that you can have a disagreement that doesn’t knock you off your foundation. Buster says the first step is get over the misconception that we can change minds. Minds do change, but we don’t change them directly; we change them with our own mind changing. Rather than thinking “I’m going to move your mind from point A to point B”, think of your own mind and the other party’s mind each as a pile of rocks and you each have to contribute your rocks to building a new, third pile that incorporates both perspectives. This third perspective is more inclusive and transcends the problem. You don’t know in advance where the third perspective is and you have to use the other person’s perspective to triangulate it with your own. That means you have to use them as a resource rather than a receptacle of new information. Mark asked about emotional situations where things are so polarized that each side thinks the other is crazy. Buster says that in these situations, the fact that we think each other is crazy raises the question, “What do I not know about you and what do you not know about me that makes us think each other is crazy?” To resolve this, you can ask questions that you don’t know the answers to. No matter what the other party says, it will give you new information and new insight into things. Mark asked for an example. Buster says that if you are with your polar opposite political opponent, you can ask a set of questions that help you understand how their beliefs arose. These questions take you out of battle stance and help you build a relationship with them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/buster-benson-mastering-art-productive-disagreement/id1365633369?i=1000464961355 Website link: https://blubrry.com/leadfromtheheartpodcast/55513911/buster-benson-mastering-the-art-of-productive-disagreement/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
Neil Pasricha on Coaching For Leaders, Corey Quinn on On Call Nightmares, Craig Daniel on Build by Drift, and Bryan Liles on Hanselminutes. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the four podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 6, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. NEIL PASRICHA ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Neil Pasricha with host Dave Stachowiak. Neil described his first professional role, working at Proctor & Gamble. He had graduated from Queen’s University in 2002, one of the top business schools in Canada and, at the time, a job at Proctor & Gamble was one of the top marketing jobs you could get. Neil felt like Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket. But he was horrible at the job. He had been expecting to spend his days creating PowerPoint presentations and instead was asked to create spreadsheets to analyze trucking, gasoline, and a million other variables to determine how much to increase the price of mascara. As a high achieving adolescent, he took his failure to be his own fault rather than a factor beyond his control. He worked late, came in on weekends, and started grinding his teeth. A few months in, the company wanted to put him on a performance improvement plan. He couldn’t handle the notion of being fired, so he quit nine months in. He catastrophized this event. He thought, “If I can’t work here, at the best company, with the most supportive culture, kind people, and a lot of structure, I can’t work anywhere.” He thought, “If I can’t do marketing, my highest mark in business school, I certainly can’t do finance,” and, “If I look for another job, they’re just going to call P&G who will say ‘This guy is horrible.’” He pictured the worst-case scenario: he thought he would go bankrupt and thought his life was over as a working person. He calls this, “pointing the spotlight at yourself”. High achievers have a tendency to think, “It’s all about me and I’m terrible.” He was a low-resilience person. He wrote his new book, You Are Awesome, about resilience because he identified himself as lacking it. Like most of us these days, he grew up without famines, wars, and other sources of societal stress. He got the gold stars and participation ribbons and didn’t have the tools to handle failure. He didn’t see for years that the P&G blow actually was his first lesson in resilience. He says we look at successful people and think their lives were a string of successes, but the most successful people are those that have also seen the most failure. He cited Cy Young, who has won the most games in baseball ever. He also has the most losses. Nolan Ryan, who has the most strikeouts, also has the most walks. Dave talked about his first full-time role as director of a center that helped students learn math and reading skills. He was average at the job and the culture wanted people to show a lot of initiative. He struggled, got passed over for promotions, and the feedback he was given was that he wasn’t moving fast enough, wasn’t taking initiative, and wasn’t meeting deadlines. Like Neil, Dave dropped out and started his coaching business. Neil says that Dave’s and his own feelings of incompetence are a result of the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the feeling that we’re being noticed, observed, and judged more than we really are. Nobody at P&G probably even remembers Neil, but the spotlight effect had caused Neil to feel that everybody had watched him fail. To help reduce this effect, Neil asks himself three questions: 1. “Will this matter on my deathbed?” 2. “Can I do something about this?” And 3. “Is this a story I’m telling myself?” For example, if you fail a biology test, the story you might tell yourself, “I failed my parents.” Dave asked whether Neil is now comfortable with being uncomfortable. Neil had thought that he had reached a point where he was finally comfortable with being uncomfortable, but when he left Walmart to take his side hustle full-time, he suddenly felt uncomfortable again. He says you have to treat it like yoga. You have to keep learning it until you learn it. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/448-the-value-of-being-uncomfortable-with-neil-pasricha/id458827716?i=1000461086169 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/value-being-uncomfortable-neil-pasricha/ COREY QUINN ON ON CALL NIGHTMARES The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Corey Quinn with host Jay Gordon. Corey started his on call career in what he called an “abusive” environment. One year in, a new manager was dropped in and the first thing this manager decided was that he wasn’t going to be on call himself. The number of people on call dropped from four to three and then another person left. So Corey was on call 50% of the time and he could never schedule his life around it. At the end of that time, Corey swore he would never put himself in this situation again. When he started the Duckbill Group, he decided that anything he did would be “business hours only”. Jay asked Corey what in 2019 most excited him in the world of cloud. Corey said that it was the awareness by the providers that building the fastest, most exciting, far fetched, far flung technologies was not going to be what won them the hearts and minds of their customers. Instead, he saw the large providers speaking to enterprises about migrating from data centers to cloud environments. They talked about Microsoft’s advantage in selling the cloud to enterprises. Corey says one of Microsoft’s big advantages in cloud is that they have forty years experience apologizing for software failures. Explaining these failures to non-technical audiences is something Microsoft excels at and Google and Amazon have had to learn. Jay brought up that the embrace of managed Kubernetes was a big trend in 2019. Corey says that his objection to it is that if you run everything on top of Kubernetes, you’ve abstracted away what you’re doing from the cloud providers’ built-in primitives so much that it becomes challenging to do workload attribution of cost. Programmatically figuring out which workload is the expensive one is surprising difficult. Jay talked about Hashicorp’s rise in 2019, providing tooling around cloud agnosticism. Corey said that one of the best conversations he had on his own podcast, Screaming In The Cloud, this past year was with Hashimoto. Hashimoto argued that Terraform provides workflow portability rather than workload portability and that one is worth pursuing and the other one is not. Jay said that this was the first year that Amazon talked about multicloud. Corey says they talked about hybrid but still avoided multicloud. Corey believes that every cloud provider hates multicloud until they realize a large customer is going to go with a different provider, then multicloud is wonderful. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-46-year-in-review-corey-quinn-duckbill-group/id1447430839?i=1000460596737 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-12-23T11_00_16-08_00 CRAIG DANIEL ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build podcast by Drift featured Craig Daniel with host Maggie Crowley. Their topic was “What does Drift look for when hiring product managers?” Craig says that the product manager role is unique in that you don’t have direct reports but you need to be able to influence the engineering team, the designers, and a slew of stakeholders that includes customers. Regarding technical skills, Craig says they look for systems thinkers with the ability to break down a problem, articulate their breakdown, look at data and combine that data with qualitative research. Maggie asked about hiring for associate PM roles and Craig says it goes back to a core principle that a person’s aptitude and attitude outweighs their experience. Craig defines aptitude as a combination of ability to learn and curiosity. These people are those who can grow faster than normal. Maggie added that these people are paying attention to the world around them, are asking questions of the tools that they’re using, and are not just assuming things are the way they are. For more experienced hires, Craig is looking for results. Sometimes there are good people who were in bad companies or joined a startup prior to product-market fit that never got off the ground. If they don’t have results, you want to see outputs: shipping things, building partnerships, and media coverage. People who are successful in product are those that can build coalitions, roll up their sleeves, do the hard work, and get stuff done. Maggie says that PMs can be afraid to be accountable for the end result. It is easy to say, “I wrote my one pager,” “I wrote the spec,” or “We stuck to the timeline.” There are so many excuses that you lose sight of the fact that you need to be accountable for results. Regarding the interview process, Craig says Drift’s process consists of a design leader interview, a product team interview, an executive interview, and something called, “The Who method.” Craig himself is looking for fit. This is not culture fit. It means, “What is this person great at, what do they want to do, and what do we have available or can make available?” To get at fit, Craig asks about their superpowers. If they’re at a company with, say, five product managers, what would everyone say they are the best of the five at? What are they worst of the five at? He also wants examples of truly exceptional work. This tells him what they think exceptional is, what their emotional intelligence is (are they a braggart?), and what their value system is. Craig says he has made a lot of mistakes over the years hiring PMs and, as a result, has learned to be more systematic about it. You have to have a practical part of the interview where you have the candidate go to the whiteboard, break down a problem, or tell the interviewer about work they’ve done in the past. A particularly good practical problem is to have them talk about a product they use everyday and describe both what’s great about it and what needs to be improved about it. They talked about the Who method (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345504194). For example, if the candidate tells you they were responsible for a half-a-million user product, the Who method lets you find out how much of that was their responsibility versus something they are just taking credit for. He talked about an aspect of the Who method called the threat of reference check. You ask the candidate, say, who their previous manager was, and then say, “When I call your previous manager, what are they going to say about you?” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-really-matters-when-hiring-a-pm/id1445050691?i=1000461459804 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/what-really-matters-when-hiring-a-pm BRYAN LILES ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Bryan Liles with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started out by asking Bryan what he means by “a complete engineer”. Bryan says he has rules for everything and rule #1 is that there is a competition out there but you are only competing with yourself. You can watch what other people do and you can emulate them, but don’t compare yourself to others. Regarding being a complete developer, he says you have two aspects of being a developer: 1) writing software for money and 2) providing an impact to the world. That impact may be helping other developers level up, providing a role model, or simply doing no harm. Growing up, Bryan’s dream was simply to have a better life for himself than his parents had. Now, he wants to show people that his life was not a fluke but is a result of preparing himself for opportunities. The world Bryan wants to live in is one in which we’re trying our best and we’re also looking out for the people that come after us. Bryan talked about his recent project Octant that is a console for showing what’s going on in your Kubernetes cluster. He says that often we start to make a product and we start listing a bunch of features we want it to have. He says this is like that friend that talks too much and tells boring stories that go on for too long. We all prefer the friend who tells simple stories and it is the same with software products: you need to start off simply and solve one problem at a time. The interview ended with Bryan’s three pieces of advice that he gives to all black males that he meets. First, he says to ignore the advice that says you have to be the dumbest person in the room. That works when you have privilege and you have a safety net. Instead, be the smartest person in the room, but don’t tell anyone. Second, opportunity is rare, so when it comes, be ready. His third piece of advice is to get used to, but not comfortable, with failure. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/being-a-complete-engineer-and-bryan-liles-rules-to-life/id117488860?i=1000460922091 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/being-a-complete-engineer-and-bryan-liles-rules-to-life-BiK2k99r LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
In this episode we introduce the pod, discuss Safiya Noble's groundbreaking 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, take a look at the NYPL CulturePass program, and get to know how some new grad students decided on the UW-Madison iSchool! SHOW NOTES! Audio clip sources: Donavan, Joan. (2018, May 15.) Algorithms of Oppression. Data & Society Research Institute. Retrieved from https://listen.datasociety.net/algorithms-of-oppression/ Elevator Speech (00:09 - 00:39) Titling of book (30:52 - 32:01) Dr. Joan Donavan (the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center) interviews Dr. Safiya Noble for the Data & Society Research Institute. “Data & Society Research Institute advances public understanding of the social implications of data-centric technologies and automation.” https://datasociety.net/ Chamseddine, Roqayah and Salehi, Kumars. (2018, April 12.) Algorithms of Oppression. Delete Your Account. Retrieved from https://deleteyouraccount.libsyn.com/algorithms-of-oppression Impetus for the book (07:52 - 09:22) Radicalization (21:39 - 24:15) Hanselman, Scott. (2019, February 1.) Episode 66: Exploring Algorithms of Oppression. Hanselminutes. Retrieved from https://hanselminutes.com/669/exploring-algorithms-of-oppression-with-dr-safiya-noble Discussion of STEM student education (14:47 - 16:45) Article/Book Sources: Noble, Safiya Umoja. (2018.) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. Wajcman, Judy. (2010, January.) Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/ben057 Roose, Kevin. (2019, June 8.) The Making of a YouTube Radical. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html Additional Resources: Collins, Patricia Hill. (2000.) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. The Combahee River Collective. (1979.) A Black Feminist Statement. https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the-combahee-river-collective-statement.html Weill, Kelly. (2018, December 19.) How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-youtube-pulled-these-men-down-a-vortex-of-far-right-hate Noble, Safiya Umoja. ([2018]) How biased are our algorithms? TEDx University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXuJ8yQf6dI Noble, Safiya Umoja. (2016.) Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression. Personal Democracy Forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVZozEEWlE Current Events: Nancy Coleman, "Libraries’ Culture Pass Signs Up 70,000 in First Year" New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/arts/design/culture-pass-library-new-york.html. 8/13/19.
Karen Catlin on Retaining WIT, Jonathan Cutrell on Maintainable, Dr. Aneika L. Simmons on Hanselminutes, Sarah Wells on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Tech Done Right by Table XI. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 16, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. KAREN CATLIN ON RETAINING WIT The Retaining WIT podcast featured Karen Catlin with hosts Jossie Haines and Jordanna Kwok. Karen, who is a leadership coach and diversity advocate, got interested in tech when she saw an issue of Money magazine with a cover story about successful women with computer science backgrounds and her father pointed out the connection between a career in software and Karen’s love of crafting, puzzle-solving, and mathematics. She started her career in 1985, which was a peak year for women in Computer Science. In that year, 37% of the Computer Science degrees went to women. It dropped to a low of 17% but has started to go up again in recent years. Karen started a coaching practice because she wanted to help women who wanted to grow their careers and stay in tech. She soon realized that, even if she could be the most amazing coach on the planet, her clients would still be facing an uphill battle because they were working in companies that were not the meritocracies they claimed to be. This led Karen to explore an idea: “Instead of trying to fix the women, let’s start fixing the men.” She says there is a role for every man who is working in tech to create a more inclusive workplace on his work team and at his company. Karen says that mentoring programs are a great opportunity for people to pass on advice to someone who hasn’t had the same amount of experience, but there is a trap: studies have shown that most of us mentor people who remind us of our younger self. Karen’s advice is, if you’re doing mentoring, mentor someone who doesn’t look like you. Don’t have a mini-me protégé. Another piece of advice from Karen is to pay attention in meetings. Look out for interruptions. There is research showing that men interrupt women much more than the reverse and that women who are getting interrupted tend to step back and not participate in the rest of the meeting or future meetings. So, when you see people getting interrupted, say something like, “Jordanna was making a great point. I’d like to hear more about that.” Another thing to watch for is what Karen calls “bro-propriation”: a woman says something in a meeting that falls flat and then, later on in the same meeting, a man says the same thing and gets all the credit. An ally can say something like, “Hey, I see that you agree with the point that May was making earlier.” Discussing hiring, Karen says she used to grab old job descriptions and add new requirements to them, reasoning that all the old requirements are still relevant. She says that you should instead try to get your job description down to just five requirements. Research has shown that women apply for jobs when they have all the skills listed in the job description while men apply even if they have little more than half of the listed skills. Karen also says to have objective criteria to use for every single candidate. Ideally, use the same interview questions. She told a story about moving to Silicon Valley with her partner Tim and applying to work at the same company in the same software engineering role. The two of them had interviews the same day. Driving home at the end of the day, Tim related to Karen that his interviews were among the most difficult he had ever had while her own experience was that the interviews had all been easy. The interviewers had dumbed down the questions when interviewing her. They were both offered jobs, but she decided not to take her offer because the company didn’t respect her enough to ask her the same difficult questions they had asked men applying for the same position. She then spoke about the importance of public speaking in gaining visibility and how it can help with both recruiting in the case of giving external talks and with getting your ideas considered. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/karen-catlin-on-being-better-allies/id1458996260?i=1000440710563 Website link: https://www.retainingwit.com/karen-catlin JONATHAN CUTRELL ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Jonathan Cutrell with host Robby Russell. Jonathan is the host of the Developer Tea podcast and is a senior engineer at Clearbit. Robby asked Jonathan what he thinks are the characteristics of a healthy and maintainable codebase. Jonathan says testing and having a consistent way of testing is critical to maintainability. He also looks at the size of each concept the code expresses to see if it can fit in a person’s head. Robby asked how Jonathan’s teams have achieved consistent testing. Jonathan says that human beings are pretty good at being about 90% consistent, which is almost worse than being 0% consistent. He says to take the load off the human engineer and, for those times when you still need to put the load on them, have a way to proceduralize things such as by having a checklist or template. Robby asked what Jonathan thinks developers often get wrong when they talk about technical debt. Jonathan says that debt is an easy term to throw around because, in the financial sense, it is a very clear concept. Technical debt does not have so clear a definition. You need to evaluate what your team cares about and what has been costly from a business perspective. Some things that we may think are debt are just emotionally difficult to accept: code that we wish was different but isn’t actually causing any real problems or even forecasted to cause problems. One factor that Jonathan thinks should be consistently considered technical debt is code that is staying around but for which you don’t have any kind of validation. I liked Jonathan’s metaphor for attempting to refactor code that is not under a lot of churn. Picking up code that isn’t changing much and improving its design, he says is like paying off low-interest mortgage debt. There are probably better places to expend our effort. Developers tend to treat decisions around technical debt like one would treat the decision to clean up your house. You have the sense of ownership over your home and, regardless of whether there is risk of future problems, we feel the need to clean things up. They talked about why Jonathan started the Developer Tea podcast. Jonathan wanted a podcast that he could listen to on an afternoon walk for five to ten minutes and learn something new. Most podcasts at the time were much longer and more entertainment-driven, and he wanted something that focused on the more human aspects of the job in a short, inspirational form. He says that the podcast has been one of the most rewarding things he has done in his career. The most rewarding experiences have been when people send him emails about how an episode or series of episodes have shifted the way they think about a topic or even about how they think about their career. They talked about whether there is a correlation between healthy code and healthy teams. Jonathan says there is data around teams in general that says teams that good relationships with their manager and the people they work with have the highest performance and the lowest turnover. These good team dynamics have visible effects on the code. Strong teams, Jonathan says, eradicate fear. These fears are things like fearing that someone is going to judge you poorly when they look at your code. Second, the best teams also know how to come up with the best ideas, which involves one or more team members being able to give up their own idea without attaching a sense of failure to letting that idea go. Third, members of strong teams recognize the humanity of everyone on their team. Robby asked what developers get wrong when evaluating their peers. Jonathan says that people, in general, tend to see everyone around them as inadequate as a way to containerize the rest of the world. This bias helps us to make decisions without being riddled with anxiety about them. The downside of this shows up when we are tasked with evaluating another person. This feeling that everyone else is inadequate combines in a bad way with our natural loss aversion when we try to make sense of things. Most failures are the result of factors that could not be controlled or predicted. With hindsight, when a project is late, we try to think of why it was late and we often come up with a reason, rightly or wrongly. We don’t often come to the conclusion that the project failed because something random happened. As a result, performance reviews tend towards the negative side unless we actively bias away from that. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jonathan-cutrell-healthy-teams-know-how-to-eradicate-fear/id1459893010?i=1000447238745 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/jonathan-cutrell-healthy-teams-know-how-to-eradicate-fear-LgRTt32R DR. ANEIKA L. SIMMONS ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dr. Aneika L. Simmons with host Scott Hanselman. Scott asked Aneika about the talk she gave with her husband Anjuan, “Managing The Burnout Burndown” at the Lead Dev conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2dgOfedI3A. She talked about burnout having multiple dimensions including emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. When you are burned out, the people you work with start to lose, in your eyes, their personhood. Scott asked about how having a culture that depersonalized employees, such as by referring to them as “resources”, might lead to burnout. Aneika talked about how having a culture that values the highly-engaged software developer counter-intuitively increases rather than decreases burnout. She talked about managing burnout with the help of your relationships. When Aneika is looking burned out, Anjuan will often say, “Aneika, let’s go for a walk.” She talked about the American notion of the “protestant work ethic” and how the work itself is valued and makes the worker feel important and gives them a sense of meaning. Those that are not working are made to feel like they are not contributing. Scott connected this to how many Americans do not take all of their vacation days. Aneika talked about the difficulty of achieving work-life balance when pleasing your boss means disappointing your family and vice versa and she described how stress is the cause of many illnesses, telling her own story about getting a sore jaw while working on her dissertation because the stress caused her to start grinding her teeth. Aneika suggested building relationships with your boss and your team so that they see you as a person and not just as a contributor. When they see you as a person, they are less likely to attempt to make you feel small when you need to take time for yourself. Here's Aneika on the relationship between engagement and burnout. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/managing-the-burnout-burndown-with-dr-aneika-simmons/id117488860?i=1000447003518 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/managing-the-burnout-burndown-with-dr-aneika-simmons-1caMsclq SARAH WELLS ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Sarah Wells with host Shane Hastie. Sarah is the technical director of operations and reliability at The Financial Times. When Sarah joined FT in 2011, the company was full of smart people, but they were hampered by a frustrating set of processes. During the last eight years, they adopted a DevOps culture with a focus on automation. When she joined, it took an average of 120 days to provision a new server. They stopped tracking the improvement when they got it down to minutes. They moved from 12 releases a year to many thousand releases a year. This required pushing decision-making down to the individuals making the changes. Shane asked about how to achieve a culture of safety and experimentation. Sarah says it has to come down from the top. You cannot have a CIO or CTO is saying, “What went wrong? Who did this?” You optimize for the speed of release and for speed of fixing. You do incident reviews, but their goal is to improve things for next time, not lay blame. If you drop a database in production as a developer, that is not your fault. The fault is that it is too easy to do that. Shane asked what a culture of experimentation looks like at “the coal face.” Sarah referenced Linda Rising in saying that it is not an experiment if there is not a hypothesis and if it can’t fail. As soon as something costs a certain amount of money, very few organizations are willing to write it off, so if you’re going to experiment, it has to be something cheap and quick. Sarah gave an example of an experiment to test a design change in which they would show the star-rating on the list of film reviews. The thinking was that this would increase engagement. The experiment showed that engagement went down instead because people were less likely to click to see the full review once they had the star-rating. Shane asked about how Sarah limits the blast radius of changes. Sarah says that by releasing small amounts of code frequently and having an architecture like micro-services to keep components extremely decoupled, you are better able to understand the code you are releasing and the change is localized and less likely to affect distant parts of the product. You can also design your website to have graceful degradation when a particular service is not returning results. Shane asked about Sarah’s preference to buy rather than build. Sarah referenced Simon Wardley’s value-chain mapping and establishing the core thing a business does. For FT, the core business is news, so something like doing their own container orchestration is not part of that. Originally, they did their own container orchestration, but once Kubernetes was available, they moved to it. In discussing the sunk cost fallacy, Sarah says you always have to fight to invest in the technical stuff, so you need a good relationship between the tech leads and the product people to explain the benefits of particular technical decisions. You also need to accept that things change and you won’t always get it right. The flip side of moving fast is that sometimes you get it wrong. She related a quote from Jeff Bezos in a letter to shareholders about one-way door and two-way door decisions. For decisions that are likely a one-way door, invest time in getting them right, but for most decisions, you should just decide, commit, and revisit. Shane asked how the listeners who are working on monoliths that release once a month can get to where FT is at today. Sarah says that you need a continuous delivery pipeline so it takes no time at all to get a release out. The second thing is architectural changes. Get to zero-downtime deployments. The cultural aspects are things like process. Reduce anything that requires permission from an external team. It has to be possible for a team to just get going. She referenced Accelerate by Forsgren about the research that says not to have change approval boards. Architects get embedded in the individual teams instead. You want your engineers to be T-shaped, having one specialty but also having some skill in all areas. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sarah-wells-on-fts-transition-to-devops/id1161431874?i=1000446732957 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/sarah-wells-on-fts-transition-to-devops DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON TECH DONE RIGHT The Tech Done Right podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Noel Rappin. I realize that this is the third time in as many weeks that I have included a podcast episode featuring Dave and Andy talking about the 20th anniversary of The Pragmatic Programmer, but they keep saying different and interesting things on each podcast they visit that I keep wanting to share it. In this podcast, Dave described what being pragmatic means to him. He says that being pragmatic means doing what works, but nobody knows what works. The cool thing about software, which is also the scary thing about software, is that we are constantly reinventing the entire field. Every project is new: it has new circumstances, new technologies, and new requirements. When you don't know what to do, being pragmatic means exploring as much as you can to find out what works, having in place a system of feedback to tell you whether it is working or not, and taking steps that are reversible so that, if you make a mistake, you can go back and fix it. This, Dave says, is the essence of the book. Noel added a fourth variable, the team, that is different every time, and asked what the pragmatic approach is for how a team works. Dave says that a team is a voluntary collection of individuals. You don’t have a team that you put people into; you start with a group of people and try to turn them into a team. The book dedicates a chapter to teams that echos the previous chapters on individuals because teams need to know all the things that individuals need to know: they need to realize that they are going to make mistakes, they need to figure out when they’ve made a mistake, and they need to know how to fix those mistakes and minimize them in the future. As a programmer, your job is not to write perfect code; your job is to create something that does what the customer wants. If there are bugs along the way, that is not an exception; it just the way it is. The same applies to teams. When teams adopt that approach, they lose the incentive to blame people for things and they take on collective ownership. Andy says that the one thing that is unique to teams is an underlying trust of each other member of the team. You are much better off with relatively small, stable teams. Every time you add someone to or remove someone from a team, it is a new team and you need to start over building relationships, building trust, and learning to work with each other. Noel asked how they would compare The Pragmatic Programmer with the Agile Manifesto since they were involved in the creation of both. Dave suggested thinking of Agile methodologies like XP as a roadmap and The Pragmatic Programmer as your car. Noel said that, in re-reading The Pragmatic Programmer, he was struck by the emphasis on taking small steps and “not getting in front of your headlights”. Andy says that is critical idea because we fall into the trap of taking on too much at once all the time. Small steps, Dave added, also mean you can more easily undo and you are less likely to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy because your sunk costs are smaller. Noel asked if the way in which developers learn has changed in the last twenty years. In reference to books versus StackOverflow searches and watching videos, Dave made the point that the distinguishing aspect of a book is that the content is curated; putting it together was difficult; it took a long time for the author to organize their thinking to make it clear and approachable and to produce something authoritative and easy to read as a whole. Noel asked Dave about the pragmatic value of automated testing. Dave says that when he gets too comfortable doing something, he tries to stop using it so that he doesn’t get stuck in a rut and so that he doesn’t start to believe something religiously simply because he has been doing it a long time. He had been telling people for years that it is good to test and he had never done the experiment of not testing. He decided not to test for a period and was surprised by the result. He kept an eye on bug rates and it was just as buggy as ever, his productivity went up a little bit, and his designs were just as flexible as before. His explanation is that, having done the requisite ten thousand hours, it is now so ingrained that he doesn’t have to test to get the benefits of testing. He still feels that tests are useful when working with others and as a regression barrier. He sees his experiment with not testing as another example that nothing is sacred: if you’re truly being pragmatic, you should always be experimenting. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-68-pragmatic-programmer-at-20-dave-thomas-andy/id1195695341?i=1000446898661 Website link: https://www.techdoneright.io/68 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
Welcome to the 700th episode of Hanselminutes! Doing this many episodes wouldn't be possible without the support of my Wife Mo, so she's my guest on this special episode! We're in a mixed marriage - she's not a computer person - so we'll talk about how we get along and how we've done it for 20 years!https://www.hanselminutes.com/567/the-return-of-mo-lessons-from-scotthttps://www.hanselminutes.com/403/geek-relationships-2013-with-scotts-wife-mohttps://www.hanselminutes.com/314/more-relationship-hacks-with-scotts-wifehttps://www.hanselminutes.com/216/geek-relationship-tips-with-scotts-wife
Will Larson on Greater Than Code, Marcus Blankenship on Software Engineering Radio, Sonal Chokshi on Software Engineering Daily, Roman Pichler on Being Human, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Hanselminutes. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 2, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. WILL LARSON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Will Larson with hosts Jessica Kerr, Arty Starr, and Rein Henrichs. Will talked about systems thinking, specifically referencing Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As a sixteen-year-old, he was exposed to systems thinking by his economics professor father. They talked about how to bring about change in complex systems and Rein brought up Virginia Satir’s change model. They talked about various forms of dysfunction, with an example being tasks that are marked as completed by developers without first doing the work of validation. Will’s own example is that executives never miss their goals; they just redefine the goals so that they hit them. There is a certain level of seniority where you can never be held accountable because you are the accountability function. Getting back into the topic of how to change complex systems, Will referenced the book, The First 90 Days as a great explanation of the need to go slow and observe before you try to change things. He says that the “great man theory” has been out of style for decades in the study of history, but is still in style in tech as the most causal way to understand how change works and also the most comforting. Rein talked about how the heroic individual myth is the other side of the coin to the scapegoat. Just as you pile all the blame onto the scapegoat, you pile all the credit onto the hero. He says that cultures that engage in hero myth-building are also likely to engage in scapegoating. Will says he himself has not seen much scapegoating at the companies he works at, likely because those cultures were unwilling to hold folks accountable for their work, but he has seen the hero myth at every company he has worked. Will then spoke about the 10x engineer myth. Will says he meets people who have been in tech for six or seven years who have the idea that they are almost done with their career. It may be due to the “senior engineer after two years” phenomenon where the career path is not well-defined and a lot of companies don’t know how to take advantage of the skills of people with 15 to 20 years of experience. A second reason is that the industry is an overwhelming and draining environment and people choose to opt out of it. As a result, we have very few engineers who have been around long enough to witness the long-term consequences of their brilliant ideas. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/142-modeling-constraints-in-human-systems-with-will-larson/id1163023878?i=1000446345964 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/modeling-constraints-in-human-systems MARCUS BLANKENSHIP ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RADIO The Software Engineering Radio podcast featured Marcus Blankenship with host Travis Kimmel. They talked about motivation, specifically motivation of engineering teams. Marcus says that motivation is the desire to get things done and every engineer coming out of school is motivated from day one. If you get one of these people hired onto your team and, two years later, they are demotivated, suffering from PTSD, scared to offer ideas, and figuring they are just a cog in a machine, your problem is your company or your team, not the engineer you hired. Marcus says he is doing secret research on motivation as he is now interviewing candidates for a job and asking them why they are looking to leave their current job. Nobody says, “Pay.” Often the answer is a lack of alignment with their boss or their company, resulting in the engineer losing the desire to contribute because of a relationship problem. These engineers are not stick-in-the-muds that are angry they don’t get to use COBOL anymore. Something happened where instead of having their ideas valued and heard and being part of the discussion, they somehow got disconnected from their boss. In the seventies, Marcus says, researchers discovered a strong correlation between positive employer-employee relationships and the amount of job satisfaction, quality of work, turnover intentions, and amount of promotions. We are thirty-five years into a few thousand scientific studies that continue to prove that the relationship one has with one’s supervisor matters more than any other factor when it comes to job performance and job satisfaction. Marcus says that a supervisor’s one true job is to create a trusting relationship with the people that report to you. Travis shared his own experience in having one-on-ones with his supervisors that felt to him like they were trying to artificial manufacturing a relationship because there was no indication of what the goal of the meeting was. Marcus says that good one-on-ones are bi-directional. One-on-ones in which the boss just gets status updates from the subordinate and gives new marching orders are often dissatisfying for both parties. Another flawed kind of one-on-one is where it is all about the employee. Such one-on-ones are not effective and neither party likes these either. Marcus suggests that we apply to our one-on-ones the same Agile thinking that we apply to our work. Every month, at one of your one-on-ones, do a retro on the one-on-one. Talk about why you are doing them, what value you’re getting from them, and how to make them better. They talked about psychological safety. Marcus says a lot of managers don’t realize that they are not in a good position to measure psychological safety based on their own gut. He says tools like Claire Lew’s knowyourteam.com, officevibe.com, and other anonymous survey tools can help. When we become a manager or team lead that has you supervising or leading, we forget that we are in a position of power. Travis added that leaders need to be careful about what they say casually so that it doesn’t get taken as a mandate. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/id120906714?i=1000445260176 Website link: https://www.se-radio.net/2019/07/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/ SONAL CHOKSHI ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured a16z podcast host Sonal Chokshi with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started out by asking why a VC firm decided to start a podcast. Sonal says that a16z has always had a culture of writing, blogging, and sharing ideas. This led them to develop an editorial operation from which the podcast naturally followed. Jeff asked what lessons from blogging apply to podcasting. Sonal sees podcasting as the next evolution of blogging because of its similar intimacy and a similar feeling of authenticity. The difference, she says, is that podcasting is a community and a movement. Sonal talked about her favorite a16z episodes, including an episode on emojis. She loved it because everybody understands how to use emojis but there is a lot of deep tech and governance involved in making emojis possible. That episode, she said, encapsulates the whole a16z podcast: the intersection of technology, people, politics, context, culture, and humanity. Jeff brought up a16z’s connection to Mike Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency. Having read Ovitz’s book and noticed how it portrays Ovitz as a workaholic, Jeff asked Sonal how she finds balance while drinking from the addicting technological firehose. Sonal says there is a lack of nuance in the debates about screen time and work/life balance. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/id1019576853?i=1000446547922 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/09/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/ ROMAN PICHLER ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Roman Pichler with host Richard Atherton. Richard asked Roman what a product manager is. Roman says a product manager is someone who takes an idea and helps bring it to life, launch it, make it successful, and keep it successful. Richard asked about the distinction between a product manager and Scrum’s notion of product owner. Roman sees the product owner as a product management role, but methodologies like SAFe have redefined the product owner to be a tactical role, misunderstanding the intention behind the role and the practicalities such as answering questions from the dev team, refining backlog items, and answering support and sales questions. He says there is too much focus on the details and this risks losing sight of the big picture. To do a good job for users and for the business, Roman says it is helpful to have people looking after digital assets with the right qualifications, skills, organizational support, authority, and autonomy. He says the term “mini-CEO” appeals to some product people because it indicates that product people need a certain level of authority, but a CEO would have marketing and sales functions under their control and product people do not. Richard asked what talents Roman had to develop to be a great product person. Roman started out as a programmer and began to help business groups come up with new products. What helped him most was to boost his own understanding of how business works and the second most important element was letting go of being interested in how digital products work and focusing instead on who benefits from them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/72-to-manage-products-is-to-care-with-roman-pichler/id1369745673?i=1000446514943 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/9b2501e7-e618-46f6-8f41-abd69c871211.mp3 DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started by asking whether Dave and Andy knew at the time they wrote the Pragmatic Programmer 20 years ago that they were writing what would become a seminal work. Dave said that both of them were stunned by its success. The book was intended as a way to clarify their own thoughts based on their experiences as consultants in which their clients all had the same kinds of problems: inconsistent builds, the shipping of untested code, and impossible-to-change designs. Scott asked about the importance of the name of the book. Andy said that there was a strain of thought at the time the book was written that was dogmatic and they deliberately pushed against such approaches. Dave pointed out that this was harder on their readers because it forced them to figure out for themselves what works for them. They got into a discussion of what kind of educational background one needs to be a successful programmer. Dave revealed that he is currently teaching classes at SMU to, he says, corrupt the youth by teaching them things like functional programming, and because traditional computer science education is poorly serving the industry and the student. People are coming out of university with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and, in terms of their value in the industry, they are not much different from people who are coming out of eight-week bootcamps. He teaches third or fourth year undergraduates and graduate students and he has found that none have been shown any form of testing. He would much rather hire someone who had the right attitude, was smart, and who could talk to people and he could show such a person how to code while on the job. Andy added that he gets the feeling that most computer science programs are there to teach you to become a professor of computer science rather than a problem-solver. What Andy says people need to learn, and what university education is not providing, are problem-solving skills. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-dave-thomas/id117488860?i=1000446461596 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-with-dave-thomas-and-andy-hunt-VBmLw9lP LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:
How Do You Even Know This Crap? This week we have a special guest offering a dev tip - please welcome Scott Hanselman who blogs at Hanselman.com and has a great long-running podcast, Hanselminutes. Scott's going to share with us some tips on how you can leverage your experience to know when a problem you're facing should already have a solution somewhere. Here's Scott. Sponsor - DevIQ Thanks to DevIQ for sponsoring this episode! Check out their list of available courses and how-to videos. Show Notes / Transcript You can view Scott's article on this topic called How Do You Even Know This Crap on his site. Show Resources and Links How Do You Even Know This Crap Scott's Blog Hanselminutes Podcast
This episode is part of a cross over special with the Hanselminutes podcast. Scott Hanselman and Jessica Rose air some of the worst advice listeners have sent in and talk about bad advice in technology. To listen to the first half of this podcast, visit hanselminutes.com
When should you replace your software and when does it make sense to transform it? Scott Hanselman joins us to share his thoughts from several projects throughout his career, including Das Blog (the engine that runs Hanselminutes), Windows Live Writer, Tiny OS and .NET Core.
It's Fun Finds Friday, where we share the best of TV, movies, entertainment, tech and more! Today we've got a great gadget for getting wireless music in your car, plus two podcasts on politics and programming.
00:16 – Welcome to “Hanselminutes! (https://hanselminutes.com/)” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!” 00:57 – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing “The struggle is part of the journey.” – Scott Hanselman 13:51 – Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids 19:11 – There is Value in Suffering Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0812979680&linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87) 21:39 – Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others We RISE Women in Tech Conference (https://werise.tech/) Jessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development (http://blog.jessitron.com/2017/06/the-most-productive-circumstances-for.html) Amanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan. (https://medium.com/@amandapalmer/oh-lorde-deliver-me-from-fucking-joan-17ed0a1d83e8) 36:28 – Being Nice Online Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (1) (https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877658122957008896) Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (2) (https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877950677896617984) Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (3) (https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/878244303021015040) Scott’s “Nice” Twitter Exchange (4) (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/877950217550577664) 42:29 – Teaching (Cont’d) Scott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017 (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/NexTech-Africa/2017/Brk21) Awesomely Luvvie (https://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/) Reflections: Scott: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0812979680&linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87) Jessica: This show’s Slack community! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Scott Hanselman.
Scott Hanselman joined today’s show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that’s still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.
Scott Hanselman joined today’s show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that’s still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.
Dupa ce am auzit-o pe Monica Dinculescu, "emojineer" la Google, in podcastul Hanselminutes al lui Scott Hanselman, am decis sa o invit sa participe si la Burzcast pentru a impartasi din cunostintele ei in domeniul componentelor web si a proiectului Polymer si cu ascultatorii acestui podcast.
We talk about Snapchat, what is it good for? How do you use it? This might be Henning's last show from Germany. Jessica Lorde explained Electron on Hanselminutes. Maciej Cegłowski talks morality in tech. Kahlil ditches Browserify for Webpack. Trello made an app for Slack.
01:06 - Scott Hanselman Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Hanselminutes This Developer's Life 02:23 - Managing Diabetes American Diabetes Association 13:14 - “Closed-Loop” System Dexcom Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) 20:16 - OpenAPS 23:00 - Monitoring 26:37 - The Current State of Systems 28:44 - What can people do now? openaps 34:56 - The Future Bigfoot Biomedical 37:37 - Wearing Devices Scott Hanselman: Hacking Diabetes Picks Reading Papers (Andrew) Diabetes Light (Jaim) Diabetes Light: My holistic journey to health (Facebook) (Jaim) The Essential Prince Reading List (Jaim) Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have become synonymous with recording excellence (Jaim) The Primal Blueprint (Chuck) Mark’s Daily Apple (Chuck) Chatting with Prince on AOL in 1999 (Scott)
01:06 - Scott Hanselman Introduction Twitter GitHub Blog Hanselminutes This Developer's Life 02:23 - Managing Diabetes American Diabetes Association 13:14 - “Closed-Loop” System Dexcom Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) 20:16 - OpenAPS 23:00 - Monitoring 26:37 - The Current State of Systems 28:44 - What can people do now? openaps 34:56 - The Future Bigfoot Biomedical 37:37 - Wearing Devices Scott Hanselman: Hacking Diabetes Picks Reading Papers (Andrew) Diabetes Light (Jaim) Diabetes Light: My holistic journey to health (Facebook) (Jaim) The Essential Prince Reading List (Jaim) Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have become synonymous with recording excellence (Jaim) The Primal Blueprint (Chuck) Mark’s Daily Apple (Chuck) Chatting with Prince on AOL in 1999 (Scott)
“You’ve listened to podcasts where you gotta fast forward 8-9 minutes in before the actual meat happens.” Continue reading… The post Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
“You’ve listened to podcasts where you gotta fast forward 8-9 minutes in before the actual meat happens.” Continue reading… The post Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Today we talk with Scott Hanselman about his 20+ year career in programming from his current role at Microsoft, Hanselminutes Podcast, and to his philosophies on programming and problem solving. Hosts: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ and Louis Maresca Guest: Scott Hanselman Subscribe and get Coding 101 automatically at https://twit.tv/code Follow @PadreSJ and @LouMM on Twitter. Bandwidth for Coding 101 is provided by CacheFly. Sponsors: braintreepayments.com/coding digitalocean.com - promo code: C101
Phil Haack (yes, it's pronounced "hack") works at GitHub finding ways to make it better for .NET and Windows developers everywhere. Prior to GitHub, he was a senior Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, among other projects. These projects were released under open source licenses and helped served as examples of the open source model for shipping software to other teams at Microsoft. Phil is a co-author of the popular Professional ASP.NET MVC series and regularly speaks at conferences around the world. He's also made several appearances on technology podcasts such as .NET Rocks, Hanselminutes, Herding Code, and The Official jQuery Podcast.
Rob Conery takes over Hanselminutes again! He talks to Scott about the motivation for a young person to stay in school (and software) when bartending can easily pay the bills. Rob also tries to get Scott to lose his train of thought.
I was at CodeMash and talked to Bill Steele about 3D printing. He had a few 3D printers at the event, even one that he'd printed with another 3D printer! If you haven't seen a 3D printer in person, you really need to check it out. It's amazing. In this video Bill not only explains how these amazing things work but also gives me a closeup look at the objects being printed. He talks about the MakerBot but also alternative designs to the MakerBot that enable even larger items to be printed.The future is now and it will be printed in 3D.
I visited Arizona and spoke at the AZGroups event with Scott Guthrie and Brady Gaster. While I was there my friend Eric Herbrandson (you might remember him from ScratchAudio and Hanselminutes) invited my wife and the kids over to the AppFive offices to check out their Electron Microscope. This isn't a tiny microscope...it's huge but it looks at tiny things all using WPF software that's written by AppFive. Forgive the cell phone video, this was originally intended as just a bit of video for myself but I thought you guys might enjoy it as well.
I was at CodeMash in Ohio last week and saw this robot moving around the conference floor. I was lucky to get a nice demo and play with "Eddie" for a bit. You can even buy an Eddie of your own. There's lots of great information on Eddie and his coming out party at MakerFaire last year on the web. The platform is a very interesting and open one. Now, how do I convince the wife that this is a good idea?Eddie was programmed by Lwin Maung and Min Maung. Our blogs can be found at www.maungs.com.Eddie is created by Parallax (www.parallax.com/eddie) and programmed using Microsoft Visual Programming Language and Robotic Studio (www.microsoft.com/robotics). Lwin Maung: Lwin is a mobile developer and an expert on mechatronics. His mobile applications have been featured on technology sites such as engadget, gizmodo, and pocket now. He has also designed and created programmable microcontrollers and robots for educational use from the ground up. When he is not cranking out code, you can find him teaching or speaking to development community on mechatronics, mobile and application development.Min Maung: In his "spare" time, Min is a skilled cross-platform mobile developer, aggressive hackathon competitor and technical speaker and when he is not coding, he is building robots. Monday thru Friday, you can find Min at a leading, privately-held payroll and HR software solutions company cranking out .net code and writing apps in ASP.Net, Silverlight, and other .net solutions.
Scott sits down with Rafael Rivera to talk about the black box that is Windows. Or is it? Rafael doesn't take no for an answer and shares stories of breaking apps to fix them. No more secrets, this week on Hanselminutes.
Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack visited the "Open Source Fest" at Mix 11 in Las Vegas just a few months ago. One of the projects that really stood out - amongst the dozens of great projects shown - was Glimpse.Glimpse is a server-side NuGet package that plugs into ASP.NET (and other technologies soon) and adds a client-side almost "Firebug"-style UI that gives you amazing insights into your web application. It's gotta be seen to be understood and appreciated.This is raw footage, to be clear, but it's fun. We start talking at the beginning and are a little silly, but we quickly move out into the hallway and can hopefully be better heard over the din.Learn more about Glimpse at http://getglimpse.com and follow Anthony van der Hoorn (@anthony_vdh) and Nik Molnar (@nikmd23) on Twitter!
Scott and Jonathan Carter are freaking out backstage at Mix11. What's it look like? How much of the demos are real? (Most of it!) What's involved in prepping for contigencies if a demo fails? All this and more, backstage at Mix11.
Scott's at the Intel Agile Conference today and got the chance to talk to Rally Software's Agile Fellow Jean Tabaka about why your project sometimes needs time to fail and whether we need both internships and a formal track within Software Development.Jean is a Certified ScrumMaster and Practitioner, a Certified ScrumMasterTrainer, and a Certified Professional Facilitator. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders, published in the Addison-Wesley Agile Software Development Series. More importantly, she's scary smart, fantastically approachable, and a joy to hang out with.All this, plus Robby the Robot. Enjoy.Follow Jean Tabaka on Twitter and learn more about Rally and Jean at http://www.rallydev.com.
Scott is in Redmond this week and talks to Jeff Derstadt, the Lead Developer on Entity Framework Code First (or, as Scott says, EF Magic Unicorn). What's the deal with this new feature in Entity Framework? What about the bad rap that EF got back in the day? What's new in EF4 and how does EF Code First sit on that? Which is the right choice, Model First, Database First or Code First? All of this plus demos in this off-the-cuff interview.(Sorry the first part of the video is dark, it gets lighter halfway through.)
In this found video (I found it on my Windows 7 Phone, oops!) Scott is at Qdoba with Phil Haack, Ted Neward and two other gentlemen whose names escape me. As I recall, the conversation became so interesting that I had to pull out my phone and start recording the raw footage. That footage is here, remainging raw. We talk about Testing, Culture, Microsoft, Agile and Tacos.
Scott's found video on his phone, and lo and behold, it's a guerilla video of Scott acosting Clint Rutkas in his Channel 9 lair. What's all that equipment on Clint's shelves? What's he erasing and trying to hid from us? Does he solder in his office? All this and less.
Scott stopped by Ward Cunningham (you know, the guy who invented the Wiki. Yes, that Ward Cunningham) to hang out, and discovered Ward's treasure trove of electronics, software, soldering guns and web accessible sensor arrays that run 24/7/365. Ever wish you had a real cool uncle that didn't take you fishing, but instead showed you how to create your own multi-processor computer with $2 chips off the shelf? Let's step into Uncle Ward's basement.
Scott sneaks into the office of Phil Haack and Morgan the Canadian Intern to talk about the release of ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 and some of the cool "futures" stuff that Morgan (and our fleet of interns) is working on.
This SECOND Part of my talk on Social Networking for Developers is "32 Ways to Make Your Blog Suck Less."In 2009, I presented a talk at Wintellect's Devscovery conference called "Social Networking for Developers." My postulate was that EVERY developer should be using Social Networking, and this talk I gave was my introduction of this idea to a large group. This was the keynote for the conference. I finally got ahold of the source recordings (only guerilla recordings had been available previously) and as even those recordings were popular, so I'm preserving these talks here as a way of encouraging more discussion.Be sure to watch Part 1 if you haven't already!
In this talk, I propose that EVERY developer needs a blog.In 2009, I presented a talk at Wintellect's Devscovery conference called "Social Networking for Developers." My postulate was that EVERY developer should be using Social Networking, and this talk I gave was my introduction of this idea to a large group. This was the keynote for the conference. I finally got ahold of the source recordings (only guerilla recordings had been available previously) and as even those recordings were popular, so I'm preserving these talks here as a way of encouraging more discussion.Be sure to watch Part 2 after this one.
Scott's in Redmond this week and chats with developer Damian Edwards about "Razor," IIS Express, SQL 4 Compact Edition and VS2010 Tooling. ScottGu recently announced all of these cool new developer tools, and folks at Microsoft are actively working on integration with Visual Studio 2010 and one of those folks is Damian. What's he got to show Scott today?
Scott and James are on a world tour and racking up the miles. James shares some of his best travel tips and tricks, and Scott shares how he moves through airport security as fast as possible. It's Techie Travel with James and Scott this week on Hanselminutes, recorded from Sydney, Australia.
This last week over a 7 day period, I went to Munich, Cairo and Dubai. I presented in three keynotes and did a total of 10 sessions. I crossed 12 time zones and missed my kids. I talked to/with/at about 3000 people. I took some video while I was travelling with my Creative Vado HD and slapped it into Windows Live Movie Maker just now. Here's my trip montage.You could call this either "The Glamourous Life of a Technical Speaker" or "If this is Tuesday, this must be Cairo" or "Scott needs to learn to say No."Enjoy.
Two Englishmen in a row? What a sellout I am. This week I chat with Chris "ChrisNTR" Hardy, an ASP.NET programmer by day who writes C# code for the iPhone by night. He took it upon himself to answer a tweet from me and write the beginnings of a "Hanselminutes iPhone Application." How did he do it?
As a remote employee, I'll do anything to make my job easier and more importantly, to get folks at work to REMEMBER THAT I'M OUT HERE. You can only do so much with Video Chat. I just wish I had a physical presence on campus. Well, the folks at MSR (Microsoft Research) are doing some research into what they call "Embodied Social Proxies." Basically, how will a team's relationship with a remote work change if there is a physical stand-in (er, Embodied Social Proxy) that they can interact with. It's more than just a table with a webcam. Check out the video!
Last August my role at Microsoft changed a bit so I took Chris Sells to lunch at our local food court (where the lady at the Indian Restaurant always shakes the big piece of chicken off her serving spoon before she dishes my plate, but I'm not bitter) to talk about being a manager at Microsoft.Chris leads a team and seems to get a lot done, so I figured it'd be a good idea. Check our our FIRST video interview from the August 2009 lunch here, then watch this FOLLOWUP Lunch from yesterday (about six months after the first) where I at first admit defeat, then go back into being in denial, then I leave to redouble my efforts. Enjoy the Wisdom of Chris Sells as he attempts to set me straight.
Scott at PDC09 in Los Angeles this week and got a great opportunity to get a guided tour of a piece of the Windows Azure Cloud from Patrick Yantz, a Cloud Architect with Data Center Services. You may think it's a Cloud Container, but it's not! Join me on this very technical 15 minute deep dive inside the making of the hardware behind the Windows Azure Cloud.
I'm in Sweden this week and I got a chance to talk to legendary ASP.NET Debugger and Escalation Engineer Tess Ferrandez. In this video Tess shows me how to debug a dump of an ASP.NET Web Site with a pile of awesome and totally new features in Visual Studio 2010. I also talked to Tess for an extended Debugging 101 session on the full 30 minute audio edition of my Hanselminutes Podcast out later this week.
I spoke at the StackOverflow conference in San Francisco and Seattle this week (long week, let me tell you) and I got the opportunity to sit down with Jeff Atwood from CodingHorror and Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software, along with the man, the legend, Rory Blyth. The audio also appeared on the StackOverflow podcast in part, but here's the raw video from our backstage ramblings.Warning: extreme ramblosity ahead!Joel explains his Duct Tape Programmer post. Apparently DevDays is a duct tape conference, and this section of the recording is a duct tape podcast. Some discussion of the ubiquity of mobile code. Also, if you are nostalgic for the era “when development was hard”, the consensus is that you should be doing mobile development today on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian. Rory elaborates on his experience with (and effusive opinions on) iPhone development to date. Is coding in Objective-C best accompanied by a flux capacitor, New Coke, and Max Headroom? Also, his excitement for MonoTouch. Joel and Scott put on their amateur language designer hats and have a spirited discussion of type inference and Fog Creek’s in-house DSL, Wasabi. Scott covers some of the highlights of new and shiny features coming in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the C# 4.0 language, and the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web framework.
It's time for a pile of "Hanselminutes on 9" Episodes, Dear Reader! Recently, I spent a day wandering around building 42 trying to dig up the scoop on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4. In this episode, Phil Haack and his son are attending the Patterns and Practices Summit on campus. Does Phil work on more than just ASP.NET MVC? Turns out he does, and he gives us a little insight into the work the ASP.NET 4 team is doing.
It's time for a pile of "Hanselminutes on 9" Episodes, Dear Reader! Recently, I spent a day wandering around building 42 trying to dig up the scoop on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.In this episode, I sit down with David Ebbo. He shows me a feature I didn't see coming! He takes an older-style ASP.NET 2.0 application and upgrades it to ASP.NET 4. He then enables the GridView with Dynamic Data features...but without adding any references or changing the web.config. He adds validation in seconds. You can maintain legacy apps *and* add new functionality, it seems!
It's time for a pile of "Hanselminutes on 9" Episodes, Dear Reader! Recently, I spent a day wandering around building 42 trying to dig up the scoop on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.In this episode, the Boss Dmitry interrupts Scott and Stephen a number of times with actual work while they dive into how ASP.NET AJAX 4 works. What's this? MSAjax controls exposed as jQuery plugins? What planet is this?
It's time for a pile of "Hanselminutes on 9" Episodes, Dear Reader! Recently, I spent a day wandering around building 42 trying to dig up the scoop on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.In this episode, Scott Galloway espouses the importance of cleaner markup, shows some new controls and some HTML 5 spikes he's playing with.
It's time for a pile of "Hanselminutes on 9" Episodes, Dear Reader! Recently, I spent a day wandering around building 42 trying to dig up the scoop on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.In this episode, Brad Wilson shows the new Templated Helpers in ASP.NET 2, Areas, and David Ebbo drops in. Scott also does a very bad impression of Dmitry (the boss.)
This wacky episode of Hanselminutes was recorded at 3am on a sad, sad Saturday morning with an intrepid group of UStream and Twitter users who watched Scott chat about gadgets and technology and ultimate fail to save the video. This is the only artifact. This is fortunate because Scott does an audio podcast.
In this unusual episode of Hanselminutes, organized late at night over Twitter, and recorded as a community conference call, Scott moderates a discussion on open source and the new CodePlex Foundation.
Chris Sells and Rory Blyth come over to Scott's house and proceed to record a horrible episode of Hanselminutes. Consider this a Holiday episode that is devoid of content. Run away, quickly, and we'll be back with great new shows, new topics and new guests in the new year. As for this episode, if you listen, you'll never get the time back. ;)
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
