Podcast appearances and mentions of sean corbett

While Artificial Intelligence AI is not a new phenomenon, its use in the gathering of intelligence and the amount of AI tools available are growing at pace. In part one of this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Jim Clover OBE, Varadius Ltd, to take a deeper look into the practical uses and implications of AI for the defence intelligence community. They explore its real-world effectiveness in gathering and analysing intelligence and also why human oversight is still critical to ensure the intelligence it is producing is both ethical and valuable.

Irish mortgage rates are on average the fifth highest across the 19 states in the Euro Zone, there is a new flex mortgage with Avant and the ECB rate is now 2% but will it go lower? Our expert today was Sean Corbett, Director of SYS Mortgages.All with thanks to Hidden Hearing.

Janes analysts James Trigg and Aparna Iyer join Sean Corbett and Kate Cox to discuss the strategic depths of Yemen's role in global security. They unpack the complex military, political, and regional dynamics shaping this pivotal Middle Eastern country and how Yemen's conflict influences international shipping lanes, serves as a battleground for proxy wars, and impacts the delicate balance of power in the region. James and Aparna also discuss the challenges and techniques they use to monitor such a fluid situation.

Five years after their first episode of the World of Intelligence podcast, Kate Cox, director of Janes RD&A Strategic Programmes, turns the table on Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to uncover the origins of the podcast and how it has evolved alongside the prominence of OSINT for intelligence analysis, and to offer a glimpse into the future of intelligence.

Faced with the starkest security environment for in decades, and against the backdrop of competing security priorities by the US as its strongest ally, the European Union (EU) has embarked on a plan to reverse its under-investment in defence and rebuild military capability through the Readiness 2030 initiative. Andrew MacDonald, head of Janes Defence Budgets, and Guy Anderson, head of defence markets and economics at Janes, join Sean Corbett to discuss the costs ahead and the outlook for success.

Following the release of a special report examining the recent record number of Chinese air-sea operations around Taiwan, Janes Senior Air Reporter Akhil Kadidal joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss what these escalations could mean for Taiwan. They also examine how the changing military capabilities of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) could signify a shift in its focus from training to combat orientation.

In this podcast culture expert Satgin Hamrah joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss why understanding culture is crucial in providing context to your intelligence. They explore how ingrained cultural nuances and historical ties influence global security trends, decisions, and behaviours, and why grasping the subtleties of culture is essential for effective engagement and decision making in the defence intelligence community.

In part two of our podcast, Jenny Town, Rachel Minyoung Lee, and Martin Williams from 38 North and Cristina Varriale from Janes join Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to continue to unravel the implications of the new US administration on North Korea's place on the world stage and how its relationship with Russia might evolve in 2025 and beyond.

Joe speaks to Sean Corbett with Sys Mortgages Limerick about the predicted ECB rate cut Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first part of this podcast, Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Jenny Town, Rachel Minyoung Lee, and Martin Williams from 38 North and Cristina Varriale from Janes to take a closer look at North Korea. With South Korea hitting headlines recently following President Yoon Suk-yeol's impeachment, the panel discusses North Korea's reaction to these events and what the new US administration means for US-North Korea relations.

In this podcast Janes analysts F Xavier Casals and Claire Chu share their expertise with Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to explore the likelihood of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They discuss the analytic tools and insight they use to provide a framework for indicator and warning analysis and why a non-military invasion may be more likely.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett reflect on a year packed with podcasts. In the 26 episodes published in 2024, alongside their panel of guests, they explored emerging and current threats, global security trends, and the impact of misinformation, disinformation and artificial intelligence on open-source intelligence and society.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Claire Fuchs, an analyst on the Janes Geoeconomic Influence and Threat Intelligence (GITI) team, to discuss why the nuances of language and linguistics are important to the interpretation of open-source intelligence (OSINT). As a speaker of nine languages Claire explores the need to approach language with caution and the limitations of artificial intelligence (AI) in interpreting and translating language.

For the final #PropertyRoundup show, we are delighted to be joined by Sean Corbett, Head of Mortgages at SYS Mortgages, in our new Connemara studio!We discuss market uncertainty, switching mortgages, buy to let mortgages and expectations for 2025. Learn more here

Rachel Minyoung Lee, Senior Fellow for the Stimson Center's Korea Program and 38 North and Cristina Varriale, Janes lead analyst - APAC join Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to explore the closed environment of North Korea, its changing strategic allegiances and what the reported deployment of North Korea troops to Russia means for global stability.

With the situation in Israel and Lebanon continuing to evolve, Janes analysts Elliot Chapman and Suraj Ganesan return to join Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to provide an update on the situation on the ground and the strategic implications of the conflict for regional security.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett take a closer look on the increasing use and threat of misinformation and disinformation. They explore the differences between the two and why now more than ever it is important for analysts to use tradecraft to overcome these threats to ensure analysis is formed on truth and intelligence can be trusted.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by IBM master inventor Martin Keene to explore the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on open-source intelligence. The panel discusses how AI can support tradecraft, the future of AI-driven predictive analytics, and why humans are critical in evaluating AI analysis.

In the second part of this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are again joined by Janes analysts Dylan Lee Lehrke and James Rands to discuss the lessons learned from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The panel continue their exploration of the changing tactics being deployed by Russia and Ukraine including the increasing use of unmanned warfare. They explore if their use is an indicator of a change in modern warfare and how the conflict may evolve over time.

In part one of this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Janes analysts Dylan Lee Lehrke and James Rands to discuss the lessons learned from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The panel discusses the changing tactics deployed by Russia and Ukraine during the campaign and what this conflict has told us about the conduct of modern warfare.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined in this episode by Janes analysts Puja Banerjee, Sarbhanu Nath and Shivani Gayakwad to discuss the key events relating to the ongoing political instability in Bangladesh.Following weeks of protests and violence, the country is currently being run by an interim government following the resignation of Sheikh Hasina on 5th August. The panel discuss how this instability will impact the country and it's international neighbours and allies. They also share how open-source intelligence provides indicators for predictive assessments of the ongoing situation.

In this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Janes analysts Elliot Chapman, James Trigg, Anant Venkatesh and Suraj Ganesan in response to recent events and growing tensions in the Middle East and Levant.The panel provide context on the fast-moving situation in the region and discuss how open-source intelligence can support predictive intelligence to understand the prospect of serious escalations in the conflict.

In this episode Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Janes analysts Estefania Dominguez and Matthew Herman to provide situational understanding of the potential implications to state stability of the presidential elections being held on 28 July 2024.Estefania provides a contextual overview of why these elections are so significant and the panel discuss how the use of open-source intelligence helps to provide predictive analysis of situations in a relatively closed environment such at Venezuela.

In this podcast James Rands, senior Balkans and military capabilities analyst at Janes, joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to provide a deeper understanding of the High North, Arctic region. With climate change likely to expose a northern sea route in the next decade or so and the potential abundance of natural resources, many countries will want to stake claim on this previously impenetrable region. Rands highlights the military capabilities required to operate in this challenging environment.They also discuss the important role open-source intelligence plays in providing early-warning indicators of activity and any escalation in tensions in what is likely to become a key global strategic area.

In this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by analysts from Janes Country Intelligence team, James Trigg, Maria Lampoudi and Lewis Smart to understand if the conditions may be right for another Arab Spring similar to that experienced in 2010.The team explores how OSINT can provide valuable early warning signs of potential escalations in tensions, the lessons learned since the previous Arab Spring and why applying tradecraft is so important to its intelligence analysis.

In this episode Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Phil Ritcheson Ph.D. to discuss why intelligence sharing is now more important than ever. They discuss the growing need for allied and partnership and how by using open sources facilitates more timely intelligence sharing. However, ensuring that the open sources can be trusted and are assured is critical to maintaining strategic advantage.

In this podcast Janes senior analyst James Trigg, joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss Libya. Historic civil and political unrest have made it a country of interest globally for decades. Whilst other conflicts and world events have forced countries to switch their focus, Libya remains a country which requires attention particularly for countries in Southern Europe and the Middle East.They discuss how open-source analysis can help plug the gap in understanding when attention is focused elsewhere and how using Janes tradecraft with a long-term view, provides a more balanced understanding of the stability, impact and influence Libya has in the region and beyond.

In this podcast Janes analyst F Xavier Casals joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett for a deep dive into China Taiwan relations. Xavier explores how by using the political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, information (PMESII) framework we can gather structured analysis and more complete picture of China's future intent.

The situation in Yemen is particularly complex. Even before the start of the attacks on shipping in November 2023 by Ansar Allah (commonly known as the Houthis), the country has been of interest to many. A large-scale humanitarian crisis has emerged following a decade of conflict across the country drawing in the Yemeni government, Ansar Allah, southern Yemeni secessionists, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen's Al-Qaeda affiliate, and a minor Islamic State faction. In this podcast James Trigg, Senior Research Analyst for the Middle East and North Africa Country Intelligence team at Janes joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to explore how open-source intelligence has allowed us to get a deeper understanding of the relatively closed environment of Yemen and the complex situation in the country.

In this new podcast episode Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Amil Khan, the founder and CEO of Valent Projects, to delve deep into the implications of misinformation and disinformation for open-source intelligence. They identify the difference between misinformation and disinformation and how we can overcome thesechallenges to support open-source intelligence.

Over the course of 2023 Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett hosted more than 20 podcasts exploring topics such as the implications of AI for OSINT, the need for empathy indecision making, and tradecraft in open-source intelligence. Janes analysts also discussed how OSINT has supported Janes analysis of new and emerging situations such as that in Sudan, Haiti, and Israel. In this episode Harry and Sean look back on the key themes and what they learnt from the discussions with their guests in 2023.

This week on iPropertyRadio…For our final #PropertyRoundup show of 2023, Sean Corbett, Head of Mortgages with SYS Mortgages, joins host Carol Tallon to discuss Ireland's mortgage market, including home buyer trends nationwide. He also discusses the lack of competition in the marketplace right  now and gives a glimmer of home for new mortgage applicants in 2024. Learn more about SYS Mortgage

Claire Chu, Janes senior China analyst joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss how China's economic activity projects influence globally and what she learnt as part of the recent US Congressional staff delegation to China.

In this podcast Janes analysts Lewis Smart and Elliot Chapman discuss with Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett how they have supported Janes' timely analysis and insight on the evolving situation in Israel and Gaza and how this supports the intelligence gathering required by intelligence and defence organisations.

Robert Ashley Jr. former director of the DIA joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss the use of open-source intelligence in the defence intelligence enterprise and the opportunities OSINT provides to intelligence communities.

Robert Ashley Jr. former director of the DIA joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss the use of open-source intelligence in the defence intelligence enterprise and the opportunities OSINT provides to intelligence communities.

Dr Joana Cook and Dr Shiraz Maher authors of 'The Rule is for None but Allah: Islamist Approaches to Governance' join Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss the role that OSINT has to play in understanding violent extremist organisations and the challenges in doing so.

In the second part of this podcast Robert Cardillo, President, Cardillo Group and previous Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and ex-deputy Director of the DIA, joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to continue the discussion of the importance of geospatial intelligence to enhance our use and understanding of OSINT in a classified environment and the use of AI.

Robert Cardillo, President, Cardillo Group and previous Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Deputy Director of the DIA, joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss the importance of geospatial intelligence to enhance our use and understanding of OSINT.

Keith Dear, Managing Director of Fujitsu's Centre for Cognitive and Advanced Technologies, joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss the use and limitations of AI in support of OSINT. With AI capabilities evolving at an ever increasing speed, they explore what this means for decision makers and analysts and how human and AI can work together.

This week on iPropertyRadio… This week on #PropertyRoundup, host Carol Tallon chats to Sean Corbett, Mortgage Sales Director with Mortgage 123. Sean talks about helping home buyers and an increasing number of buy-to-let investors to navigate Ireland's shrinking mortgage market at a time of rising interest rates. He explains some of the key differences between the four lenders in the marketplace, including who assumes promotions for civil servants and who goes that extra mile for the self-employed! Sean also talks about properties that are simply not mortgageable.*Property Roundup is sponsored by Ireland's Property District, your industry communications partner: https://propertydistrict.ie*Produced by Katie Tallon MPRII, with Hear Me Roar Media on sound https://hearmeroarmedia.com Watch back and listen back: https://ipropertyradio.com/#ipropertyradio #mortgage123 #property #ireland #realestate 

Randy Nixon, Director, Open Source Enterprise, CIA and long time user ofJanes joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett to discuss thepower and utility of open source intelligence in the intelligence community,why the people in these organisations are so important and how this community canoptimise OSINT in their organisations.

In this podcast Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett revisit some of the key themes they covered in 2022 and discuss what they have learnt about the power of open source intelligence.

Warren Strobel, National Security Reporter joins Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett in this podcast to understand the role open-source intelligence has to be play in Journalism.

Harry Kemsley and Sean Corbett are joined by Dr Claire Yorke, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, to discuss the fascinating subject of empathy and why it is so important in decision making, our analysis and open-source intelligence.

Sean overviews several concepts discussed on the show so you can think more deeply about your online interactions with potential customers. From their entry to your website, to getting them on your mailing list, and finally to harvesting great reviews from them.  * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/search Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Experienced website designer Paul Renault talks to Sean about some of the concrete ways that the website visuals can motivate a user to choose your business over your competitors. * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/search  Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

EG Orren returns to do an in-depth brainstorm session with Sean about how small businesses can more than double their revenue (and free up the time of their best performers) by planning out email automation sequences. Book a free call with EG here: https://tidycal.com/egorren/custom-social-media-tips * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sound engineer / audio consultant Brett Leonard joins Sean to talk about simple room setups that will help a small business owner capture cleaner sound for Zoom meetings, video shoots, podcasts, and other online marketing efforts, plus some accessible tips on what equipment to buy. Learn more about Brett at http://blpaudio.com/ If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

e.128 Jhae Pfenning finally announces what he has replaced his 1997 Turbo Acura NSX with. Will Leitner returns to explain the differences between what a bank or other vendor sees for credit scores versus what a consumer sees. Sean Corbett (JDM Reverend) joins the show to talk about his iconic Mugen Honda Del Sol build. 1. Jhae announces new vehicle 2. Will talks credit scores from lenders 3. Sean Corbett joins the show Connect with the show · Instagram JhaePfenning · Support us on Patreon · YouTube HardParkingPodcast · Facebook · Twitter JhaePfenning · Support This Podcast on Anchor · HardParkingPodcast@gmail.com Hard Parking Media LLC Jhae Pfenning --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hardparking/support

SEO expert Daniel Moscovitch returns to tell Sean his current top performing strategy for getting businesses to appear higher up on Google searches. You have to hear Daniel's take on how the pages and sub-pages of your website can net you massive traffic once you organize them properly. For SEO help, you can reach Daniel at https://www.morehotleads.com/. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews award-winning filmmaker Adrian Halter on the power of video to help your business stand out. Learn more about Adrian's company Halter Media: https://haltermedia.com/ * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews digital marketing consultant EG Orren about a social media strategy (particularly Facebook) that can transform your business. Get a free half hour of consulting with EG here: https://tidycal.com/egorren/custom-social-media-tips * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews the "Email Supremacist" Ben Settle about building a rabid following and incredible customer relationships (and of course tons of sales) using email. Ben is a world leader in email copywriting. Get a free digital copy of his prestigious Email Players newsletter and access to his mobile app (with hours of biz building strategies) here: https://www.bensettle.com/ * * * If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory in the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews "local search" expert Nyagoslav Zhekov about building citations and cleaning up your business listings to get much better results on Google. Nyagoslav is the director of local search at https://whitespark.ca/, and can be contacted at nyagoslav@whitespark.ca. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

About SeanSean is a senior software engineer at TheZebra, working to build developer experience tooling with a focus on application stability and scalability. Over the past seven years, they have helped create software and proprietary platforms that help teams understand and better their own work.Links: TheZebra: https://www.thezebra.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sc_codeUM LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-corbett-574a5321/ Email: scorbett@thezebra.com TranscriptSean: 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: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. An awful lot of companies out they're calling themselves unicorns, which is odd because if you look at the root ‘uni,' it means one, but they're sure a lot of them out there. Conversely, my guest today works at a company called TheZebra with the singular definite article being the key differentiator here, and frankly, I'm a big fan of being that specific. My guest is Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, Sean Corbett. Sean, thank you for taking the time to join me today, and more or less suffer the slings and arrows, I will no doubt be hurling your direction.Sean: Thank you very much for having me here.Corey: So, you've been a great Twitter follow for a while: You're clearly deeply technically skilled; you also have a soul, you're strong on the empathy point, and that is an embarrassing lack in large swaths of our industry. I'm going to talk about that right now because I'm sure it comes through the way it does when you talk about virtually anything else. Instead, you are a Software Development Engineer in Test or SDET. I believe you are the only person I'm aware of in my orbit who uses that title, so I have to ask—and please don't view this as me in any way criticizing you; it's mostly my own ignorance speaking—what is that?Sean: So, what is a Software Development Engineer in Test? If you look back—I believe it was Microsoft originally came up with the title, and what it stems from was they needed software development engineers who particularly specialized in creating automation frameworks for testing stuff at scale. And that was over a decade ago, I believe. Microsoft has since stopped using the term, but it persists in areas in the industry.And what is an SDET today? Well, I think we're going to find out it's a strange mixture of things. SDET today is not just someone that creates automated frameworks or writes tests, or any of those things. An SDET is the strange amalgamation of everything from full-stack to DevOps to even some product management to even a little bit machine-learning engineer; it's a truly strange field that, at least for me, has allowed me to basically embrace almost every other discipline and area of the current modern engineering around, to some degree. So, it's fun, is what it is. [laugh].Corey: This sounds similar in some respects to oh, I think back to a role that I had in 2008, 2009, where there was an entire department that was termed QA or Quality Assurance, and they were sort of the next step. You know, development would build something and start, and then deploy it to a test environment or staging environment, and then QA would climb all over this, sometimes with automation—which was still in the early days, back in that era—and sometimes by clicking the button, and going through scripts, and making sure that the website looked okay. Is that aligned with what you're doing, or is that a bit of a different branch?Sean: That is a little bit of a different branch from me. The way I would put it is QA and QA departments are an interesting artifact that I think, in particular, newer orgs still feel like they might need one, and what you quickly realize today, particularly with modern development and this, kind of, DevOps focus is that having that centralized QA department doesn't really work. So, SDETs absolutely can do all those things: They can climb over a test environment with automation, they can click the buttons, they can tell you everything's good, they can check the boxes for you if you want, but if that is what you're using your SDETs for you are, frankly, missing out because I guarantee you, the people that you've hired as SDETs have a lot more skills than that, and not utilizing those to your advantage is missing out on a lot of potential benefit, both in terms of not just quality—which is this fantastic concept that dates all the way back to—gives people a lot of weird feelings [laugh] to be frank, and product.Corey: So, one of the challenges I've always had is people talk about test-driven development, which sounds like a beautiful idea in theory, and in practice is something people—you know, just like using the AWS console, and then lying about it forms this heart and soul of ClickOps—we claim to be using test-driven development but we don't seem to be the reality of software development. And again, no judgment on these; things are hard. I built out a, more or less, piecing together a whole bunch of toothpicks and string to come up with my newsletter production pipeline. And that's about 29 Lambdas Function, behind about 5 APIs Gateway, and that was all kinds of ridiculous nonsense.And I can deploy each of the six or so microservices that do this, independently. And I sometimes even do continuous build or slash continuous deploy to it because integration would imply I have tests, which is why I bring the topic up. And more often than not—because I'm very bad at computers—I will even have syntax errors, make it into this thing, and I push the button and suddenly it doesn't work. It's the iterative guess-and-check model that goes on here. So, I introduced regressions, a fair bit at the time, and the reason that I'm being so blase about this is that I am the only customer of this system, which means that I'm not out there making people's lives harder, no one is paying me money to use this thing, no one else is being put out by it. It's just me smacking into a wall and feeling dumb all the time.And when I talk to people about the idea of building tests. And it's like, “Oh, you should have unit tests and integration tests and all the rest.” And I did some research into the topics, and a lot of it sounds like what people were talking about 10 to 15 years ago in the world of tests. And again, to be clear, I've implemented none of these things because I am irresponsible and bad at computers. But what has changed over the last five or ten years? Because it feels like the overall high level as I understood it from intro to testing 101 in the world of Python, the first 18 chapters are about dependency manager—because of course they are; it's Python—then the rest of it just seems to be the concepts that we've never really gotten away from. What's new, what's exciting, what's emerging in your space?Sean: There's definitely some emerging and exciting stuff in the space. There's everything from, like, what Applitools does with using machine learning to do visual regressions—that's a huge advantage, a huge time saver, so you don't have to look pixel by pixel, and waste your time doing it—to things like our team at TheZebra is working on, which is, for example, a framework that utilizes Directed Acrylic Graph workflows that's written GoLang—the prototype is—and it allows you to work with these tests, rather than just as kind of these blasé scripts that you either keep in a monorepo, or maybe possibly in each individual services' repo, and just run them all together clumsily in this, kind of, packaged product, into this distributed resource that lets you think about tests as these, kind of, user flows and experiences and to dip between things like API layer, where you might, for example, say introduce regression [unintelligible 00:07:48] calling to a third-party resource, and something goes wrong, you can orchestrate that workflow as a whole. Rather than just having to write a script after script after script after script to cover all these test cases, you can focus on well, I'm going to create this block that represents this general action, can accept a general payload that conforms to this spec, and I'm going to orchestrate these general actions, maybe modify the payload of it, but I can recall those actions with a slightly different payload and not have to write script after script after script after script.But the problem is that, like you've noticed, a lot of test tooling doesn't embrace those, kind of, modern practices and ideas. It's still very much the, your tests, you—particularly integration tests do this—will exist in one place, a monorepo, they will have all the resources there, they'll be packaged together, you will run them after the fact, after a deploy, on an environment. And it makes it so that all these testing tools are very reactive, they don't encourage a lot of experimentation, and they make it at times very difficult to experiment, in particular because the more tests you add, the more chaotic that code and that framework gets, and the harder it gets to run in a CI/CD environment, the longer it takes. Whereas if you have something like this graph tool that we're building, these things just become data. You can store them in a database, for the love of God. You can apply modern DevOps practices, you can implement things like Jaeger.Corey: I don't think it's ever used or anything in the database. Great, then you can use anything itself as a database, which is my entire schtick, so great.Sean: Exactly.Corey: That's right, that means the entire world can indeed be reduced to TXT records in DNS, which I maintain is the… the holiest of all databases. I'm sorry, please, continue.Sean: No, nonono, that's true. The thing that has always driven me is this idea that why are we still just, kind of, spitting out code to test things in a way that is very prescriptive and very reactive? And so, the exciting things in test come from places like Applitools and places like the—oh, I forget. It was at a Test Days conference, where they talked about—they developed this test framework that was able to auto generate the models, and then it was so good at auto generating those models for test, they'd actually ended up auto generating the models for the actual product. [laugh]. I think it used a degree of machine learning to do so. It was for a flashcard site. A friend of mine, Jacob Evans on Twitter always likes to talk about it.These are where the exciting things lay is where people are starting to break out of that very reactive, prescriptive, kind of, test philosophy of, like I like to say, checking the boxes to, “Let's stop checking boxes and let's create, like insight tooling. Let's get ahead of the curve. What is the system actively doing? Let's check in. What data do we have? What is the system doing right at this moment? How ahead of the curve can we get with what we're actually using to test?”Corey: One question I have is the cultural changes because back in those early days where things were handed off from the developers to the QA team, and then ideally to where I was sitting over in operations—lots of handoffs; not a lot of integrations there—QA was not popular on the development side of the world, specifically because their entire perception was that of, “Oh, they're just the critics. They're going to wind up doing the thing I just worked hard on and telling me what's wrong with it.” And it becomes a ‘Department of No,' on some level. One of the, I think, benefits of test automation is that suddenly you're blaming a computer for things, which is, “Yep. You are a developer. Good work.” But the idea of putting people almost in the line of fire of being either actually or perceived as the person who's the blocker, how has that evolved? And I'm really hoping the answer is that it has.Sean: In some places, yes, in some places, no. I think it's always, there's a little bit more nuance than just yes, it's all changed, it's all better, or just no, we're still back in QA are quote-unquote, “The bad guys,” and all that stuff. The perception that QA are the critics and are there to block a great idea from seeing fruition and to block you from that promotion definitely still persists. And it also persists a lot in terms of a number of other attitudes that get directed towards QA folks, in terms of the fact that our skill sets are limited to writing stuff like automation tooling for test frameworks and stuff like that, or that we only know how to use things like—okay, well, they know how to use Selenium and all this other stuff, but they don't know how to work a database, they don't know how an app [unintelligible 00:12:07] up, they don't all the work that I put in. That's really not the case. More and more so, folks I'm seeing in test have actually a lot of other engineers experience to back that up.And so the places where I do see it moving forward is actually like TheZebra, it's much more of a collaborative environment where the engineers are working together with the teams that they're embedded in or with the SDETs to build things and help things that help engineers get ahead of the curve. So, the way I propose it to folks is, “We're going to make sure you know and see exactly what you wrote in terms of the code, and that you can take full [confidence 00:12:44] on that so when you walk up to your manager for your one-on-one, you can go like, ‘I did this. And it's great. And here's what I know what it does, and this is where it goes, and this is how it affects everything else, and my test person helped me see all this, and that's awesome.'” It's this transition of QA and product as these adversarial relationships to recognizing that there's no real differentiator at all there when you stop with that reactive mindset in test. Instead of trying to just catch things you're trying to get ahead of the curve and focus on insight and that sort of thing.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: One of my questions is, I guess, the terminology around a lot of this. If you tell me you're an SDE, I know that oh, you're a Software Development Engineer. If you tell me you're a DBA, I know oh, great, you're a Database Administrator. If you told me you're an SRE, I know oh, okay, great. You worked at Google.But what I'm trying to figure out is I don't see SDET, at least in the waters that I tend to swim in, as a title, really, other than you. Is that a relatively new emerging title? Is it one that has historically been very industry or segment-specific, or you're doing what I did, which is, “I don't know what to call myself, so I described myself as a Cloud Economist,” two words no one can define. Cloud being a bunch of other people's computers, and economist meaning claiming to know everything about money, but dresses like a flood victim. So, no one knows what I am when I make it up, and then people start giving actual job titles to people that are Cloud Economists now, and I'm starting to wonder, oh dear Lord, have I started the thing? What is, I guess, the history and positioning of SDET as a job title slash acronym?Sean: So SDET, like I was saying, it came from Microsoft, I believe, back in the double-ohs.Corey: Mmm.Sean: And other companies caught on. I think Google actually [unintelligible 00:14:33] as well. And it's hung on certain places, particularly places that feel like they need a concentrated quality department. That's where you usually will see places that have that title of SDET. It is increasingly less common because the idea of having centralized quality—like I said before, particularly with the modern, kind of, DevOps-focused development, Agile, and all that sort of thing, it becomes much, much more difficult.If you have a waterfall type of development cycle, it's a lot easier to have a central singular quality department, and then you can have SDET stuff [unintelligible 00:15:08], that gets a lot easier when you have Agile and you have that, kind of, regular integration and you have, particularly, DevOps [unintelligible 00:15:14] cycle, it becomes increasingly difficult, so a lot of places that have been moving away from that. It is definitely a strange title, but it is not entirely rare. If you want to peek, put a SDET on your LinkedIn for about two weeks and see how many offers come in, or how many folks in your inbox you get. It is absolutely in demand. People want engineers to write these test frameworks, but that's an entirely different point; that gets down to the point of the fact that people want people in these roles because a lot of test tooling, frankly, sucks.Corey: It's interesting you talk about that as a validation of it. I get remarkably few outreaches on LinkedIn, either for recruiting, which almost never happens or for trying to sell me something which happens once every week or so. My business partner has a CEO title, and he winds up getting people trying to sell him things four times a day by lunchtime, and occasionally people reaching out of, “Hey, I don't know much about your company, but if it's not going well, do you want to come work on something completely unrelated?” Great. And it's odd because both he and I have similar settings where neither of us have the ‘looking for work' box checked on LinkedIn because it turns out that does send a message to your staff who are depending on their job still being here next month, and that isn't overly positive because we're not on the market.But changing just titles and how we describe what we do and how we do it absolutely has a bearing as to how that is perceived by others. And increasingly, I'm spending more of my time focusing less on the technical substance of things and more about how what they do is being communicated. Because increasingly, what I'm finding about the world of enterprise technology and enterprise cloud and all of this murky industry in which we swim, is that the technology is great—anything can be made to work; mostly—but so few companies are doing an effective job of telling the story. And we see it with not just an engineering-land; in most in all parts of the business. People are not storytelling about what they do, about the outcomes they drive, and we're falling back to labels and buzzwords and acronyms and the rest.Where do you stand on this? I know we've spoken briefly before about how this is one of those things that you're paying attention to as well, so I know that we're not—I'm not completely off base here. What's your take on it?Sean: I definitely look at the labels and things of that sort. It's one of those things where humans like to group and aggregate things. Our brains like that degree of organization, and I'm going to say something that is very stereotypical here: This is helped a lot by social media which depends on things like hashtags and ability to group massive amounts of information is largely facilitated. And I don't know if it's caused by it, but it certainly aggravates the situation.We like being able to group things with few words. But as you said before, that doesn't help us. So, in a particular case, with something like a SDET title, yeah, that does absolutely send a signal, and it doesn't necessarily send the right one in terms of the person that you're talking to, you might have vastly different capabilities from the next SDET that you talk to. And it's were putting up a story of impact-driven, kind of, that classic way of focusing on not just the labels, but what was actually done and who had helped and who had enabled and the impact of it, that is key. The trick is trying to balance that with this increasing focus on the cut-down presentation.You and I've talked about this before, too, where you can only say so much on something like a LinkedIn profile before people just turn off their brains and they walk away to the next person. Or you can only put so much on your resume before people go, “Okay, ten pages, I'm done.” And it's just one of those things where… the trick I find that test people increasingly have is there was a very certain label applied to us that was rooted in one particular company's needs, and we have spent the better part of over a decade trying to escape and redefine that, and it's incredibly challenging. And a lot of it comes down to folks like, for example, Angie Jones, who simply, just through pure action and being very open about exactly what they're doing, change that narrative just by showing. That form of storytelling is show it, don't say it, you know? Rather than saying, “Oh, well, I bring into all this,” they just show it, and they bring it forward that way.Corey: I think you hit on something there with the idea of social media, where there is validity to the idea of being able to describe something concisely. “What's your elevator pitch?” Is a common question in business. “What is the problem you solve? What would someone use you for?”And if your answer to that requires you sabotage the elevator for 45 minutes in order to deliver your message, it's not going to work. With some products, especially very early-stage products where the only people who are working on them are the technical people building them, they have a lot of passion for the space, but they aren't—haven't quite gotten the messaging down to be able to articulate it. People's attention spans aren't great, by and large, so there's a, if it doesn't fit in a tweet, it's boring and crappy is sort of the takeaway here. And yeah, you're never going to encapsulate volume and nuance and shading into a tweet, but the baseline description of, “So, what do you do?” If it doesn't fit in a tweet, keep workshopping it, to some extent.And it's odd because I do think you're right, it leads to very yes or no, binary decisions about almost anything, someone is good or trash. There's no, people are complicated, depending upon what aspect we're talking about. And same story with companies. Companies are incredibly complex, but that tends to distill down in the Twitter ecosystem to, “Engineers are smart and executives are buffoons.” And anytime a company does something, clearly, it's a giant mistake.Well, contrary to popular opinion, Global Fortune 2000 companies do not tend to hire people who are not highly capable at the thing they're doing. They have context and nuance and constraints that are not visible from the outside. So, that is one of the frustrating parts to me. So, labels are helpful as far as explaining what someone is and where they fit in the ecosystem. For example, yeah, if you describe yourself as an SDET, I know that we're talking about testing to some extent; you're not about to show up and start talking to me extensively about, oh, I don't know, how you market observability products.It at least gives a direction and bounding to the context. The challenge I always had, why I picked a title that no one else had, was that what I do is complicated, and if once people have a label that they think encompasses where you start and where you stop, they stop listening, in some cases. What's been your experience, given that you do have a title that is not as widely traveled as a number of the more commonly used ones?Sean: Definitely that experience. I think that I've absolutely worked at places where—the thing is, though, and I do want to cite this, that when folks do end up just turning off once they have that nice little snippet that they think encompasses who you are—because increasingly nowadays, we like to attach what you do to who you are—and it makes a certain degree of sense, absolutely, but it's very hard to encompass those sorts of things, and let alone, kind of, closely nestle them together when you have, you know, 280 characters.Yes, folks like to do that to folks like SDETs. There's a definite mindset of, ‘stay in your lane,' in certain shops. I will say that it's not to the benefit of those shops, and it creates and often aggravates an adversarial relationship that is to the detriment of both, particularly today where the ability to spin up a rival product of reasonable quality and scale has never been easier, slowing yourself down with arbitrary delineations that are meant to relegate and overly-define folks, not necessarily for the actual convenience of your business, but for the convenience of your person, that is a very dangerous move. A previous company that I worked at almost lost a significant amount of their market share because they actively antagonized the SDET team to the point where several key members left. And it left them completely unable to cover areas of product with scalable automation tooling and other things. And it's a very complex product.And it almost cost them their position in the industry, potentially, the entire company as a whole got very close to that point. And that's one of the things we have to be careful of when it comes to applying these labels, is that when you apply a label to encompass someone, yes, you affect them, but it also we'll come back and affect you because when you apply that label to someone, you are immediately confining your relationship with that person. And that relationship is a two-way street. If you apply a label that closes off other roads of communication or potential collaboration or work or creativity or those sorts of things, that is your decision and you will have to accept those consequences.Corey: I've gotten the sense that a lot of folks, as they describe what they do and how they do it, they are often thinking longer-term; their careers often trend toward the thing that happens to them rather than a thing that winds up being actively managed. And… like, one of my favorite interview questions whenever I'm looking to bring someone in, it's always, “Yeah, ignore this job we're talking about. Magically you get it or you don't; whatever. That's not relevant right now. What's your next job? What's the one after that? What is the trajectory here?”And it's always fun to me to see people's responses to it. Often it's, “I have no idea,” versus the, “Oh, I want to do this, and this is the thing I'm interested in working with you for because I think it'll shore up this, this, and this.” And like, those are two extreme ends of the spectrum. There's no wrong answer, but it's helpful, I find, just to ask the question in the final round interview that I'm a part of, just to, I guess sort of like, boost them a bit into a longer-term picture view, as opposed to next week, next month, next year. Because if what you're doing doesn't bring you closer to what you want to be doing in the job after the next one, then I think you're looking at it wrong, in some cases.And I guess I'll turn the question on to you. If you look at what you're doing now, ignore whatever you do next, what's your role after that? Like, where are you aiming at?Sean: Ignoring the next position… which is interesting because I always—part of how I learned to operate, kind of in my earlier years was focus on the next two weeks because the longer you go out from that window, the more things you can't control, [laugh] and the harder it is to actually make an effective plan. But for me, the real goal is I want to be in any position that enables the hard work we do in building these things to make people's lives easier, better, give them access to additional information, maybe it's joy in terms of, like, a content platform, maybe it's something that helps other developers do what they do, something like Honeycomb, for example, just that little bit of extra insight to help them work a little bit better. And that's, for me, where I want to be, is building things that make the hard work we do to create these tools, these products easier. So, for me, that would look a lot like an internal tooling team of some sort, something that helps with developer efficiency, with workflow.One of the reasons—and it's funny because I got to asked this recently: “Why are you still even in test? You know what reputation this field has”—wrongly deserved, maybe so—“Why are you still in test?” My response was, “Because”—and maybe with a degree of hubris, stubbornly so—“I want to make things better for test.” There are a lot of issues we're facing, not just in terms of tooling, but in terms of processes, and how we think about solving problems, and like I said before, that kind of reactive nature, it sort of ends up kind of being an ouroboros, eating its own tail. Reactive tools generate reactive engineers, that then create more reactive tools, and it becomes this ouroboros eating itself.Where I want to be in terms of this is creating things that change that, push us forward in that direction. So, I think that internal tooling team is a fantastic place to do that, but frankly, any place where I could do that at any level would be fantastic.Corey: It's nice to see the things that you care about involve a lot more about around things like impact, as opposed to raw technologies and the rest. And again, I'm not passing judgment on anyone who chooses to focus on technology or different areas of these things. It's just, it's nice to see folks who are deeply technical themselves, raising their head a little bit above it and saying, “All right, here's the impact I want to have.” It's great, and lots of folks do, but I'm always frustrated when I find myself talking to folks who think that the code ultimately speaks; code is the arbiter. Like, you see this with some of the smart contract stuff, too.It's the, “All right, if you believe that's going to solve all the problems, I have a simple challenge to you, and then I will never criticize you again: Go to small claims court for a morning, four hours and watch all the disputes that wind up going through there, and ask yourselves how many of those a smart contract would have solved?”Every time I bring that point up to someone, they never come back and say, “This is still a good idea.” Maybe I'm a little too anti-computer, a little bit too human these days. But again, most of cloud economics, in my experience, is psychology more than it is math.Sean: I think it's really the truth. And I think that [unintelligible 00:29:06] that I really want to seize on for a second because code and technology as this ultimate arbiter, we've become fascinated with it, not necessarily to our benefit. One of the things you will often see me—to take a line from Game of Thrones—whinging about [laugh] is we are overly focused on utilizing technology, whether code or anything else, to solve what are fundamentally human problems. These are problems that are rooted in human tendencies, habits, characters, psychology—as you were saying—that require human interaction and influence, as uncomfortable as that may be to quote-unquote, “Solve.”And the reality of it is, is that the more that we insist upon, trying to use technology to solve those problems—things like cases of equity in terms of generational wealth and things of that sort, things like helping people communicate issues with one another within a software development engineering team—the more we will create complexity and additional problems, and the more we will fracture people's focus and ability to stay focused on what the underlying cause of the problem is, which is something human. And just as a side note, the fundamental idea that code is this ultimate arbiter of truth is terrible because if code was the ultimate arbiter of truth, I wouldn't have a job, Corey. [laugh]. I would be out of business so fast.Corey: Oh, yeah, it's great. It's—ugh, I—it feels like that's a naive perspective that people tend to have early in their career, and Lord knows I did. Everything was so straightforward and simple, back when I was in that era, whereas the older I get, the more the world is shades of nuance.Sean: There are cases where technology can help, but I tend to find those a very specific class of solutions, and even then they can only assist a human with maybe providing some additional context. This is an idea from a Seeking SRE book that I love to reference—I think it's, like, the first chapter—the Chief of Netflix SRE, I think it is, he talks about this is this, solving problems is this thing of relaying context, establishing context—and he focused a lot less on the technology side, a lot more of the human side, and brings in, like, “The technology can help this because it can give you a little bit better insight of how to communicate context, but context is valuable, but you're still going to have to do some talking at the end of the day and establish these human relationships.” And I think that technology can help with a very specific class of insight or context issues, but I would like to reemphasize that is a very specific class, and very specific sort, and most of the human problems we're trying to solve the technology don't fall in there.Corey: I think that's probably a great place for us to call it an episode. I really appreciate the way you view these things. I think that you are one of the most empathetic people that I find myself talking to on an ongoing basis. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Sean: You can find me on Twitter at S-C—underscore—code, capital U, capital M. That's probably the best place to find me. I'm most frequently on there.Corey: We will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:32:37].Sean: And then, of course, my LinkedIn is not a bad place to reach out. So, you can probably find me there, Sean Corbett, working at TheZebra. And as always, you can reach me at scorbett@thezebra.com. That is my work email; feel free to email me there if you have any questions.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:33:00]. Sean, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Sean: Thank you.Corey: Sean Corbett, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test at TheZebra—because there's only one. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and 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 an angry ranting comment about how absolutely code speaks, and it is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and oh wait, what's that the FBI is at the door make some inquiries about your recent online behavior.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.

Websites.ca sales manager Ryan re-joins us to discuss some simple steps for doing an annual website review and checking the health of your online presence. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/  Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews PPC expert Daniel Moscovitch on the right way to use Google Ads in your overall SEO strategy, plus some of the things to avoid. Learn more about Daniel at https://www.morehotleads.com/strategy/.  If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews SEO expert Jacob Kettner on the best ways to get your local business found on Google, how to get more online leads, and the major factors that affect search engine optimization.    Learn more about Jacob at https://firstrank.ca/.  If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/  Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean interviews expert copywriter Lorri Yurkowski on the right strategies and approach to write your website text in a way that will appeal to your best customers. Learn more about Lorri at https://www.lorriyurkowski.com/.  If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/   Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean takes you through two ways (one for B2C and one for B2B) that you can get better exposure on the web. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Sean lets you in on some of the top email marketing strategies. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Wildfire Special! As Canadian residents deal with potential home evacuations over fires, we thought it was timely to discuss some of the foundational preparations you can put in place for your website and online presence in case of a future digital emergency. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss some of their favorite free online tools to enhance your website or internet presence. On this episode they cover the booking/calendar service Calendly, and the cloud data integration service Skyvia. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss how you can tap your web team to aid seasonal changes in your industry. They also start the conversation off with a support issue over Google's Page Speed ranking and why you should worry about basic user experience instead. Here is the article mentioned in that convo: https://business.websites.ca/page-speed-impact-is-load-time-really-that-important/ If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Go behind the scenes with our copywriter and marketing consultant Sean, to see if online content creation will actually help your business. Many hosting or website service packages come with an add-on option for "content creation". This usually means writing articles for your website. All too often, small businesses don't see any results from this add-on, and in the podcast Sean will tell you why. He'll also go into some of the ways you can properly approach content creation, and what kind of expectations you should have. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss managing your images, to get the best website results (across all browsers and devices), with the least back and forth. With modern mobile phones we are all equipped to take high-quality photos. But there are a few steps you need to take after that, to ensure they work properly online. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss ways to streamline your site. Starting from a strategic perspective, and then getting down into the details of some dead-weight modules/features that can be safely deleted from 99% of business websites. And finally, why it's okay that pages require scrolling. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean talk about the pros and cons of contact forms on your website. The main complaint people have is spam, but there are some important things to know about how to handle that. They also discuss alternatives like Chat Boxes, including a free one you can use from Facebook Messenger. If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss domain names and what they affect in terms of SEO, how many you need, how hard they are to transfer, and more.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan is back to discuss small business website concerns heading into winter 2020. He and Sean talk about Google My Business reviews, and the alternatives for people who don't have or can't setup a Google account. They also talk about simple website order forms (in addition to phone and email options), and using Ads to get your site on top of search results until you can do it organically.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io "Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean talk about the ideal type of website for the majority of small businesses in Canada. What is "just right" for features, design, and support? If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/ Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Learn about the latest email scam being used on small businesses.Plus, Ryan and Sean discuss general red flags to spot fraudulent emails, and even how the spam folder of your email account may contain some (real) treasure... and why it ends up there.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean take you behind the scenes on how web designers and support teams think and talk. That way you can dictate your requests so that they get done more efficiently and quickly.This topic focuses on general requests, but we also deep-dive on targeting keywords on your web pages, and the Dos and Don'ts of making an effective keyword list.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/The keyword article mentioned in this podcast is here: https://business.websites.ca/how-to-choose-keywords/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan and Sean discuss some simple ways that businesses can pivot online (in times of crisis, or just in general). The focus is on simple, actionable tips that don't cost a lot and can be implemented quickly.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan talks about your potential website security risks, and how to best respond to a breach (which is unlikely for a small business). Then Ryan and Sean discuss online trolls, and the three ways businesses can deal with them -- including an idea of how you can profit from troll comments on social media.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Ryan talks about using a simple contact form to generate leads from your site (which of course also comes with some spam), and he and Sean bring you up to date on how your Google My Business description affects your search results, when you should say “thanks” on your site, and why not to worry about scary-sounding emails about your domain expiring.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Website update troubles, fake Google calls, and wasted web design “real estate”.If you have a small business in Canada, get listed for free in the fastest growing website directory of the country: https://websites.ca/Music from https://filmmusic.io"Loopster" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

You are what you surround yourself with. When your environment changes, your mind changes with it. We recently talked about how your environment can put you in a creative mental state, when we talked to Donald M. Rattner, on episode 201. But what about the objects you surround yourself with? They’re a part of your environment, too. The devices we use are a part of our environment, and the devices we use affect our mental state, too. We’re already pretty intentional about how we change our environment for the exact activities we’re doing. You cook in your kitchen, and you sleep in your bed. You wouldn’t sleep in your kitchen, so why do you meditate with your smartphone? Image: View Across the Bay, Juan Gris Thanks for sharing my work! Thanks to the 80,000 Hours podcast for syndicating my conversation with Rob Wiblin to their podcast. Thanks to the Traction Growth & Income podcast for interviewing me. Thanks to the Big Gay Author podcast for mentioning my interview with Robbie Abed. On Twitter, thank you to @mrlacey, @giftedguru, @LWCvL, @dbarrant, @kierantie, and @thepixelgrid. On Facebook, thank you to Sean Corbett. On Instagram, thank you to @jamesonbairesq, and @realba88. Our Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is the author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast and his Love Mondays newsletter, David explores what it takes to make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher RSS Email Facebook Messenger Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Sponsors https://offgridmindfulness.com Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/dont-meditate-smartphone/

Co-hosts Bryan Fox and Carol Tallon were joined in studio by Sean Corbett of Mortgage123.ie and Guillaume Pellerin, CEO of Zoobox Ireland. Joining us by phone from New York was Aaron Block, co-author of 'Proptech 101: Turning chaos into cash through real estate innovation'. Produced by Katie Tallon

#PropertyMatters on Dublin South FM, Tuesdays 6-7pm Ireland's first weekly property radio show, Property Matters, launched In January 2019 on Dublin South FM 93.9 and is now available internationally via iTunes and Spotify podcast (@iPropertyRadio). Seasoned political journalist and broadcaster, Bryan Fox, and I (Carol Tallon) team up to deliver 60 minutes of industry chat with guests from the areas of planning, construction and property. This week we were join in studio by Sean Corbett of Mortgage 123 to help would-be buyers and investors to prepare for their mortgage application; Darragh Lynch of Darragh Lynch Architects who told us of a collaborative project amongst six Malahide neighbours to develop the mews lane at the rear of their homes (great solution for those wishing to downsize without leaving their neighbourhoods!); and Amanda Bone of Amanda Bone Architects joined us to discuss trends in the Dublin market and how great design can unlock the hidden potential of even the tiniest home! *Listen back to #PropertyMatters here: https://anchor.fm/ipropertyradio

Today Ryan read out an open letter written by a Volunteer Coach. It got quite a reaction from our listeners. Ryan spoke to two of them; Sean Corbett who trains under 10s, and Deborah whose husband is a soccer coach.