It Depends

On this episode, Ben, Mo, Daniel, and Jesse discuss the nature of doing development work that is not strictly writing code all the time. They try to find the appropriate balance between time spent coding and time spent in meetings. This topic includes some great tips on how to do meetings efficiently and effectively. There's even a rousing few minutes about what defines a meeting.

On this episode, Daniel, Jesse, and Ben discuss all the recent hype around your favorite voice assistant speakers. They talk through the reasons for current spikes in popularity of voice speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. Most importantly, the engineers discuss how to develop for and take advantage of these new and exciting platforms.

On this episode, Daniel, Mo, Brian, and Ben discuss the necessary steps toward becoming a presenter at a tech conference. This includes selecting a conference, choosing a topic, crafting an abstract, mastering the topic, preparing a slide deck, and giving the presentation. Listen in for specific presentation tips and tricks!

On this episode, Daniel, Jesse, and Brian talk about research and development and its place in an agency. In addition to defining R&D, they discuss how to manage and spend research time well. This conversation also includes more on how to keep up with articles and technologies, which is expanded from a previous episode, namely "10: Should I Learn this New Technology?".

On this episode, Daniel, Jesse, and Mo embark on the final episode in our DevOps series. Specifically, the topic is scaling to handle additional load for a site in production. Do you handle the traffic by buying more servers or by growing existing servers?

On this episode, our very own chatbot expert, Daniel Pritchett, joins Mo and Ben to discuss chat as a service. While there is a lot of hype around chatbots recently, these engineers decode chat as a platform and engage in all kinds of fun along the way. Listen in to hear about the implicit increases in efficiency, knowledge sharing, and time savings that can come with chatbots. Also, look out for Daniel’s talk at Southeast Ruby in October and his upcoming book!

On this episode, Ben, Daniel, Jesse, and Mo discuss the cloud and application hosting. The conversation includes services such as Heroku, Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Listen in to hear about how developers make the decision to use platform as a service or infrastructure as a service to manage and host their applications.

On this episode, Ben, Jesse, Keith, and Mo discuss configuration management and continuous deployment. Using technologies like Docker and Ansible can identify and provide dependencies for applications. Learn how to fight for consistency across development and production environments with containers.

On this episode, Ben, Mo, Jesse, and Daniel cover continuous integration & delivery, monitoring, logging, and more. Do today’s developers all need to learn some DevOps? What are the tradeoffs in targeting platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, or the traditional ‘bare metal’ deployment?

On this episode, Jesse, Mo, Keith, and Brian discuss the balance between using a search engine and asking co-workers for help. When you have a tricky problem to solve, either of these tactics will include some significant trade offs. The team explains when and how to Google to be effective in programming.

On this episode, Ben, Jesse, and Daniel discuss pair programming. With the strategy of pairing comes significant benefits to productivity, code quality, rubber ducking, and knowledge sharing. Listen in for helpful tips about tooling and managing differing team strengths and energy levels.

On this episode, Jesse, Mo, Ben, and Daniel discuss the continuous improvement topic of tech conferences. They discuss how to choose a conference, the most helpful aspects of a conference, and how to attend conferences well. Perhaps most importantly, the group explains how to take full advantage of the conference by sharing knowledge with the whole team.

On this episode, Ben, Mo, Daniel, and Jesse discuss three important questions regarding the priority of testing when writing code. Could you change your code for tests? Would you change your code for tests? Should you change your code for tests? Listen in to hear about how testing is a first-order concern in writing good code.

On this episode, Ben, Daniel, Jesse, and Brian discuss software testing. From types of tests to tooling for testing, learn how tests can help you make better software in less time with reproducible, regression-preventing tests. And finally, the debate about test-driven development is rekindled again!

On this episode, Daniel, Mo, and Jesse debug all the problems. They address making and questioning assumptions as a programmer, how to debug different types of errors, and the best tooling in various operating systems. Listen in to hear about test journals, buddy debugging, rubber ducking, and much more!

On this episode, Daniel, Stephen, Ben, and Colin go beyond engineering practices to talk about another important part of the life of the developer. We call it leadership, but it involves all kinds of soft skills as well as individual ownership of practices, products, and projects. In large part, this episode reveals our "secret sauce" in team projects.