All Episodes
What Your Company Actually Values
No one tends to think twice about their "company values". They tend to be meaningless words posted on the website or on a poster hung on the wall. They don't inform nor tell you anything about how your company operates. However, your company does …
How to Have a Good PR
Pull requests are something we'll make thousands of times in our careers, but it's easy for them to go off the rails. Problems can emerge from the code, to the review comments, to the very concept of the pull request itself, turning what should have …
Common Agile Failures and Fixes
Agile, when properly implemented, can be an exceedingly powerful philosophy on software development. But gone wrong, it can often hinder and harm more than it helps. In this episode, I discuss common agile implementation failures and pitfalls across a wide …
What Even is Agile?
Most companies proclaim to "be Agile", but what does that even mean? Are they? Is that a good thing? And what are all these other terms we hear about, like Scrum and Kanban? Are we Agile because we have standups and use Jira? In this episode, we take …
Event Loop: Responding to the Amazon Layoffs
This is a bonus Event Loop episode keeping you in the loop regarding current events. Amazon just announced they are laying off around 14,000 employees. Was it due to AI? Does this represent the beginning of the end for our field? And how should we all respond …
Preventing Burnout
Burnout is unfortunately something that happens to a lot of us in our industry, and it can be an absolutely debilitating experience. In this episode, I review what burnout is, warning signs of approaching burnout, what makes our industry specifically …
The Unreasonable Risk of Rewrites
We are often tempted to rewrite software - who doesn't like a new greenfield project? With all the promise of cleaner code, architecture, and fixing every problem in the past, they can be tempting to recommend. But here, there be dragons. Rewrites are …
Software Estimation and Other Lies
We are notoriously bad at software estimation, yet we will be asked to do it hundreds if not thousands of times in our careers. Why are we so inaccurate? Can software estimation ever be accurate? Are we just doing something wrong?
Build vs Buy
As engineers, we are often faced with the question if we should build or buy a piece of software. In this episode, I attempt to provide a framework for thinking about and ultimately answering this question.
Engineering is Social
Engineering is fundamentally a social activity. This might sound completely counter intuitive, but it's an important reality for understanding the nature of our work. In this episode, for those whom are in the industry already, I describe various tips for …
Ya Ain't Gonna Need It
One of the most powerful and important axioms in software engineering, in my opinion, is "Ya Ain't Gonna Need It". This axiom tells us that we shouldn't be implementing code on pure speculation of customer needs, but rather wait until we …
The Problem with Technical Interviews
Technical interviews have been broken for a while. In this episode, I discuss how and why our process is broken, how the industry got here, explore how other industries handle their interviews, and discuss what our interview process should look like, and how to …
AI is Not Going to Take Your Job
AI is everywhere, but is it going to take our jobs as software engineers? Should we start looking for other careers? Is it safe to enter this industry if you're just entering college? We take a look at historical examples, compare this cycle with others in …