The Buffer Overflow Podcast

Evolving the teams with Product Management - hear about the apps team product management journey at Buffer!

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they reflect on the apps team product management (PM) journey with our now-PM, Steve! Up until this year, the apps team at Buffer has never had a product manager - this is a role we've always tried to fulfil amongst ourselves, or relied on other teams at Buffer to support with. Now that we have a PM and are experiencing some great changes to our team and how we work, we take a few moments to reflect on how we've previously been working, with how we are seeing things adapt now.

We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

The Journey from Support to Engineering - hear from Mick on how he made a change in his career at Buffer!

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they learn about our guest's path from a support role at Buffer to an engineer! Mick began his Buffer journey running support, and it was (and is!) something he does very well! Along the way, he learned the product inside and out and recognized things that would block or slow down the team or customers. So, he turned to learning code as a way to create new things to speed up internal processes and flows. Eventually, he made the jump from support to engineering! This week, we unpack what that journey looked like for him.

We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

Timecodes

• Introduction: 0:42
• First role at Buffer: 1:45
• Current role: 3:38
• Inflection point: 5:20
• Learning a new discipline: 9:00
• Juggling Roles: 14:20
• Context switching: 16:00
• Advice for those looking to switch to a new role: 21:30
• Outro: 26:00

Side projects - they are everywhere in the tech industry.

On this week's episode, join Jordan and Joe as they unpack the impact of side projects. After all, Buffer itself is the result of our CEO's side project endeavors! We chat about them in terms of our careers, how to manage them, what they can help bring to the table as well as the not-so-great bits about them. Further, we ask the question - should you even have one at all? It's easy to feel left behind in the development world if you don't, but there's more to the story. We hope you enjoy this week's episode and feel free to continue the discussion online with us at @bufferdevs!

Timecodes

• 2:00 - What side projects do we have?
• 2:15 - Jordan <> Spend Stack
• 3:15 - Jordan <> A Best-in-Class iOS App: The Book
• 4:00 - Joe <> Minimize
• 5:00- Joe <> Compose Academy
• 7:30 - Good Things about Side Projects
• 7:45 - Learning new skills
• 8:44 - Skills bleed over between your job and a side project
• 12:50 - Mindfulness and Side Projects
• 13:45 - You won’t know it all or be able to learn it all
• 16:35 - Work Life Balance
• 17:00 - When do you work on it?
• 20:34 - It’s fine to go slow and be slow
• 21:10 - It’s also fine to have *zero* side projects
• 23:10 - Until next time

Within the Engineering team at Buffer we have several front-end teams working on different parts of the product. Whilst it is important to create a space for continued learning for these teams, there are also a lot of shared goals. To ensure that these teams are able to collaborate on these goals, frequent gatherings take place to create a space to learn from one another and help move tasks forward.

Ana Almeida, who is a Senior Engineer working on the Front-End of Buffer, facilitates these syncs and takes some time in this episode to share her experiences! Here we cover:

• What the front end syncs are being used for
• How they're helping to push the team forward
• How they're helping to bring the teams together in a remote environment
• What the role looks like for someone facilitating the syncs and any guidance for others looking to do the same thing
• ...and more!

We hope you enjoy this episode of Overflow!

The Self Taught Developer

It's a term we hear more often these days - "I'm self taught!". What seemed like a rarity years ago has been increasingly more common in our industry, so today we sat down with our engineer on staff who taught himself programming (one of 11 at Buffer!) - Hamish Macpherson!

Hamish is a senior engineer who works primarily on the front-end of Buffer. In this episode, we cover:

• His journey to learning programming
• How early jobs and projects helped him level up quickly
• Resources and communities to learn from
• Dealing with an initial rejection from Buffer when applying the first time, and how he took feedback in and improved to land the job the second time
• ...and more!

We hope you enjoy this episode of Overflow! Feel free to reach us online to chat about today's episode anytime:

• Buffer (@buffer)
• Jordan (@jordanmorgan10)
• Joe (@hitherejoe)
• Hamish (@hamstu)

This week, Jordan and Joe discuss a topic that many engineers have needed to adapt to in recent times: Working Remotely.

Many of us have been forced to work remotely due to the happenings around COVID. Both Jordan and Joe have been working remotely at Buffer, collectively for over 8 years. In this episode we share our personal experiences for working remotely, as well as some guidance on what we do to make things work well for us.

Welcome back to the Buffer Overflow show! We're excited to bring you a brand new season of topics, guests and chats about remote work, software engineering and more. For this season, we'll be bringing on more guests to talk about interesting work they've been doing, and we'll hold a three question format for each of them. 

To get started, we're delighted to have Amy Lee Bennett on to chat all about accessibility! Amy Lee works on the front end team at Buffer, where she does excellent work on our flagship product, Publish. Along the way, she's brought up a lot of interesting points about accessibility on the web, how to think about it as a team and she's talked a lot about tools to help developers provide a great accessibility experience.

So join Jordan and Joe as we discuss accessibility at length with Amy Lee for our first guest episode!

Time codes:

• 00:47 - Guest Intro
• 2:05 -  Setting the stage: What is accessibility?
• 3:45 - Question 1: Fostering an Accessibility mindset
• 11:30 - Question 2: Tooling for Accessibility
• 14:45 - Question 3: Accessibility and Design
• 19:30 - Bonus: Should you have an accessibility statement?

This week, Joe and Jordan discuss a common topic found in software engineering: technical debt.

While some engineers might consider dealing with it right away a verity of software development, others perhaps think it best to work around it and build around infrastructure what's already in place. 

Is there a middle ground? 

Further, how do you deal with technical debt regardless of your stance? What are some lessons learned? How do you advocate for time to fix it within your organization?

We'll take a look at some first hand examples of technical debt we've introduced ourselves in Buffer, what we did to fix it and how we addressed existing technical debt. Along the way, we'll see how technical debt is really all about your mindset - everyone has it, and you've got to respect the code that came before you while thinking about how to create a sustainable path forward with the work that you do day in and day out.

This is our last episode of season 1 of the Buffer Overflow podcast. We will return in 2020 with some exciting guests from Buffer's engineering team!

Time Codes:

• What is technical debt? (2:40)
• Valuing both speed and stability (4:00)
• The balance of feature work versus technical debt (6:25)
• The law of 1%s in terms of technical debt (11:40)
• How tackling technical debt can introduce more of it (13:20)
• The biggest refactors we've done at Buffer, and one lesson we took from them (16:40)
• Joe answers: Refactor versus Rewrite - How do you know which to pursue? (22:36)

Reader Mail:

From Anton: "How do you measure technical debt?" (25:00)

This week, it's all about major operating system releases! With Android 10 and iOS 13 freshly released to the masses, we talk about how we think about the annual cycle of O.S. releases at Buffer and what it means to our mobile team. Each year, we're inundated with some new A.P.I., sweeping architecture changes and more - so a lot of nuance is required to manage all of these new opportunities effectively.

Topics include balancing O.S. work with "feature" work, or projects and initiatives your company already had in development during O.S. announcements, how to evaluate if a new A.P.I. is ready to use and more. We finish up with some reader mail which asks the important question - when should we start development on these new, major releases?

Time Codes:

• Topic 1: iOS 13 (3:00)
• Topic 2: Android 10 (4:20)
• Topic 3: OS work versus Feature Work (15:15)
• Topic 4: Evaluating new tech and APIs (21:00)
• Topic 5: GDE and Previews from Google (25:00)

Reader Mail:

• "How early in the beta cycle do you begin development?" (26:00)