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Work In Programming

Work In Programming

By Matthew Weeks

What's it actually like working on a product team in tech?

Each episode, Matthew interviews folks from all facets of the tech industry. We'll be interviewing developers, product managers, scrum masters, and managers what their day to day is like, what practices keep their team running smoothly, and what they look for in new team members.
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Guillermo Rauch — NextJS 9.4, JAMStack, distributed systems, and manging eventually consistent state.

Work In ProgrammingMay 14, 2020

00:00
01:53:26
Brian - Breaking Down the Steps to Becoming a Technical Founder

Brian - Breaking Down the Steps to Becoming a Technical Founder

This week Matt sits down with Brian Faber. Brian is the CTO & Co-Founder of Mayday. In this episode, we discuss how Brian went from getting his first computer at the age of seven and teaching himself to program, to skipping university and getting his first development contract building Game Boy Advanced. We discussed the process of building a start-up & managing time.

Other things discussed in this episode include:

- Hiring Practices

- Working for Ubisoft

- Does it make sense to go to school for gaming?

and so much more.


If you liked this episode, check out Mayday or connect with Brian directly (Of course, Mayday *is* hiring!) 

  - Brian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-faber-4117203/

  - Mayday website: https://mayday.am

May 13, 202154:46
Mark Prince–Dive In & Be Obsessed

Mark Prince–Dive In & Be Obsessed

This week Matt sits down with Mark Prince. Mark is a software engineer at Quantum Mob, where he works with big name clients building web sites. When Mark turned 30, he made the decision to make a career change, and reignite his childhood love of coding. Mark explains how he would “pre-work” in order to learn quickly on the job & why he credits his history of service jobs for his success as a software engineer. Other things discussed in this episode include: - Managing your time - Make sure you love code before you enter a boot-camp - More Code Fewer Chips and so much more.
Apr 28, 202141:15
Josh Cunningham - Digging deeper into a product to understand the entire software development lifecycle

Josh Cunningham - Digging deeper into a product to understand the entire software development lifecycle

This week Matt sits down with Josh Cunningham, technical lead at Auth0. Josh started his 15-year programming career while studying chemistry and quickly moved into freelancing and agency work before joining Auth0. We discuss the learning curve of joining a fast-growing product company, and how quickly. In this episode, we discuss why and how testing is critical and how to navigate the real human issue of remote communication. Josh also explains why he finds journaling so important both on a professional and personal basis.
Other things discussed in this episode include:

Writing code that's testable means writing better code.
How to give useful code reviews.
Tests are documentation, and other lessons from Lucho.
Mar 18, 202153:31
Andy Knight - Automation Panda origin story, BDD, test automation before it was cool

Andy Knight - Automation Panda origin story, BDD, test automation before it was cool

This week Matt sits down with Andrew Knight. You likely know Andy from his blog AutomationPanda.com or from one of his many talks at Tech Conferences spanning across the globe. In this episode Andy discusses how the TI-83 got him hooked on programming, how Automation Panda started as a place for him to save his notes between jobs, and how blogging led to speaking at conferences, consulting, and many more opportunites. Other things discussed in this episode include:

  • Writing Cucumber before it was Cucumber
  • Never planning on being a Developer
  • LexisNexis being the greatest opportunity of his career and so much more

You can follow Andy on:

  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/AutomationPanda
  • His Blog: https://automationpanda.com/
  • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwkshD85UGzUH651KyVK4zQ
Mar 11, 202101:24:25
Landy Simpson – Growth Happens in Uncomfortable Situations

Landy Simpson – Growth Happens in Uncomfortable Situations

This week Matt sits down with Landy Simpson, engineer. Landy discusses the first talk she gave for Power to Fly & what she learned from that experience. We also cover why Landy took up writing, including a very successful Elastic Search Engine article that peaked the interest of some important industry folks and led to her Power to Fly conference. 

Other topics discussed in this episode include:

  • Companies can always tell you their vision but not exactly what they want 
  • Why optimizing search engines matters
  • Why zoom Socials kind of suck, and much more.


Landy's blog: https://simplyy.medium.com/

Landy's Twitter: https://twitter.com/simp_lyy

Feb 25, 202144:55
Charity Majors, CTO of HoneyComb.io — Empowering great engineering teams with great tooling

Charity Majors, CTO of HoneyComb.io — Empowering great engineering teams with great tooling

This week Matt sits down with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb. Charity discusses the dangers of aging code in pre-production, what it takes to lead an engineering organization, from on-call, to management, to hiring.

Some other topics discussed in this episode include:

  • Spending 3 years at a big company is enough
  • Do Managers need to be technically literate?
  • Why having a work “home base” is important
  • Why having a little bit of curiosity will save you time in the long run & much more...
Feb 09, 202101:29:20
Nora — Confidence as a junior developer & should you do a bootcamp?

Nora — Confidence as a junior developer & should you do a bootcamp?

This week Matt sits down with Nora, a junior developer at a digital consultancy, to discuss having success in theprofessional world of programming despite not having a University Degree. Noratalks about the confidence that graduating from a programming bootcamp gave her & how she has been able to take that with her to excel in her career. 

Another highlight from this episode included how continuing to learn about other aspects of programming are important to your growth, even if you are not using them on a daily basis.

Jan 28, 202130:15
Sameer Mehta - Engineering Organized Learning & Productivity

Sameer Mehta - Engineering Organized Learning & Productivity

This week Matt sits down with Sameer to talk about excelling in your first role and using it as a stepping stone, establishing a personal knowledgebase, and the importance of staying organized. We dive into how Sameer got started building contract versioning software for the Real Estate space and his experience converting a legacy Ruby on Rails and Ember application to NextJS. 

Some other highlights from the episode:

  • How Sameer implements Zettlekasten to take detailed notes of his favorite books and podcasts.
  • Why the experience from your first job may be more important than the job itself.
Jan 14, 202151:42
Thom Lamb - Freelancer vs Agencies vs Product Companies

Thom Lamb - Freelancer vs Agencies vs Product Companies

This week Matt sits down with Thom Lamb to speak about the pros and cons of Freelancing vs Agencies vs Product Companies. We discuss the importance of budgeting your time & finances as a freelancer as well as best practices to consider when entering the software design field. Other things discussed in this episode include how the pandemic exposed a lot of businesses, the confidence an agency can bring you, & the trials and tribulations of freelancing.
Dec 22, 202055:47
Dan Moore - Blogging, how to get started in the start-up world and building developer relationships in a virtual world
Dec 17, 202050:27
Ivan Aimufua — From trades to professional developer in 1 year

Ivan Aimufua — From trades to professional developer in 1 year

This week I caught up with an old friend, Ivan Aimufua. We talked about why he left his job as a plumber to find his passion, and found himself gorging on everything he could find related to code. Over the course of the next year, he taught himself a mixture of Python, Javascript, and more to eventually find himself in his dream job at Punchcard Systems, where he works today, partnering with entrepreneurs to build out software products from idea to completion.
In this conversation, we covered:
How to learn effectively.
The skills that developers need to master AFTER they learn to code and get the job.
The challenges involved in working with clients.
How to balance work and life while working remotely.
And more!
Dec 11, 202046:51
Arunoda Susiripala — Building Storybook, Meteor, Next and communities on open source
Aug 22, 202054:04
Kadi Kraman — React Native, leading teams, and consulting for major companies
Aug 08, 202001:04:48
Guillermo Rauch — NextJS 9.4, JAMStack, distributed systems, and manging eventually consistent state.

Guillermo Rauch — NextJS 9.4, JAMStack, distributed systems, and manging eventually consistent state.

This week, I spoke with Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel (formerly Zeit) and co-creator of NextJS, and long-term member of the open source community.

We spoke about:

• New features in ReactJS and NExtJS 9.4 like hot refresh, incremental static site generation, and more
• Components as the perfect abstraction
• Distributed systems
• Pushing content to the edge
• Building systems but maintaining creativity with tools like Figma
• How Infrastructure As Code might not be so great
• Why you need to put your work out there early (#100DaysOfCode)
May 14, 202001:53:26
Jesse Herlitz — Building CastroFM's ad system using No-Code tools, designing the right experience for your users, building relationships

Jesse Herlitz — Building CastroFM's ad system using No-Code tools, designing the right experience for your users, building relationships

This week on Work In Programming Matt sat down with Jesse Herlitz, the General Manager of CastroFM about how he approaches business experiments and customer feedback, how he uses no-code tools to build out new features quickly, and his advice for building and maintaining healthy relationships in life (the work-place included).
May 07, 202001:18:37
Riegie Jeyaranchen — Learning development, starting companies, and using your team to accelerate growth

Riegie Jeyaranchen — Learning development, starting companies, and using your team to accelerate growth

This week, I spoke with Riegie Jeyaranchen about his transition from startup founder, to building his own agency, and finally to working for a company. We discuss everything from how to learn, how teams and processes can bolster one another, kubernetes and modern DevOps, and everything in between.
Apr 22, 202001:06:30
Mike Moll — Remote working and team management, and how to start a business if you've lost your job.
Mar 28, 202041:47
Thom Lamb — Startups, military, learning to code, teaching, powerlifting, and more.

Thom Lamb — Startups, military, learning to code, teaching, powerlifting, and more.

This week I spoke with Thom Lamb, a fellow team lead and senior software developer at Quantum Mob. He is a larger than life character, with some great ideas on how to do anything from learning new skills, to teaching, to managing a team, solving problems, and much more.

Thom's journey is a very interesting one. He started in the military. After his active duty he taught himself basic programming to make his job easier, so he could study computer science at nearby U of A. From there he got into personal training as a powerlifter, which lead him to creating his first startup, and eventually learning web development with the MERN stack in order to build and grow his product. When he decided he wanted to work for someone else again, he journeyed all the way from New Brunswick to Toronto, Ontario where he knew he'd get more connections and accelerate his growth.

Since then he has come to join our team at Quantum Mob, and is one of the inspirations for starting this podcast. He is one of those unique individuals who treats everyone with the same level of directness and respect.

This is a long one, but please enjoy! We cover many actionable topics from startups to working in a team. Timestamps to come later.
Feb 16, 202001:22:18
Jonathan Lorimer — Starting a meetup and functional programming

Jonathan Lorimer — Starting a meetup and functional programming

This week I spoke with Jonathan Lorimer the host and organizer of the Toronto Haskell Meetup, a past graduate and mentor for LightHouse Labs, and a full-stack engineer at Ecobee.
Feb 09, 202001:23:13
Alex Hess — Designing for accessibility, and building a social network in real life

Alex Hess — Designing for accessibility, and building a social network in real life

This week, Matthew Weeks has a conversation with Alex Hess. We talked about all things design, from Atomic Design principles, to accessibility, Ui vs UX, Neumorphism, and how building a real world community is the best way to become successful in social networks (online).

Alex Hess currently works as a product design lead at ICF Next. While he is a fantastic designer, he identifies as a generalist. He started his path to design while freelancing as a web developer at the same time as completing his masters in economics. His approach to everything stems from empathy and authenticity first.
Jan 23, 202001:27:05
Aditya Murray — Getting started, and leading remote teams.

Aditya Murray — Getting started, and leading remote teams.

This week on Work in Programming, Matthew Weeks interviews Aditya Murray, a lead backend engineer at Ready Makers. Aditya has worked in all sorts of development teams, from tech giants like Blackberry and IBM, to startups and remote teams. He is an action-taker, who constantly pursues new opportunities to learn.
Jan 18, 202052:09
January 17, 2020

January 17, 2020

Jan 17, 202000:38