The 6 Figure Developer Podcast

  Jon Skeet joins us to talk Noda Time, Semantic Versioning, and Diversity in Tech. Jon is a software engineer with Google, working in the London office. He has a keen interest in C# and also in date/time APIs.   Links https://twitter.com/jonskeet https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/ https://nodatime.org/ https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet   Resources https://semver.org/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/library-guidance/cross-platform-targeting   "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Lunchpool is on a mission to help build stronger connections through lunch break networking. The app helps facilitate "frictionless lunch planning" so that you can meet other professionals with similar interests or goals.   Links https://letslunchpool.com/ https://twitter.com/letslunchpool https://twitter.com/i_am_abell https://twitter.com/m_dimmitt https://www.facebook.com/letslunchpool https://www.instagram.com/letslunchpool/   Sponsor We are thrilled to have PVS-Studio sponsor this episode. PVS-Studio code analyzer performs code analysis and issues warnings on code with a high probability of having bugs and potential vulnerabilities. The tool supports C, C++, C# and Java, and it can work with Visual C++, GCC, Clang compilers, and some of those for embedded systems. The analyzer works on Windows, Linux and macOS and can be used as a stand-alone tool and integrated within Visual Studio, IntelliJ, SonarQube and more. To find out more, please follow the links below: * PVS-Studio * Technologies used in the PVS-Studio code analyzer for finding bugs and potential vulnerabilities   "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Olivia Liddell is a Cloud Training Specialist at Cloudbakers. She is a former Chicago Public Schools teacher who now specializes in technology training and change management. She is passionate about teaching, mentoring, and distance running.   Links https://twitter.com/oliravi https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivialiddell/   Resources https://www.slideshare.net/OliviaLiddell/olivia-liddell-codemash-2019-becoming-an-effective-mentor https://www.shrm.org/membership/student-resources/pages/mentorprogram.aspx https://www.mentoring.org/ https://medium.com/@benlesh/thoughts-on-mentorship-in-tech-d46c8401c23c https://www.theserverside.com/feature/The-best-ways-to-approach-mentoring-women-in-tech   Sponsor We are thrilled to have PVS-Studio sponsor this episode. PVS-Studio code analyzer performs code analysis and issues warnings on code with a high probability of having bugs and potential vulnerabilities. The tool supports C, C++, C# and Java, and it can work with Visual C++, GCC, Clang compilers, and some of those for embedded systems. The analyzer works on Windows, Linux and macOS and can be used as a stand-alone tool and integrated within Visual Studio, IntelliJ, SonarQube and more. To find out more, please follow the links below: * PVS-Studio * Technologies used in the PVS-Studio code analyzer for finding bugs and potential vulnerabilities   "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Brad has been a professional software developer for more than 25 years, working as a consultant, developer, team lead, architect, and CTO. He is currently working at Microsoft on the App Center team, having previously worked on the ASP.NET and CodePlex teams. He has been involved in the agile development space since 2003, and along with Jim Newkirk (NUnit 2's author) works on the unit testing framework xUnit.net. In his spare time, you will often find him gaming (board & video), playing music, or on the water in his kayak. You can find him (@bradwilson) and xUnit.net (@xunit) on Twitter.   Links http://bradwilson.io/ https://xunit.github.io/ https://twitter.com/xunit https://twitter.com/bradwilson https://github.com/xunit/xunit "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  David is a family man, geek, musician, illustrator, speaker, software developer, and Microsoft MVP living in North GA. He's currently a Senior Developer Advocate at Okta. He runs on a high-octane mixture of caffeine and JavaScript, and is entirely made of bacon.   Links https://twitter.com/reverentgeek https://reverentgeek.com/ https://github.com/reverentgeek https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidneal/ "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Heather is the CTO of ROCeteer, a Las Vegas-based entrepreneurial growth company. She is a dynamic, highly-sought-after speaker who has delivered more than 500 presentations to a list of clients including Microsoft, Starbucks, Zappos, Nestle, Boeing, MGM, The Four Seasons, and others.   Links https://heathriel.com/ https://twitter.com/heathriel https://antarcticonf.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/heathriel https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherwilde/ https://www.inc.com/author/heather-wilde "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Jason is a game developer and writer who loves to teach others how to build their own games. He's spent his career working on all types of games, but his real passion is in teaching others game development.   Links https://unity3d.college/ https://twitter.com/Unity3DCollege https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-weimann-bab0984/ https://unity3d.college/2018/11/28/unit-testing-in-unity-testing-against-monobehaviors-using-mocks/   Transcript Jason Weimann: Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Really excited to be here. John Callaway: Yeah, so before we get started into sort of the unity and whatnot, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Kind of how you got started in the industry. Jason Weimann: Yeah. Sure, I'd love to. I think my story, I don't know, it might be a little weird, might be normal. But I started off as just a little kid with a computer and no games. My first computer was a Commodore 64. I had three games that I got when I got the system and never had the money or anybody to buy me another one. So, it kind of drove me to the idea of "Hey, can I make my own games?" And I'd get these little magazines that had code that I could type in and make something happen, and it kind of got me started and got that spark going like, "Hey, I could create a game for myself." Jason Weimann: So, I kind of taught myself. I'd say I taught myself a little bit but it was mostly my uncles teaching me how to code by writing some Basic, writing a little bit of ... I'd say games, but they weren't really games. Pick a number or copying a choose your own adventure book into a big giant mess of Basic. But it was a lot of fun and it kind of got me motivated onto that and thinking, "Hey, I could do game development one day." And that kind of fell away. You become a teenager and get distracted by a lot of other stuff, so that faded away for a while and it didn't really do any ... I still played a lot of games and worked on computers a lot, and did a little bit of stuff here, a little scripting for myself every now and then. But I didn't really try to code again until quite a while later. Jason Weimann: Well, I shouldn't even say ... The next step was I got an electronics degree. I thought, "You know what, I like computers. I like video cards that make good graphics. So, I'm gonna design video cards and make them even faster and make things better." I went through that whole process and realized that it was kind of boring. I shouldn't say it was boring. It wasn't as immediately gratifying. You didn't get that immediate gratification. Like I could draw out my circuits and figure out like, "Okay, this is gonna do this." I never got to the point of being able to design a graphics chip or anything like that. But I could do my basic circuits and all of the stuff that I needed for that. But I never got that excitement that I got from writing some software. And partway through, I took some more software classes and that just kind of reinvigorated me and got me going on that again. Jason Weimann: When I finished my electronics degree, I ended up getting a software job instead. So, got like an entry level software job writing test tools for Intel, just writing test tools for servers. Which was a blast. And I think it really kind of pushed me to know that software was what I wanted to do. Before that, I'd done some basic stuff. I had played around with C++ and I was pretty terrible at it. At that time, this was kind of when I discovered C#. So, I got started,

  Heather is a passionate coder and entrepreneur. She has experience working with Fortune 500 companies building enterprise-level voice, mobile and C#/.Net applications. She focuses on external thought leadership, encouraging fellow programmers to present on topics outside of the office and in the community.   Links https://www.quorralyne.com https://github.com/Quorralyne https://twitter.com/quorralyne https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermdowning https://www.youtube.com/thehelloworldshow "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  Maxim has worked at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and now works as a staff software engineer at Uber. Cadence is a distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine we developed at Uber Engineering to execute asynchronous long-running business logic in a scalable and resilient way.   Links http://cadenceworkflow.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/fateev/ https://twitter.com/mfateev https://github.com/uber/cadence https://atscaleconference.com/videos/cadence-microservice-architecture-beyond-requestreply/ https://aws.amazon.com/swf/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable/durable-functions-overview https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/ https://getakka.net/ "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  What is Quality Software and how do we ensure we are Delivering Quality Software?   Transcript Clayton Hunt: This week we're talking about quality and how we can deliver quality software. Jon Ash: So quality software that's what the QA departments for? John Callaway: Quality is everyone's responsibility. I heard ... I think either on a podcast or on a YouTube video or maybe just on Twitter, I might've read that you're not paid to deliver code. You're paid to put code into production. I would take that a step further and say, you're paid to deliver value. Whether that is a right code and produce some functionality and put that into production where it is being useful to someone or some process, or if it's just a configuration setting or it's a new manual process of Pencil and paper. Clayton Hunt: Yeah, companies don't want code they want or they think they want software because they think that it can solve a problem that they have or optimize a process that they already ... That's in existence. They don't actually care about the code at all. John Callaway: Stepping back for just a minute, what are we trying to do to find when we use the term quality? Clayton Hunt: Well, the first thing that always comes to my mind is quality software. A software that does what the company needs with limited breakdown. So I mean, bugs happen, you can't get rid of all the bugs. But five ninths worth of operation is really what we shoot for most of the time. Jon Ash: And I would also add to that the ability to extend that code into new functionality that, that the business might need. So, you want the software to remain software and not just another form of hardware, even if it can stay running as hardware. Right. John Callaway: So something that we'll continue to deliver value as the needs of the business change? Jon Ash: Correct. John Callaway: So by that, do you mean that it's something that's easily maintainable and easily extendable or, what more do you mean by that? Jon Ash: Yeah, I think the maintainability and extendability are where those two pieces are what I'm talking about. Yeah, I mean I think that you just ... It needs to be able to be modified, right? So either add features to that or modify the way that, that system things that are integrated with it? There are definitely different ways of going about that, right? You don't necessarily have to change the literal code that's running. You could add ... It could be a part of a system where you could extend it by adding other modules or other pieces of code, right? The way that you maintain it. But the code itself has to be able to be maintained and extended, and flex with whatever new requirements however the business changes, how the world changes, 'cause code really, once it's written, the computer should be able to continue doing that exactly the same way for forever. Jon Ash: I mean, assuming you don't have things like, memory leaks and other issues, right? If it's quality code that's running well, it'll run for forever. But if you can't change it, then you're going to have to go and stop that code to introduce a new system because the old one was too inflexible. John Callaway: It sounds like you've been answering the question, of why Clean Code matters. Clean Code is a term that any followers of Uncle Bob would be familiar with, but it basically means code that is maintainable and flexible enough to change with the business needs. Are there any other reasons why Clean Code matters? So other than keeping up with the business, why would Clean Code matter? Clayton Hunt: To Ash's point? I think it, has to do with,

  For over twenty years Mike has been building high-performing software development teams and organizations through the use of Agile and Scrum. He's worked with startups and some of the largest organizations in the world.   Transcript Clayton Hunt: With us today is Mike Cohn. For over 20 years, Mike has been building high performing software development teams and organizations through the use of Agile and Scrum. He's worked with startups and some of the largest organizations in the world. Welcome, Mike. Mike Cohn: Thanks Clayton, it's nice to be here. Jon Ash: Before we kind of jumped into the meat of things. Would you just kind of give us a little bit of background about yourself kind of, maybe how you got started in the industry and- Mike Cohn: I think I had a pretty typical progression started out as a programmer. I got into that as a PhD student in economics and dropped out what's called, 'all but dissertation' when I saw how much you make with a PhD, was a lot less than you made with a Master's. I quit with my masters and went places working and doing economics research. And everywhere I went back then they needed more programming help than they need to one more economist, so just kind of stuck with that and it's what I love doing anyway. I started out that way as a programmer, worked my way up to managing teams, director in different organizations VPC, all type things. I fairly typical programmer to management progression, I believe. John Callaway: Very nice. How did you get involved in the whole Agile movement? Mike Cohn: I knew Ward Cunningham, who was one of the guys at the Agile Manifesto meeting. He emailed me the day after the meeting. I just worked on a project here in Boulder, Colorado, He emailed me the next day and said, “Hey, look what I did over the weekend.” And that was the Agile Manifesto. I got involved with that and through that met Mary, Pop and Decken. We were kind of the Mary and I were the two that kind of Co-founded the Agile Alliance just kind of get it going, just to get the paperwork and then brought a whole bunch of other people like, Bob Martin and stuff and right at the beginning but. I was right there right afterwards through the relationship with ward. John Callaway: With the formation of the Agile Alliance and things like that, you've authored a number of books, many of which I've got on the shelf behind me, hasn't been just well received, and the community responding well, right out of the gate. How much of a transition from the old software development practices, many of which were waterfall types of development, how easy is that transition or has that transition been for the companies that you've worked with or been involved with? Mike Cohn: Well, I think a lot of us were doing Agile before the name came around, the name got assigned in 2001. I've been doing Scrum since 95 when it really first got started. But back in the late 90s, if you were doing what's called Agile today, you really felt alone. Everybody was doing what was called the Rational Unified or the Unified Process back then. The company in particular that I worked for, we were buying, not a lot, but maybe a handful of companies a year, and every time we bought one, they were doing the Unified Process, and they'd have this wonderful documentation that's great to artifacts, and we'd buy them and I'd constantly be like, oh man, maybe we need the time to do these documents. Look at how much better they were, the hell of these nice documents, and after doing that for a couple years, seven or eight companies like that. It was like, okay, there's a reason we're buying them, they're not buying us. Mike Cohn: I was just very thankful that we'd always been too busy to do those documents.

  Dennis Doomen is on an everlasting quest for better solutions that will significantly improve the efficiency, the quality and the productivity of your software development teams. And among other things he is the author of Fluent Assertions, an API for asserting the results of unit tests in .NET.   Transcript Clayton Hunt: With us today is Dennis Doomen. Dennis is on an everlasting quest for better solutions that will significantly improve the efficiency, the quality and the productivity of your software development teams. Welcome Dennis. Dennis Doomen: Thank you, thank you for having me. Clayton Hunt: So before we get started, would you give us a little bit of introduction about yourself, maybe how you got started in the industry? Dennis Doomen: Ah, wow. 21 years and counting, absolutely. I actually don't know how I end up in this business. I mean, I just liked software development since I was young, I had a [inaudible 00:01:10], maybe you remember that. I had a [inaudible 00:01:14] as well, and started programming a C and C++ at the time. Somehow, I ended up in the non-IT business, but I did a little programming outside my job and then I decided to make it my profession. I've been doing this, for yeah, basically as I said, for the last 21 years as a professional software developer consultant. Dennis Doomen: Last 10 years I've been speaking a bit, doing some open source development as you may have heard. I enjoy my work; I am passionate. Love to talk about it. Clayton Hunt: Very cool. I was able to catch one of your presentations in Orlando a month or two ago on dependency injection and inversion of control. You want to maybe give us a high level overview of what that talk was all about? Dennis Doomen: Yeah. It was mostly driven by the fact that I ran into a couple of architects, experienced ones, that were telling the teams like, "You should not use dependency injection. It's evil. It's going to hurt you. It's going to ... I don't know, bring your code base down." And then I started to think about, why is that? Why are people somehow rejecting something? And the same happens with [inaudible 00:02:28] relational mappers, for instance. And I started to think about that, and I realized that probably everything is ... All of this whole attitude or mentality is caused by the fact that we misuse something. Dennis Doomen: Every tool has its advantages and disadvantages. If you understand that, you also learn when something makes sense or not. Dependency injection is one of the examples that you can easily take the wrong path. If you take the wrong path, it's going to hurt you. TDD is test-driven development; it's another example like that. Dennis Doomen: I started to think about, okay, what is it? What people ... what frustrates them or what are the pains of dependency injection? And tried to come up with some examples that tried to keep you away from that and make you successful Or at least I would say successful but at least allows you to solve the problem in the way it was supposed to be solved. Clayton Hunt: So what were some of the kind of misdirections that people were using? Sort of, dependency injec- yeah, dependency injection [inaudible 00:03:28]. Dennis Doomen: Yeah, that's a good question. The people say stuff like, they hide the magic. You don't actually understand or it's really difficult to reason like how does an object get resolved and how did the dependencies get in? Where are they registered? They say that it is force it's kind of ... and other situations where all unit tests successfully complete and then when you run the application stuff starts to fall apart because you've never actually verified that your registration code is doing what it's...

  Joel is an MIT Educated, family first workaholic. Joel loves his k9 friends Ted, Teddy and Bently has a beautiful wife Michelle. Recently Joel has welcomed a brand new addition to the family, his first child, a daughter, Ari. Joel has a passion for writing clean object oriented code with a heavy emphasis on services. Single Responsibility Principle, Low Coupling and High Cohesion are just a few of the important design principles he employs.   Transcript Jon Ash: Before we get started would you tell us a little bit of backstory about yourself? How you got started, and what motivates you? Joel Beasley: Yeah, for sure. My father was an engineer, he came out of the Air force. He was putting the GPS systems into the B32 stealth bombers in the 80s. So that's how he got his education. Then he came out of the Air force, started doing freelance work. And then my mom had two other kids. We have three kids. And she said, "Take this one with you to work, so he doesn't cause any trouble here at the house." So my dad would take me to work with him and give me smalls tasks to keep me busy. And later I realized he was just trying to buy himself time to get work done by having me go chase down items, and memory, and things like that, and solder different parts together. Joel Beasley: So from there I got really into technology, wrote code all the way up through high school. After high school had some successful projects in the real estate space, and fitness, and then in accounting, and personal financial management. Met some investors, started seeing other people make the same mistakes I was, so I started sharing with them. But there wasn't enough time for me to share all my advice, so I learned about blogging. Well I know about blogging, but I learned about, you write when you can't tell everyone everything all the time. Joel Beasley: So you can just say, "Hey, take these collections of writings if you need them, here you go." So that turned into a blog which turned into a book. From the book I wanted to make sure I would get flamed publishing nonsense, so I started sending copies of it to different CTOs. And from friends, past people I had acquaintance with, and then some just popular CTOs. And they started to write back and we ended up having these phone calls. And that turned into recordings of the phone calls to share on a mailing list. Joel Beasley: And then someone was like, "Hey idiot, it's called a podcast. Stop sending me MP3s of your conversations." That's when I learned that a podcast was more than just an app on the iPhone. And we started a podcast, and then it grew really fast. Now we're just sharing and helping people everyday. I like it. John Callaway: So the initial project and book was modern CTO. You want to tell us a little bit more about that? Joel Beasley: Yeah. Those conversations, there was about 12 recurring conversations. Please don't quiz me on them now. One a big one was like, spaghetti code MVP epidemic. Everybody was writing some really bad spaghetti code. And they were making the excuse of, "Oh, it's an MVP, I can write really bad spaghetti code." I said, "There's only two reasons why you write bad code, either you know how to write good code and you choose to write bad code, or you just don't know how to write good code." Joel Beasley: And both of those things suck because they're both fixable, right? You can learn how to write good code, and then just reduce the scope. And then have a moderately quality base that's not spaghetti code crazy. And obviously there's a spectrum of spaghetti code too. But like, Ben Orenstein's spaghetti code's a lot different than a first time engineer. John Callaway: I saw you tweet out that particular quote ... or someone else had tweeted out that code and at...

  This week the guys talk about team construction and culture. Do you really need 37 senior developers? What is the proper makeup of a team? * Team pyramid * Diamond shaped team   Links Clean Code - Episode 1 "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

  The old stereotype of the pale programmer in the corner is going away. Those in the developer role are becoming more diverse and varied. This week the guys talk about the care and feeding of modern day software developers. - Software Developers - Software Engineers - Architects - Builders, not brick layers   "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved   × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!