Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk and Tech for Developers

Does the tech industry have an alcohol problem? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Does the alcohol have a place on the job? At parties? How far does one go? Scott talks to Victor Yocco about a way to think about drinking in the workplace.

Scott talks to Data Scientist Safia Abdalla about the rise of python notebooks and new ways to think about interactive computing, both online and off. What is "interactive literate coding" and how does it change computing for both the technical and not-quite-technical user? All this and Safia teaches Scott about the "nteract" project.

You've pair programmed but have you tried Mob Programming? Woody Zuill and his team "discovered" programming as a group and it changed their whole process. Woody joins Scott and explains how they stumbled on this, how they refined it, and how Mob Programming may make your programming life better.

Sandi Metz and Scott explore the art and science of teaching. How to people learn? How can we be better teachers? When presenting information, what's the best way to get it from your brain into the students? Why am I phrasing everything like a question? All this and more on this week's episode.

Iheanyi Ekechukwu is a Product Engineer with Digital Ocean. He has a background in both design and development. Are such people unicorns? How closely should designers work with developers? Are these truly separate practices...and how separate?

What is Infrastructuralism and how can it help you think differently about software and large problems? Scott sits down with Everett Harper, CEO of Truss. They talk about how applying some old ideas in new ways helped them fix healthcare.gov.

We first interviewed Paul Stovell a few years back when he started a micro-ISV he was calling "Octopus Deploy." Now it's a fully formed and successful company whose flagship product Octopus Deploy is used all over. Damian Brady joins Scott and explains why deployment is more subtle then you think.

Patrik Svensson had an idea in 2014 for a build automation system that had C# at its heart. Fast-forward to 2016 and Cake Build has a thriving group of core contributors, a large group of "contrib" plugins, and it's joined the .NET Foundation. How does Cake work, and how does one build an open source project into a success?

Linda Liukas is a Finnish computer programmer, children's writer and programming instructor. In 2014, her Hello Ruby coding book for children raised $380,000 on Kickstarter becoming the platform's most highly funded children's book. She talks to Scott about how it all started and where teaching coding to kids is going!

Scott Anderson works at Funomena on Virtual Reality games. He's currently working on Luna, a unique tactile VR puzzle game. Do you need many thousands of dollars and a super-powered computer to experience VR? Scott Anderson gives us a tour from Google Cardboard to Oculus and beyond.

Luvvie Ajayi has been writing. She's been writing for YEARS. She has been blogging for 13 years! She's a noted humorist, techie, digital strategist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She's spoken all over (including The White House!) and taught classes worldwide. Today she joins Scott to talk about her brand, her tech, and her hilarious new book "I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual"

Jason Scott is the internet's historian and archivist. He is the creator and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. In 2011 he proposed that the MAME arcade emulator be ported to JavaScript and the next half decade changed how we think about old software and hardware on the internet.

Daphne Chong has had a great year. While she's been a professional developer for many years, this year she's organized user groups, spoken at a number of conferences, and generally pushed herself out of her comfort zone. How did she do it?

Felienne is always learning. In exploring her PhD dissertation and her public speaking experience it's clear that she has no intent on stopping! Most recently she's been exploring a large corpus of Scratch programs looking for Code Smells. How do children learn how to code, and when they do, does their code "smell?" Is there something we can do when teaching to promote cleaner, more maintainable code?

Scott sits down with Dan Driscoll to talk bots. What happened in 2016 that made bots more intelligent and more relevant than ever before? Why now, and what can YOU do with your own bot written in Node.js, .NET, or using their REST API?