Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast

The software world is vast and ever changing. Cutting through the noise of language fads and building a system that meets your organization’s goals, is maintainable, scalable, performant and clean is no easy feat. It is the Principal Engineers that stand at the helm and steer the ship in the right direction. Today we dive into the world of one Principal Engineer steering the ship for an iconic brand and how he views his role, what it means to be a principal engineer, his thoughts on AI in software, the importance and meaning of InnerSource software development, and more. Our guest, Jeff Bailey, is one of those superheroes guiding a famous brand to success. He started his software journey as a teenager and his first computer was a White Box 286, that he traded his Sega Master System and some games to acquire. He now has over 25 years of professional software development experience. He has worked for companies like Internet In A Mall, Earthlink, Evoque and Axian doing consultant work, and has a wide range of experience in languages like Perl to Cold Fusion to Python to Java to Javascript. He is currently a Principal Software Engineer at Nike and the co-leader of the Tech Modernization Team. He believes you must be a force multiplier to enable maximum efficiency for your team and prioritizing the right tool for the job. When our guest is not designing architecture or driving excellence at Nike he is gaming on Nintendo Switch, Steam and Xbox or creating a moody vibe playing his guitar. Enjoy the conversation!! Connect with Jeff: LinkedIn Website/Blog Sponsor: Clairity: Do you know how your engineers feel about your company? About their work? Connect your Github and install Clairitiy’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code "buildwithpeople" and get 20% off your first year to discover real insights about your engineers experience. Show notes and helpful resources: Alfred Productivity App - A MacOS productivity app for automating workflows and tasks NuShell - A tool that allows running commands against JSON, CSVs, and other file types using a consistent query language. Jeff’s Tools Jeff's blog post on Learning, Earning and Growing InnerSource Commons - A global community focused on promoting InnerSource practices and building InnerSource programs Principal engineer role - Jeff describes his role as a "force multiplier," amplifying the effectiveness of his team by solving complex problems, exploring new technologies, and always thinking a step ahead. A principal engineer isn't just a tech expert but a leader who can look beyond code to the broader organizational needs Building software for and with people - For Jeff, the ultimate goal of any technology is to serve people. Whether it's through enhancing productivity or solving everyday problems, software should make life simpler and less complicated for its users. His focus is always on understanding the real needs behind the code. Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Ding ding... It's 3 am and your phone has just sent you multiple P1 alerts. Your site is down and you need to find out what the issue is and fast, but your log data is all over the place, metrics on your services are sub par and it's really hard to know where to go to find the issue. What if there was a way to leverage AI to help you make sense of your data in a clear and concise way, making your 3 am alert wake up call a walk in the park? This is exactly what our guest, David Wynn, is doing at Edge Delta, an automated observability platform that monitors your services, alerts you when something is wrong, and guides root-cause analysis. Today, we dive into observability; what it is, the data pieces that make up this ecosystem, tips on how to start your data collection journey, ways our guest is integrating AI with human expertise to enhance system observability and more. David received his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from Duke University and with over 15 years in the industry he has worked at companies like Intapp, Sumo Logic and formerly was Head of Solutions at Google Cloud for Games. Currently, a Principal Solution Architect for Edge Delta, an automated observability startup, he applies his visionary approach to automated observability, ensuring systems are not only monitored but also intelligently guided through root-cause analysis when issues arise. When our guest is not making your production monitoring a breeze, he is reading philosophy and participating in the vibrant geek culture in Atlanta attending events like DragonCon. In his LinkedIn profile he calls himself the “People Machine Liaison”, enjoy the conversation! Connect with David: LinkedIn Ftwynn.com EdgeDelta Sponsor: Get Space: Are your engineers happy? Productive? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code buildwithpeople and get 20% off your first year to find out real insights about your engineers experience. Show notes and helpful resources: Definition of observability: Understanding what the system is doing and whether it's doing what it's intended Three pillars of observability are Logs, Metics and Traces Logs are like notes to yourself from the code, and are only as structured and useful as the notes you write Metrics are numbers, usually counts or measurements, that represent what you want to track Traces tie together the different components of a distributed system into one object, capturing the flow and timing of a transaction or operation Events are narrative-level components that describe key occurrences in the environment MELT is the acronym for Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces Context as a 4th pillar Three layers of Context; 1. Team context (developers, what maps to code), 2. Architecture context (how services are architected), 3. Business intent context (what the system is supposed to do) Collection is step number 1 - getting the data into a place where you can understand it Automated observability: Makes the collection process easier by automating aspects of it and makes the analysis process easier by using techniques like clustering algorithms Edge Delta uses the k-means clustering algorithm to group similar events and apply sentiment analysis to identify issues. Engineers should focus on understanding and implementing the business requirements correctly, as that will lead to better observability signals Large Language Models (LLMs) are not reasoning machines; they are associativity machines that cannot truly understand or reason about concepts Reality has a surprising amount of detail article - by John Salvatier ReBoot cartoon - The main character Bob acts as the Guardian of Mainframe. Correction from the episode: he has a keytool named Glitch (not Gadget as mentioned) that he wears on his left wrist Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

You know that feeling when you are in the zone and time seems to standstill? You’re on fire, completely focused, and distractions vanish? That feeling is FLOW.  In today's world with constant interruptions and demands on our attention, achieving flow can feel impossible. But what if there was a way to cultivate this state and optimize your productivity? That's where "flow as a practice" comes in. It's the art of getting in and staying in that magical flow state.  We are joined today by a Flow Experience expert to help us understand what Flow is, why it’s important for our joy, ways we can achieve it and more. Our guest, Arty Starr, has been a software engineer for over 20 years doing work in various areas like semiconductor factory automation, supply chain optimization, data pipeline automation and helping companies identify and solve their biggest problems with data. Today she is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and author of the book Idea Flow: How to Measure the PAIN in Software Development. During the pandemic our guest decided to get her PhD at the University of Victoria, where she is now a researcher at CHISEL - The Computer Human Interaction & Software Engineering Lab, working with Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey.  Her thesis project is developing a theory of Developer Flow, and the two cognitive processes of Momentum and Troubleshooting. She is also the founder of FlowInsight, helping developers thrive and find joy through more time in the flow state.  Additionally, she is on the advisory board of CodeScene, a painter, a 2D/3D animator, and is working on a new play-based approach to learning coding and animation with a 3D character, called "Learning with Fervie". Our guest believes that we as software engineers are the magicians of this world because we can bring our dreams to life. When our guest is not finding ways to bring the invisible to the forefront, and bring joy and hope back to our work, she is spending her time outside, hangin’ with the trees. Enjoy the conversation! Connect with Arty: LinkedIn Sponsor: Get Space: How do you know if your engineers have time in the day to experience flow? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code buildwithpeople and get 20% off your first year to get real insights in your your engineers experience. Show notes and helpful resources: Bridges Summit - YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS THIS Flow Insights - Sign up for BETA to use the tools Arty talked about during the show - join her to help build a better product Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi The Computer Human Interaction & Software Engineering Lab at the University of Victoria run by Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey Arty is speaking at UberConf Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas C. Engelbart The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First by Jeffery Pfeffer The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge Getting into the optimal performance state by Robert Nideffer What Makes Interruptions Disruptive?: A Process-Model Account of the Effects of the Problem State Bottleneck on Task Interruption and Resumption, by J. P. Borst, N. A. Taatgen Shape UP by Ryan Singer Prerequisite conditions to get into flow state: Clarity of the goals and rules of the task, challenge skill level balance and unambiguous feedback. Intrinsic motivation is a very important piece to flow Setting clear goals and breaking down work into micro intentions will help you achieve flow If we focus on experience and thriving we ought to get productivity for free Other talks by Arty: Enabling Powerful Software Insights by Visualizing Friction and Flow and Keynote at SpringOne on Flow State Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Metrics are hard. Identifying which metrics to measure is even harder. So how do you get started? And how do you know when you have achieved true developer productivity zen? Like anything in life the path to mastery is a journey and today we are joined by a passionate staff engineer from Meta to share with us his theory on a developer productivity maturity model which paints a wonderful mental picture on knowing where we stand in our developer productivity journey and how companies can move through the stages. We also discuss productivity dashboards, if you actually need dashboards, how Meta thinks about developer productivity and more. Our guest, Karim Nakad, has his Masters of Computer Science from University of Wisconsin and previously worked for Amazon for SageMaker and Prime. He is currently a Staff Software Engineer at Meta making an impact in the productivity organization. He is dedicated to improving developer efficiency across the board and paving the way by generating and exposing productivity and code quality metrics across the tech industry and alongside leading experts and researchers. His excitement around improving the daily working lives of software engineers is palatable and contagious and I can’t wait to dig in. I met our guest at a developer productivity engineering conference last year and when he summarized back to me the purpose of a project I was working on in such an eloquent manner I knew then he had to come on the podcast to share his thoughts and efforts around bringing happiness to engineers and building products for people. When our guest is not helping engineers move fast and be productive, he games and travels the world. He also two Macaws a green wing and a blue and gold. Enjoy! Connect with Karim: LinkedIn Twitter Threads Sponsor: Get Space: Do you know what pain points exist in your company? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code "buildwithpeople" and get 20% off your first year Episode correction: Karim wanted to clarify the difference and intersection between qualitative/quantitative and objective/subjective: Qualitative: Non-number data such as the subjective free-form text in surveys. Quantitative: Data that can be counted, such as subjective multiple-choice in surveys or objective system measurements. Show notes and helpful resources: DORA The SPACE framework Karim’s best advice: “Anyone can be an expert you just need to read the code” Karim’s everyday tool: Obsidian - note taking app Reflect note taking app The Hack language Karim says developer productivity is about creating an efficient and enjoyable experience as that is what encourages devs to do their best work To measure, rely on frameworks our there like DORA or SPACE and Karim recommends using metrics you already have to start with AutoFocus paper: Workgraph: personal focus vs. interruption for engineers at Meta - improved personal focus by over 20% KPIs rule of thumb takes two forms: Latency and Reliability An example of latency is test latency and how quickly do they complete An example of reliability is test reliability and how often your test delivers good signal Productivity Engineering Maturity Model (5 stages): Ignorance: Not know about or not prioritizing developer productivity Awareness: Forming a team focused on addressing highest pain points for example around continuous integration or testing Initiation: Merging KPIs into a common productivity goal and creating dashboards Refinement: Making recommendations on dashboards to improve productivity Mastery: Automating and integrating productivity improvements into workflows Advice for smaller companies: Keep an ear on the ground for industry research from companies like Google and Microsoft, and leverage frameworks like SPACE and DevEx to measure and improve productivity. The importance of nudging teams in the right direction rather than mandating productivity solutions, allowing teams to find their own paths to improvement. Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Our work could be more fun if…. My engineers could be happier if… Is this the right problem to solve?... Software development is all about solving hard problems in fun and creative ways and asking these questions in the work we do allows us to think more creatively. Our guest, Brit Myers, loves to ask these types of questions and solve them with her high performing teams.  Today, we dig into how we can make sure we are asking the right questions to ensure we are solving the right problems, learning from failure, how to build high performing teams, how we can think about metrics as feedback loops and more! Brit was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has 4 kids. She received her BS in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon and has recently completed her Executive MBA from University of Michigan. During undergrad she had no intentions of getting into tech but during an internship she fell in love with programming. With over 15 years of experience now under her belt, she is a technology leader with experience in scaling high-performing engineering teams and building platforms across various industries. She worked at Hyland as AVP of Cloud Engineer, at Firebolt Analytics as Head of Cloud Engineering, and currently is the VP of engineering at System Initiative where she leads a team of talented engineers creating a new collaborative power tool designed to remove the "papercuts" from DevOps work. When our guest is not eliminating "papercuts" from DevOps she is spending time with her family,  building DIY projects with her kids, or working outside in her garden. Her passion is building amazing things with amazing people, so it was only fitting she join us on the show today. Enjoy! Connect with Brit: LinkedIn Discord Twitter System Initiative and Open Beta Signup Sponsor: Get Space: Want to collect feedback directly from your engineers? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code buildwithpeople and get 20% off your first year to get real insights in your your engineers experience. Show notes and helpful resources: Brit Myers Readme Second Wave of DevOps blog post by System Initiative’s Co-founder and CEO, Adam Jacob Important advice she got from her grandfather: Figure out what people in power want and find a way to give it to them She views metrics and trends more as signals to ask questions rather than definitive answers; you need to look at context Strongly values empowering teams and giving them autonomy to make decisions Asks for feedback often to model good practices and help teams develop skills Focuses on facilitating the right conversations and alignment through process At System Initiative, she is building a collaborative DevOps platform to create infrastructure simulations and remove friction from workflows System Initiative is described by Adam Jacob (CEO) as if Figma and Miro had a DevOps Baby and it is changing how we collaborate Overall advice: Keep focused on the outcomes you want to achieve in software development and don't lose sight of them amidst new technologies and frameworks Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Today on Building With People For People we delve into what and how we make our workspaces not just productive, but also joyful. Have you ever wondered what elements contribute to that feeling of fulfillment in your job? Is it flow state, or the immediacy of feedback, or the camaraderie of an exceptional team? These aspects are pivotal for anyone's career satisfaction and effectiveness, no matter their field. But our focus is how do we gauge and enhance the developer experience? It's more than just crunching numbers on things like build times or pull request cycle time. While these quantitative metrics have their place, they only paint part of the picture. The true essence lies in understanding the human factor behind these numbers, because, at the end of the day, we create tools for each other, as people. We are joined today by Justin Reock, an extremely passionate software engineer who makes it his daily mission to help engineers find happiness and joy in their work. We dive into his involvement in the Developer Experience community, frameworks you can use to help think about how and what data to collect to increase developer experience, and providing environments where developers can thrive like an internal developer portal. Justin has held roles like Solutions Architect and Chief Architect, previously worked at Gradle as their Field CTO and Chief Evangelist and is currently the Head of Developer Relations at Cortex.io, focusing on transforming businesses through internal developer portals. He is also a part of a movement to pull together multiple disciplines to discuss ways in which we can improve engineering productivity. When our guest is not helping engineers find joy in their work he is playing games of any format (board, video, etc), running, reading, grilling, and he and his wife are renovating their RV! Connect with Justin: LinkedIn Twitter Sponsor: Get Space: Do you know if your engineers experience joy in your organization? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code buildwithpeople and get 20% off your first year to get real insights in your your engineers experience Show notes and helpful resources: Theory of Constraints as defined in The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt The Phoenix Project book Justin’s early tech toys - Atari 2600+ and the Tandy 1000 EX Personal Computer He is creating a programable relay system for his RV using Rust Other videos of Justin: DevOps, 12 Factor, and Open Source and Breeding 10x Developers Beauty of open source is its ability to enable and equalize the playing field Internal Developer Portal - A system that attempts to pull disparate system data and put it in one place to make a predictive and personalized space The SPACE of Developer Productivity - A holistic developer productivity framework combining both workflow metrics and perception metrics. Developers mostly think about “Activity” metrics like lines of code or number of builds but we need to give equal weight to the perception metrics, the "Satisfaction" and "Communication" dimensions of SPACE If you curate a better experience for your developers you will lead to better productivity outcomes DORA - is only one part of the value stream, it is the creation and deployment of an artifact and captures throughput, but it doesn’t capture everything before that like writing the code, or meetings or slack messages SPACE is seeking a balance between the five metrics and wants to tell a story about the tension that exists between the different dimensions. The secret of SPACE is it is immune to Goodhart’s law - “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” Gitlab DevSecOps 2022 Survey The DevOps Handbook Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Products are designed and created for their users right? Well at least they should be. A 2021 McKinsey Global Digital Sentiment Insights survey sites that 56% of users of digital services state they are dissatisfied by the user experience.  Today, we are joined by Satyam Kantamneni, a master of design thinking to shed some light on why this might be and to share his insights on how we can create user-centric organizations that leave users delighted while also driving business growth through the practice of User Experience Design. Satyam has a Bachelors in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University, an MS, of Human Factors Engineering from Wright State University, has attended Stanford, the School of Design Thinking, and received his Executive MBA from Harvard Business School.  He is currently the Managing Partner and Chief Experience Officer at UX Reactor. He has developed and curated the PragmaticUX framework, which is a scalable, consistent, replicable, and measurable approach to innovation in a digital world.  A subset of the framework is captured in his book:  User Experience Design: A Practical playbook to Fuel Business Growth. As our guest says Good Design is Good Business. Connect with Satyam: LinkedIn Website Email Sponsor: Get Space: Do you know if your developer’s user experience is a good one? Install Get Space’s real-time survey iteration tool now with code "buildwithpeople" and get 20% off your first year to get real insights in your your engineers experience Show notes and helpful resources: User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth Bv.d = m.p.p.e; Business value by design = Mindsets, Process, People and Environments The Experience Value Chain The 5 Mindsets Design is Business - Google Design Presentation by Satyam Collaboration Trinity - Magic happens when you have an Experience Strategist, a Product Owner, and an Engineering Architect As apart of Experience Transformation, everyone in your organization should be able to tell you four things: 1. Who are your top users; 2. What their top 5 pain points are; 3. What the org is doing to solve these pain points; 4. Knowing how the organization measures outcomes You should be collecting 3 research Insights: formative, sensorial and validation Formative: collecting insights on biggest user pain points Sensorial: collecting continuous real-time data about my users so I can adjust in real time Validation: collecting insights around where I have solved my top user pain points The power is knowing your user, tracking their journey, and constantly delivering user delight Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Developer Productivity Engineering is becoming more and more a mainstream idea. But what does it mean and how does it apply to me? Today we talk with an engineering wizard, Max Kanat-Alexander about how his company, LinkedIn, thinks about developer productivity. Using his team as framing we will investigate methodologies and approaches he and his team use that enables happier and more productive engineers. Max has held numerous roles throughout his career including Chief Architect for the open-source Bugzilla project and Tech Lead for Code Health at Google. Currently he is a Principal Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and is the founding technical lead for the Knowledge Systems team inside of the Productivity & Happiness org. He is also the author of two books, Code Simplicity which is now available for free online, and Understanding Software. When our guest is not finding ways to help engineers be more productive, he is spending time with his two-year-old son and making music. Our guest is an absolute delight, is a fountain of endless knowledge, is always so enthusiastic about helping others and I hope you enjoy our conversation about developer productivity with him today. Connect with Max: LinkedIn Blog Website Twitter Sponsor: Get Space: Install Get Space's real-time survey iteration tool now with code "buildwithpeople" and get 20% off your first year Show notes and helpful resources: Three pillars of focus for Max’s team: 1. Metrics, 2. Feedback and 3. Knowledge DPE Summit 2023 Talk Definition of developer productivity at LinkedIn - A developer can effectively and efficiently accomplish their intentions regarding the systems they are attempting to build and they are happy with the systems, tools, processes, and facilities that are involved in software development Max designed a metric called “Code Reviewer Response Time” - He will be releasing open source notes soon with more info You need to show metrics to the people who can take action on them and you need to show them metrics that they want to take action on Always start with the goals of the business or goals of team and if a team cannot tell you or cannot tell you what their metrics should be its because they do not know what their goals are Any survey is better than no survey and free text feedback is very valuable LinkedIn uses both a quarterly survey and a real-time feedback system Using their real-time feedback system they found that satisfaction rating is .5% higher than quarterly surveys Two questions he would ask when starting a survey are: 1. Using a 0-5 scale: “I regularly reach a high level of productivity”, and 2. Free text feedback: “What are some aspects of development that have frustrated you in the last three months?” High quality up-to-date documentation is the highest productivity driver 2023 DORA report For more show notes visit podcast.unfilteredbuild.com. Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Your password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, a special character and be at least 8 characters long. These directions should be all too familiar to you when creating a new password for some new account you are signing up for. Have you ever stopped to think about why these requirements exist? Today, we are joined by, Laura Bell Main, a passionate cyber security expert who will share her journey with us into the wide world of security, help us understand the importance of security and ground us in a daunting world with simple and effective ways to secure our digital lives. Laura has been in the cyber security world for over 20 years. She has her Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, has worked for the New Zealand Internet Task Force, as a security consultant for various companies, was a board member for Hackers Helping Hackers and is an investor and advisor for Onwardly. Currently, she is the founder and CEO of SafeStack, a company dedicated to teaching the world how to secure the software we build. She is a published co-author of two books Security for Everyone and Agile Application Security and is spreading the good word of security best practices high and low. She says “to protect one of us we must protect all of us”. When she is not on her mission to build a team of 30 million security minded software developers she is spending time with her two daughters, restoring old mechanical things like 100 year old sowing machines and is an avid gardener. Connect with Laura: Website Twitter LinkedIn Show notes and helpful resources: 1 Hour Appsec - free application security program Build Amazing Things Podcast hosted by Laura Bell Main Smurf Attack Security is one of the oldest problems we have and it is very human - (video) Security is about how we protect the things that have value from other people who have sufficient motivation to take action to get them One key tip to protect your self in the digital world is to make sure your email password is very very strong Make sure you also look at the people around you in your life and give them support to protect their digital footprint “Minimum Viable Security” - The minimum amount of security you can do that takes care of your highest priority risks Security becomes a tool to increase sales and is a large part of software quality Maori sayings: “Kia Kaha” - Stay strong, be brave and “Kia Ora” - Hello Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

For front end engineers there are so many frameworks that abstract away the actual HTML sometimes making accessibility and web fundamentals an afterthought. Accessibility in 2023 must be a 1st class citizen. How do you know if you are making things accessible for your users?  Today we are joined by, Derek Fons, a passionate engineer to discuss building a community with empathy, web fundamentals, simple things you can do to make a more accessible website and more. Derek, has been in the tech industry for over 20 years and has found a home in coding, mentoring and building community. Growing up he barely graduated high school - having to take night school to graduate on time, and he never went to college. His past struggles and overcoming this adversity, has given our guest a unique perspective on building software for people, with empathy at the center. He has held roles at companies like Apple, Amazon, Conde Nast, Everywell and now is a Staff Engineer at Restore Hyper Wellness. When our guest is not solving technical challenges and creating accessible software he is spending time with his children, mentoring, playing video games, reading comic books and doing CrossFit. It is his mission to help others be their best selves. Connect with Derek: LinkedIn Twitter Github Show notes and helpful resources: More on Accessibility: Episode 1 with Dezireé Teague More on Mentoring: Episode 3 with Dan Degreef Helpful WCAG Patterns AXE dev tools by deque Lighthouse dev tool Clean code is easy to delete A few tips to test for accessibility: Navigate through your app with just your keyboard Place yourself in the shoes of your users - if building mobile make sure you test it on a cell phone Leverage your built in screen reader utility to test your application Observe how your users use your software if you can Its our job as engineers to make sure we are solving problems for our users and if we are not, our software is useless HTML Links - Make sure you have proper text describing where your links go - not CLICK HERE HTML select drop downs and inputs MUST have focus- Do not remove the default outline! HTML labels are big! Make sure you use labels properly with inputs Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

When you think of Kubernetes or Docker, I bet empathy is not the first word that comes to mind. Today, I am joined by, Kelsey Hightower whose passion it is to bring empathy to work everyday and we talk about how to reframe our approach to building tools for humans, learning from the physical world, config management, containerization and more. Kelsey earned his CompTIA A+ certification and began his career working at BellSouth installing DSL. He has worked at Puppet Labs, Monsoon Commerce (where he wrote his open source config management library Conf’d ), and currently he is a Distinguished Engineer, Google Cloud.  He is a leading expert and advocate in Kubernetes and is known in the tech community as the explainer and chief of Kubernetes having spoken at many many conferences and even co-founding the Kubernetes-focused KubeCon conference. He is also a published co-author of the book Kubernetes: Up & Running. He likes to say he is a SysAdmin who can code and a big part of his day is spent elevating people. Enjoy our conversation! Connect with Kelsey: Twitter Show notes and helpful resources: Meet Kelsey Kelsey’s book: Kubernetes: Up & Running “If there is a problem do what is necessary to solve it no matter what” “You do your best work when you are at your best” Brian Grant - Chief architect of Kubernetes Kim Bannerman - People first empathetic leader “A 10x engineer can make 10 people better - level up the people around you” “Always seek to understand why you do what you do” “Continue to grow by observing the world around you and make adjustments so you can make an impact” Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

What is your tech stack of choice these days? Have you tried the HOWL stack? Do you have front end clients that are bloated, have huge bundle sizes and have complicated tooling? Are you having to write business logic on the server AND the front end? The HOWL stack might be just for you. The HOWL stack is Hypermedia On Whatever (backend) you’d Like. Hypertext you say? Yeah you know like text displayed on a computer screen that has references to other text. Sound familiar? It should, the most popular way to view hypertext today is via the World Wide Web which is itself the canonical hypermedia system. Today we are joined by Carson Gross to discuss what Hypermedia systems are, concepts like Representational State Transfer (REST), Hypermedia As The Engine of Application State (HATEOS), and his library, HTMX, which is in direct response to how complicated web development has become. Carson has been the software industry for over 20 years and has his Masters of Computer Science from Stanford. He started programming in grade school in Apple Basic and then, later, with HyperCard and has worked in many languages like Java, Ruby on Rails and Python. He is very active in the open source community responsible for projects like intercooler.js, hyperscript and the main library of discussion today, HTMX. He also teaches part time at Montana State University, is writing a book on Hypermedia systems, and currently runs his own software development shop, Big Sky Software, which finds hot, new industry trends and then builds the opposite of that. Connect with Carson: Big Sky Software About LinkedIn Twitter Show notes and helpful resources: HTMX Library Hypermedia.Systems book Hateoas Essay Two states of every programmer meme Components of a Hypermedia System How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? Uniform Interface of REST Mother of All HTMX code bases → real world HTMX port html.org/examples → active search Locality of behavior The Grug Brained Developer Hyperview - server driven mobile app framework - by Adam Stepinski Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

There are so many different types of career paths in the world of software, how do you know which path to take? Would you like wearing many hats (not just software), working for yourself and being exposed to lots of different types of tech? If so, maybe software consulting is the right path. In today’s episode we are joined by a React Native Mobile consultant who will answer questions like, how do you put yourself out there to become a consultant? How do I know I have the skills necessary? What skills should those be? And much more. Our guest today, Matthew Holland is a long time friend of mine and just an all around stand up guy. We met in coding bootcamp at the University of Texas at Austin and immediately connected through our love for music. He is a big advocate for people experimenting and gaining experience through internships and hands-on experience and is currently a Senior React Native Mobile Consultant working for himself. Previously, he has worked as an engineer for companies like Sam’s Club, EverlyWell, and the Sumo Group. He has also helped to build mobile apps for companies such as Pella Corporation, Univision, and Downtowner. He grew up playing classical piano and is now exploring the realms of jazz. When he is not helping teams solve their technical problems or playing piano he is often battling through a MADabolic workout class, learning to cook a new Thai dish, reading nonfiction, or traveling. Connect with Matthew: LinkedIn Medium Blog Show notes and helpful resources: Craig Silverstein - first Google employee - offered advice to students to build something to solve a problem you are interested in. phind.com and ChatGPT Number 1 place for leads = LinkedIn Skills that have helped Matthew succeed: Curiosity, self-motivation, ability to identify most important tasks, and being comfortable with ambiguity When assessing if a contract is right for you, talk to the team members, ask about the cadence of the team (scrum/agile etc), and look at the codebase One way to maintain a codebase is writing the right tests “Listening to Kenny G” - the HBO Kenny G documentary React Native - learn once, write anywhere Harvard Study on Happiness- Number one predictor of happiness is having good relationships with people A study of musicians and the brain - jazz vs classical Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

The tech landscape is exploding with AI tools to help you automate all sorts of workflows like code completion with Github Copilot or personal assistants like Chat GPT. But what about if you are a content creator with hours of recorded video content, what tools exist for you? “Content is King” so you have to be putting out diverse content continuously. What if you had a tool that automagically creates blogs and tutorials from already recorded video? Well you are in luck because we have just the tool for you…enter Contenda. Today we have the dynamic, inspiring, multi hat wearing founder and CEO of Contenda to tell us all about how it works and ways it can help you automate your content pipeline. Our guest, Lilly Chen, confounded the Colorado College Esports where her team won the first ever NCAA Division 3 championship and she built a retention product for twitch streamers at a hackathon that went viral and helped a Twitch streamer break a Guinness world record for most subscribers to a stream. She was a software engineer at Midgame building voice assistants for gaming which was acquired by Facebook, she has built machine learning infrastructure for Facebook Reality Labs, is a Member on the Board of Trustees at Colorado College and now runs an AI startup. On paper her career trajectory might seem straightforward but she has had her share of adversity. Off paper her story is one of struggle, self reflection, perseverance, triumph and inspirational to all. From dropping out of high school, to becoming a Buddhist monk, to a college graduate, to a startup founder, our guest is trailblazing the AI world so hit play to hear her amazing journey. Connect with Lilly: Email - lilly @contenda.co Twitter LinkedIn Contenda Show notes and helpful resources: Sign up for a Private Contenda Beta @ unfiltered.contenda.co Dota 2 Oh My Zsh bash tool Avatar: The Last Airbender Twitch subathon article related to Lilly’s A/B twitch retention product Listicle fun - Transform many blogs into a new blog! Contenda released this feature on the day of this recording (April 28th) Autocode - turn ideas into software Autocode + Contenda video on how to integrate with Contenda Marktprompt + Contenda integration: Confbrew Optical Character Recognition Pipeline Open AI and Chat GPT Autocode template - Get all YouTube Video Ids from a playlist URL Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

When you design and build a web application for scale, you need to make a lot of decisions and small details can add up to create massive impact. So when you build a web application how do you know what framework to use, which cloud provider to choose or database solution to use? Relational, Document, Graph? You may also need users to login to your site but how do you authenticate them? Do you use sessions, JWTs, or third party authentication? How do you scale and support millions of users?  We are joined today by an engineer whose passion it is to solve these exact questions and come up with solutions for designing scalable software systems. Our guest today loves tinkering and building products from scratch. Growing up he was fascinated with Leonardo DaVinci and the machines he built, watching many history episodes on the topic. His love for software started over 10 years back when he took a web dev course on HTML, CSS and VB script where he built a website that helped others create websites, it was a “create your own website” type website. He went on to earn his degree in computer science from University of Pune in India. He started off as a UX engineer, after which he switched to exploring the Data Science domain for a brief period and slowly migrated to designing scalable systems for startups and other companies. Currently he is working as a Software Consultant at a company named Sahaj.ai When our guest  is not designing software or architecting solutions he is traveling, reading, watching movies, playing soccer and cooking. He is a big foodie and his favorite meal to make is Biriyani (a rice dish). In his words he was born a nomad and wants to explore the world. Connect with Denny: Twitter LinkedIn Denny’s Newsletter Show notes and helpful resources: Obsidian note taking software for productivity - the 2nd person to call this out, so take a look! Quote from Steve Jobs - “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards…” Jugaad - Innovative fix or hack Netflix and Chaos Engineering Open source libraries for Chaos Engineering Denny’s article: A Commentary on Authentication Methods Denny’s article: Sql, NoSql, Graph: A Commentary on Databases Denny’s article: Twitter's Tough Architectural Decision Yagni principle - You aren’t gonna need it No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

As a developer have you ever worked on an API endpoint but you can’t easily find the documentation for the API to see how pieces work, or can’t find the specific sequence diagram on how your domains interact, or how about using some clunky outdated internal tool that you have to use to compile your code, well your user experience is suffering, more specifically your developer experience is poor. The term “developer experience” or DX is becoming more and more pervasive in the tech industry as companies realize how important it is for the success of their businesses. But what is DX you ask? Well, in today’s episode I am joined by a very special guest to answer that question and explore the realm of DX engineering and how you can help yourself and your team become more productive and build the experience you deserve. Our guest today, Cassidy Williams, spreads the joy of tech through her contagious positivity and accessible content. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Iowa State University and is a startup advisor and investor and developer experience expert. Currently, she is the CTO at Contenda, an AI content generation platform. Previously, she was the Director of Developer Experience at Netlify and has also worked at a variety of large and small companies like Remote, React Training, CodePen, Amazon and Venmo.  She's active in the developer community, has given hundreds of talks around the world, and also co-hosts the Stack overflow podcast and The Dev Morning Show (at night) podcast. She is one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under.  She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be. When Cassidy is not inspiring the next generation of coders she is playing music, singing karaoke, creating memes, building mechanical keyboards, and hanging out with her sister. Connect with Cassidy: Twitter The Dev Morning Show (at night) LinkedIn Website Show notes and helpful resources: CTO at Contenda Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry Subscribe to Cassidy’s newsletter it won’t disappoint Cassidy’s fav joke at the time of recording “I adopted my dog from a blacksmith. As soon as we got home, she made a bolt for the door!” Obsidian note taking software for productivity As a developer experience engineer you are making developers live’s easier through content generation, demos, tutorials and anything that can get them from zero to 1,  the “Time to Hello World” Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky Cosynd App - The fastest and most affordable way for content creators to register their works Visit podcast.unfilteredbuild.com for more info Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

TypeScript here, TypeScript there, everywhere a little TypeScript! Grab your cloak and wand and join us on this wizarding journey!! That’s right today’s episode is all things TypeScript. We dive into TypeScript and uncover its true power of catching errors early, running anywhere javascript does, and giving you type inference all with the help form a true master of the language. We also touch on different ways to think about imposter syndrome and ways to grow your audience as a content creator. Our guest today, Matt Pocock, hails from the greater Oxford area in England and is an educator, content creator, software engineer and a Typescript Wizard. He has a Master of Arts in Practice of Voice and Singing from the Guildford School of Acting and was a public speaking coach and British Accent trainer prior to his software career. He has built a voice training app called VoiceHacker Accents available for Android and a VSCODE extension to help learn Typescript.  With his deep study of the English language it is no wonder he has taken to the deep study and teachings of TypeScript. He has held many developer jobs over the years and his most recent was as a developer advocate at Vercel (the company behind Next.js). Currently, he is a full time TypeScript instructor working on Total TypeScript, the most comprehensive TypeScript course available on the web. When Matt is not teaching the world how to wield the TypeScript wand he is big football fan and playing board game “Expecto patronum”!! Summon the Patronus Charm of hope and happiness and TypeScript here we come!! Connect with Matt: Twitter Youtube LinkedIn Website Show notes and helpful resources: Total TypeScript course Total TypeScript VSCODE extension Voicehacker Accents App Matt’s Beginner’s TypeScript course (as referenced in the episode examples) Matt loves Generics in TypeScript Tips on migrating to TypeScript: Run tsc init which creates a basic config file, then start small and move individual files first, like utils files OBS - Open Broadcast Studio - Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming You need a thesis for people to follow you Be Useful!! Davinci Resolve - video editor Fun phrases you may have heard and their American equivalent: “It’s pants” = It’s bad, rubbish “Bang on Rails” = Terrific or marvelous “I can’t be asked” = I can’t be bothered Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

How long does it take to get your code into the hands of your customers? Do you manually copy your files to a production server? If you answered longer than a day and yes then the code deployment product, Semaphore, is what you need. Today, we chat with, Marko Anastasov, the co-founder of Semaphore, a code integration and delivery platform, about the inception, creation, and his team’s learning journey building Semaphore. His story is riddled with encounters of monoliths and microservices, tales of building a learning culture, and reflections around the human factors in building tech products, like why do we make the technical decisions we make? Marko is a product guy and a programmer guy and has been a maker since he was a kid. He earned a Masters of Science in computer science from University of Novi Sad in Serbia. Currently, he is a founding partner of Rendered Text, a remote Rails consulting shop and the co-founder of Semaphore. When Marko is not helping companies ship code faster, he is exercising and spending time with his wife and 4 year old daughter. Connect with Marko: Twitter LinkedIn Website Show notes and helpful resources: Semaphore CI Marko’s article on What is Proper Continuous Integration? XKCD comic about compiling Marko’s article picked up by Hacker news, The Cracking Monolith: The Forces that Call for Microservices You should be able to describe your microservice in one sentence without saying the word “and” Marko’s article on  7 ways continuous delivery helps build a culture of learning Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

Production is down!! Faulty code was released!! Users are losing your trust by the second!! Ugh, how did this happen and how could this have been prevented? By writing the right tests! Today, Jedi test master, Kent C. Dodds, joins us as we discuss all things testing, from the types of tests in your tool belt, how to write the right tests, when to run them, tools you can and should use, and ways to ensure your tests are performant. Kent is a world renowned speaker, educator, a beacon of inspiration in the tech community and has written an entire course focused solely on Testing Javascript. He graduated from BYU with a Master of Science in Information Systems, and has worked at companies like Domo, Alianza and PayPal. He is a Google Developer Expert and an instructor on egghead.io and Frontend Masters.  He is actively involved in the open source community as a maintainer of projects like Glamorous, Downshift and Testing Library, and is a contributor to hundreds of popular npm packages. Prior to his current role, he co-founded Remix and worked as the Director of Developer Experience. Presently, our guest is a Software Engineer Educator working for himself and working on what he calls his magnum opus - EpicReact.Dev. When Kent is not teaching the world about software or spending time with his family he is cruising around on his onewheel or snowboarding.  Prepare to become a Jedi test master!! Connect with Kent: Twitter Website Youtube Discord Show notes and helpful resources: The Testing Trophy blog post Why I never use shallow rendering blog post Avoid the test user  blog post Making your UI tests resilient to change blog post Common mistakes with React Testing Library blog post Migrate from Enzyme to Testing Library documentation How to know what to test blog post Business and engineering alignment blog post Playwright - End-2-End testing library Vitest testing framework Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.

In today’s digital world you must have an online presence to be effective. Not only a presence but a unified, beautiful, and fast user experience. How do companies achieve consistency across thousands of pages? How do different stakeholders across the organization gain visibility into the capabilities of a system? One way is through a single design system which essentially is a set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns. Today we are joined by a guest who has first hand experience at crafting such a system for the financial giant Intuit. Join us as we dive into the importance and complexities of building such systems, the journey of our guest and how she found  the role that straddles multiple worlds to bring unification across an organization. Our guest today, Kelly Harrop, has held positions as both a designer and an engineer for companies like Intuit, Fossil, USAA and Tekzenit, giving her a unique perspective into the technical creation process. Her journey into tech is anything but ordinary, she has been a professional Guitar Hero player and a video game model. Currently, she is a Principal UX engineer at Intuit crafting design system solutions for complex frameworks. When Kelly is not designing beautiful experiences and building usable systems she is playing video games including her current favorites, Overwatch and Elden Ring, and drinking cold brew. Connect with Kelly: Twitter LinkedIn Podcast-Code & Pixels Website Show notes and helpful resources: Kelly’s UX Engineering for Design systems article Storybook How Intuit organize their Storybook Proof - a test runner for Storybook Style Dictionary by Danny Banks - referencing Design Tokens Clarity - A design systems conference DevTools.fm podcast iTerm DocBlocks - a better way to make storybook documentation Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.