Technology Leadership Podcast Review Keith McDonald: tech blogger and podcaster

Chris Ferdinandi on Greater Than Code, Ben Orenstein on Maintainable, Susan Rice on Coaching For Leaders, Courtland Allen on Software Engineering Unlocked, and Matt Stratton on Hired Thought.
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 16, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
CHRIS FERDINANDI ON GREATER THAN CODE
The Greater Than Code podcast featured Chris Ferdinandi with hosts Rein Henrichs and Jacob Stoebel. Chris is a proponent of plain vanilla JavaScript. He says that modern web development has grown so much in scope and complexity that it makes it difficult for beginners to get started and it can negatively impact the performance of the web for users in ways that developers with fast machines don’t always feel.
One of the reasons things are the way they are today, Chris says, is because a lot of backend developers migrated to the front end because that was where the exciting stuff was happening and they brought with them their approaches and best practices.
The front end, however, is a very different medium. In the back end, you have control over how fast the server is, when things run, the operating system, etc. On the front end, you have none of this. People are accessing what we build on a variety of devices that may or may not be able to handle the data we’re sending and may have unpredictable internet connections.
If a file fails to download or the user goes through a train tunnel and we’ve built things in a modern JavaScript-heavy way, the whole house of cards falls apart on these users. Chris would like people not to abandon JavaScript altogether, but to be a little more thoughtful about how we use it.
Modern web development involves a few things: frameworks, package managers, and doing more and more things (such as CSS) in JavaScript. All of this JavaScript has the effect of slowing down performance because 100KB of JavaScript is not the same as 100KB of CSS, a JPEG, or HTML because the browser needs to parse and interpret it.
Because of these performance problems, single page apps have become more popular. But now you’re recreating in JavaScript all the things the browser gave you out of the box like routing, shifting focus, and handling forward and back buttons. You’re solving performance problems created by JavaScript with even more JavaScript, which is the most fragile part of the stack because it doesn’t fail gracefully. If a browser encounters an HTML element it doesn’t recognize, it just treats it as a div and moves on. If you have a CSS property you mis-typed, the browser ignores it. But if you mistype a variable in JavaScript, the whole thing falls apart and anything that comes after that never happens. 
For Chris, a better approach to web development is one that is more lean and more narrowly-focused on just the things you need. His first principle is to embrace the platform. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that DOM manipulation that used to be really hard years ago is really easy these days in vanilla JavaScript. Also, many of the things that JavaScript was required for in the past can be done more efficiently today with HTML and CSS.
He also says that we need to remember that the web is for everyone. Because we are often using high-end computers, the latest mobile devices, and fast internet connections, we forget that this is not the experience for a majority of web users. We build things that work fine on our machines but are pain

Jurgen Appelo on Agile Toolkit, Amitai Schleier on Mob Mentality, Colleen Bordeaux on Coaching For Leaders, Scott Hanselman on Hanselminutes, and Buster Benson on Lead From The Heart.
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 2, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
JURGEN APPELO ON AGILE TOOLKIT
The Agile Toolkit podcast featured Jurgen Appelo with host Bob Payne. Jurgen says that companies go through several stages in their lifecycle and investors make investment decisions based on what stage they think a company is in. Some investors, for example, wait until a company has achieved product-market fit before investing. At first, budgets are small because the risks are higher. Then, as more evidence is accumulated and the weaker companies have failed, the remaining companies get the bigger budgets. This is called an innovation funnel.
Seeing how well this works in startup funding, Jurgen started to see the benefit that this could have if adopted inside organizations. Corporations tend to invest in projects by predicting what ideas will succeed. Instead, they could create an ecosystem where all the ideas can participate and they would go through stages like a startup where they need to find product-solution fit, product-market fit, and those that make it to the end get the biggest funding.
They talked about business agility and Jurgen says that it is more important to focus on innovation and you will achieve business agility as part of the package.
Bob pointed out that organizations are setting up skunkworks and innovation labs but, unless they can integrate their innovations with the core business, they will end up like Xerox Parc and other companies will exploit their innovations and disrupt them. Jurgen says that this innovator’s dilemma, as described by Clayton Christensen, requires you to switch to the mindset that your products and services don’t have eternal life. This is normal for any organism, but a species can live forever. The innovator’s dilemma, he says, was solved millions of years ago in nature. We need to borrow this regeneration capability from nature and say that the innovation is not the product or service; it is the system for generating products and services.
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jurgen-appelo-startup-scaleup-screwum-lean-agile-dc-2019/id78532866?i=1000465296924
Website link: https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/2/d/3/2d3a6b2936031059/leanAndAgileDC2019_Jurgen_Appelo.mp3?c_id=64647230&cs_id=64647230&expiration=1582618595&hwt=2e7c8bfffbafc47eef3a10950edf34ae
AMITAI SCHLEIER ON MOB MENTALITY
The Mob Mentality podcast featured Amitai Schleier with hosts Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick. As a technical Agile coach, Amitai likes to sit with programmers and program, sit with testers and test, and sit with managers and manage. He loves to put things in terms of cost and risk and one of his areas of specialty is legacy code.
When Amitai tried to make a career change from being a developer to being a technical Agile coach, he believed that if he could just say the right words in the right order with the right tone of voice, people would have to agree with him and behavior change would occur. This didn’t work. He realized that getting the words right is important, but you need to earn people’s trust first.
He pair-coached with Llewellyn Falco and this taught him about the synergy between mobbing and coaching. One example of that sy

Dimitar Karaivanov on Agile Atelier, Claire Lew on The Product Experience, Eric Willeke on Agile Amped, Mike Bugembe on The Product Experience, Colleen Esposito on Hired Thought
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 17, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
DIMITAR KARAIVANOV ON AGILE ATELIER
The Agile Atelier podcast featured Dimitar Karaivanov with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Dimitar is an expert on scaling Kanban. Dimitar thinks of Agile as a company sport rather than a team sport. At the team level, scaling is horizontal. The more interesting kind of scaling to Dimitar is vertical scaling. If you have a hundred or a thousand teams, the real challenge is the coordination piece on top of those teams and the strategic piece on top of that. If you don’t have an optimized coordination layer that reduces the number of things the organization is working on, your organization is spread too thin. He explained the importance of teamwork and coordination using the metaphor of a band of musicians.
Scaling Kanban starts with a single team. What Dimitar likes about Kanban is that if you follow the basic rules, it always results in some kind of improvement.
Next, we want to connect the teams to a management layer that performs the coordination activities. People often perceive Kanban as a visual board with some sticky notes on it. Actually, if you go horizontally, then vertically, it is more of an instrumentation facility for your organization. Like a performance profiling tool, you connect Kanban to your organization and it provides entry points with time stamps and starts collecting data. With this profiler, you can dig in and find out what the slowest part of your organization is.
Rahul asked about roles in scaled Kanban. Dimitar says there are only two specialized roles called out in Kanban: the service delivery manager and the service request manager. Because one of the principles of Kanban is to start where you are, you do not have to change a lot about roles when you start using Kanban. The service request manager role just means having someone who is responsible for requesting work, such as product manager. The service delivery manager just needs to be someone who is responsible for ensuring the work gets done. This could be a Scrum Master or maybe just a team lead. If the organization is adopting Kanban as a whole, you will need someone on the strategic level that is connected to the Kanban system and has a say in what gets done and when.
Rahul asked about failures Dimitar has seen. Dimitar has seen problems in which training just the teams and expecting this to lead to business agility failed. Another route to failure was relying on tools to do all of the work of creating agility. He says you need people with personal agility. You need to find these people or stimulate your existing people to grow themselves so that they become agile in their mindset.
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/id1459098259?i=1000464007645
Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2020/01/29/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/
CLAIRE LEW ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
The Product Experience featured Claire Lew with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Randy started by asking Claire if she’s ever accidentally been anybody’s worst boss. This was the question that Claire herself had asked at the Business of Software

Kevin Callahan on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Matt Wallaert on The Product Science Podcast, Mirco Hering on Troubleshooting Agile, Ryan Ripley on Agile FM, and Adam Tornhill on Maintainable.
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 3, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
KEVIN CALLAHAN ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ
The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Kevin Callahan with host Shane Hastie. Kevin helps people solve complex problems together. Sometimes that looks like Scrum, Kanban, and technical practices, and sometimes that looks like organizational development and strategy.
Shane asked about positive organizational development. Kevin says that positive organizational development is an interconnected body of work with the core idea that true sustained change doesn’t happen when we simply try to fix things that are weak or broken. Positive change suggests that you go to the places that are already good and you amplify them and the places that weren’t working so well cease to be relevant.
Shane asked what this looks like in practice. Kevin says that, because he is actively inviting people into the room and looking to see what the group already knows together, he finds it energizing and refreshing and people lean into it and feel like they belong there.
Shane asked how someone in a position of influence who wanted to create some kind of change in their organization would approach the organization and their people. Kevin likes to start with open questions that get the people to imagine everything was right in the company and ask what people are  doing differently, what customers are saying, what quality is like, and what stories people are telling each other when they don’t think anyone is listening.
These positive questions get people to imagine what could be and starts in motion the change effort that makes it possible to achieve the change. You may get answers like “I only want to work four hours a day,” or, “I want six months of paid vacation,” but eventually you may get answers like, “I really wish I had the opportunity to learn more things.”
Shane connected Kevin’s ideas to Dave Snowden’s notion of sense-making and asked how you make sense from non-viable statements like, “I want to work four hours a day,” so that you arrive at more viable questions like, “How do I stay at home more?” Kevin says that instead of reacting to non-viable requests by blowing them off, ask follow up questions to build a bigger narrative. You could ask clean language questions like, “What kind of four hour workday? What would come before your four-hour workday? What would come after?” This builds a bigger narrative that helps you respect something that is valuable to this person while still respecting the organization’s collective needs.
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/kevin-callahan-on-positive-organisational-design-complex/id1161431874?i=1000462364585
Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/kevin-callahan-on-positive-organisational-design-and-complex-systems
MATT WALLAERT ON THE PRODUCT SCIENCE PODCAST
The Product Science Podcast featured Matt Wallaert with host Holly Hester-Reilly. Trained as a behavioral scientist, Matt is Chief Behavioral Officer at Clover. He says he is always fascinated by outliers, those customers that are using his products in unconventional ways. He says that having c

Johanna Rothman on Programming Leadership, Thomas “Tido” Carriero on Product Love, Adam Davidson on Lead From The Heart, Josh Wills on Software Engineering Daily, and Amitai Schleier on Programming Leadership.
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 20, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP
The Programming Leadership podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Marcus Blankenship.
Marcus started out by asking Johanna why it is important to think about managing ourselves. Johanna says that when we don’t manage ourselves, we don’t have the capability to manage other people. For example, if we insist on micro-managing people, they cannot grow and we prevent them from doing their best work.⁠
⁠Marcus asked her what micromanagement has to do with managing ourselves. Johanna says that micromanagement comes from fear. You need to learn to manage yourself to manage this fear and reduce your need to micromanage. ⁠
⁠She says the reason the first book is about managing yourself is that if you can avoid doing the things that make people feel badly, you can create an environment where people can excel.⁠
⁠They talked about surveys and Marcus asked Johanna’s opinion on anonymous versus named survey responses. Johanna says that when you have a culture where there is a lot of blaming and micromanagement and little coaching, she would recommend an anonymous survey.⁠
⁠Marcus talked about how technical managers often know how to do the work itself very well and he asked Johanna when this can trip us up. One way it trips us up, she says, is that people on the team don’t get a chance to practice if the manager is writing code instead of managing. Second, when you have not been in the code in a while, you do not know what it looks like anymore. ⁠
⁠Marcus asked how managers can get time to think in today’s high time-pressure environments. Johanna says that if you are spending a lot of time in meetings, you should be looking at whether you can delegate any of those meetings to the people doing the work. This delegating is not sloughing off your responsibilities, but making sure you are not part of a team that you are not supposed to be a part of.⁠
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-better-manager-means-starting-yourself-johanna/id1461916939?i=1000460138590
Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/becoming-a-better-manager-means-starting-with-yourself-with-johanna-rothman/
THOMAS “TIDO” CARRIERO ON PRODUCT LOVE
The Product Love podcast featured Thomas “Tido” Carriero with host Eric Boduch. Tido oversees all of engineering, product, and design at Segment. Segment provides customer data infrastructure or CDI, helping companies collect, unify, and connect data about their own interactions with their customers. It gives these companies a unified view of their customer data across all channels.⁠
⁠When he joined Segment, Tido was blown away by how robust the ecosystem was and by the attractive idea of empowering business teams, marketing teams, and product teams by installing application tracking once and being able to turn on integrations with the flick of a switch. Often, he says, a lot of business and marketing and less technical folks are blocked from doing the best job they could do because of tough integration problems that Segment solves.⁠
⁠Segment naturally

Neil Pasricha on Coaching For Leaders, Corey Quinn on On Call Nightmares, Craig Daniel on Build by Drift, and Bryan Liles on Hanselminutes.
I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.
This episode covers the four podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 6, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
NEIL PASRICHA ON COACHING FOR LEADERS
The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Neil Pasricha with host Dave Stachowiak. Neil described his first professional role, working at Proctor & Gamble. He had graduated from Queen’s University in 2002, one of the top business schools in Canada and, at the time, a job at Proctor & Gamble was one of the top marketing jobs you could get. Neil felt like Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket. 
But he was horrible at the job. He had been expecting to spend his days creating PowerPoint presentations and instead was asked to create spreadsheets to analyze trucking, gasoline, and a million other variables to determine how much to increase the price of mascara.
As a high achieving adolescent, he took his failure to be his own fault rather than a factor beyond his control. He worked late, came in on weekends, and started grinding his teeth. A few months in, the company wanted to put him on a performance improvement plan. He couldn’t handle the notion of being fired, so he quit nine months in.
He catastrophized this event. He thought, “If I can’t work here, at the best company, with the most supportive culture, kind people, and a lot of structure, I can’t work anywhere.” He thought, “If I can’t do marketing, my highest mark in business school, I certainly can’t do finance,” and, “If I look for another job, they’re just going to call P&G who will say ‘This guy is horrible.’”
He pictured the worst-case scenario: he thought he would go bankrupt and thought his life was over as a working person. He calls this, “pointing the spotlight at yourself”. High achievers have a tendency to think, “It’s all about me and I’m terrible.”
He was a low-resilience person. He wrote his new book, You Are Awesome, about resilience because he identified himself as lacking it. Like most of us these days, he grew up without famines, wars, and other sources of societal stress. He got the gold stars and participation ribbons and didn’t have the tools to handle failure.
He didn’t see for years that the P&G blow actually was his first lesson in resilience. He says we look at successful people and think their lives were a string of successes, but the most successful people are those that have also seen the most failure.
He cited Cy Young, who has won the most games in baseball ever. He also has the most losses. Nolan Ryan, who has the most strikeouts, also has the most walks.
Dave talked about his first full-time role as director of a center that helped students learn math and reading skills. He was average at the job and the culture wanted people to show a lot of initiative. He struggled, got passed over for promotions, and the feedback he was given was that he wasn’t moving fast enough, wasn’t taking initiative, and wasn’t meeting deadlines. Like Neil, Dave dropped out and started his coaching business.
Neil says that Dave’s and his own feelings of incompetence are a result of the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the feeling that we’re being noticed, observed, and judged more than we really are. Nobody at P&G probably even remembers Neil, but the spotlight effect had caused Neil to feel that