Make Better Software Fog Creek

In this interview with Justin Searls, Co-Founder at development agency Test Double, we discuss issues in open source software and what we can do about them. Justin raises problems for both consumers and contributors - like managing hundreds of dependencies to security issues and burnt-out maintainers. We dive into the efforts being made to address these and what you can do too.

In this interview with Ed Finkler, Lead Developer and Head of Developer Culture at Graph Story, we discuss soft skills that are important for developers. We dive into how things like humility and empathy impact your effectiveness as a developer, as well as ways to ensure you're always learning and how you can give back to the community.

In this interview with Yitzchok Willroth, aka CodeRabbi, we discuss how he has applied Talmudic Maxims to improve Software Engineering practices at Grovo. We cover how in teaching others we can develop ourselves, the benefits of pair programming, how you can get product and engineering teams to work closely together and important metrics to focus engineering teams.

In this interview with Coraline Ada Ehmke, Lead Software Engineer at Instructure, we discuss data-driven refactoring and developer happiness teams. Coraline gives some great advice on the kinds of tests we should write for refactoring, tools to use and metrics to monitor, to make sure our refactoring is effective. We also learn about the role of refactoring in the Developer Happiness team at Instructure.

In this interview with Oren Ellenbogen, author of 'Leading Snowflakes', we discuss development team leadership. We dive into the things great engineering managers focus on, how to 'code review' management decisions, keep code quality high and developers happy, as well as work well with other teams.