Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast Nigel Finley

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.

Let’s say you work on a team and you have a bunch of services, how do you share knowledge about the important parts of how things work? I would hope documentation is the answer and not “tribal knowledge”. But good documentation can be hard. So is communication and so is continuing to grow your career when there are so many directions you could go.  In today’s show we are joined by a guest who gives us tips and tricks on better ways to create sustainable documentation, thoughts on how to communicate more effectively especially in an interview and shares a continuous learning framework he uses to help him grow.

Our guest today, Eddie Hinkle, believes the software we use should feel natively human and engage us both emotionally and cognitively. He has over 15 years experience managing engineers and designers and has worked in all sorts of industries including internet Saas, government contracting, cyber security, medical and health, education and more.  Currently he is an engineering manager at Glassdoor, is the host of the podcast Webjoy, and a mentor  for Collab Lab and ADPlist.org.

When he is not helping engineers grow their career with empathy he spends time with his three kids, a 5 month old, a 3 year old, and a 4 year old. He is also an avid reader and has even completed reading 52 books in one year. In his words if we aren’t learning we are stagnating.

Connect with Eddie:


Twitter
LinkedIn
Website
Webjoy Podcast

Show notes and helpful resources:


Glassdoor
Eddie’s 5 types of documentation: 1. Document your code; 2. Document your company processes; 3. Document your day - he uses the tool Reflect; 4. Documenting your successes and failures; 5. Document your concerns
Eddie uses Docusaurus for his technical documentation
Eddie’s 4 tips for continuous learning: 1. Take classes; 2. Apply your knowledge in a practical setting; 3. Expose yourself to new people and different ways of thinking about concepts; 4. Environment - explore a wide variety of tools and languages that are relevant
Volunteer your time or join free group project session at Collab Lab
Find or become a mentor at ADPlist.org

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.

Have you used Google search today? Or listened to music recommended to you? The results and suggestions you receive from these types of services are powered by Data Science. In today’s world, big data and insights are the new currency. While it's the machines that ultimately do the number crunching and provide the data, it's the human touch behind the scenes that make it all possible. In today’s episode we explore the field of Data Science and Machine Learning and how it permeates every walk of life and the endless possibilities it provides.

Our guest today, Ryan Valenza, is a scientist through and through. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Physics and Math from University of Maryland Baltimore County and his Master of Science in Physics from the University of Washington (PhD). He has held roles as a Data Engineer and Data Analyst at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and as Chief Data Scientist at Stackline, an e-commerce startup. He recently began a new job as the Director of Machine Learning at Bungie. If Bungie rings a bell it should, they created the gaming franchises of Halo, Destiny and Marathon to name a few.

When he is not teaching machines how to interpret data he is a big gamer himself with origins in Donkey Kong Country, a runner and an adventure planner for his three year old daughter.

Connect with Ryan:


LinkedIn
Twitter
Twitch

Show notes and helpful resources:


Condensed matter physics
Random forest and gradient descent algorithms
Converting sound to image using Sonographic Sound Processing
Convolutional Neural Network -  a series of mathematical transformations
Google deep mind
AlphaGo - the computer program that defeated the Go grand master
AlphaStar - the computer that plays StarCraft II
Words to live by - “You should never bring someone else down to bring to yourself up”
Ryan’s intro to machine learning will cover supervised learning , unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning
Data Science at UMBC

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.

Are you just learning to code or a self-taught developer? Need help with structured direction in your learning journey? Then you have to check out The Coder Coder!!  If neither apply check this resource out anyway, there is something for everyone. In today’s episode we examine the world of learning how to code from the perspective of the teacher and dive into what it’s like to sit in the driver’s seat creating content and running a successful Youtube coding community. We also discuss how to learn, tips on asking for help, best places to start your code journey, and much much more.

Our guest today is a beacon of hope for career changers everywhere. She is a self taught coder who began her coding career doing data entry and now creates extremely approachable, fun, entertaining and very educating tutorials for beginner web developers via her blog, online courses and videos. She is a Youtube sensation with a community of over 361K subscribers that she has built from the ground up. She has been in the industry for 8 years, recently quitting her full-time job to focus 100% on her Youtube community and has worked on every part of the development stack.

Connect with Jessica:


Twitter
Instagram
Youtube
Website/Blog

Show notes and helpful resources:


Frontendmentor.io  - build real world projects
Freecodecamp resource and Discord community
Odin Project - Learn how to code!
Jessica’s responsive design course coming soon!
MDN - Mozilla Developer Network  - great web documentation
Jessica’s Freecodecamp articles
Jessica’s video: Learn web development as an absolute beginner
Jessica’s video: How to stay motivated when learning to code
Jessica’s video: Are you sabotaging your coding career? (with Mortal Kombat style fight scenes)
Jessica’s video: Stop wasting time when learning to code video
Jessica’s gear: RE20 mic, A7S Camera, OBS Screen Casts, Adobe Suite, Vissles keyboard, Fully standing desk
Jessica’s favorite/highest production coder coder video: The Office Tour

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.