The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast Stride NYC

In today’s episode, we have the ultimate showdown between product management and developers. Meet our guest Rob O’Brien. His career started in information science technology, giving him a good grounding in app development. He has since gained extensive experience managing engineering teams as well as coaching product employees and building product teams. O’Brien shares what he believes to be the biggest missteps that product managers can take and illustrates why product managers should be available for feedback throughout the development process. Hear why it’s important to have good communication between product management and developers and why the entire team should be present during stakeholder feedback. We also discuss how to identify what should be the company’s top priority at any given time, and how you can use the RICE or MoSCoW methods to objectively determine what to pursue at a particular point in time without conjecture. Join us for an energetic discussion on all things development, product management, and teamwork!

These days it seems that every Tom, Dick, and trash collector is live streaming. In today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole Podcast, we speak with Melissa Wahnish about her experiences with live coding. Melissa has been live coding for years and even has her own website full of tips and tutorials called Ruby Thursday as well as a YouTube channel of the same name. We talk all about how Melissa got started and the many ways that audience feedback can help you get unstuck when you can’t solve a problem. The experience is also useful for young coders who have an opportunity to realize that even experienced coders get stuck and need to consult Google when they run into problems. It takes bravery to take on live coding but having a sense of humor and willingness to be vulnerable online are indispensable allies that help you access the many benefits of live coding. Melissa shares some of her early stumbles and what she learned from them. We also get a great run down for first-time live coders on how to set up their first live coding session, along with plenty of tips to help make it an awesome experience. It turns out that live coding is an excellent way to access the broader community, share knowledge, and hold yourself accountable to finish projects and keep that momentum going. For all this and more, join us today!

Today we are speaking about getting things done! What does it mean when we say something is done and how can you and your team get a better handle on the concept for better products? At times, as developers, we might feel like we are done as soon as the code is written and passed, but in reality, there are more steps in the process, and to get to a real state of being finished we need to formulate a proper framework or checklist for being done! This is one of the issues with working with different teams, as responsibility can sometimes get a bit lost, and so putting some time in, to develop an appropriate way to measure completion can lead to fewer issues and confusion down the road. In today's episode, we also look at the important aspects of feedback and corrections, and how 'done' might be a relative term, especially as your products gets increasingly complex. So for all this and a few more thoughts on how you can move things into that beautiful 'done' column, come with us, down the Rabbit Hole!

While many companies still look for programmers who have CS degrees, there is often a gap between what colleges teach and the skills the industry requires. This is a gap that bootcamps are trying to fill and today we have Alex Oh, founder of Seoul-based bootcamp WCoding, here to share his perspectives on this newer approach to learning code. We start our conversation on the subject of the many paths into programming by sharing pieces of our own code learning journeys.

Many managers assess developer performance as if they were runners, where how many lines of code you write determines how good you are. Instead, developers are like baseball players, where a suite of metrics is needed to measure performance. In today’s episode, we unpack how metrics are used to judge coding performance and how metric incentives can create less than desirable coding behaviors. After chatting about how vaccine eligibility metrics can incentivize binge eating, we chat about the ins-and-outs of using test coverage to measure project health. We then discuss how managers are weighing their team’s efforts in the age of remote work. While reflecting on when it can be useful to look at how many lines of code someone has written, we explore how incentivizing individual performance can damage a team project. Later, we share some of our successes with AB testing. Using metrics as incentives can lead to both positive and negative unintended consequences. Join us to hear about how these knock-on effects can impact your work. 

While it may be true that coding is something that anybody can do, that doesn’t take away from how difficult it is to learn. Join us for the second part of our conversation with brilliant software engineer and instructor Bryan Berry as we dive into what it takes to learn to code. Early in our conversation, we focus on the extra non-language-specific skills that you need to pick up to become a fully-fledged developer. From specializing in certain roles to deciding what type of programmer you want to be, we talk about the difficult choices that beginner coders need to make. After reflecting on why programming involves continual learning, Bryan shares some anecdotes from The Codeless Code website. Later, we discuss how early coders can overcome imposter syndrome before touching on why networking is so useful to growing your skills. Tune in for more insights on learning how to code.