Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How are you ensuring your employees are happy and will stay with your company? Your employees are the most important piece to your business and as such you must learn what they want in their and career and enable it. In today’s discussion we focus on empathy as the future of business in tech, why it’s important for developers to gain business acumen for greater success in their role, how a new product, YugaHQ, can help companies predict and prepare for employee turnover and much more.

Our guest today, Kiran Kanakadandi, has an Electrical Engineering degree from Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology in Hyderabad, India, a MS of Computer Science from Clemson and has published a thesis on Graph Theory. He began his career as a kernel and distributed systems developer at NetApp. Our guest is a 2 time startup founder, founding Potatop Technologies and is currently serving as the founder/CEO of YugaHQ, an employee retention SaaS. Kiran believes empathy is the best business model. He is the author of a US Patent, speaks 4 languages, enjoys listening to deep Indian classical music, American classics like Towns Van Zandt, and is a movie trivia buff.

Connect with Kiran:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Kiran’s Career paths for developers article
• Kiran’s On Business Awareness for Engineers article
• Kiran’s Three parts of your job article
• Kiran’s Always Be Rehiring article
• Paul Graham - Do things that don’t scale - Essay
• Indian Classical Music: Uyyalalugavayya performed by Dr Mangalampalli Balamuralikrishna and composed by Thyagaraja written in Telugu over 200 years ago
• Indian Classical Music: Bhavayami Gopalabalam performed by Dr M S Subbulakshmi and  composed by Annamacharya over 800 years ago in Sanskrit
• Film music with music video: Chaiya Chaiya by A R Rahman from the movie Dil Se
• "I'll be here in the morning" by Townes Van Zandt - this is Kiran’s favorite version
• Productivity Hack => Chrome plugins - Marvelous Suspender (tab remover) and Tab Manager Plus

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.

• Personal Website
• LinkedIn

Show notes and helpful resources:

• The Software Crisis - Edward Dijkstra
• Conway’s Law:  Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure
• Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas - including the topic of Information Hiding
• Righting Software - Juval Löwy
• John Ousterthout - A Philosophy of Software Design
• Software Engineering Radio Podcast
• Thinking in systems by Donella H. Meadows
• Jeff’s Tao of Software Architecture: An Introduction Article
• Jeff’s Software Leadership Distilled Article
• Jeff’ Leadership Style Matrix Article - Discussing Authoritarian, Familial, Managerial, and Transformational leadership styles through the lens of Empowerment and Clarity
• Mermaid.js, GraphVis, PlantUML - Tools to build documentation

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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 just hired a new engineer. How do you reduce their time to productivity? How do you give back hours of time to engineering leaders spent prepping and training the new hire? You examine your onboarding process and you use Pathlight to help.

Today’s show marks the 10th episode of Building With People For People!! I am very excited for our show today as we explore how a pre-med molecular biologist found her way into software and is building a startup addressing the software talent bottleneck. We also discuss proving your product through an MVT (minimum valuable test), the importance of diverse backgrounds, and how each of us can work together to create a more inclusive tech landscape.

Our guest, Lizzie Matusov, had the startup life in her blood at a young age when as a kid, she and a friend started a dog walking business. She began her software career working on open source for Red Hat and has worked at Invitae as a Full Stack Engineer and Technical Product Manager. Currently, she is the co-founder of Pathlight, a product helping technical teams hit their goals and grow faster by re-imagining the onboarding experience. Additionally, she is an MS/MBA Candidate at Harvard Business School and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has spoken at conferences, describes herself as a community builder, is a plant lover, and is on a mission to change what it means to be a technologist for the better.

Connect with Lizzie:

• Twitter
• Email

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Lizzie’s journey into software
• Pathlight - They are looking for design partners to run their first version completely free!
• Larsen created by Alex Benoit - a product to help prevent burnout and improve team culture
• EM twitter community
• Career Karma
• Learning about minimum viable tests
• Rippling - effortlessly manage payroll, benefits and more
• Learn Tensorflow

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.

• Twitter
• Website

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Steps Mitra took to become an engineering manager in 2 years after college
• Join the Twitter Engineering Manager community
• Engineering Advice You Didn’t Ask for Podcast
• Book Mitra for 1:1 consultations
• A Portfolio of Small Bets - Daniel Vassallo - An online course
• ThingTesting Company
• Mitra’s guide to giving great feedback
• Mitra’s guide to giving weekly updates
• Goodbye Buttermilk! A story of why Mitra shut down her first startup: The Buttermilk company
• Turn your recipes into an online business - Step-by-step guide
• Sign up for Mitra’s Pop Culture For Dummies Newsletter or listen to her recently released podcast version of Pop Culture For Dummies Podcast
• Sign up for Mitra’s reviews of products and brands - The Honest Tester

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.

• LinkedIn

Show notes:

• The top skill Randy looks for when hiring is the ability to work well with others
• Pay attention when interviewing not to introduce affinity bias - where you identify with the candidate because they are like you
• Your interview process can and should adapt based on the size of your team and company
• Take home tests as an interview method Randy has learned is generally not preferred.
• Randy strives to build collegiality amongst his team
• Check out Roblok
• Best advice he has received is: "犬も歩けば棒に当たる” which translate roughly to “when a dog walks he hits a stick.” If you keep moving, mentally or physically, you will find interesting, often useful, things. So keep exploring.
• DemandStar is hiring so make sure to checkout their careers page for the most recent listings (and much more to come)
• “Authenticity and imperfections can communicate a lot” -Randy Sears

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 guest, Jenn Creighton, has worked at companies like ClassPass, Apollo GraphQL and has been a guest on the React Podcast, has spoken at many conferences including React JS Girls: the Conference, React Conf, and JS Conf Mexico. She is also a co-organizer for useReact NYC.  Currently she is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix working in the developer productivity org, host of her own podcast - single threaded, and truly a positive force in the tech community.

Jenn will be giving her Debugging in JS talk IN PERSON at React Miami April 18-19 and Reactathon in May - Don’t Miss It!!

Connect with Jenn:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Dev.to page

More Jenn:

• Single Threaded Podcast
• “Your emotions are not an anti-pattern” - JS Conf Mexico talk
• Mini course on React architecture including flexibility, composition and principles
• Jenn’s journey into code via blog post

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Emotional First Aid Kit by Guy Winch
• Recurse Center social rules
• useReact.NYC
• React Miami - April 18-19, 2022
• Reactathon In The Park,  Berkley CA-  May 3-5, 2022
• Netflix Job culture
• “No rules rules - Netflix and the culture of reinvention” by the Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix

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 do Goldilocks and Engineering Management have in common? The “just right” strategy can be used to motivate and grow employees. Tune in today as Drukwerkdeal Engineering Manager, Jelle Smeets, from Apeldoorn Netherlands walks us through this management theory and other ideas on employee motivation. We also talk about applying scrum methodologies, simple ways to avoid burnout, the importance of getting to know each other’s cultures, and learning in public.

As a kid, Jelle discovered engineering through his love of Dragonball Z and dove head first into building his own HTML fan site. His passion for solving puzzles lead him to become a full time software engineer with a Bachelors in computer and information science, to a certified scrum master, to now an engineering manager where he sees himself as a football (soccer) coach and strives to lead by example. Jelle is also a fair-weather runner, a blogger and a gardener.

Connect with Jelle:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Blog

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Leveling engineers with the Goldilocks rule
• 4 lessons I learned as a starting scrum master
• My journey into tech
• McGregor’s theory x and theory y
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Coaching Agile teams by Lyssa Adkins
• Culture Map  by Erin Meyer
• Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
• Notion tool

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.

Her love for community service began while in college at UT Austin organizing Hour of Code events for local schools. She has since spent a great deal of time organizing Disney’s Seattle internship program and is currently a teacher through the TEALSK12 program and a mentor with Mentors in Tech. Not only is Sierra a software engineer she is also a book cover and e-marketing material designer with over 20 published covers. Prior to working at HBO Max, she worked at The Walt Disney Company and Microsoft.

Connect with Sierra:

• LinkedIn
• Personal Website

Show notes and helpful resources:

• First Bytes Summer Camp - engineering camp for high school girls
• Arduino - Starter kits
• UT Austin’s Coding in the Classroom and Hour of Code - getting students involved in programming through an hour of code. Minor correction from the show, this program is NOT an after school program as mentioned, it IS an hour per week during class
• WICS - Women in Computer Science at UT Austin - a shared community that confirmed her sense of belonging in software engineering
• Disney Professional Internships
• TEALSK12 - Technology Education and Literacy in Schools program - Apply now to be a mentor
• MinT - Mentors in Tech
• Tips for better communication: 1. Set the context, 2. Know your audience - are they technical or not?, 3. Learn the communication style of those you are engaging with and 4. Practice practice practice
• Building authentic relationships: 1. Bring your whole self and your personality to work and 2. Be humans outside of work - engage with your coworkers through things like coffee chats
• Sierra is currently reading: Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
• Learn Python, learn Rust
• Pound Fit
• Tech using to solve everyday problems -  Fantastical

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 trying to decide if software engineering is the right path for you? Are you currently an engineering manager and want tips on how you can grow and foster a better team? Join me as I speak with Chief Operator of the Rube Goldberg machine (CTO of Kajabi), Mahesh Guruswamy, as he guides us through how he measures success in his role as CTO, his 6 tenants of conflict resolution, ways to build a learning culture, how to know if engineering management is right for you, and much more.

Mahesh has been in tech for over two decades and has held many different positions ranging from software engineer to Director of Architecture, to VP of Engineering at companies like Vanguard, Fidelity Investments, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amazon Alexa, and Smartsheet. While in graduate school before he started his career in tech, he was a cashier at McDonald’s and through his interactions with the diverse clientele he discovered his knack for connecting and empathizing with all walks of life. As a self described “non-traditional” engineering leader he is a builder of product development teams and an angel investor.

Kajabi, an all-in-one business platform to create and scale your knowledge business.  They are hiring all types of positions including engineering, head over to their careers page to learn more.

Connect with Mahesh:

• LinkedIn

Abridged Show Notes: 

• Conflict Resolution - Mahesh’s 6 tenants here
• Management is right for you if you get a warm and fuzzy feeling when your team succeeds
• Three ways to measure success: program outcomes, talent help, and system health
• Turn office politics into a way to explore people’s true intentions in order to help build better products
• Success as a manger is: Navigating discussions with teams, shipping features and low employee attrition
• Build a framework that allows your team to make the right decisions (through operating tenants)
• Mahesh’s favorite book - How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie - changed his perspective on how to approach teams and relationships
• First Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  

See more detailed show notes at https://podcast.unfilteredbuild.com/ep4-mindful-management-mahesh-guruswamy/

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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.

• Apdex Users Group
• New Relic breaks down Apdex
• FreshPing -  set up monitoring your website Apdex in seconds and for free
• New Relic
• Data Dog
• Splunk
• Log Rocket

Dan Degreef, one of my mentors, has been tinkering with online businesses since he was a teenager, has run multiple small businesses including an email marketing company and a software consulting business. He is a home brewer extraordinaire and is currently a software leader and problem solver working as a Staff developer at Indeed.com

By building relationships with others you can build your knowledge base and grow your career. Join us for an episode on mentoring, what it means to us as developers, the different types of mentoring relationships (yes we have defined a few) and ways to find mentors.  We also discuss the differences in working at small vs large companies, what it means to be a senior developer and more.

Connect with Dan:

• LinkedIn
• Github

Useful Resources:

• Coding Coach (Free)
• Codementor IO (Paid)
• Mentor Cruise (Paid)

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.

• Personal Website
• LinkedIn

Show Notes and useful resources:

• Githaxs - Use the coupon code Unfiltered at checkout for 35% off the startup plan
• Wikipedia definition of CI
• Continuous Integration - AWS
• Continuous Delivery - AWS
• Conceptual Integrity Blob Post
• Technology Addiction and the brain
• DevOps process: Working in small batches
• Article summarizing current analytics on pull request cycle times and more - State of the Octoverse

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.

• LinkedIn
• Code Fellows Black History Month article
• 5 Things I've learned as a Person of Color in Tech

3 Accessibility tips:

1. Be mindful how you use colors
2. Always use an alt text label
3. Semantic Html

Helpful Resources:

• Black girls code
• Screen reader tech
• Chrome plugin
• WCAG

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.