CTO Think Podcast

The world feels like a different place from just a couple weeks ago, but it's not. The United States is still in the same place it has been for a long time, if you're a minority. Randy and Don discuss the Black Lives Matter movement, police accountability, racism, privilege, guilt, and where they might fit in to not being part of the problem.

Right before the COVID pandemic hit, Randy was asked to take on the management of two new teams, which changed his typical role of manager-developer to strictly people management, meetings, and project tracking. Don and Randy discuss the change as it affected Randy and what he thinks is the most important factors for folks in the same boat.

Don and Randy continue their discussion about the business plans in the Big Idea Gator Business Plan Competition, this time about the best entries and how the competition played out. Coconuts!

Don brings in a few examples from an upcoming Big Idea Gator Business Plan Competition in which he's playing the role of a judge. We discuss the importance of good writing, identifying the problem, and setting reasonable goals and metrics to give folks the notion you have some idea what you're doing. In Part 1, we discuss the weakest entries before tackling the better ones in Part 2.

Don and Randy talk about what's been going on with the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected their firms, jobs, and side projects. What does it mean to talk to folks under your wing? What kind of leadership does it take when the real world seems out of your control?

Don asked Randy about what he's working on, lately, and Randy exclaimed, "nothing fun," which actually turns out not to be true. Randy details the additional mix of people, communication, and risk management around mature application development and it becomes the setting for a larger-picture discussion on how things change with app dev as you age.

Randy is making efforts to improve the communication of visual examples via remote video meetings. We discuss his first attempt to achieve online whiteboarding using a Macbook Pro, a Wacom One tablet, and a Google Jamboard.

In Don's role as CTO for AspirEDU, he has a number of security audits posed by potential customers and increasing complexity around third-party hosts. Randy keeps wanting to talk about the XFL (Part 2).

Randy pitches to Don an approach for a CMS project and then rifs on the cool new toy he recently purchased for the kitchen: A sous vide cooking device.

This week we take a look at the state of a few hyped technologies and see where they really are in terms of usefulness, adoption, and long-term viability. Don thinks VR will never go mainstream and Randy wants a drone to bring him something, ANYTHING, right now.

Don and Randy discuss content management options from the old-school Full Stack apps, WYSIWYG SaaS, and Headless + Static Site Generator options

Don takes Randy along for the ride of his latest applications using Microsoft's Power App platform. They discuss building an application that uses Twilio, Trello, Flow, Power Apps, OneDrive, Adaptive Cards, and Microsoft Teams without much code, if any.

Don describes his work on moving his company to Microsoft and his use of Power Apps. This leads to a discussion of the automation vs programming strategies and how this might be the future for all non-coding employment.

Randy's been approached, both at his job and from an external firm, about the need for a CMS. The old stalwarts of Wordpress and Drupal don't seem to work, but the idea of a Static Site Generator and persisted content does. Randy and Don discuss the new products out there that can potentially serve both needs.

Randy has been working on Twilio a bit since the team last worked on the Chasms project and updates Don on some of the interesting features Twilio has brought to market. In addition, they discuss a few gotchas about SMS pricing that might needlessly cost developers a few extra bucks.

Randy is part of a team focused on building a Service Oriented Architecture with Go. Don figures out he has always been using services, but the SOA acronym seemed to involve more than simply work. Randy explains further the use of messages, queues, and other approaches to request buffering.

Don has been hearing Randy tell him to quit coding so much and finally does something about it: He decides to build an app without writing a line of code (but not delegating it to someone else) by using Microsoft's Power Apps platform. This week, we discuss everything about PowerApps and how this might be THE FUTURE!

Domino's Pizza recently lost a lawsuit regarding the lack of accessibility features for their online ordering platform. Don and Randy discuss the ramifications of the decision and whether accessibility is worth the time and effort product managers might put into making their products more inclusive.

Chris Coyier recently posted a tweet regarding a front-end developer he knew that "could not build a website." Is this strange? Shouldn't every developer that claims front-end skills be able to prop up a basic site?

When a CTO is juggling multiple responsibilities, people, and projects, what is the best use of their time? Randy, once again, tells Don to put down the keyboard and quit coding stuff!

This week, we shall rant! The term "Clean Code" is a vague and irresponsible phrase to use regarding programming and Randy will have nothing of it. It's time Uncle Bob's cute money-making catch phrase was put to pasture.

In honor of the second week of the college football season, Randy and Don discuss three programs, UCLA, Tennessee, and FSU, falling into disaster scenarios and compare each with CTO failures at technology firms. We keep the football/sportsball strategy discussion to a minimum, but we do eventually call out Tennessee as the "Steve Ballmer" of college football schools. Go Rocky Top?

Following a tweet from Ben Hong @bencodezen about whether people need to master JavaScript before using a framework, Don and Randy discuss how they have used, shipped, and been paid to use framework and applications many times without knowing the base language beforehand.

A recent blog post by Philip Thomas of Moonlight titled "Startups Should Not Hire a CTO" sparked a conversation about why blanket statements like "Startups Should Not Do X" that are clickbait and should probably be avoided as good advice. Instead, we discuss letting your needs to drive your hires, instead, and the kinds of people you probably do want to hire to lead technical efforts. Randy's cats don't like anything about the recording, in addition to the article.

Don and Randy discuss the changes that ageing has on their development skills and focus, how to combat it (or adapt to it), and stay somewhat off the "old person joke" train... sort of.

With hacking stories dropping on a seemingly daily basis, the question keeps coming up about application security: Should you build your own user authentication or use an external service? This week, Don and Randy discuss the Buy vs Build debate around auth, and whether the high costs of outsourcing outweigh the high risks of rolling your own.

Randy reacts to a Tweetstorm about Lambda School using his former experiences as a bootcamp teacher to add some perspective

Randy starts his new position and Go (or Golang) is one of the main languages used there. He reviews what he's learned so far and what's ahead.

In reaction to a Twitterstorm about the concept of a 10x engineer being important for any startup, we discuss the downfalls of such a thing and what positives exist.

Randy is about to start a new job and has a number of opinions about the job search, hiring, negotiation process he recently went through. Don tries to play Devil's Advocate as the employer/hiring side, but Randy's not hearing any of it! Don uses coconuts as the example of currency and Randy somehow manages to quadruple the asking price for labor in the Hawaiian produce marketplace Don tried to set up.

Randy and Megan recently worked on a Single Page App and Megan learned how to use Cypress for integration/acceptance testing. Don and Randy discuss how Cypress works vs the old stalwarts, like Selenium. Automated testing for the win!

The show begins discussing setting up a product roadmap for AspirEdu, but things devolve when Don mentions he is considering swapping Wordpress for the marketing website with a static site builder. Randy thinks adding more developer dependencies is a bad idea and coins the term "Free-time Driven Development" (tm) and can't wait to make T-Shirts and Medium posts promoting the brand.

Don and Randy discuss the "New Microsoft" and how a change in leadership has led to a completely different experience with one of the largest technology firms in the World. We also take a road trip back to the early days of developing on the MS platform and laugh about how badly Steve Ballmer did with predicting the future. Bonus: Clippy gets a mention!

We have an exceptional guest for our 50th episode in Jess Szmajda, CTO of Axios, and we cover a whole lotta ground:

From building "horrible PHP sites", to constructing retail tech teams from scratch, we then tackle the subject of taking on the role of CTO of a fast-growing media firm, being a trans CTO, and promoting a more diverse community in technology. Whew!

We start out discussing the difference between a CTO and Director/VP of Engineering, title creep, and whether the idea of a "software architect" has any relevance at all. We then cover wider ground with managing small vs large teams, the adoption of Spotify squads/pods in team management, and adding new business (TV) that is vastly different than the core company product (online publishing).

The subject matter covers a vast amount of ground, but it's all valuable in today's tech community.

Don and Randy discuss the latest installment of the Chasms app saga. Don heads out to Denver for a sales conference loaded with potential customers of the Chasms text-to-chat system, but finds no takers. Further research finds a well-funded competitor, named after a dubious fruit. Is the Chasms project dead on arrival?

This week we review an old, but good, blog post by Andy Skipper named "Looking at the life of the CTO through the stages." We discuss our own experiences across these stages and the ones we haven't reached, yet. Randy also continues his rant on tech developer/manager hiring practices, so no surprise there!

After years of testing with Ruby on Rails and rspec, Randy never had quite the flow with testing on the JavaScript and Node side of things... until now. We discuss the value of testing with Node, Express, and in the context of Firebase Functions and why Randy is happier with TDD, or at least, Test Something, Sometime, Somehow development.

Over the past two decades of working in tech, the use of Continuous Integration (or CI) has become a mainstream approach to product development. Randy and Don discuss the systems they used before (or lack thereof), what they use now, and why Continuous Integration meets the hype.

Randy is working with a client that uses Pantheon for Drupal hosting and he loves the tools. After spending a good decade using cPanel on cheap hosts, the stability that WPEngine and Pantheon gives PHP developers the best hosting options around. The conversation moves into discussion of Heroku, as well.

We discuss business metrics, reporting, statistics, and how many of the numbers, without context, lack much value. Can your business deliver the Five Nines? Does it even need to? What kind of performance can you guarantee when upstream providers are involved?

Randy is diving back into the Chasms backend using Firebase Functions, which is written (by him) in Typescript. We discuss the ins and outs as to why Typescript was chosen, some pain points that cropped up along the way, Randy's attempt to rip it out, and ultimately why sticking with Typescript was necessary in this particular case.

Alternative episode title: Typescript. Do I need this crap?

Don's firm is looking to hire a non-senior Python developer to help spread the workload of the engineering team. We discuss how he's writing up the job description, who he's really looking for in the role, and what kinds of skills the person must have to be effective in the role.

While continuing work on the Chasms app, Randy asks Don for his two cents on an approach to solving a document datastore (firestore) schema involving a many-to-many relationship. A discussion ensues to make sure the whole approach to the project is right.

A customer claims the service provided didn't meet expectations despite them choosing the more “economical” solution. Another client’s manager felt a contractor “yelled” at them, but the contractor felt they barely raised their voice. This week we talk about the human side of handling different opinions and trying to prevent problems like these in the first place.

This week we talk about how we’ve hired consultants in the past, where we’ve failed, and the perspective of consultants that might help tech leaders understand who they’re hiring.

As a continuation to a previous episode, Don discusses why he's going to roll up his sleeves and handle a data-gathering project himself. He attempts to support his choice using a reference to a Liam Neeson movie quote and Randy begins berating Don with more Liam Neeson movie examples than is appropriate. Along the way, the discussion covers some good considerations about business management, outsourcing, training in-house, and how hand-on work can ruin actual job duty focus.

This week we discuss the various C-Level titles in the tech world: CTO vs CIO vs CDO vs others. What do folks with those titles tend to do and do the titles really matter? Also, Randy talks about his newest hobby: Kitten pictures!