Software Engineering Unlocked

In this episode, Abi Noda explains how to measure developer experience and why a good developer experience matters. We also talk about: What factors influence developer experience What developer experience has to do with productivity, performance and even job retention The SPACE framework, and how to use it to measure productivity

Luca Galante runs a vibrant and fast-growing community around platform engineering and today he shares with us why every organization should invest in a platform engineering team. We also talk about: - what is platform engineering - the difference between platform engineering and DevOps - what developer productivity has to do with platform engineering - why self-service for developers is so important

Nadia Zhuk shares how to build a career as a self-taught programmer successfully. She learned to program all by herself and changed her career from being an English teacher to a full-stack developer. We also talk about: - teaching yourself programming - starting your developer career as a self-taught developer - getting your foot into tech - changing your career by teaching yourself how to program - moving countries and taking chances for a better life - how feature flags are used at Intercom - how mentoring, pair programming, code reviews, and also the concept of a buddy can help you ramp up your coding career.

Alexander Serebrenik gives us an overview of his exciting research on emotions and social aspects of software engineering. We also talk about: social aspects of software engineering, what software productivity has to do with your emotions and how you feel, problems such as confusion or frustration in code reviews, how to give respectful, yet candid code review feedback, and how ageism, sexism, and more lead to negative consequences such as drug abuse in software engineering.

Especially in recent years, several attacks on the software supply chain, like the SolarWinds attack or the ongoing Log4j vulnerability, made it clear that our complex software ecosystems are hard to understand and even harder to keep secure. The software bill of material aims at solving this problem. In this episode, Barak Brudo explains what a software bill of material is and why they are important for security and to reduce vulnerabilities. I also question if we are ever going to be able to reach a state where SBOMs are part of every software or library. We also talk about: - security and software regulations like the software bill of materials - software license poisoning - what to do when you face a security breach - human engineering attacks like 2FA fatigue

Heather Reid shares her difficult job search journey and how she overcame self-doubt and kept trying until she found the perfect job. Although Heather had been active in the testing community for over a decade, when she was searching for her newest role, she heard ‌she wasn’t a tester and that she had been gone too long gone. We also talk about: - bad interview experiences - why she was seen as "too long gone" in testing - how to handle job rejections - how she proved everyone that rejected her during job interviews wrong - advice for job seekers and people interviewing in tech.

Let's revisit the top 5 interviews in 2022, which gives us all the opportunity to listen to some episodes you might have already forgotten or missed. Episode Chapters: 0:00 Intro 01:21 Making money with open source 09:08 Profitable small bets 24:15 Career growth and mindset 35:12 Writing tests that find bugs 45:15 Drawbacks of being an engineering manager 55:50 Wrap-up and support the podcast 57:25 Closing song

Michael Lynch shares what he learned by writing code at Microsoft and Google, and how that differs from the software practices that he embraces in his own software company. We also talk about: - what is the root cause when code reviews are evil - how to establish a great code review practice - software engineering practices at Google and Microsoft, - how to balance code quality, time to market, and paying back technical debt - writing software as a bootstrapped business - his lessons learned building tiny pilot, including scaling customer support, software testing.

Lauren Peate shares how engineering metrics can be ethical with Multitudes. We also talk about: - what are ethical developer metrics? - how to best measure developer productivity? - ensuring engineering metrics can not be misused - do developer metrics lead to gaming the system? - how can DORA metrics be used to improve team performance?

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen shares how and why he built Fiberplane, a platform for collaborative debugging notebooks. We also talk about: - the idea behind collaborative debugging notebooks, - how Fiberplane can help resolve incidents faster and blamelessly, - how Fiberplane works together with other debugging, monitoring, and observability tools, and - Micha's entrepreneurial journey building two startups in the developer productivity space.​

Ashley Hunsberger deeply cares for developers, their happiness, and their productivity. After seeing how vital developer experience is, Ashley set-out to work in a relatively new role with new responsibilities: developer experience. Now, she is the Director of developer experience at Tackle.io, and in this interview, she tells us all about what that actually means.

In this episode, I talk to Harshit Chitalia about how we can make security easier for developers. Harshit is the co-founder and CTO of Tromzo, a start-up dedicated to reducing the friction between developers and security. Before that Harshit spent eight years as Director of Engineering at Juniper Networks. We talk about: - why software security is sometimes difficult for developers - how static analysis tools can help developers with security - why Harshit founded Tromzo and - how this start-up journey is going.

In this episode, I talk to Nicolas Dular, a senior full-stack engineer at GitLab, about his experience of becoming an engineering manager. We talk about: - how he became an engineering manager - what he liked about this role - what he did not like about being an engineering manager - and why he decided to move back to an individual contributor role.

From workplace dynamics to code reviews, misunderstandings can arise for a variety of reasons. People have different interpretations of things or of what is said, different assumptions of others' motives, and simply miss out on the information they need to understand something. This can lead to conflict building up over time. But what if there’s a way that people could come to a common understanding through common knowledge and similar wavelength? Jess Rose joins me in today’s episode to share her insights on creating better workplace experiences and how managers can balance contractual duties to the company and the individual ethical responsibilities to the people they manage. We also talk about learning: the process itself and how it’s different for everyone, and how Jess is fostering more equal access to technical education in digital spaces. Jess founded the Open Code meetup series, an international series of weekly mixed-level, language-agnostic study sessions for programmers and aspiring programmers. She also co-founded Trans*Code with the incomparable Naomi Ceder, resulting in a series of community-building hack days for the Trans* community, allies, and well-wishers that have stretched across 4 countries and 2 continents. A developer relations strategy specialist and leader with extensive work in open source spaces, Jess is an established keynote speaker with an education background as well. We’re bringing you another value-packed episode, so tune in till the end!

For engineers feeling stuck and unfulfilled, my guest Dagna Bieda has valuable advice. Dagna is a software engineer turned career coach who has mentored 50+ clients, some of whom worked at big brand names (such as LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Disney), as well as much smaller businesses. Whether it’s for promotion, salary increase, landing a new job, or becoming a CTO, she’s committed to helping her clients reach their full potential. In this episode, Dagna talks about hitting a wall in her engineering career and eventually finding a passion for coaching. She also discusses her perspective on how to navigate cultural differences in the workplace and how engineers can change their mindsets to set themselves up for success.

In the software world, there are a lot of opportunities. You just have to have the right mindset, preparations, and systems. In this episode, my guest Avdi Grimm shares how he found his independence by running a training and consulting business for over ten years. He reiterates the importance of time efficiency, task delegation, and why you should remove yourself as a bottleneck from your business. He also goes in-depth about the work he does on Graceful.Dev and how he is utilizing WordPress for the website. Avdi is a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and has several courses on his website Graceful.Dev (formerly RubyTapas.com).

There is a simpler way to reduce complexity in our systems, and it starts with rethinking data. This is the core of Data-Oriented Programming and, in this episode, my guest Yehonathan Sharvit answers our questions about the paradigm. As an expert in the field, Yehonathan breaks down the basics of Data-Oriented Programming, how it compares to object-oriented programming and functional programming, and how we can apply it in our codebases.

In this episode, I talk to Emma Bostian, who recently started as a software engineer at Spotify. And Emma is the kind of person, that not only applies and interviews for jobs, but at the same time writes a complete book about her interviewing experience hunting for this dream job. This book sold so well, that she could pay back all her medical debt. Before joining Spotify, she worked for LogMeIn, and IBM. She won competitions and moved countries several times. We talk about: - her interview experience with Spotify and Google, - her experience moving countries during a global pandemic, - what makes for a great onboarding experience and - how we can take action to make sure workplaces are friendly and welcoming.

In this episode, my guest, Paige Bailey, shares her experience as a director of machine learning and machine learning operations. We discuss how we can ease the processes of reviewing data science codes through GitHub's codespaces and Copilot.

What does it take to foster a workplace culture where employees, specifically coders, have the liberty to learn without feeling punished for it by the system? Innovation is impossible without failure, but most work cultures suffocate creativity without realizing it. We talk about: - how she deviated away from a traditional path of a researcher to start her company, Catharsis Consulting, - how to foster a learning culture within your engineering team - what learning debt is and - how learning debt hinders software engineering teams from reaching their full potential.

In this episode, I talk to Bekah Weigel, who runs the virtual coffee community about community building. Bekah graduated from a Bootcamp in 2019 and quickly created a striving and very special developer community in just under two years. We talk about: - how she kick-started the developer community virtual coffee - what it takes to run the community - how sponsorships make it possible to be sustainable, and - how community members take over a large part of running the community.

Daniel Vassallo left his cushy job at Amazon, where he made over half a million per year, to start his own business. We talk about: - anxiety when start-up attempts do not work out as planned - how he overcame failure - his strategy of small bets to reduce uncertainty - and all the little products that provide him with an average of 23K USD of profit per month.

Alvaro Trigo is a web developer who could quit his full-time job due to his popular open-source software FullPage.js. We talk about: - how to use open source to make a living - how long it took him to build software people want to buy - what he does against fraud - and his advice for developers that also want to go independent with open-source software.

Let’s look at some research studies together to see whether “happy developers are more productive”. I will let you know my take on it, and how it relates to the study I did on developer experience. We talk about: - whether happy developers are more productive - what makes developers happier at work - with which negative consequences do you have to reckon if developers are unhappy - and what are the most important factors that make developers more satisfied at work.

Dr. Mauricio Aniche explains how developers can write tests that find bugs. Writing effective test cases that bring confidence is not that easy. Many developers are familiar with testing frameworks and regularly write automated software tests. Yet, often they don’t test systematically. That’s why Mauricio writes a book called “Effective Software Testing” which shows practical approaches to systematically test software. You can win a digital copy of the Effective Software Testing book, when you like and retweet this episode’s link, which you can find here. We talk about: - the difference between effective and not effective test cases, - how domain-based testing helps to write good test cases, - how you can use coverage reports to get an idea of which scenarios you haven’t tested yet, - and how to write testable and maintainable code.

Learn how crystal clear engineering values can help you and your team to build a strong engineering culture. We deep dive into why well-defined, explicit engineering values are a competitive advantage for your engineer teams. We will also look at how engineering values: - help everyone to make decisions that are aligned with your company goals and values; - how they help newcomers understand what your team expects from them; - and how they help potential candidates to evaluate whether they would strive in your engineering team. But knowing your engineering core values form also the basis for being able to answer the hard questions every engineering team should ask themselves, like: - what does high-quality code mean to us, - how much testing do we need, - or when is a code change ready for release?

Dr. Storey explains how to best use the SPACE framework to measure the productivity of software engineering teams. Dr. Storey is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria and a distinguished expert in empirical software engineering. We talk about: - Productivity metrics for software developer - Developer experience as a different mindset to improve developer performance - The SPACE framework, which focuses on giving a well-rounded understanding of developer productivity.

In this special episode (50th) I’ll tell you a bit about the research on developer experience and developer productivity that kept me so busy this year. You will learn about: - some history of productivity-focused thinking - new productivity research like the Space Framework that helps understand and measure developer productivity - the difference to the Developer Experience framework that I co-created - why (IMHO) metrics and a productivity-driven mindset can be problematic for your culture and long-term success - and what you should focus on instead.

In this episode, I talk to Florin Pop. Florin is a web developer that started building websites in 2013 and worked many years as a successful freelancer. I know Florin from his super-popular YouTube channel and his funny and inspiring Twitter stream. In this episode, he explains how content creation became a lucrative career path for him. We talk about: - how he turned from developing software as a freelancer to a successful content creator - his recipe of success through failure and smart goals (e.g. specific and measurable goals) - his journey to more than 100K YouTube followers.

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Holly Cummins. Holly was the development practice lead for IBM Garage for Cloud, before becoming an innovation leader in IBM’s corporate strategy team. She drives innovation for companies in various industries, such as banking, catering, retail, or even nonprofit organization. She is also a Java Champion, a JavaOne Rockstar, a published author, and a regular and vivid speaker. We talk about - What it takes to drive innovation in an organization - Test-driven development (TDD) - Ensuring a healthy and welcoming company culture - The benefits of Pair programming

In this episode, I talk to Trier Bryant and Kim Scott who co-founded the company Just Work which helps organizations and individuals create more equitable workplaces. Trier Bryant is a strategic executive leader with distinctive Tech, Wall Street, and military experience spanning over 15 years and the CEO of Just Work. She’s previously worked at Astra, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, and led engineering teams in the United States Air Force, where she already also drove diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Kim Scott is the author of both successful books: Just Work and Radical Candor. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. We talk about: - how they both landed in tech - their diverse and exciting background - how to counter bias, prejudice, and bullying in the workplace - the framework for diversity and inclusion they developed - and how engineering teams can be more inclusive.

In this episode, I talk to Tracy Lee. Tracy is the CEO and co-founder of This Dot Labs, a widely successful dev shop. She is also a speaker, conference organizer, and blogger. We talk about: - how she dared to start her first start-up as soon as right out of college, - how she learned to program and fall in love with JavaScript and the community, - how she founded a successful development shop, - her advice in terms of a marketing-driven versus product-driven startup launch.

In this episode, I talk to Matt Biilmann. Matt Matt is the CEO and co-founder of Netlify – the modern platform for high-performance websites and apps. Netlify has around 150 employees and an estimate of over 20 million dollars of annual revenue. Matt also coined the term Jamstack, which stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. We talk about: - his journey bootstrapping Netlify to a million-dollar company - how he got the vision for the JAM-stack, - how it feels to grow a company from a two-person adventure to over 150 employees, - how he envisions the collaborative software development of the future, - and the acquisition of FeaturePeek.

In this episode, I talk to Patrick Wagstrom. Patrick is the Chief Data Officer at Brightcove. Before that Patrick was the director of emerging technology at Verizon, meaning that he leveraged AI/ML, augmented reality, blockchain, IoT, quantum computing, and even 5G.  Before that, he was a senior director of data science at Capital One. Even before that, he was a "research nerd"(his own term) at IBM working on the Watson project. We talk about: - his role and responsibilities as a chief data officer, - the difference between building systems that support machine learning and systems that don't, - distributed software engineering, - data governance and GDPR, - and how to make sure your AI model is unbiased.

In this episode, I talk to Karls Hughes. Karl is a software engineer who turned into an entrepreneur in the midst of the pandemic last year. His start-up draft.dev creates content that reaches software engineers - which means he combined his two passions, development and content creation. We talk about: - his transition from developer to CTO and now to the business owner, - value-based pricing and how to focus on the customer segment that gets the most value out of your product, - how to scale as a bootstrapped business, - why blogging is such a career changer for developers.

In this episode, I talk to Liran Haimovitch, CTO of Rookout - an effortless debugging tool, about how to get to high-quality code. We talk about: - what are the challenges of moving fast - what does productivity mean - a lot about code reviews - and I also give you a glimpse of the research I'm currently doing.

In this episode, I talk to Max Stoiber. Max is a JavaScript Engineer that is in love with React and Node, and also a fellow Austrian. He has a track record in the open-source world, worked for Gatsby, and Github, and also is a successful entrepreneur.  We talk about: - what he learned about software engineering best practices at GitHub, - why he started his newest side-project bedrock, - why building an indie or small lifestyle businesses is not his thing anymore, - and how he prepares to build a billion-dollar business.

In this episode, I talk to Annie Liew, who works as a web developer at a startup called Pastel. She transitioned from Design to Engineering, and I want to know how she experienced this. We talk about: - about her experience transitioning from Designer to Engineer, - the role her Juno Web Development Bootcamp (formerly HackerYou), - her new role as the first engineering hire at a startup, - her drive to learn and level up in public, - and how she managed to build a large Twitter following.

In this episode, I talk to Michael Feathers. Michael is the author of the super-popular book “working effectively with legacy code”. He is also the founder and director of R7K Research and Conveyance, a company that helps engineering teams with their software and organization design. Recently, Michael also joined Globant as Chief Architect. We talk about: - legacy code and how to deal with it - how systems almost feel like living organisms - how we are on a journey with our code, and why it’s so important to care for it, - how legacy code is the result of an organization where engineers turn faster (leave the company/team) than the code churns.

In this episode, I talk to Jenn Creighton. Jenn is a Senior Staff Engineer at Apollo. Jenn specialized in frontend-end development is currently working on the open-source work for Apollo GraphQL. She also is a frequent conference speaker, an authoritative voice in tech, and recently started her own podcast called single-threaded We talk about: - what a senior staff engineer does, and which responsibilities this title entail, - why she needed to frequently change her job in order to advance her career, - how gaslighting, bias, and being underrepresented, underpaid, undervalued is part of her decades-long experience as a developer - and how she makes sure she is helping others to enter tech and have a better experience.

In this episode, I talk to Natalie Davis. Natalie is a recent Bootcamp graduate that managed to get hired quickly after graduating. She is vividly sharing her knowledge on Twitter and started to make real waves in the dev community within just one and a half years in tech. We talk about: - her experience at a developer Bootcamp,  - how she managed to quickly get hired after graduating, - how she keeps up with all the stuff she has to learn, - how she decides to adopt best practices, - and how to overcome rejections by staying positive and focusing on growth.

In this episode, I talk to Felienne Hermans, who is an associate professor at the University of Leiden and researches how developers think and learn. We talk about: - why it is so hard to read and understand code, - her book "The developer's brain", - how we can learn easier to program, - techniques to understand complex code quicker, - how a shared vocabulary can help teams, not only during code reviews - and her process to write a book developers will love.

In this episode, I talk with Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security. Luta Security specializes in helping businesses and governments work with hackers and security researchers to better defend themselves from digital attacks. Katie is also an expert when it comes to bug bounty programs and how to successfully prepare organizations to implement a vulnerability disclosure program. We talk about: - vulnerability disclosure, - the security challenges faced by military and government organizations, - her entrepreneurial path, - how to establish yourself as a hacker or security expert, - and how to build security in your software development process.

In this episode, I talk to Alex Schladebeck, a testing expert, and a powerful voice in the tech community. Alex is the CEO of Bredex, a dev shop that offers tailor-made IT solutions but also specializes in quality assurance and testing. A decade ago, Alex graduated in linguistic and came into tech by accident. So, I obviously have to ask her about her career transition, and testing. What we talk about: - transitioning into tech from a non-traditional background - what it takes to get from an intern position to becoming the CEO - which role testing plays at Bredex - how mob or ensemble programming is used to facilitate learning - how to lead remote software teams

In this episode, I talk to Nader Dabit. Nader is a web and mobile developer, who specializes in building cross-platform and cloud-enabled applications. Right now, he works at Amazon Web Services, where he develops features in the client team and improves developer experience. Before, he founded his own training company, specializing in React Native, and trained engineers from organizations such as Microsoft, Amazon, the US Army, and many more. We talk about: - how he managed to build a following on almost every popular social platform, - how he got started with his own training company focusing on React Native - what serverless means, and why you should care about it, - how to build an MVP using a serverless-first mindset, - and how frontend developers can leverage serverless technologies to become a full-stack developer.

In this episode, I talk to Tomasz Łakomy, a senior frontend engineer at OLX Group. Tomasz is fascinated about teaching everything he knows and has over 170 video tutorials. We talk about: - how they develop, test, and reviews software at OLX group, - what war rooms are and how they help to combat technical debt, - how he managed to create over 170 video tutorials about software engineering, - why he is AWS certified as a front-end engineer, and - how skydiving helped him to be a better software developer.

In this episode, I talk to Ben Lesh. Ben is a Senior Software engineer at Citadel Securities. Before that, Ben worked amongst other companies, at Google and Netflix. Ben is also the Project Lead for RxJS. RxJS is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences. We talk about: - how he got into several FAANG companies without a CS degree, - the importance of building relationships, and an online brand, - the benefits of being helpful and kind to others, - the differences in engineering practices at Google, Netflix, and Citadel Securities, and - what RX.js is and why you might need it.

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library. Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React. We talk about: - Why you should not mock your software system during testing, - how "testing library" helps create more meaningful and maintainable tests, - if and how manual testing is still needed to increase your confidence in the software system.

In this episode, I talk to Diana Mounter, the Director of Design Infrastructure at GitHub. Diana traveled the world and lived in many different countries – even continents. She started as a print designer and spent some time in government before she got into web and design. Now, she leads the design systems at GitHub. We talk about: - what design systems are and why we need them, - how GitHub deals with legacy code and refactoring, - how the designer role interplays with other roles at GitHub, - how and why designers do code reviews, - and how GitHub strives for inclusive designs that make everyone feel like an expert.

In this episode, I talk to Emma Bostian, who recently started as a software engineer at Spotify. And Emma is the kind of person, that not only applies and interviews for jobs, but at the same time writes a complete book about her interviewing experience hunting for this dream job. This book sold so well, that she could pay back all her medical debt. Before joining Spotify, she worked for LogMeIn, and IBM. She won competitions and moved countries several times. We talk about: - her interview experience with Spotify and Google, - her experience moving countries during a global pandemic, - what makes for a great onboarding experience and - how we can take action to make sure workplaces are friendly and welcoming.

In this episode, I talk to Chris Biscardi, an independent software consultant about how he became successful through open source and community building. We talk about - how he niched down to only work with open source companies - how he build the Party Corgi community by showing up and leading by example - and what he thinks it takes to start your own successful software business in 2020.

In this episode, I talk to myself. Yeah, to celebrate the one year anniversary of the podcast, I tell you about my own journey into tech, and my experiences working at Microsoft and Microsoft Research. I share with you the turning points in my career and also how and why I started my own business. I talk about: - how I got into tech without any previous computer knowledge,  - how my dream of becoming a researcher in the industry became true, - and why I transitioned to remote work. - Finally, I talk about starting my own business because of the need for more flexibility to combine family and work.

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library. Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React. We talk about: - best practices in testing modern software systems,  - the testing pyramid and it's "successor" the testing trophy, - why integration tests might be more beneficial than unit tests, - how you should avoid testing implementation details, - and how testing sentiments have changed over the last 10 years.

In this episode, I talk to Angela Andrews, a solution architect at Red Hat. Angela is a curious learner who has worn many hats over the last +20 years in the tech industry. We talk about: - her experiences as a sysadmin, - how she learned to program, - and how she transitioned into becoming a solution architect at Red Hat. - She also shares why she has a wall of different certifications, - and started a bunch of different learning circles - and communities that help people learn to program and reach their goals.

In this episode, I talk to Jigyasa Grover, a machine learning engineer at Twitter. Jigyasa is my first data engineer, and so it's great to learn from her about what her day to day work entails. But in addition, she is also very ambitious and tells me about her successful career path through internships and research projects. We talk about: - what a machine learning engineer does,  - how to get started as a machine learning engineer, - open source and Google's summer of code projects, - and her role at Facebook combing data and software engineering.

In this episode, I talk to Amir Salihefendić, CEO and Founder of Doist, the company behind the widely successful productivity app ToDoist. Amir shares with me his entrepreneurial journey and talks with me about the company and engineering values lived at Doist. We talk about: - bootstrapping from idea to market leader, - how asynchronous communication helps create better products, - why he believes in the vitality of recharging, - and how to get a job at the remote-first company Doist.

In this episode, I talk to Tudor Gîrba, CEO and co-founder of Feenk, a software consultancy. Over the last 10 years, Tudor researched new ways to develop software – called moldable development. In this interview, I did deep to understand what that exactly means, and how he started to work on a novel IDE that enables moldable developments. We talk about: - how reading code slows down software productivity, - building developer tools, - starting your own software company, - transitioning from consultancy to product company, - and applied research.

This episode is part 2 of my interview with Cher. In this part, we deep-dive into her interview experience at Apple and how she worked her way up to a Staff engineering position. We talk about: - the hiring process at Apple - the tasks and responsibilities of a Staff engineer - mental health, and bipolar disorder - and how the "disability" box can be a life-changer when it comes to getting accommodations for your special needs. Check-out also part 1 of this interview, in which Cher talks about how she overcame poverty and hardship.

In this special episode, Cher shares her inspirational story about she overcame hardship and poverty, and worked her way up to now be a staff engineer at Apple. Cher has incredible strength in her, and bravely shares her struggles dealing with mental health issues publicly. She also regularly reminds people that they belong in tech independent of their education or background. I am impressed by how she openly shares her vulnerabilities and encourages and lifts up others.

In this episode, I talk to Trisha Gee, who is the Lead of the Java Developer Advocacy Team at JetBrain. She is an expert for Java high-performance systems, and developed software for a variety of industries, such as finance or manufacturing. We talk about: - how she got started in tech, - why it’s harder to read than write code, - how it is to work at JetBrains, - her hiring experiences, - and how she overcame imposter syndrome and started to feel confident with her competences.

In this episode, I talk to Martin Gratzer, CEO, and founder of Topmind. Topmind is a successful boutique dev shop in the heart of Carinthia in Austria. Martin shares with me, how he managed to build a striving development agency far way from Silicon Valey and other tech hot spots. We talk about: - why he decided to start his own company,  - what helped him get started on his entrepreneurial journey, - how he managed to be successful by focusing on a niche, - what he advises others that want to freelance or build up the dev shop, - and behind the scenes info on what it means to develop software as an agency.

In this episode, I talk to Peter Pezaris. Peter is the CEO and co-founder of a start-up called CodeStream. What's interesting about Peter's story is that CodeStream isn't his first startup. CodeStream is one of the many companies Peter built. So, in this interview, we talk about his 25 years-long journey building tech startups and what he has learned along the way. We talk about: - how he started his journey as a founder, - which technology changes he went through throughout the different tech start-ups, - the tech stack and architecture of the developer collaboration software CodeStream, - how he was able to build a team that stuck with him through four different startups, - and his advice for first-time founders.

In this episode, I talk to Troy Hunt, a leading security expert. Troy is a successful Pluralsight author and runs security workshops all around the world. He also is person behind the popular web haveIbeenPwned, which allows everybody to check whether their data has been exposed in a data breach. In this episode, we talk about: - how to prevent data breaches, - what software engineers have to know about the security and software vulnerabilities, - how to take your career in your own hands and - how he started to teach security to millions of developers worldwide.

In this episode, I talk to Dan Abramov. Dan is a developer at Facebook, working on the popular JavaScript framework React. Dan is also one of the most well-known person in the whole front-end developer scene and recently started working on his new side-project JustJavaScript. We talk about: - how he got a job at Facebook, - his interview tips for getting into Facebook - the development mentality and the development practices at Facebook, - and his new project JustJavaScript that helps intermediate developers to become JavaScript experts.

In this episode, I talk to Courtland Allen, the founder, and chief-indie hacker of the Indie Hacker community. After many years of trial and error, Courtland launched the widely successful indie hacker community and the indie hacker podcast. We talk about: - how he managed to build a lively community from the scratch - his tips for first-time founders - why he wanted to code as little as possible, and still coded as much as possible - his four-phase success plan for kick-starting a profitable community-based business.

In this episode, I talk to Laurie Barth, a staff software engineer at Gatsby. Laurie is also a vivid conference speaker, tech blogger, and egghead instructor. We talk about: - how she got this awesome position at Gatsby - her work as an open-source maintainer - code reviews and making sure to give valuable feedback - and growing a Twitter following.

In this episode, I talk to Suz Hinton, about her transition from Microsoft to Stripe, mentoring and advancing one’s career and live coding. We talk about: - her role and responsibilities at Stripe, - how to understand what customers and users want, - why she left Microsoft, - how she now ensures the job and company culture matches her expectations, - and how she started mentoring junior developers. - Finally, Suz tells me all there is to know about live coding.

In this episode, I talk to Charlie Gerard who recently switched from the software consultance ThoughtWorks to the product company  Atlassian. She now works on Jira, the planning and bug tracking software that comprises a codebase of several million lines of code.  We talk about:  - her experience working at Atlassian, - the software engineering practices used at Atlassian, - how diverse roles on a team help make better products, - her interview experience to get into this popular developer tool company, - the difference between working for a product company versus a consultancy,  - how to become a GoogleDev expert and a Mozilla Tech speaker, - and of course also about her passion to tinker with brain-controlled interfaces.

In this episode, Allison McMillan, a software engineering manager at Github joins me to talk about - how she broke into tech from a non-traditional background, - how she overcame obstacles and problems as a new mother in tech and - how she builds herself a striving career. As always, we also talk about software development methodologies such as code reviews and testing at Github. And surely, I pick her brain about remote work and her strategies to stay focused and happy in a remote setting.

In this episode, I talk to Charity Majors, founder, and CTO of honeycomb. Honeycomb is a tool for introspecting and interrogating your production systems. It represents the new generation of monitoring systems that can handle highly distributed and complex systems. Charity shares with me what observability means and how we can make systems more reliable and maintainable. We talk about: - the new generation of DevOps, - how and why we should assess systems in production, - the flaws of staging areas, - what it takes to make on-call a good experience, - how to assess engineering excellence, - and how and why she founded honeycomb.

In this episode, I talk to Derrick Stolee, a principal software engineer at Microsoft who makes sure the Git version control system is lightning fast. We talk about: - his career switch from being a professor to become a software engineer at Microsoft,  - what it means to contribute to open-source during your worktime for Microsoft, - how he improves the speed and performance of such a widely-used and mature software system as Git, - how to do code reviews via mailing lists, - and what it takes to become an open-source maintainer.

In this episode, I talk to Alper Kemal Koç, who was the first engineer building a low code platform called Kuika, that helps users develop mobile applications. Alper shares with me how he build this startup from idea to serving over 15 customers, and which cultural differences he observed when building software in Turkey, the Netherlands and the rest of the world. We talk about: - why and how he joined this startup,  - how he decided on the right tech stack, - how customer feedback influenced their direction, - which engineering practices he values at this startup, - and which relationship they have with their investors.

In this episode, I talk to Leif Singer, an engineer at the fully remote company Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress, a famous and powerful content management system with an estimated 75 Million user base.  We talk about: - why he switched from academia to industry, - how he got hired without knowing the company's tech stack, - why he worked for several months at Automattic before being hired, - how the Automattic creed, influences, and guides company values and mindset, - Automattic's software engineering practices, - and how they fight technical debt during quarterly scheduled clean-up weeks.

In this episode, I talk to Sandeep Panda, CEO and Founder of Hashnoce, a friendly and inclusive developer community. Sandeep shares with me his entrepreneurial journey and all the lessons he learned along his way. We talk about: - building a developer community from scratch, - getting investors to fund your projects, - the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, - transitioning to remote work, - software engineering practices in a startup, - code reviews, testing, deployment, and keeping technical debt at bay.

In this episode, I talk to Scott Hanselman, a partner product manager at Microsoft. Since years, Scott is one of the most successful tech bloggers, he has three podcasts and actively works on making tech a more diverse place. We talk about: - how it is to work remotely for Microsoft, - how to get such a remote position at Microsoft, - making tech a more diverse place, - starting with open source, - and productivity.

In this episode, I talk with Cassidy Williams, a senior software engineer that works for the fully-remote company CodePen. CodePen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. We talk about: - working remote for a small startup - how to find fulfillment in your career and through side projects - how to port an application from one technology to another - how humor can make tech a more welcoming place - and how she interviewed for CodePen.

Hello and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. The show in which I talk to experienced developers from different companies about how they develop maintainable, scalable and reliable software people love.