Podcast Episodes

No matter how efficient you are, when you get stressed your productivity drops. It is important to be resilient in stress so that you can overcome stressful situations.

If you've worked on complex or distributed systems at all, at some point you've seen them produce behavior that is predictable in hindsight, but that you never would have predicted yourself. Systems take on a life of their own, especially as different parts are developed at different rates by different people.

Everyone has habits, behaviors they do on a regular, daily basis. These habits are either moving you toward your goals and success or they are holding you back from them.

User interfaces are hard to get right, especially for developers. While the nitty gritty details are better left to design podcasts, there are some simple rules that developers can keep in mind when building UI and UX. While not perfect, they will get you a long way.

We all need some regular relaxation to avoid burnout. Downtime is a brain break from all the internal processing that our minds do daily and even helps to improve productivity.

When you replace a running legacy system with a new system, it can be tempting to do it all at once. However, doing so courts disaster and makes the process much more painful than it has to be. Even though it sounds easier, a sudden system cutover is seldom pleasant.

Whether you are a manager, team lead, or executive you will lead several types of people during your time in leadership. From the too reliant who comes to you for everything to the grizzled veteran who has been coding longer than you've owned a computer understanding team dynamics is important. It can be difficult to know how to motivate and lead all the types of people on your team.

While it's nice to be able to pull in packages to do various things in our projects, we need to think long and hard about how we are going to maintain those dependencies over time, in particular in how they relate to security. Supply chain attacks on software components are only going to get worse over time.

Just like there are multiple ways to use a computer there is more than one way to use your mind. Many different ways exist to focus your thoughts from study and meditation to creating mind maps. Understanding these will help you improve your concentration.

Your database is probably the most valuable part of your application, and it can be terrifying to think of it falling apart. Yet, that is just a day in the average developer's life in many companies.