Loosely Coupled Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost
Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost combine their decades of experience as web developers to talk about developer life.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about how automation can be helpful in your day to day life as a developer.
This episode is all about legacy code. Jeff and Matt talk about what legacy code is how you can work through the task of working within a legacy codebase. In some instances it makes sense to replace older applications with APIs, but sometimes that is a problem. Jeff and Matt both talk about real-life situations they've been in and how they worked through it.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about our friends, allies, and sometimes sworn enemies in the development world: product managers and project managers. They will cover how to interact with these roles and even how to be a good manager.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about systems administration and DevOps for developers. This topic is important because, as developers, having an understanding of the full stack your application is deployed on can separate you as a senior developer. They talk about some times when having some insight into working with linux, managing and configuring webservers, databases, etc. has come in handy as well as reference some important things you should know as a developer to be able to help in an emergency or just to maintain your application’s health in production.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the concept of a minimum viable product and what it means to us as developers. The concept of an MVP is simple but it often gets used as an excuse to put out poorly-implemented products. Listen as Jeff and Matt discuss their opinions about the problems with MVP in our industry and how we as developers can fight against them.
This is a live mashup episode with PHP Roundtable from php[tek] 2015 where we are joined by Sammy Kaye Powers from PHP Roundtable, Jordi Boggiano from Composer, Coderabbi, and a host of other people drifting in and out of the conversation from the audience. This was a special episode where we commemorate the success of PSR-7 with an ice cream cake.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about a very important skill all developers need to learn: how to say no. Saying no is pretty easy but there are ways to appropriately convey the reason why doing what is being asked is not a good idea.
In this episode Jeff and Matt discuss what it means when you take the step to open sourcing your package or library. This is significantly different than working on an application and the goal of this episode is to talk about what you’re getting yourself into as a package maintainer.
In this episode, Jeff and Matt discuss the benefits and drawbacks to being someone’s employee or to being a freelancer and being your own boss. There are many reasons you might choose one or the other, and only you can make that decision. This episode is a discussion of the past experiences Jeff and Matt have with freelancing and being employed.
In this episode Jeff and Matt explore how they go about organizing their work life and our personal lives. They cover the idea of how the process evolves depending on your environment and even your personal inclinations. In 2011, Jeff wrote a blog post about the tools he used back then and realized that it has changed a little but for the most part works for him. They cover some pitfalls of processes that require tickets/stories to be broken down into parts where developers cannot understand what they’re doing or why, and how they’ve learned over time to get to that information. They also talked about learning how to be professionals and defend against situations that would impact your work or your code in negative ways. Finally they touch on Matt’s work scheduling experiment which is inspired by the Makers Schedule versus the Managers Schedule and how it has helped him be more productive.
In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about their experiences of getting teams moving on good practices. They will cover times when it has been challenging to convince higher-ups the value of doing certain things, all the way to how to go about changing teams by example.
This episode is sponsored by our friend, Coderabbi, who is currently on the Wisdom as a Service World Tour 2015. The tour is a spirited initiative to engage 35+ User Groups representing over 2000 PHP developers around the world in a conversation about Community, Software Craftsmanship, Personal Growth and Professional Development. You can check out wisdomworldtour.com for more information or to see just where in the world is Coderabbi.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the idea of establishing and participating in mentoring relationships. As participants in the PHP Mentoring organization or initiative, mentorship is an important part of Jeff’s and Matt’s lives as developers. The main theme in this episode is that you should find a way to get past your fears and find a way to get involved with mentoring in your community. Along the way they cover some advice based on past experiences of what to expect and how to establish successful relationships.
This episode is sponsored by our good friend Coderabbi who is just about to depart for Europe on the initial leg of his Wisdom as a Service World Tour. The Tour is a spirited initiative to engage more than 35 User Groups representing over 2000 PHP developers around the world in a conversation about Community, Software Craftsmanship, Personal Growth and Professional Development. If you are a User Group Organizer who would like arrange a Tour visit, a potential sponsor who wants your message to be a part of the conversation or are simply interested in playing “Where in the world is Coderabbi?”, visit wisdomworldtour.com today!
While you’re following links don’t forget to follow @_looselycoupled, @wisdomworldtour, @coderabbi, @jcarouth, and @shrtwhitebldguy to keep up to date on all of the things.
In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about the difficult task all developers are continuously faced with: estimation. They cover some examples of times they have found estimation difficult, techniques that have worked for them, and even some advice on how to deal with the stress of estimating incorrectly. Ultimately, estimation is a part of the necessary communication that must happen for a project to be successful.
This episode is sponsored by coderabbi. If you do not know or do not currently follow coderabbi, you are missing out and should fix that right now. He is bringing the Wisdom as a Service tour to areas around the world in the coming months. Join him in his Virtual Hallway Track, IRC channel #coderabbi on Freenode.
In this episode, Jeff and Matt discuss mental health, a very important and very personal topic. There is a lot of great work being done right now in our industry to bring awareness to issues of mental health including > prompt by EngineYard, Open Sourcing Mental Illness by Ed Finkler, and #HackTheStigma, among others. This discussion talks about our thoughts on the topic in general as well as gets into personal experiences.
If you or someone you know is dealing with mental health issues, you are not alone.
In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about some things they have learned about being remote developers. While both are currently employed as remote developers they have also worked in on-site jobs. This episode is a collection of things that might be different, things to expect, things that might be hard, and, of course, whether you need to wear pants.
In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about how to look at job descriptions and what to expect during interviews for the jobs you really want to have. They will combine their experiences on both sides of the interview room and reminisce about good and bad interview experiences. Interviewing may be stressful, but it’s how you advance your career.
In this episode Jeff and Matt finally discover the mystery of the Trello card “Elephpantitus” and attempt to cover how important or how unimportant it is to diversify your programming background within a given language community. Perhaps it’s a good idea to focus on being a PHP developer rather than a WordPress developer or a Magento developer, or maybe it isn’t. This episode could be titled Maybe since they weren’t really sure which way to lean starting out.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about how we teach and how we learn as developers. Often subjects such as testing or object-oriented programming are taught in ways that could be considered the most difficult way possible. This episode covers some advice about how teach these types of subjects in an accessible way and, even better, how to go about learning difficult subjects.
In this episode Jeff and Matt continue their conversation about careers by discussing their thoughts on titles and classifications of developers. If you’ve ever asked “what is a senior developer?” or even “am I a senior developer?” this episode is for you.
In this episode Jeff and Matt discuss experiences with career management and career development. This was the first ever live recording of an episode, broadcast over Google Hangouts on Air. With the help of the kind folks in the IRC channel (#looselycoupled on Freenode) this episode covers topics such as salary negotiation, when to ask for a raise or promotion, how to plan a career plan, how to deal with co-workers in difficult situations, and a few other pieces of advice about successfully navigating a career as a developer.
In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the idea of polyglotism, the benefits, practical advice about choosing which languages to learn and how to be successful while learning new languages. You should go out and find a new language and prepare to give it the time it deserves. It’s best to find a mentor or someone to help you and step out of your language or paradigm comfort zone.
Links
- F#
- @jclermont
- clojure
- @igorwhiletrue
- Learn $x the Hard Way
- codecademy
- The Splat Operator in PHP 5.6 by Lorna Jane
In this is episode Matt and Jeff discuss how to build a testing culture in your company. They discuss organization resistance, the importance of testing and how to move forward when the rest of your company is less than excited.
In this episode, Matt and Jeff join forces with PHPTownHall to talk about Open Source, burn out and briefly discuss their favorite open source projects. Jeff had a spell of bad luck with the wifi at the AirBnB he stayed at in San Franciso, so you may not get as much of him as you’d like.
If you’ve not checked out PHPTownHall, you can do so here PHPTownHall
Also if you aren’t following Ben or Phil on Twitter you should:
- Ben Edmunds
- Phil Sturgeon
In this episode Matt and Jeff talk about how and why you should consider getting involved in side projects. Despite the jovial subtitle, “Getting a little side action,” participating in development outside of your normal development routine is beneficial to you as a developer as well as to your employer or clients. They further expand on the topic by talking about non-code-related side projects such as podcasts, discussion groups, or even writing.
If you’re looking for a project to get involved with, the PHP Mentoring Mentor App would love to have your participation. Contact either of us, or come hang out in #phpmentoring on Freenode to get involved.
In this episode Matt and Jeff talk about their experiences with adopting Agile as individuals and as teams. The important take aways are to not be too loose nor too rigid with the practice; to accept change as it happens but to not force change too rapidly; to honor the purposes of the components of agile practices; and, above all, to find what works for your team specifically over what you read in a book.
Episode 3 of the Loosely Coupled podcast was recorded live at Lone Star PHP. Since we were at a conference, we decided to do a meta episode about conference experiences and speaking at conferences. This episode covers information from how Jeff and Matt got involved with the conference community all the way through some advice on submitting your first talks. If you have never been to a conference, find a way to get to one soon. It’s more than just the presentations.
In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about code quality and beautiful code. Beautiful code follows a standard. If you don’t have one, find one and adopt it. For PHP projects you can start with PSR-2, a part of the PHP-FIG Standards, or PSRs (not actually called Phil’s Silly Recommendations.)
Find a project you can admire–or at least one that has the quality level you want to achieve–and study it. One example might be to look at a framework that’s popular, such as Laravel. Study the project and realize that it likely didn’t come to exist exactly how it is now overnight.
Don’t be afraid to throw code away. Your first solution will never be the best solution to the problem. It’s okay to write code to learn more about your problem–perhaps just tests, even–and then get to a reasonably-clean solution eventually.
While Jeff and Matt talk a lot about coding standards, there is much, much more to clean code. The three holy books of clean code are Clean Code: A handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanshipand The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert Martin (a.k.a. Uncle Bob,) and Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell. Reading these three books won’t necessarily make your code better, but it certainly won’t hurt you to be aware of what they contain.
Learning the process of writing clean code takes an entire career. Matt watched a relevant TED talk about the technique of learning things in 20 hours called Learning Anything in 20 Hours. To become great at doing anything as a programmer, you have to learn the process of breaking your subject up into segments and practice. It’s Matt’s opinion that the idea of taking 10,000 hours to master something is too daunting, so breaking things up into 20-hour segments is more appealing.
On the subject of practicing, one useful tool for practice is a Code Kata). There is a formal definition and lots of resources for code katas. But what if you could just apply the concept of repetitive practice into your tasks? Matt did something like this with an OAuth 1.0 client he was working on to learn about signatures.
There is no substitute for actually writing code. No amount of reading documentation will substitute for experiencing the errors that come about from your misunderstandings. It is part of the process.
Being a sole developer is hard in terms of code quality. You need someone else to look at your code because that exposes the problems with the legibility of the code you’re writing. So if you are a sole developer, find some way to get someone else’s eyes on your project. No one will know if your code is good or bad if they can’t see it. Posting small gists or pastebins is not sufficient.
Ship early, ship often. If your code is only local, no one can help you. Get your code out there as soon as possible. You’ll be a better developer because of it.
Jeff and Matt weigh in on developing libraries for a larger audience. You should start by solving an actual problem in your business, then extract into a library if it’s relevant outside of your business. Don’t start out with the goal of making the new hotness, let that come naturally. Matt mentioned his Snaggle library as something he’s working on right now and Jeff mentioned a project he worked at for his employer called the Gem formerly known as Clerk. Both of these started as libraries which kind of contradicts this advice.
If you’re looking for a HTTP client for your PHP projects, look no further than Guzzle.
The last important point of discussion is to always challenge your expectations and assumptions in your code. When you’re writing code you should be constantly asking yourself, “why am I doing it this way?” Sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know,” which means you need to take a break and seek out the answer to the question.
Go forth and practice writing clean code.
In this episode Jeff and Matt discuss passion and confidence within the context of development and how to deal with internal and external influence on your passion. They cover caring about what you’re doing, motivation level, dealing with criticism and feedback, Imposter Syndrome, and the Dunning-Kruger man. Key takeaways are to remember that everyone experiences highs and lows in their confidence; coping with what seems like a lack of passion can be as simple as doing something else for a while; and it is important to be aware of your situation and to talk about it.