Jellyvision Tech Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jellyvision Tech Podcast
Courtney Adams, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, and Jessy Smith, Senior QA Analyst, talk about QA tooling, best practices, and tips for enhancing software quality.
Zach Herr, a Solutions Architect, discusses using the SBAR communication framework to make technical decisions.
Colin Smith, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, talks about how to identify and manage toil in software systems.
Hosts Dave Cohen and Nana Gapar reflect on how the podcast started, how it has evolved in the past two years, and what they've learned.
Returning guests Alex Bugosh and Zach Herr discuss how our understanding of Tech Debt has evolved and reflect on the progress that Jellyvision has made after one year.
Paul Adkins, Sr. Director of Security and Infrastructure at Jellyvision shares his thoughts on Impostor Syndrome, a mental health topic that affects people in tech and other industries. Paul talks about its impacts on his career, including moving into the tech industry from a non-tech role and advocating for his value at work. He also offers recommendations for mitigating it that can be done on your own or with the help of others.
Warning: book spoilers ahead!
Jesse Landis, Associate Release Manager, and Michael Meidenbauer, Software Engineer, discuss the devops tour-de-force novel The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. They go into their favorite moments, how Lean manufacturing principles apply to software development, and some of the controversial parts of the book. They also decide if they know anyone who reminds them of any of the characters in the book.
Julia Heney, Lead UX Writer, and Joe Thomas, Engineering Team Lead, discuss how they set up book clubs in their org. They talk about how books were selected, how virtual meetings were conducted, and more scholastic tidbits.
Director of Engineering Kevin Templin talks all about growing your tech career. He shares how he got into his first tech role and his thoughts on promotions, individual contribution, and what to consider if you want to go down the management track.
Software Engineers in Test, Courtney Adams and Dave Lyzenga, return to discuss common testing frameworks, tools, and regression testing strategies. They talk about the pros and cons of sharing test scaffolding tools across teams and why we moved away from it.
Bill Sorensen shares an open-source library he authored called tzientist. It's a "Scientist-like library for Node.js, implemented in TypeScript. It permits comparing legacy and refactored code paths in production environments, verifying both functional and non-functional requirements. This is also known as the Parallel Run pattern."
Bill goes into what inspired him to author the library, what it's been like to maintain it, and why you should consider using it if traditional testing strategies won't handle the refactoring you're trying to do.
- https://twitter.com/BillSorensen
- https://github.com/github/scientist
- https://github.com/TrueWill/paleontologist
- https://deno.land/
- https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Feathers/dp/0131177052
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBAR
Courtney Adams and Dave Lyzenga, Software Engineers in Test, discuss testing processes as part of product development. They talk about their experiences with different products and frameworks. They also cover the Testing Pyramid, cross-browser and cross-operating-system testing, how to define Acceptance Criteria (AC) for success.
Dan Kryzanowski, our resident NextJS expert, discusses what goes into developing an enterprise-level application using this React fullstack framework. He talks about the developer-experience enhancements that he and his team made which led to a successful release on a tight deadline and some outstanding resulting metrics.
“Know your tools - use an interactive debugger. Your brain isn’t a compiler - stop trying to interpret code by reading it.” ~Matt Schick, Lead Engineer at JellyvisionWhat is legacy code? Should you rewrite your legacy app to use microservices? The answers may surprise you.
Hosts Nana and Dave ask Matt about legacy app maintenance, developer archetypes (investigators vs creators), the “strangler pattern,” monolith designs, and more. Matt goes into tradeoffs, boundaries, hairy migrations, debugging, testing, clean code, and perhaps most importantly, “leaving your legacy.”
Jellyvision developers Dave, Nana, and Avner talk with guest Duke Greene (developer at Stitch Fix) about getting into the tech industry. Duke reflects on his teaching experiences at Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron as well as what helped him get his first full-time developer job.
Avner Shanan, Nathan Green, and Subi Shah talk about all things mentorship:
- How mentorship benefits both the mentor and a mentee
- How to get the most out of mentorship
- The nuts and bolts of creating a mentorship program within a company
and more!
Guests Becca Lesser and David Morefield talk about designing and developing accessible applications.
A little about the importance of addressing accessibility:
- Over a billion people are estimated to live with some form of disability, which can include blindness, deafness, and a variety of others. This corresponds to about 15 percent of the world's population. (World Health Organization)
- About 217 million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment. (World Health Organization)
- Over 61 million Americans (1 in 4) have a disability that impacts major life activities. (CDC)
- Approximately 40 percent of adults age 65 and up have one or more disabilities. (CDC)
Source: https://blog.usablenet.com/business-case-for-web-accessibility-in-2020
Resources:
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Accessibility
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Understanding_WCAG
- https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
- https://www.deque.com/
- https://www.deque.com/training/
Accessibility Tools:
- https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/accessibility_testing.html
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wave-evaluation-tool/jbbplnpkjmmeebjpijfedlgcdilocofh?hl=en-US
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/image-alt-text-viewer/nhmihbneenlkbjjpbimhegikadfleccd?hl=en
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe-devtools-web-accessib/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd?hl=en-US
- https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core-npm/tree/develop/packages/react
Guests Alex Bugosh, Nathan Green, and Zach Herr discuss what Tech Debt means to them and how it can impact development.
How does engineering at Jellyvision work? Guests William Dibbern and Sunil Chopra discuss the infrastructure, general team setup, and product problems we try to solve.
Try out a sample of what’s to come on the Jellyvision Tech Podcast with this sneak peek!