Artsy Engineering Radio: Recent Episodes
Artsy Engineering
Sultan, Jon, and Matt get together and talk about what they've been up to lately. The surprising CSS of form inputs? Revamping key application surfaces? Combining systems that probably should've been one system to begin with? All that, and more, in this episode!
Artsy Alumni Anna joins Matt Dole to discuss what she's been up to since leaving Artsy (spoiler: a lot of cool stuff)! What has she learned from her work at Foundation, and how has she grown in the last year? Tune in to find out!
How is Steve doing after a year in his new job? Let's find out about one of our favorite Artsy alumni friends!
Kaja and Erik are having a well rounded conversation about wedding planing and mentoring and programming language ecosystems. Does this potpourri of topics raise a lot of questions? Find the answers in this episode. And make sure to sign up for the Ruby mentorship as either a mentor or mentee: https://firstrubyfriend.org/
On this episode of Artsy Engineering Radio, Adam Butler joins us in our new series "Artsy Berliners" where we highlight the exciting stories of the Artsy team in Berlin. Adam shares his unique journey from being a security guard to becoming a musician, then transitioning to tech while still being a musician on the side. We'll hear about his experiences touring as a musician, and his move from the UK to the US, and finally settling in Germany. Tune in for an interesting conversation!
Pavlos, George and Kaja talk about what kind of music they listen to during work and how it helps them to get into the "tunnel". If you listen to this episode and get curious about examples of their described music, we have the links to the songs and playlists here!
Kaja' playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5G2JL58Ub6RrwlBY0Zpmjt?si=98adafce1dda4397
Kaja's favorite work song (Aliens): https://open.spotify.com/track/1Sk3itOeGmFFYHOosfrt6c?si=b45655df2fdf47e1
George' playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ryLnMcPum6WeCr0FSV4oQ?si=256e7b50f61144eb
George's favorite band for work music (hubris): https://open.spotify.com/track/6NuQIYiZEoWXnErCScAbAG?si=31c8215337c24504
Amenra: https://open.spotify.com/track/0mfo3pSczHkPwlWbawU2uX?si=a84c1f9e8e0549f5
Pavlos' playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5EyGjQnVOv0ZLoaMzTX95g?si=78d59f20ac7441b1
Today we have a very special (and a little sad) episode: our beloved Pavlos is leaving Artsy, and he joined Matt to tell us who he is and what he's learned during his time here.
We'll miss you, Pavlos! Come back any time!
Jon Allured, Pavlos Vinieratos and George Kartalis talk about Betterer, a tool by Craig Spence (aka phenomnomnominal), all about trying to get your codebase in a better state. We used it for a couple of week. What did we think? What did we love, and what did we had issues with? Let us guide you through our experience with betterer.
PS: Jon loves green dots.
Links:
- https://github.com/phenomnomnominal/betterer
- https://github.com/artsy/eigen/pull/8045
This week, Matt Dole & Brian take time to reflect on a recent security-focused learning group run by engineers at Artsy. Have you ever wanted to beef up your security chops and hang out with your team at the same time? Listen to learn how you, too, can become a security expert...or at least less of a security noob 😉
In this episode Erik and Kaja are talking about their experience working 4 days a week instead of 5.
Kaja joins Matt Dole to talk about her experience at this year's EuRuKo (European Ruby Conference). What was her favorite talk? What did she learn that will change how she works? Tune in for the answers to those questions and more!
https://2022.euruko.org/
Today on the podcast, Matt Dole is joined by former Artsyer Justin Bennett to talk about what he's up to these days. Turns out he's up to quite a lot! Tune in to hear about his podcast (devtools.fm), his time at Recurse Center, his current work at Oxide, and much more.
Justin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/zephraph
We are getting to know a bit more about our engineering manager Pamela, how she got here and what she enjoys about her job but also her fun creative hobby and her experiences with leading teams when the leaders left.
Motivation is one of the driving forces for accomplishments and achievements, but it's not always easy to stay motivated. In this episode, Mounir, Matt Dole, and Sultan are talking about how to motivate yourself and stay focused. They also discuss burnout, how to avoid it, and what to do when feeling unmotivated and burnt out.
Recommending artworks to collectors is tricky but having four different ways to do it… Listen as Sarah Haq and Jon Allured talk about how they are improving the artwork recommendations at Artsy by establishing a single source of truth and more!
At Artsy, we have a concept of a "practice": engineers across different teams who meet on a regular basis to discuss cross-system plans, problems, and systems. This week on the podcast, Matt & Kaja discuss how our practices work, what we like about them, and what could make them better.
Joining Matt Dole for a "Who Are You and How Did You Get Here" episode is George, a React Native specialist at Artsy. Tune in to learn how he went from waiting tables to waiting on CI!
Pavlos Vinieratos talks with Angela Patrinou (a fellow Greek), about Angela's mobile app. It's called Buddies, and it's about finding friends around the city you just moved into!
We discuss how the idea came about, how the development went, the launch, and a bunch more.
Join us for the first episode of Whatchu working on (on the side), on Artsy Engineering Radio. More to come!
On this week's episode, Matt, George, and Angela get together to discuss their experience teaching coding skills in a volunteer environment. Why did they get into teaching? What have they learned from teaching others?
Jackie Potts and Kaja Santro are both from a Ruby-backend background and working as software engineers at Artsy. In this episode they are talking about how it is to work in this area while also being dog moms and what their favorite Ruby gems are and what is so scary about frontend. They also just laugh and chuckle a lot on this episode, so prepare for some of those good vibrations coming your way!
Carlos joins Matt this week for another "Who Are You, And How Did You Get Here" episode! Tune in to learn how he went from building games with RPG Maker as a teenager in Brazil to working as a software engineer in Germany today. It's been quite a journey!
Ever wondered whether we run on Heroku or Kubernetes? How we monitor and deploy our apps? Tune in to this episode for an overview of Artsy's infrastructure choices with Senior Director of Engineering (and 10-year Artsy veteran!) Joey.
Today's episode is very special: Artsy engineer Erik is joined by 3 engineers who worked at United Airlines starting in the late 1970s (one of whom is his mom!), who share a look back at their careers and some amazing programming history. You don't want to miss this one!
Artsy hosted our 10th hackathon two weeks ago! Matt and Pavlos sit down to discuss how things went, how things changed from the last one, and talk about the projects we worked on, as well as others.
In engineering there are interesting sub paths of careers that you can grow into. One of them is the engineering management. What a great opportunity to hear from Elena, our new engineering manager! She will be talking to us about her own career but also about how to approach the switch into management if you are thinking about it.
While Artsy is originally based in NYC, the company has been making a lot of effort in the last year to hire a lot of people in Berlin in order to build up a big team in the German capital. Matt Dole and Kaja Santro talk about how that has been going for them and how they experienced the exciting process of the "Berlin Calling".
Pavlos Vinieratos talks with Adam Butler, about Adam's mobile app that recently launched. It's called Reams, and it's a "Deeply Superficial RSS"!
We discuss how the idea came about, how the development went, the launch, and a bunch more.
Join us for the first episode of Whatchu working on (on the side), on Artsy Engineering Radio. More to come!
https://apps.apple.com/de/app/reams/id1229027127?l=en
A bittersweet episode, as Jon Allured and Matt Dole give Steve Hicks one last chance to reflect on his learnings at Artsy before he moves on. Hop up on grandpappy Steve's lap as he reminisces on what he's taking away from his experiences.
Notes Tanya Reilly's talk on Glue work - https://noidea.dog/glue
One of Steve's dumb robot demo videos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIxCeI1Vz4E
Steve Hicks talks with Emily Marmoy-Haynes and Saj Rasul about Artsy's secret sauce to hiring -- the reference check! They dig into how Artsy uses these calls to identify the strongest candidates without subjecting them to excruciating tests.
Anna Carey joins Sarah Haq to discuss breaking into tech, the problem with the phrase "imposter syndrome," and why asking for help is the most important skill she's developed as an engineer.
In engineering we usually have roughly two career paths to choose from: Individual Contributor and Engineering Manager. Kaja will talk to Steve about his career choices and why he decided to go deeper into hands on coding.
Jackie Potts joins Steve Hicks to do a project retro. They discuss the chronology, the challenges, and the joys of a recent project integrating with a third-party shipping provider. They maybe make each other cry.
Tamara joins Matt Dole to talk about her path to engineering. She's faced a lot of discouraging obstacles and discrimination - and thought about giving up at times - but we're glad she's stuck with it and found her way to Artsy.
Artsy hosted our 9th annual(ish) hackathon two weeks ago! Sarah, Pavlos, and Matt sit down to discuss how it went, what we learned, and some of the cool projects that people worked on.
On this Episode Erik and Kaja talk about ethical questions in software engineering and how the tech world has a responsibility to build good and ethical software. They will cover some examples when things definitely crossed the line of being ethical and try to figure out how to be an ethical software engineer. Talks mentioned in that episode where "The Reasonable developer" by Joe Corcoran from the Isle of Ruby in 2018 and "So you can Sleep at Night: Ethics in IT" Jonathan Rothwell & Steve Freeman at the GOTO Berlin 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI5qEJ39KMc).
Issra Hashim and Alican Akyuz are both "second career developers". One in training, one senior. They join host Pavlos Vinieratos to talk about their transition from careers unrelated to development and coding, to exactly that. Listen to their stories here.
Jon Allured, Anna Carey, and Steve Hicks recap season 1 of Artsy Engineering Radio. What did we learn? Who listened? And which were our favorite episodes?
Our favorite episodes
- SEO with Jenna: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/8923775-28-seo-at-artsy
- WAYAHDYGH with Roop: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/8870072-26-wayhdygh-roop
- Scaling your impact with Ash: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/8549214-4-scaling-your-impact
- Scaling your impact with Orta: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/8549218-8-scaling-your-impact-pt-2-this-time-with-orta
- Refactoring with Jon, Chris, and Laura: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/9247721-36-a-conversation-about-refactoring
- Product Management with Guillaume: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/9165963-product-management-and-engineering-with-guillaume
- Women in Engineering with Laura: https://artsyengineeringradio.buzzsprout.com/1781859/9205283-35-women-in-engineering-laura
Sarah Weir, Luis Gualberto, and Steve Hicks talk about better and more modern ways to think about people and teams. Rather than defining engineers as back-end or front-end, developer archetypes better capture the value an engineer brings to a team. And when scaling teams, Team Topologies provide a model to escape Conway's Law and build for user needs.
Notes
- Team Topologies book
- Conway's Law
Erik, Pavlos, and Anna talk about tools for productivity such as our desktop setup and code editors, as well as tools and ideas for collaborating across different time zones.
Artsy Legend and Art Enthusiast Barry Hoggard's joins host Sarah Haq to talk about his experience as a collector. Listen to his incredible journey as a collector, from where it all started to how his partner, James Wagner, and him have filled their beautiful home with 1,000s of artworks.
We would like to apologise for accidentally calling our wonderful Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Everette, Elliot in the podcast.
Emily, Adam, and Matt talk about Artsy's recent efforts to hire more engineers to grow our Berlin office. What surprises and challenges have we faced? How do we think about employee leveling and retention of new employees? Find out on this episode!
At Artsy the Data and Engineering Teams work together really closely. Listen as Abhiti Prabahar and Jon Allured chat about this collaboration and how this has evolved over time. Also find out what even is a data pipeline!
Jon Allured, Sultan Al-Maari, and Steve Hicks talk about knowing when to give up on a problem and when to keep digging. Sultan talks about how he got into software development, and how things are going at Artsy so far. Come hang out with us!
Join Laura Bhayani and Chris Pappas with host Jon Allured as they have a conversation about refactoring. What is it? How is it done? Why should we do it? When are we finished?
Artsy Engineer Laura Bhayani returns for another episode of Artsy Engineering Radio with host Sarah Haq, to share her inspirational journey into the field and the challenges she faced along the way. Laura and Sarah talk about everything from keyboards to unicorns and being a fricking badass.
Artsy's Group Product Manager Guillaume Delgutte shares his path to product management at Artsy with Artsy Engineering Radio host Anna Carey. They discuss product manager and engineer collaboration, Guillaume's experience with improv and how that's informed his work as a PM, and how to remain both humble and confident as a leader.
This week, Anson joins Matt Dole to talk about his role as a tech lead, going through the Bloomberg internal bootcamp, the importance of effective communication in software, and his new-found love for wine tasting. Take a listen.
On this episode of Artsy Engineering Radio, Anna Carey talks to Director of Engineering Sarah Weir about her path to Artsy, what it means to be a Director of Engineering at Artsy, and reflections on our team Offsite.
This week, Artsy Engineer Laura Bhayani tells Steve Hicks how she approaches making large changes in a codebase, and why she enjoys that kind of work.
Longtime Artsy engineer Oksana joins Matt Dole to talk about what it means to be a product-focused engineer, balancing the demands of a career in engineering with the demands of parenting, and much more.
Two new Artsy engineers, Tanjie and Irakli, join Matt Dole to talk about their experience joining Artsy. From the interview process to their "rotations" through different teams, what have they liked? What would they change about how Artsy interviews and onboards? Listen to find out!
Jenna Poczik and Jon Allured discuss the vast topic of SEO and explain Artsy's approach. Listen as they go from answering questions like what even is SEO to how website performance impacts a site's rankings.
Artsy Engineer Kaja Santro returns for another episode of Artsy Engineering Radio with host Sarah Haq to discuss what it is really like to be a woman in tech. Kaja and Sarah discuss the barriers to entry for women and how language and gendered toys have played a negative role in deterring women from pursuing careers in engineering.
Artsy engineer Roop joins Artsy Engineering Radio host Anna Carey to discuss how he got into designing art books and then programming after getting kicked out of college. Roop also shares his dual background as a cartographer for art world institutions and how that experience informs his work at Artsy.
Jon Allured and Steve Hicks talk about how to review non-trivial pull requests, and life as a remote-solo employee during COVID.
On this episode of Artsy Engineering Radio, Kaja Santro joins us for a "who are you and how did you get here" interview. We'll learn about her transition from philosophy and linguistics to programming, the ways she thinks Artsy could improve our developer workflows, her love of learning new skills, and much more.
Sarah Haq and Matt Dole talk about "engineering culture." What exactly do we mean when we say culture? What does bad culture look like? What about good culture, and how do we get there?
Jon Allured, Anna Carey and Matt Dole talk about Volt, the Artsy CMS system. After some history, we get into how this project has evolved over time and where it might be going next.
David Sheldrick and Steve Hicks talk about Artsy's journey to build an Android app. This episode is filled with tips and perspective on breaking down a large project into actionable steps.
Anna Carey and Steve Hicks talk about how communications—writing, speaking, podcasting—intersects with engineering.
Steve Hicks and Justin Bennett talk about empathy in workplace culture, how to build trust and safety, and the importance of providing space for people.
Join Tricia and Damon as they discuss how they design and build software with accessibility in mind.
Anna Carey, Jon Allured, and Steve Hicks hang out and talk about what they're working, what excites them, and the challenges and rewards of 3rd-party integration.
In part 2 of Anna Carey's interview with Artsy's Former CTO Daniel Doubrovkine (dB), dB talks about his move to AWS, the future of NFTs, and his love of art.
Anna Carey speaks with Artsy's Former CTO Daniel Doubrovkine (dB) about building and scaling a strong engineering culture, why Artsy became Open Source by Default, and what makes a great CTO. He also shares stories of the most exciting—and sometimes stressful—moments in the early days of Artsy Engineering.
Jon Allured, Pavlos Vinieratos, and Devon Blandin talk about moving across the globe, device naming schemes, and building mobile apps with React Native.
Anson Wang shares his experiences as a tech lead with Steve Hicks. They talk about navigating feedback, leading projects, and being a supportive leader. Anson leaves you with a fun fact you can't unsee.
Join Anna Carey, Jon Allured, Justin Bennett, and Matt Dole as they discuss how Artsy's engineering culture has changed as the team has grown, making the software industry more inclusive, and what it means to be a 'good engineer'
Matt Dole and Director of Platform Engineering Joey Aghion discuss Joey's life as an engineer. What has he learned from working at multiple failed startups? What is he excited about building at Artsy?
Jon & Steve hang out and talk about stuff. Steve gives Jon (probably) bad advice about building a content strategy, and Jon talks about the habits in his personal operating system.
Artsy's Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering Sam Rozenberg joins us to talk about his transition from finance to tech, moving from Spotify to Instagram to Artsy, and what he thinks is most special about Artsy’s engineering culture.
Orta Therox tells Jon Allured and Steve Hicks how he became a top contributor to open source software, and teaches them how to get better at things like design and pair programming.
Anna Carey joins us to talk about overcoming impostor syndrome, asking for help, and her path from Artsy to coding bootcamp and back to Artsy.
Eve Essex talks to Steve Hicks about the differences between building infrastructure and building products, the intersection of software engineering and creative practice, and why you can't afford to be precious about the product.
Jon Allured and Joanna Brocksen discuss the structure of Arty's Product team. What even is a PDDE??
Jon Allured, Ash Furrow, and Steve Hicks discuss scaling your impact as an engineer. How can engineers be more effective and create more value than we capture?
Matt Dole asks engineer Chris Pappas who he is and how he got here. Tune in to learn about BBSes and how skateboarding started Chris's career in software.
Ash Furrow and Steve Hicks talk about hiring practices to avoid, how Artsy hires engineers, and the right questions to ask in an interview.
Ash Furrow talks with Steve Hicks about facilitating meaningful and inclusive team meetings, and how meetings are part of building teams, trust, and systems.
Jon Allured, Matt Dole, and Steve Hicks introduce you to Artsy Engineering Radio and help you understand why you need another podcast in your life.