hexdevs: Recent Episodes
hexdevs
"Be a lurker and start small. Read a PR, try to understand what’s going on. Leave a thumbs up 👍 if you like it. This is a very easy way to get started. And build a habit out of that". -- schneemsHow to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors
Recently, Richard published the book “How to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors". The missing handbook will guide you from making your first contribution to building a sustainable practice.
Listen to and watch our conversation with Richard Schneeman (@schneems) about the book, and how to go from coder to contributor.
Episode Links
- Get to Senior
- Get to Senior Crash Course
- Podcast Interview
- schneems.com
- Richard Schneeman on Twitter
- How to Open Source
- Fearless Change: Learn the secrets of successful contributors
- Watch the interview on YouTube
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:28 say hello to our cat, bob!
03:25 what prevents developers from contributing to open source?
04:58 the bystander effect
06:42 not comfortable contributing to new repo
08:30 be a lurker: read a PR and leave a thumbs up
10:12 building tiny habits for Open Source
11:19 do you really want to contribute to open source?
13:53 If you contribute to Open Source, can you skip coding interviews?
14:39 do you need a CS degree to contribute to Open Source?
15:14 use a fake account or nickname on GitHub
16:18 what prevents people from contributing more?
17:52 how do you find time to contribute to open source?
19:00 how to do open source work as part of my job?
21:53 how do you find Open Source projects to contribute to?
24:16 how to build a culture of open source at work?
27:20 what is CodeTriage & how it works?
28:56 writing the book How to Open Source
30:07 tips for getting started with open source
32:23 workarounds vs fixing bugs upstream
34:10 can you get promoted by doing open source work?
37:29 open source work and becoming Principal Engineer
40:26 making mistakes in public
41:57 merging the wrong commit in Ruby on Rails
44:39 what if my Pull Request is rejected?
50:00 how to build a contribution practice
55:14 closing remarks
Are you tired of feeling like an impostor? Do you feel like you've been holding yourself back for too long? That you are missing out on growth opportunities because you don't feel confident enough?
We believe you can be happy AND grow in your career. No need to sacrifice one to get the other. But to get there, you need as many tools and support as you can get.
In this episode, Amor Muto shares strategies to help you beat Burnout, Fear of Success and Imposter Complex.
About our guest
Amor Muto is a Certified Professional Coach with a vast knowledge and experience on the imposter complex, leadership and fear of success, especially with Software Developers. He is a tetraplegic entrepreneur with 15+ years of experience. Purpose-driven to make burnout a thing from the past.
Show Notes
- Join the Waiting List to the next cohort of Get to Senior
- Unhappy as a Developer? How Not To Be Miserable with Dr. Randy Paterson
- Skara.ai
- Get access to over 400 personal and professional coaches from around the world with Sphere.Guide. Use Code: hexdevs to get 50% off the first month.
"How can I practice my skills so I can code faster?"
One way is to design Drill Exercises when learning a new skill. It helps break down the steps and practice them in isolation until you master all of them. Plus, you get instant feedback.
Master technical skills faster. Design Drill Exercises and practice deliberately.
Listen to this short episode about designing effective technical practice as a self-learner. We also mentioned what we've been reading and listening to lately.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:22 What is deliberate practice?
01:06 Ultralearning and Drill Exercises
01:48 Direct Drills for Technical Practice
04:08 Fast Feedback on Learning
06:02 Foundational Skills
07:13 Practice above your current skill level
10:42 Learn Hard Things Faster
14:27 Improving your memory
15:11 The Feynman Technique
18:08 Subtracting and Doing Less
21:23 Ask good questions and simplify
22:55 Ending
Links
- Join the Waiting List to the next cohort of Get to Senior
- Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition
- Perceptual Learning == More Ruby Experts? | RubyConf 2021
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
- Do Less - Hidden Brain episode
"I had a huge list of the technical things I needed to learn for this new position and turns out none of them was missing for me to get to Senior. I need to do some leadership work, do more mentoring, and is a matter of time. But now I know what to do and I know what to focus on. And that was really surprising. I don't need to spend hours studying programming" -- Caroline Salib.Are you an experienced software developer and don't know how to get promoted to Senior level? Have you been trying to master one technical skill after the other and still not sure how to make the jump to Senior?
In this episode, we talk about the non-obvious skills experienced software developers miss when trying to make the jump to Senior -- and how to get out of the technical trap that is keeping them stuck in the mid-career level.
Listen to our conversation with Caroline Salib to learn how she is taking control of her career and being on the path to Senior level.
About our guest
Caroline is a super talented Ruby Software Developer. She is passionate about code quality, automated tests, and open-source projects. She loves the feeling of fixing broken things and building software that will have value to others.
We talked about her experience publishing a gem for the first time, and learning C. We also talked about her “spread” experience as a Software Developer. With more than 10 years of experience, she wasn’t sure what she was missing to become a Senior Software Developer.
Carol shares the struggles of changing backgrounds from .NET, to PHP and then to Ruby. And the importance of being kind to ourselves, being comfortable with being uncomfortable, and how to embrace our mistakes.
Caroline told us how she is changing the direction of her career. By doing challenging things, taking action, and being the person who chooses to fix the problem instead of complaining about them.
Show Notes
- Get to Senior Cohort
- Caroline Salib Twitter
- SimpleBlog - Simple ruby blog
Are you ready to Get to Senior?
Want to become a badass software developer on track to becoming a Senior just like Caroline? We just opened the doors for the next Get to Senior cohort.
If you want more support and accountability on your path to Senior, enroll in the next cohort now to start your journey to Senior level.
Often as developers, we believe we are supposed to know everything. Just figure everything by ourselves. As long as we get faster and better at coding, our careers will progress smoothly.
But if you ask around, you’ll notice that most people are feeling technically stuck, despite years of experience. If you ask for career advice, people will throw you an endless list of complex technical skills to master.
That’s not what you’ll find here.
Have you ever reflected on your career goals as a Software Developer? How often do you talk with someone who’s doing the kind of work you want to be doing?
Mina Slater is our guest for this episode. Mina decided she will never be stuck. She is always doing things that are uncomfortable and scary, such as communication and leadership skills. Some people call these "soft skills for software developers".
With more than a decade of experience with theater management before becoming a Software Developer, Mina has been progressing in her career as she wanted. She even created her own role. In the week this episode was released, she was promoted to Senior Developer!
This episode also addresses this fact: no pacing is right or wrong, everyone has their own journey. How do you make sure you are moving forward and not getting stuck on your journey? That’s what this episode is about.
You’ll hear Mina using phrases such as “helping my team”, “reflecting on my progress”, “peer-mentoring”, “people skills”. These are clues of how to explore opportunities to grow in your career organically.
About Mina Slater
Mina Slater is dedicated to using her "superpowers" for good, to connect people and bring them closer together by contributing to meaningful and inclusive products.
Since transitioning from a career in theater management by way of Northwestern Coding Bootcamp in April of 2018, she has developed as Engineer and Consultant, with a specific interest in the backend and Ruby On Rails.
—
Do you feel like you’re too experienced to be a Junior but not enough to be a Senior? Feeling stuck in your career? Don’t know what to do next in your Ruby developer career?
Join Get to Senior, a collection of case Study interviews with Ruby developers. Learn from real people. Follow guided exercises to put into practice the strategies from the case studies to map out your Path to Senior. Grab your Get to Senior copy now.
Or sign up for the free Get to Senior Crash Course to receive 5 email lessons over the next 2 weeks. Learn how to identify opportunities to work on challenging projects while on the job. Get started now.
—
★ Episode Notes & Links
★ Buy Get to Senior
★ Get to Senior Free Email Crash Course
Do you suffer from Slack notification anxiety? On-call schedules and deadlines giving you nightmares? Are your teammates nitpicking your code during code review?
Instead of quitting your job out of frustration and having to go through another round of technical interviews, what if you knew how to have a great relationship with your work?
Learn how to deal with imposter syndrome, unrealistic deadlines, and stop communicating passive-aggressively today!
Communicate effectively with your team and finish the day feeling good about what you've accomplished.
Listen to our conversation with Dr. Randy Paterson, a psychologist and author practicing in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of "The Assertiveness Workbook - How to express your ideas and stand up for yourself at work and in relationships."
He taught us effective skills we can use to feel better about our daily jobs as developers. Learn how to tell your manager that the project is running late without being the negative person in the team. And how to deal with conflict without freaking out.
Whether you've experienced any of these situations at work or have heard stories about it, it's always good to learn how to communicate better and avoid resentments. Enjoy the episode and share it with a friend or colleague!
Sign up for the hexdevs newsletter today and receive exercises, research-based techniques and actionable ideas to help you become an expert developer!
Episode links- Full episode Transcript and Show Notes
- Save your spot for the hexdevs Software Design Workshop and take the next right step for your career
- Dr. Randy Paterson's website
- The Assertiveness Workbook - How to express your ideas and stand up for yourself at work and in relationships
- Psychology Salon with Dr. Randy Paterson - YouTube channel
- First Person Plural: Emotional Intelligence & Beyond podcast
Are you working on Ruby on Rails Applications that are constantly on fire, overwhelmed by technical debt?
Instead of being a firefighter, what if you could be a happy programmer again and "Escape the tar pit"?
Learn exactly how to measure tech debt and take the right steps to immediately improve code quality!
Listen to our conversation with Ernesto Tagwerker (@etagwerker). He is the Founder & CTO at FastRuby.io & Ombu Labs.
He and his company are the maintainers of many code quality projects: skunk, rails_stats, metric_fu, and rubycritic, and many other important Ruby gems such as database_cleaner, bundler_leak, and next_rails.
He's an expert in upgrading and improving legacy Ruby on Rails applications. He taught us some step-by-step strategies you can follow to quickly measure and improve code quality.
Sign up for the hexdevs newsletter today and receive exercises, research-based techniques and actionable ideas to help you become an expert developer!
Episode links- Full episode Transcript and Show Notes
- Save your spot for the hexdevs Software Design Workshop and take the next right step for your career
- Read How to Improve Code Quality on a Ruby on Rails Application
- Ernesto Tagwerker on Twitter
- Podcast episode about maintaining shoulda_matchers with Gui Vieira
- RubyConf 2019 - Escaping The Tar Pit by Ernesto Tagwerker
- The Code Quality Challenge
- The Mythical Man-Month (book)
- Breaking Up the Behemoth by Sandi Metz
- Getting Empirical About Refactoring
- Code Quality Tools
- Makers vs Menders Talk by M. Scott Ford
- Surviving Legacy Code Workshop
- skunk.fyi (gem)
- skunk (gem)
- rails_stats (gem)
- metric_fu (gem)
- rubycritic (gem)
Do you feel frustrated with everything you need to learn as a developer?
When you can't learn a simple software development concept, build a simple feature, or find a simple bug, and you feel completely stuck. It's common to think that things will never 'click' for you.
Do you know these days when you feel like you're digging yourself into a hole?
What if you could use that energy to build up a ladder you can climb instead?
What if you had a strategy to get into the flow and focus on doing your best work as part of your coding journey?
The Thoughts and Questions from the Unstuck Guide for Developers will help you re-frame your perspective when you’re feeling in a rut on your coding journey.
Episode Notes and Free Cheat Sheet
Monica Lent is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She started coding before the age of ten, and haven’t stopped since. After working for more than 10 years in the tech industry as an engineer, tech lead and manager, she decided to quit her job and bootstrap a SaaS company full-time.
Show Notes & Transcription
Brian David Hall is an expert in conversion optimization. He's a software engineer by training, runs his own company, and is the host of the SaaS Experiments Podcast, where he talks to other experts in growth marketing. We talked about the unusual tech jobs he's had that helped him learn other skills beyond coding.
You can use your skills in other areas like Marketing and Sales to transition to a tech job instead of throwing away your current expertise. Learning how to code on top of your existing skills will give you superpowers!
If you want to transition into a tech job, you can start by solving problems for your current company. By doing this, you'll build a portfolio, get real-world experience, stand out from other candidates that only know how to code but have no experience in other areas.
You can also look for a "weird tech job", which is a job that involves coding but is not a developer role at a tech company.
You can find the coupon to Brian's new e-book on the Show Notes (link below) plus some highlights and transcripts!
Show Notes and Transcript
Michael Lynch is a software developer and blogger. He used to work as a software engineer at Google, but he decided to quit and now he's a solo founder, and blogs about his experience.
He's recently launched the course Hit the Front Page of Hacker News. The course teaches everything he has learned about Hacker News after getting many of his original blog posts to hit the front page. It covers the site's unique culture, how to choose topics, improve your writing, and what to do if your submission fails.
We also talked about going solo founder, and his financial independence journey.
Highlights
00:00 Intro
00:41 Who is Michael Lynch?
01:58 Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
03:04 Courses vs e-books
04:00 How many copies were sold
05:04 Beta-testing the course before launch day
07:19 Financial Independence and becoming an entrepreneur
08:16 Financial Independence and travelling
09:16 The shock of going back to a normal job
11:08 Planning for Financial Independence by building a business
12:37 Mr. Money Mustache, the 4% rule and Early Retirement
14:16 How much you make vs How much you save
14:33 What does he want to do when he retires early?
15:12 Life expenses and business expenses
15:49 Negotiating a big salary at Google by getting multiple job offers
18:30 Financial choices in your 20's and the optimum strategy
23:05 A good salary for boring work isn't fun
25:56 Bootstrapping is very different than the startup life
26:48 Having freedom and control over the direction of your product/business
28:40 Prioritizing and evaluating business ideas
31:05 How to do market research
32:57 Lessons after quitting Google: content strategy, marketing, and distribution
36:59 Keep yourself motivated and don't put too much pressure on yourself
39:49 Advice to anyone who wants to quit their job and start a business
42:36 Final remarks
Links from this episode
Show NotesHit The Front Page of Hacker News CourseMichael Lynch's Site
Michael Lynch's Twitter
Sign up for our newsletter to get the Highlights from our episodes
Listen to this episode to learn how Preetam Nath and Sankalp Jonna, co-founders of SuperLemon and DelightChat, started and grew a Shopify micro-SaaS to $30,000 monthly recurring revenue and more than 20,000 users.
They did all of that by themselves, the team was just Preetam and Sankalp, and Sankalp was the only engineer. As they say on their website, they are "A small team with a big heart".
SuperLemon is a WhatsApp plugin for Shopify stores serving over 20k users with 1.5k paying customers. It recently crossed 30k dollars in MRR, and all of this growth happened in about 14 months.
They are now building DelightChat, a customer support tool for small and medium-sized direct-to-consumer & e-commerce brands running lean teams, and recently started hiring and growing the team.
Highlights:
- How they did market research before writing any line of code and how being a little "impatient" with growth is a good thing for a founder
- How they scaled the app to 20k users with a team of 2 people (1 engineer) by using the Keep It Simple Silly (KISS) principle
- How distribution is the most important thing for a micro-SaaS and why they decided to target the Shopify marketplace
- How they prioritize features and make their customers happy while having a very lean team
- How to acquire customers every day for the next year
- Why you should build a business that allows you to have freedom and live a good life
- We also asked them if they ever received an offer to be acquired or to get VC funding
Links:
- DelightChat
- SuperLemon
- MicroSaaS Guide
- Preetam Nath's Twitter
- Sankalp Jonna's Twitter
- Sankalp's engineering blog
- Notes and Transcript
Learn how to develop a habit of learning in public, writing daily, and helping your audience. Chris Bongers has been sharing software development tips every day for the past 250 days on his blog Daily Dev Tips and on twitter.
Here's what we talked about:
- How Chris got started with writing
- How he wrote more than 250 articles during lockdown
- Which daily tips were the most popular
- How he comes up with ideas for Daily Dev Tips. Spoiler alert: by working in public, he gets lots of suggestions from his followers. Win-win!
- The benefits of learning in public and writing every day for Daily Dev Tips
- How he manages his energy levels and productivity, and avoids burnout
- What helped him grow his audience
- SEO and blogging tips for beginners
- Where should you share your blog posts: on Hashnode or dev.to?
- How hiking is the best activity for writers
Thanks to our sponsors:
- VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!
Links:
- Daily Dev Tips
- Chris Bongers on Twitter
- Blogging for Devs Community
- Subscribe to our newsletter
- Visit the hexdevs blog
Dmitrii Pashtuskii is a digital nomad living in Bali, and recently quit his job so he could travel and build a business.
This episode will be a little different: Dimitrii will be asking us questions about moving to Canada because he wants to apply for a visa very soon. In a future episode we will talk more about his projects and the life of a digital nomad.
If you ever wanted to move to Canada, this is the time. Canada is planning on bringing more than 1 million immigrants in the next 3 years!
We thought it would be the great opportunity for us to share our story and help others. We are also thinking of writing a short guide with more information, documents and resources we used in our visa process. In case you are interested, you can sign up for the wait list.
Here's what we discussed:
- Why we moved to Vancouver, Canada
- How VanHack helped Thiago get a job in Canada
- Why Dmitrii is planning to get a visa and settle down in Canada after living the nomad life
- How long did it take us to get our Permanent Residency through the BCPNP program
- How Express Entry works
- The tech community in Vancouver
- Life in Vancouver: Are people friendly? Is it easy to make new friends?
- Getting a Canadian Citizenship
Follow our podcast and sign up for our newsletter to get updates when we launch new episodes.
Thanks to our sponsors:
- VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!
Links from this episode:
- Moving to Canada - A guide for developers to move to Canada - join the wait list if you're interested :)
- Dmitrii's Twitter
- 12xstartup.com
- Learning Story - The community for people who learn in public
- Global Skills Strategy Visa
- Subscribe to our newsletter
- Visit the hexdevs blog
We are all competent in the team, but why do the projects always get delayed, why did we run into problems? We do sprints, we do sprint planning, something is not working. Shape Up helped me get the right balance between long-term and short-term planning.Does that ring a bell?
Our guest, Raymond Huang, told us how Shape Up helped his team get the right balance between long term and short-term planning and deliver better software.
As a developer, you know that estimates are hard, and you can't know everything ahead of time while planning. You also know that some of the 'agile' tools are not really helping. You've tried Scrum, but you are doing Kanban instead. The team struggles to ship and misses the deadline and we see all the failed goals on the sprint chart. Shape Up was written to help with that problem.
Shape Up is the latest book from Basecamp. It's a guide on how they do Product Strategy.
In this episode, we learned how Raymond applied the ideas from Shape Up at Unbounce.
We asked questions such as:
- Would Shape Up work in my company?
- How do I convince my team to try it?
- How to start adopting Shape Up?
- Do I need to follow all the steps described in the book?
- If I had to choose only one takeaway from Shape Up, which one would it be?
- How do I shape a cycle?
- Will I finally get rid of my team's Tech Debt Backlog?
If you enjoyed this episode, let Raymond now. Don't forget to follow our podcast and sign up for our newsletter to get updates when we launch new episodes.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad, even during the pandemic!
Links from this episode:
Raymond Huang Linkedin
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Check out our new website. We have a blog now!
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
"Most startup founders don't want to prove themselves wrong. There's an inherent bias, they hear what they want to hear, and they go seeking the information to prove themselves right because they've attached themselves to their idea." -- Kenny MacKenzie Kenny is an expert in product-market fit and market validation and has been mentoring startup founders for many, many years.
After creating his own startup, raising money, building a product, launching it and seeing it fail because of a lack of product-market fit, Kenny spent loads of energy trying to reflect on those mistakes so he could understand the causes of startup failure and the tactical and strategic frameworks and practices that will improve the chances of business success.
He identified very common types of cognitive biases that early-stage founders will face, such as a lack of product-market fit, false positives, and not knowing what problem you're trying to solve or who you're trying to help. These things lead to errors of judgment that will surely kill a startup.
If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to act like a scientist/private investigator, find the right problems, experiment and learn from customers before you write any line of code or build anything. This will improve your chances of being a successful startup founder.
"You're not a developer, you're not an engineer, you're not an entrepreneur. You're a scientist/private investigator. Think of the market opportunity as a crime, there is a criminal out in the loose and they keep hurting all these different people. You're trying to understand that criminal's pattern of behavior. The criminal is the market need. You're investigating, not trying to force your will on the world. Once you understand a meaningful problem that people have, then you can start being the visionary." -- Kenny MacKenzie
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Kenny MacKenzie on Linkedin Find Better Problems Worth Solving - Ash Maurya
The Mom Test Book - Rob Fitzpatrick
The Value Proposition Canvas - strategyzer
Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice - Anthony Ulwick
Outcome Driven Innovation - Anthony UlwickVisit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
This is the second part of our interview with Fabiano where we talk about his new job in Munich - Germany, and also about the visa process, working in Europe, and the challenges he's facing now, like learning the German language.
Fabiano decided to move abroad after being the CTO of Magnetis for many years. He now works as a Senior Fullstack Engineer for Shore - the leading provider of cloud-based business solutions for small and medium-sized companies.
He gave some tips for people who want to find a job and move to Germany, and talked about his new life in Munich.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to tell Fabiano about it. We are sure he would love to hear from our listeners. And if you want to move to Germany to work with Fabiano, Shore is hiring, so check out this episode to learn more about their relocation package and their engineering culture.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Fabiano's Twitter
Fabiano Beselga is our first guest for 2020!
He co-founded Magnetis, one of the most successful fintech startups in Brazil, and served as the CTO for over 7 years. Magnetis is a robot advisor startup who grew 200% every year over the past few years, and now has more than 10 thousand clients, USD$90M under management and 90 people on the team. Widely recognized as one of the best places to work, Magnetis is a great example of a company that successfully adopted a remote work culture.
Fabiano built the engineering team from scratch and all the processes and culture around it, making sure to create a diverse team composed of people coming from different backgrounds and having different levels of experience. We talked about creating and managing a fast-growing team while also scaling the business and driving innovation. He always believed that establishing a good culture would lead to a great team and a great product, and the success of his team is a reflection of that. He also thinks that CTOs should focus on building the culture from the start.
If you want to become a C-Level executive or become a better leader, check out this episode. Fabiano shared a lot of great advice on how to make sure you are giving the support your team needs and how to establish good practices, deliver better products, and how to hire well.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Fabiano's Twitter
Smart and Getting Things Done
Magnetis Backstage Blog
Guru-SP Meetup
This short episode contains a couple of special notes. We just wanted to thank you for all your support this year! We hope we can continue learning together in 2020. Happy Holidays!
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Amed Rodriguez is a Senior Software Engineer who has extensive experience with lean startup and has developed software for many startups in San Francisco. He is originally from Mexico and is now living in Vancouver.
After leading a Lean Startup product development company for many years, he co-founded a startup in the health sector which got an interview with Y-Combinator (W15). After not getting accepted into YC, he started working as an engineer for companies in the Bay Area.
We talked about his experience of trying to get a work permit to be able to live in the US, and why he eventually decided to immigrate to Canada instead. He also shared some tips on how to get more startup clients and projects when you're working as a freelancer and how he's found jobs in the US and Canada.
We also talked about the main differences between living and working as a developer in Monterrey, San Francisco and Vancouver, and the challenges of working onsite after many years of remote work.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Amed's Linkedin
Lendesk is hiring in Vancouver, BC!
Have you ever thought about contributing to open-source projects but don't know where to start or which project to choose? Gui Vieira has been the maintainer of the popular 'shoulda-matchers' gem since 2017.
We talked about the job of being an open-source maintainer. not only that, but we also discussed TDD, as well as his entrepreneurship journey in the past, and the process of moving to Canada.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
shoulda-matchers gem
Open Source Friday
Lendesk is hiring in Vancouver, BC!
Linda Peng is a frontend developer and a musician. She graduated in Economics and Public Policy (Social Sciences), and she was always interested in social work. She worked at a non-profit for a couple of years, where she had the opportunity to switch to a web developer job in 2013.
Now she is a front-end developer and is the creator and maintainer of CodeBuddies.org. Inspired by the idea of remote meetups, she created CodeBuddies to help everyone learn to code together no matter where they are. 100% open-source, people used CodeBuddies to organize more than 1289 hangouts sessions.
We also talked about her musical background. In October her Kickstarter campaign was baked and she launched her first album, called "Violin.play() - Code-inspired violin music". Linda generously shared a secret code for our listeners so they can listen to the entire album, so make sure to listen to this episode and share it with your developer friends.
To give you a taste, some of the songs included are "A walk through the binary tree forest", "What is this", "Callback Hell", "Superclass" and more.
We discussed how putting your side projects out there helps you meet new people and achieve unexpected results.
If you enjoyed this episode and Linda's album, make sure to let her know, we're sure she would love to hear your feedback! :)
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!Linda's twitter
Linda's Youtube channelCodeBuddies
Violin.play() - don't forget to get the secret code during the episode :)
Linda's Kickstarter
Originally from Panama, Andrea Bernal is a Computer Systems Engineer with a Master's in Supply Chain Management. She lived and worked in the US after winning a Fulbright Scholarship, and has extensive experience with Portfolio Management and Finance. Nowadays, she lives in Vancouver and works as a Project Manager for Telus.
Andrea is on her way to financial independence, making extra money on the side from doing nutritional consulting work. She is a minimalist and a member of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence/Retire Early).
She worked as an Assistant Producer to the Netflix documentary "What The Health", and runs a very popular Youtube channel called "Plantae Revolution" about plant-based nutrition.
In this episode, Andrea shared with us some effective ideas on how to take care of your money and your health, and how to be more productive and intentional about your life. We talked about investments, Financial Independence and Early Retirement, ETFs, and Minimalism. She plans to become financially independent in the next 10 years.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Andrea's Linkedin
Plantae Revolution: Andrea's Youtube channel
Questrade
WealthBar
Stephanie and Celestian's Blog
Game Changers
What the Health
Cowspiracy
Dominion
Keith Bingman is a Principal Engineer at Unbounce, where he leads frontend development. He learned javascript by himself 15 years ago when he was working as a photographer. He is originally from the US, lived in Germany, and now lives in Vancouver, Canada.
We talked about being self-taught and how to improve yourself as a developer by building personal projects.
He also talked about his experience of doing "big software rewrites" in the past and the present, moving a project from other technologies to React. We also talked about Elm, Rust and the future of frontend development.
According to him, you need to be very persistent when you want to introduce good practices to an established team and you need to lead by example. That helped him unlock the potential of the engineering team by introducing testing, pair-programming and mentoring. He has been a mentor for a very long time and is very passionate about it:
"Pair programming is mentoring just by itself. I always learn something new by pair-programming, it doesn't matter how experienced they are".
As a Principal Engineer, he tries to make sure he helps the team to unblock themselves and that everyone is mentoring others from the get-go.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack helps great tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Keith's Linkedin
Jenny Chan is a digital nomad, and a Full Stack Developer. She runs a very successful community for female developers called Women in Web Dev.
In this episode, she gave some tips for those who are planning to do a bootcamp, how she got her first job after finishing it, the importance of putting yourself out there and making connections, and how she got her first remote job as a developer.
Jenny shared some tips on how to find a job as a junior developer and how her community helps women start their careers as web developers, how to get a remote job and how to be productive while working remotely.
Thanks to our sponsors:
VanHack. VanHack helps tech talent get jobs abroad.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Jenny's Women in Web Dev community
Indie Hacker Vancouver Meetup
Antoine Ponsard is a Software Developer with a Master's in Computer Science and is a specialist in Human-Computer Interaction. We talked about his experience of moving from France to Vancouver to pursue his Master's Degree at UBC. He currently works with front-end development at Asana, a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work.
If you've been thinking about studying abroad, listen to our conversation because Antoine shared some interesting advice on how to get a scholarship.
Asana is also hiring, so make sure you check out their job openings.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Asana Jobs
We talked with Ulisses about migrating Ruby projects to Elixir while he was working at Plataformatec alongside the creator of the Elixir language, the process of writing his book and why you should learn Functional Programming, and how he moved toEstonia in Northern Europe.
Enjoy it!
PS: only Brazilians listeners will get the reference @ 16:20 ;)
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Buy Ulisses book!
Ulisses website
Ulisses Twitter
Erlang discussion with Brian
Elixir jobs
Coingaming Careers
VanHack has helped more than 700 developers get a visa-sponsored job in Canada and Europe.
In this episode, Ilya Brotzky, the founder and CEO of VanHack talks about the challenges of running a remote global company, how he learned from his mistakes and built a very successful business, and what are the goals for VanHack in the next few months.
He also gives more details about some great companies that are hiring international talent, and how you too can get a job abroad through VanHack.
Links from this episode
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Sign up for VanHack
VanHack Events page
Justin Jackson's post about the ice cream analogy
Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, once said: "Erlang is 'write once, run forever'".
Grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea and listen to this amazing conversation with Brian St. Amand, an expert Erlang software engineer. Erlang is a powerful yet not so popular tool for building fault-tolerant distributed systems. We talked about how to start learning Erlang, how to build good and maintainable software, and some interesting philosophical discussion about the human side of software development or, as Brian said, "the liberal art of programming".
This episode is also a tribute to Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, who passed away a few months ago. Thank you, Joe.
Links from this episode:
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Learn You Some Erlang for great good
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Cowboy Open source project
Brian's Linkedin
Gleidy Mendoza is a Front-End and UX Developer originally from Venezuela. She started working with Java but when Ajax came out, she fell in love with the possibilities of working with UX to deliver a better product for her clients.
She first came to Vancouver to study English. After sending her resume to many companies here, one company offered her a job and a Work Permit. Since 2010, she's been working in Canada, and she's been working for Unbounce since January 2019.
On this episode, we talk about working on the frontend, the importance of mentoring and how adopting practices like Pair Programming in your company can help your team grow faster.
Links from this episode:
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Gleidy's Linkedin
Unbounce website
Links from this episode:
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!
Stella's website
Ruby Conf Colombia 2019
Unbounce
Welcome to the hexdevs Podcast, the podcast for the smart developer. This is our first episode. We talk about what you can expect from this podcast and how you can find us. Hope you're excited to join us.
Visit our Podcast page and subscribe to our newsletter!