Acima Development

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, the panelists join forces and discuss the things that scare them in code and how to avoid these pitfalls. Mike begins by recounting his experience with a fast-growing startup that used a poorly managed customer management system. This system lacked version control, searchability, and a test environment, which forced developers to tweak code in prod...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, the panel delves into the topic of changing programming languages in applications. They reflect on their experiences transitioning between languages like COBOL, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, highlighting the complexities and costs associated with such endeavors. They stress the difficulty of converting large, established applications to new languages due to...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, host Mike starts by sharing an anecdote about his three-year-old son, emphasizing the importance of guidance and support in learning. This sets the stage for a discussion on onboarding new employees, highlighting the similarities between guiding a child and mentoring new hires. Mike notes that new employees, like his son, have potential but require...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike and the team delve into the importance of breaking down projects into manageable iterations to avoid stagnation and inefficiency. Mike shares a story about a past experience with a developer who struggled to produce releasable code, which led to the realization that breaking projects into smaller milestones can significantly enhance workflow a...

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, Mike and the panel talk about the intricacies of project estimation, sharing personal anecdotes and professional experiences. Mike begins with a story from his childhood, illustrating how his father's ability to estimate distances accurately influenced his understanding of estimation as a skill that can be developed with practice. He draws parallel...

The panel delves into the challenges and strategies of onboarding new employees to discuss the importance of communication, mentorship, and understanding context. Mike shares a story from his construction days in New Orleans, where he learned the value of being paired with an experienced team member. This buddy system helped him overcome communication barriers and adapt more quickly to his new env...

On this episodes, the panelists dive into common myths surrounding software development. Kicking off with a reference to Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month," the conversation challenges the notion that adding more developers to a lagging project will speed up its completion. The discussion quickly expands to explore contexts where adding skilled, senior developers might indeed be beneficial, dra...

The panelists discuss innovation and collaboration, particularly in engineering and beyond. Mike kicks off with a personal anecdote about his musical education, highlighting the limitations of conventional music lessons that focus heavily on theory and reading music, rather than fostering creativity and improvisation. This experience ties into his broader theme of innovation, suggesting that tradi...

The panelists explore the tension between conformity and autonomy within software development teams and the balance of standardization and flexibility in coding practices. The conversation revolves around their efforts at Acima to standardize pull request assignments and the dual roles in code reviews, highlighting their team's unique approach of using a chatbot compared with other teams using Git...

This podcast episode from The Acima Developer Podcast crew dives into the concept of developer habits, focusing on how habits are formed and their importance in software development. The discussion begins with a recap of the previous episode, emphasizing the "four laws" of habit formation—making it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying—as presented by Justin. These principles are highlighted a...

In this episode of the Acima Developers podcast, the panel talks about the intricacies of habit formation within the context of software engineering, sparked by Justin's interest in James Clear's Atomic Habits . Justin brings up how Clear's work resonated with his desire to become a better engineer and begins by identifying Clear's four laws of habit formation: making it obvious, attractive, easy,...

In this episode of The Acima Development Podcast, host Mike Challis introduces a discussion on code reviews by drawing an analogy between creating music and coding while sharing personal stories about feedback in musical endeavors to illustrate the importance of constructive criticism. These anecdotes highlight the parallels between receiving feedback on creative projects, like music, and technica...

The podcast begins with Mike sharing his fondness for smoothies and drawing an analogy to Git, a distributed database. He compares the irreversible process of making a smoothie to the irreversible nature of operations in Git. Mike explains that Git, emerging from the same project that gave us Linux, is a distributed database that allows information sharing and verification across geographic region...

The panel explores the connection between programming and music. To begin, Mike shares how his passion for music influenced his career switch from molecular biology to software development, and each panelist reveals their musical experiences, ranging from choir participation and band membership to a keen interest in diverse music genres and car audio systems. The discussion then delves into the si...

The panelists discuss work-life balance and avoiding burnout. Mike shares his personal experience of burnout from continuous long hours at startups and the positive impact of transitioning to a four-day workweek, which surprisingly increased productivity. The group identifies factors contributing to burnout, such as excessive workload, lack of autonomy, and value misalignment with the company. The...

The panelists discuss Ruby, a primary programming language at Acima, notable for its popularity in startups and major companies like Shopify and GitHub. They attribute its success to the Ruby on Rails framework and the language's community support. Mike shares a personal story to parallel the complexity of understanding Ruby, linking it to its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), who views Ruby as...

The panelists discuss the nature of debugging in software development. What even is a bug? Various perspectives are shared, highlighting that bugs often result from unexpected behavior in software despite the software doing exactly what it was programmed to do. Sometimes bugs, sometimes seen as errors, can become features or lead to new insights. The discussion shifts to more philosophical and met...

This week, the panelists discuss the best Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for beginners. Eddy emphasized the importance of an IDE being ready to use post-installation, reducing the need for additional configurations or extensions. Steve advocated for a minimalist UI to help beginners, suggesting simpler interfaces are more approachable. The conversation covers various IDEs, with Visual St...

The panelists explore the value of learning new programming languages. The conversation begins with personal stories about their first programming experiences, discussing languages like Logo and BASIC and, later, more complex ones such as Java, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Haskell, and Python. They emphasize how each language forces a developer to think differently about problems, highlighting the s...

The panel dissects the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence. They unravel how machine learning algorithms function, using the game of Pac-Man to break down complex topics like reinforcement learning and reward-based systems. Mike dives deeper into reinforcement learning, explaining how it operates on reward signals that assess the value of a series of actions over time. Dave chime...

In this episode, the panel dives into the nuances of learning and developing as a coder. They discuss various approaches to learning, such as "committing" code every day, even if it's just a tiny chunk, to build fluency and comfort with programming. Mark mentions the trend of long online tutorials aimed to take someone from "zero to master" and the varied success of these methods. However, they st...

The panelists discuss the role of a team lead in a software development context. Mike shares a personal story about a family hike and draws parallels between being a team lead and guiding a group of hikers. The discussion revolves around the challenges and benefits of being a team lead, considering factors such as size, experience levels, and the balance between technical contributions and leaders...

The panelists continue for part two of their discussion on testing code with RSpec! ✨ Check out Part I here! ✨ Mike kicks things off with a maze metaphor, illustrating the importance of navigating code branches. He emphasizes the branch-focused approach for comprehensive test coverage and cautions against excessive testing of external libraries while highlighting the significance of testing publ...

Panelists discuss testing with RSpec, focusing on issues like mixed idioms and non-idiomatic code. They explore the importance of following the framework's conventions and using easily understood exemplary data. The concept of cognitive load is introduced, likening it to Newton's law of gravity applied to code, and they emphasize locality and scope in defining variables. The conversation also delv...

The conversation revolves around the importance of mentorship in various aspects of life and career. Dominick compares mentors to influential figures like sports coaches and speaks about his father's guidance in his career choices. Eddy expands on this, likening mentors to a "cheat sheet to life," helping to avoid mistakes, and assisting with connections and encouragement. The discussion emphasize...