Building With People For People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast

The software world is vast and ever changing. Cutting through the noise of language fads and building a system that meets your organization’s goals, is maintainable, scalable, performant and clean is no easy feat. It is the Principal Engineers that stand at the helm and steer the ship in the right direction. Today we dive into the world of one Principal Engineer steering the ship for an iconic bra...

Ding ding... It's 3 am and your phone has just sent you multiple P1 alerts. Your site is down and you need to find out what the issue is and fast, but your log data is all over the place, metrics on your services are sub par and it's really hard to know where to go to find the issue. What if there was a way to leverage AI to help you make sense of your data in a clear and concise way, maki...

You know that feeling when you are in the zone and time seems to standstill? You’re on fire, completely focused, and distractions vanish? That feeling is FLOW.  In today's world with constant interruptions and demands on our attention, achieving flow can feel impossible. But what if there was a way to cultivate this state and optimize your productivity? That's where "flow as a practic...

Metrics are hard. Identifying which metrics to measure is even harder. So how do you get started? And how do you know when you have achieved true developer productivity zen? Like anything in life the path to mastery is a journey and today we are joined by a passionate staff engineer from Meta to share with us his theory on a developer productivity maturity model which paints a wonderful mental pic...

Our work could be more fun if…. My engineers could be happier if… Is this the right problem to solve?... Software development is all about solving hard problems in fun and creative ways and asking these questions in the work we do allows us to think more creatively. Our guest, Brit Myers , loves to ask these types of questions and solve them with her high performing teams.  Today, we dig into how...

Today on Building With People For People we delve into what and how we make our workspaces not just productive, but also joyful. Have you ever wondered what elements contribute to that feeling of fulfillment in your job? Is it flow state, or the immediacy of feedback, or the camaraderie of an exceptional team? These aspects are pivotal for anyone's career satisfaction and effectiveness, no mat...

Products are designed and created for their users right? Well at least they should be. A 2021 McKinsey Global Digital Sentiment Insights survey sites that 56% of users of digital services state they are dissatisfied by the user experience.  Today, we are joined by Satyam Kantamneni , a master of design thinking to shed some light on why this might be and to share his insights on how we can create...

Developer Productivity Engineering is becoming more and more a mainstream idea. But what does it mean and how does it apply to me? Today we talk with an engineering wizard, Max Kanat-Alexander about how his company, LinkedIn, thinks about developer productivity. Using his team as framing we will investigate methodologies and approaches he and his team use that enables happier and more productive e...

Your password must contain at least one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, a special character and be at least 8 characters long. These directions should be all too familiar to you when creating a new password for some new account you are signing up for. Have you ever stopped to think about why these requirements exist? Today, we are joined by, Laura Bell Main , a passionate cyber...

For front end engineers there are so many frameworks that abstract away the actual HTML sometimes making accessibility and web fundamentals an afterthought. Accessibility in 2023 must be a 1st class citizen. How do you know if you are making things accessible for your users?  Today we are joined by, Derek Fons , a passionate engineer to discuss building a community with empathy, web fundamentals,...

When you think of Kubernetes or Docker, I bet empathy is not the first word that comes to mind. Today, I am joined by, Kelsey Hightower whose passion it is to bring empathy to work everyday and we talk about how to reframe our approach to building tools for humans, learning from the physical world, config management, containerization and more. Kelsey earned his CompTIA A+ certification and began h...

What is your tech stack of choice these days? Have you tried the HOWL stack? Do you have front end clients that are bloated, have huge bundle sizes and have complicated tooling? Are you having to write business logic on the server AND the front end? The HOWL stack might be just for you. The HOWL stack is Hypermedia On Whatever (backend) you’d Like. Hypertext you say? Yeah you know like text displa...

There are so many different types of career paths in the world of software, how do you know which path to take? Would you like wearing many hats (not just software), working for yourself and being exposed to lots of different types of tech? If so, maybe software consulting is the right path. In today’s episode we are joined by a React Native Mobile consultant who will answer questions like, how do...

The tech landscape is exploding with AI tools to help you automate all sorts of workflows like code completion with Github Copilot or personal assistants like Chat GPT. But what about if you are a content creator with hours of recorded video content, what tools exist for you? “Content is King” so you have to be putting out diverse content continuously. What if you had a tool that automagically cre...

When you design and build a web application for scale, you need to make a lot of decisions and small details can add up to create massive impact. So when you build a web application how do you know what framework to use, which cloud provider to choose or database solution to use? Relational, Document, Graph? You may also need users to login to your site but how do you authenticate them? Do you use...

As a developer have you ever worked on an API endpoint but you can’t easily find the documentation for the API to see how pieces work, or can’t find the specific sequence diagram on how your domains interact, or how about using some clunky outdated internal tool that you have to use to compile your code, well your user experience is suffering, more specifically your developer experience is poor. T...

TypeScript here, TypeScript there, everywhere a little TypeScript! Grab your cloak and wand and join us on this wizarding journey!! That’s right today’s episode is all things TypeScript. We dive into TypeScript and uncover its true power of catching errors early, running anywhere javascript does, and giving you type inference all with the help form a true master of the language. We also touch on d...

How long does it take to get your code into the hands of your customers? Do you manually copy your files to a production server? If you answered longer than a day and yes then the code deployment product, Semaphore , is what you need. Today, we chat with, Marko Anastasov, the co-founder of Semaphore, a code integration and delivery platform, about the inception, creation, and his team’s learning j...

Production is down!! Faulty code was released!! Users are losing your trust by the second!! Ugh, how did this happen and how could this have been prevented? By writing the right tests! Today, Jedi test master, Kent C. Dodds , joins us as we discuss all things testing, from the types of tests in your tool belt, how to write the right tests, when to run them, tools you can and should use, and ways t...

In today’s digital world you must have an online presence to be effective. Not only a presence but a unified, beautiful, and fast user experience. How do companies achieve consistency across thousands of pages? How do different stakeholders across the organization gain visibility into the capabilities of a system? One way is through a single design system which essentially is a set of standards in...

Let’s say you work on a team and you have a bunch of services, how do you share knowledge about the important parts of how things work? I would hope documentation is the answer and not “tribal knowledge”. But good documentation can be hard. So is communication and so is continuing to grow your career when there are so many directions you could go.  In today’s show we are joined by a guest who...

Have you used Google search today? Or listened to music recommended to you? The results and suggestions you receive from these types of services are powered by Data Science . In today’s world, big data and insights are the new currency. While it's the machines that ultimately do the number crunching and provide the data, it's the human touch behind the scenes that make it all possible. In today’s...

Are you just learning to code or a self-taught developer? Need help with structured direction in your learning journey? Then you have to check out The Coder Coder !!  If neither apply check this resource out anyway, there is something for everyone. In today’s episode we examine the world of learning how to code from the perspective of the teacher and dive into what it’s like to sit in the dri...

How are you ensuring your employees are happy and will stay with your company? Your employees are the most important piece to your business and as such you must learn what they want in their and career and enable it. In today’s discussion we focus on empathy as the future of business in tech, why it’s important for developers to gain business acumen for greater success in their role, how a new pro...

A Software Architect’s role is to contain complexity and an Engineer’s role is to manage optionality, but what is a Product Owner’s role? To perform at your best you must understand your value creation responsibilities. In this episode we’ll explore the primary responsibilities of key roles in software development, the three crucial values that provide significant boosts in morale and productivity...