Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

Arlan Hamilton is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a seed investment fund that backs high-potential, underrepresented startup founders. She talks to Scott about how starting a fund works, how much money one needs to invest, and demystifies many of the buzzwords around investing in tech today!

Nick Farmer is best known for developing the Belter constructed language (conlang) for Syfy’s The Expanse. What's involved in creating a convincing constructed language? How real are these languages?

Scott talks to web developer and entrepreneur Kronda Adair about her business and her recent failure. How do projects fail and what do we do with that failure? Can failure be a motivator or does it slow us down? How can we turn lemons into lemonade as technologists?

Scott sits down and talks with Lyza Gardner, CTO of Cloud Four and long-time web expert, about her recent explorations into hardware using the Johnny-Five Framework. You can control Arduinos and other devices and make robots with brains written with Node.js and JavaScript! Is this the framework we've been waiting for?

Erin Tomson left Pixar after 13 years to pursue something totally new! Her hardware startup called "Modulo" brings plug and play flexibility to the world of microcontrollers like Arduino and Particle. How did she get started and make the move from 3D software to modular hardware?

This week Scott talks to to electrical engineer Laura Hughes from Arrow.com. Laura specializes in lighting and power supply design and can solve pretty much any problem with an LED. Laura schools Scott on a number of electrical issues and they come up with an epic new project idea!

Simone Giertz is a Maker, a robotics enthusiast and surprisingly (her words!) a non-engineer. She's become somewhat of an expert in sh*tty robots and we love her for it. Also, she happens to be Swedish but sounds totally American just to confuse us. Scott talks about how she gets her inspiration and how she got started!

Captain Brent Chapman has a BS from the West Point, an MS in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon, and has been tearing electronics apart since he was four. Today, Cpt Chapman works for the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) at Moffett Field and puts those skills to work. In his spare time, he tinkers, creates, and helps others do the same.

Scott talks to Lauren Tan, a Senior Developer at Dockyard, about her excitement with the Ember Framework. Her talk on "Ambitious UX for Ambitious Apps" covers new techniques like Reactive UX that are made easy with the Ember.js framework.

Afua Richardson joins Scott for this creative episode. Afua is a comic artist who has worked for Marvel, Image Comics, Top Cow, and many more. Her work on "Genius" was nominated for a Glyph Award. She's also a singer/songwriter and an accomplished musician. Afua and Scott explore how comics are made, who owns them, and how creators can express themselves in the digital age.

Scott sits with fellow Type 1 Diabetic Dana M. Lewis about the Open Artificial Pancreas System that she and her husband Scott Leibrand created. As other commercial entities race to "close the loop" for diabetics, how did two regular folks control diabetes with off-the-shelf parts? Dana demystifies the technology behind this software-managed diabetes solution.

What's it like building and scaling a mobile game to millions of users and billions of transactions? Does the cloud really allow you to "not worry about scaling" and just focus on the game? We'll hear from Kalle Hiitola, the CTO of Next Games, about their experience scaling The Walking Dead, an app that got over a million downloads in its launch weekend!

Scott talks to Kris Rothe about the best way to get started making your own video games! How technical do you need to be? Should you start with Unity, GameMaker, or something else? We'll hear about all this and more from an experience game creator!

Scott talks to Damian Edwards about ASP.NET Core 1.0 (previously ASP.NET 5). How freaked out should developers be? What's changed and what hasn't for this new version of .NET and the ASP.NET Web Framework?

Scott talks to enterprise developer, now tech CEO, Tiffany Mikell about the challenges and rewards of software development in a startup. What's it like to transition from large teams to smaller agile teams? How do you manage security and ops without dedicated teams? What are architectural discussions like with non-technical cofounders?

Scott talks to Ben Adams, the CTO of Illyriad Games, about their new massively multiplayer space game "Age of Ascent." Why is it interesting? It's massively bigger than any other game and it's written with web technologies like JavaScript and WebGL. Can they pull this off and scale?

Stacy Kirk is the CEO of QualityWorks, a node.js-focused QA company, a 20 year software development veteran, and the creator of nodeqa.io. Stacy is a graduate of Stanford and also coaches two Lego League Robotics teams! Scott and Stacy talk about the lack of respect that Quality Assurance has been getting over the last several years.

Scott talks to Data Visualization expert Irene Ros. When she isn't contributing to the Miso Project, teaching her d3.js class, or working on making OpenVis Conf the best data visualization conference it can be, she's working on projects that focus on creating engaging interactive visual displays of information.

John Henry is with Cofound Harlem, a startup accelerator dedicated to building 100 new companies in Harlem by 2020. What does an accelerator look like today? Do companies just need startup cash, or is there a more innovative and effective way to bootstrap tomorrow's companies today?

Kyle Wiens is the CEO and Co-founder of IFixit. IFixit is kind of the Wikipedia of Repair Guides and Teardowns. Scott and Kyle talk about why it's important to be able to fix your own hardware. Do we have the right of repair? Why are so many consumer electronics designed without repairability in mind?

Scott talks with Richard Campbell in this episode of Hanselminutiae LIVE. We did this show on Google Hangouts and you can watch the video at Scott's youtube at http://youtube.com/shanselman if you'd like. We talk about technology, gadgets, new directions, and industry trends.

Greg Borenstein is a computer vision expert, game designer, and author. He's currently a researcher in the Playful Systems Group at the MIT Media Lab. He also works as the futurist for the TV Series "Minority Report." The show tries to stay true to the universe of the movie while imagining a realistic (and socially conscious) future in 2065.

Scott talks to Julius Sweetland, developer of OptiKey. OptiKey is an assistive on-screen keyboard which runs on Windows. It is designed to be used with a low cost eye-tracking device to bring keyboard control, mouse control and speech to people with motor and speech limitations, such as people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) / Motor Neuron Disease (MND).

Poornima Vijayashanker was a founding engineer at Mint.com and now is building an education company called Femgineer. Her new book "Present! The Techie's Guide to Engaging an Audience" speaks to the importance of speaking up. Poornima talks to Scott about why speaking up and improving your communication skills can revitalize your career in tech.

Kyle Simpson, aka @getify, is the Curriculum Manager for MakerSquare and has created a series of books called You Don't Know JS. You can read the You Don't Know JS book series for free on GitHub, but we know you'll want to buy them after you hear this interview. Kyle sets Scott straight and explains why Scott doesn't know JavaScript. It's true, he really doesn't...at least not as well as he though...