The Ship It Podcast
How to ship software, from the front lines. We talk with software developers about their craft, developer tools, developer productivity and what makes software development awesome. Hosted by your friends at DEPT®. AKA shipit.io
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Episodes
Tuesday Nov 26, 2019
Tuesday Nov 26, 2019
In episode 2, host Brandon Aaskov (Principal Software Developer, Rocket Insights) talks with Rocket Insights software developers Brian Manning, Jon Principe about the challenge of Developer phone screens and how we go about conducting them. We then move on to discuss whether or not to use homework as part of the interview process. As usual, we end with picks and then go into an extended discussion of Elixir and Phoenix!
Topics:
0:00 - Intros
1:00 - What we do for phone screens
4:50 - What should you focus on in a phone screen?
8:50 - Should we give out homework? When?
11:45 - (Justified) Resistance to homework
15:20 - Updating existing codebases instead of new code
18:30 - Picks!
Brandon - Bandersnatch
Brian - Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neill
Jon - Elixir Phoenix Live Views
21:00 - The magic of Elixir and the return of Server Side Rendering!?
Tuesday Nov 26, 2019
Tuesday Nov 26, 2019
In our first episode, host Brandon Aaskov (Principal Software Developer, Rocket Insights) and Matt Merrill (Principal Software Developer, Rocket Insights) pontificate on what it means to be a backend developer in 2019. We delve into what "Full Stack" means, why you need to wait to scale, and a lot about interviewing!
Topics (including links to picks from the end):
0:00 - Intros
1:30 - What's the line between a front end and backend dev? Bootstrapping applications is important. Getting things going from scratch.
Image talked about at 4:30
5:45 - Where backend dev blurs into devops.
6:30 - Hiring: Unicorns are hard to hire. What questions to ask on a backend interview.
10:15 - Walking into an existing backend codebase is hard
11:45 - Level of developer experience
12:30 - Ruby on Rails and choices already being made for you
15:00 - The demise of the backend developer? (Firebase/Backend As A Service, headless CMS's and DevOps)
20:00 - Start a backend cheaply and scale when you know more
22:30 - The art of a good API
25:00 - Back to backend interviews
26:30 - Soft skills are important
27:30 - Information hoarding and simplification of a backend
28:45 - We're horrible at math
29:15 - Picks:
Code Sandbox - https://codesandbox.io/
RunJS - https://runjs.dev/
The Unix Philosophy writeup - https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch01s06.html
Tuesday Nov 26, 2019