Category: Podcast

This week Ben and I just chit chat about some goings on around NYC in technology. I kinda talk a lot this episode.

Show Notes

• iPhone 5
• Maker Fair was this weekend
• 3D Printing
• Micro controllers !!!! (obviously my favorite topic)
• Arduino
• DIY: An iPhone controlled A/C
• Raspberry Pi (only place I’ve found that has them in stock is here
• The EPA was at Maker Fair doing great stuff with micro controllers and UAV Helicopters
• Adobe’s new open source font for coding: Source Code Pro
• Siri and the future of computer interface
• The US Government has open sourced some things
• AskPatents launches
• My question about risk to engineers for looking at patents

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This week Ben and I talk with Thoughtworks developer Brian Guthrie about learning computer science, agile development and Test Driven Development.

Show Notes

• Khan Academy revamped CS program
• Inventing on Principle
• Steve Yeggie’s Conservative vs Liberal programmers rant
• Jonathan Haidt on the moral mind. (conservatives vs liberals on morality, very insightful)
• Jim offer’s up that it might be good to write custom plugins for your IDE that are specific to your office
• Sublime Build files for common build systems
• TDD (finally)

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This week Ben and I talk with Author, Entrepreneur and owner of careercup.com, former Google hiring committee member Gayle Laakmann McDowell about her two books: Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume about how to get a job at the big tech companies

Show Notes

• Interview preparation for Software Engineers looking to get into Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.
• How do technical interviews work at the large tech companies?
• Resume tips for the professional programmer!
• On MBAs
• The Seattle Anti-Freeze

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This week Ben and I talk with indy game developer 2TonStudios about their new iOS game: Ninjaboy

Show Notes

• Why program video games?
• Performance and how video games are the indy 500 of programming
• Carmack’s Keynote
• Optimizing the challenge curve.
• Why choose Unity?
• Tried MonoTouch and MonoGame for the initial port from Windows Phone 7
• How’s the $0.99 price point working? (no longer first marketing, we took too long to get the show out)
• How much does marketing play a role?
• Why is the price point so low for iOS games, when DS games are ~$30?
• Can’t pay for updates? Use In App Purchases
• How should people start? Should they try and get into digipen?

So go download it!

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Ben and I chat quickly about what happened this week at Knight Capital. How a software bug took a profitable company to bankruptcy in 1 hour.

Show Notes

• Technical explanation on Nanex
• John Carmack’s 2012 Quakecon keynote

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This week Ben and I get a chance to geek out with Chris Smith, author of Programming F#, about the recently completed second edition. Chris is a former SDET on the Microsoft F# team, and currently works for Google on developer tools.

Show Notes

• Lots of stuff about F#
• History of functional programming
• What are monads?
• What are you doing at the Google?
• Google closure compiler *terrible name, has nothing to do with ‘Closure’ on the JVM

ProTips

• Jim: Alan Kay interview on Dr. Dobbs
• Ben: JS Hotline
• Chris: “Give yourself license to fail” AND Unix tools! (sed, grep, find, etc)
• Stay away from Diablo III!

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This week Ben and I riff on some news stories along with friend and ZocDoc developer, Jeremy Kimball.

Show Notes

• Please ‘Like’ us on Facebook by clicking the Like button on the side of the site
• Device independent pixels and the ‘rem’ unit in CSS/HTML. As well as device independent pixels in WPF, and Android development.
• Craigslist takes down pad mapper
• Ben and I disagree on whether Craigslist a net good, or evil in the world?
• Profits per employee for various companies
• I talk about a specific company that took the pivoting of lean startup too far and actually abandoned customers who paid money too quickly.
• CityMaps has had a big release, and everyone should go check out the new layout and city’s available

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Today Ben and I interview former Microsoftie turned Googler, Santos Cordon about programming.

Show Notes

• How did you get into programming?
• Learning about computers back in the dos/windows days
• Ti Calculator programming.
• How did you get to Microsoft?
• Your work on Office
• What brought you to NY?
• The most important thing for an individual developer’s quality is actually using the software.
• Interviewing and what it can tell you about a company.
• How would you interview developers for your own company?
• Design patterns and over engineering.
• Software Engineering practices in general.
• Writing services vs writing shrink wrap software.

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This week Ben and I talk with Director of Mobility Evangelism at SAP, located in our nations capitol, about mobile database technologies and software engineering.

Show Notes

• Sybase acquisition by SAP.
• Mobile databases and small footprint databases.
• SAP making a play on Oracle.
• Do you still get to code?
• Building mobile application development is just beginning for many enterprises.
• What are the main challenges for dealing with enterprise and mobile?
• How does the iPhone play with enterprise customers?
• Microsoft tried multiple times to bring out bring out a tablet but can’t seem to get it working
• The future of mobile operating systems on full PCs and Laptops.
• Ben: The merge of mobile and desktop computing has been a great boon to UI design.
• UI design takes as much time as designing your system, algorithms and data structures.
• Developers vs DBAs.
• There’s no more debugging in ‘prod’ on mobile devices.
• The internet isn’t always on as much as we’d like it to be, and as such we need to store data locally for when there’s no connectivity.
• Software as a profession, do we need accreditation like lawyers and doctors?
• Many companies have tried this, A+, MCSE, IEEE and ACM certs, etc.
• Ben: Ultimately it all comes down to hiring, you wouldn’t hire a surgeon because he said he could do it.
• Managers need to read The Mythical Man Month (9 people can’t have a baby in 1 month)
• The App store model will make us all compete on software quality
• fun discussion of Uber and how it’s disrupting old business models

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