Extroverted Developer #20

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

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Extroverted Developer #19 – Brian Guthrie

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

Show Notes

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Extroverted Developer #18 – Gayle Laakmann McDowell

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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Extroverted Developer #17 – 2TonStudios

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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Extroverted Developer #16 – Chris Smith

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

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Extroverted Developer #15

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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Extroverted Developer #14 – Santos Cordon

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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Extroverted Developer #12 – Jonathan Baker

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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