no dogma podcast

Summary Steve Ellmore, co-founder and president of Disbelief tells me that games are a collaborative effort and how game dev differs from other dev. Details Who he is. What he does. His first games was in BASIC. What Disbelief does. "A game is a piece of art that can move". Game dev is iterative and never the vision of one person, why it is thought to be that way. The visionary is more of a guide, deciding what to include and exclude. Hundreds of people involved. Using game engines. Prototyping, "made four games and shipped one". Avoiding "group think". Sequels are common, holding back features. Sharing ideas between devs and companies. What happens after prototyping - playing end to end, the doldrums, getting it back together, closing stages, technical debt, making a product. How long a game takes to make. Specialized work of Disbelief, frame rates, VR. Disbelief is hiring in Boston and Chicago.

Summary Ben Day, Plualsight author, coach and trainer talks to me about real world agile and scrum. Details Who he is, what he does, Pluralsight, how long it takes to make a course; what agile and scrum are, agile is abstract, scrum is concrete; why daily standups are boring, shortening the cycle between dev and qa; Bryan doesn't think you need the meetings if the project is going well, Ben explains why you do; scrum masters should not be project managers, scrum masters are coaches, scrum masters are not leaders; Ben doesn't like the three common stand up questions; scrum should provide a framework; "multitasking is death"; people don't like being screamed at, how to deal with unrealistic expectations; software development vs software delivery; agile and scrum forget that people are involved, "Ben Day - Therapist for Teams"; it's all about people, leave ego out of it, Difficult Conversations; Ben's scrum courses on Pluralsight.

Summary Mads Torgersen, program manager for C# at Microsoft, talks to me about the upcoming release of C# 7. Details Who he is, being the C# program manager; the favorite features he introduced as PM - linq and async, why linq was added, does the C# increment big features, was async as much of a success, complications are too well hidden, Stephen Toub blog; Mads won't tell me when C# 7 is coming out, new features, tuples + deconstruction, pattern matching; how Mads manages C#, boundaries and disagreements with other teams; who makes decisions – being a "reluctant dictator"; managing resources at Microsoft; Microsoft and the C# standards bodies, why have the standards when Microsoft can do what they want; C# and the open source community, drawbacks of open source; final notes.

Summary Rachel Appel talks to me about accessibility and how a more accessible website makes a better website. Details Who she is, what she does; the Rachii; assistive technology, what they are, examples of tech; standards bodies; simple changes that help; why make a site more accessible, skip links, screen readers - NVDA, ads cause lots of problems; more easy changes that help; webaim.org; even more easy changes to a site; what to do if you can't change the site yourself, a11y.

Summary Jimmy Bogard talks about AutoMapper, why and how he built, and recent performance improvements. Details Who he is, what he does; how AutoMapper started, what it is; projections, what that are, how they work, expression trees; early mistakes, inspired by Structure Map, performance problems, difficulties with projections, rewrite, how Jimmy uses AutoMapper vs how other people use it, learning from other mappers, improving performance, expression trees are hard to debug; upcoming conferences.

Summary Samantha Stone, author and CMO of the Marketing Advisory Network talks me about tech product launches, marketing and sales. Details Who she is, what she does; her book; complex sales process, what it is and how it differs from a simple process; launching and positioning a tech product, going to market, don't build for the largest audience; engineers might not have the skills needed to target a product; how to prioritize the right product for development; focus on differentiation but pick the right ones, four steps; differences between sales and marketing, when to hire those roles, pivoting is not always a good thing, marketing comes before sales.

Summary This is part two of my interview with Jon Skeet, we continue from part 1 with some more on C# before discussing the Google Cloud Platform. Details .Net Core; is C# Jon's second language? starting on Spectrum, BBC Micro, writing his own language, c, Java was first professional language, took up C# in 2001, "Java is not that bad a language"; Google Cloud Platform, what differentiates Google from the other cloud platforms, Jon aims to make the best c# libraries; Stackoverflow "this could be my next form of addiction"; listener questions - why so many languages; keep it simple when learning and learn one thing at time; how Jon divides his time, work life balance, "don't do anything you don't enjoy or believe to be beneficial to the world".

Summary This is part one of a two parter with Jon Skeet, here we talk about Noda Time and all things time, date, time zones and offsets. We also chat about the C# specification. In part two we cover the Google Cloud Platform. Details Who he is, what he does, Google briefly (more in part two); Noda Time, history, time libraries are bad, v1 is forever, databases store datetime badly too, what is wrong with current libraries, DateTime.Now is bad, time zones and offsets, how to store and transfer Noda Time, UTC and local times; C# specification, "Mads Toegensen is the nicest person in the world", C# standards bodies, how the language changes.

Summary Stephanie Viccari tells me about the Boston chapter of Girl Develop It, an organizations that encourages women to enter software development professions. Details Who she is, what she does; Girl Develop It, Code and Coffee Boston, any one can go, wide range of technologies in use; getting a degree or not, easier to target web dev, cost of education vs benefit, are bootcamps a replacement for degrees, ease of getting started with development; how to join or help Girl Develop It.

Summary Brock Allen talks to me about Identity Server, authentication and balancing a consulting job with an open source project. Details Who he is and what he does; what Identity Server is and how it works, OpenId Connect, OAuth 2, examples of the protocols; Dominick Baier; what's wrong with a username and password, single sign on; how Identity Server works, can use multiple types of authentication, federation gateway pattern, third party permissions; Identity Server users, claims, roles, authorization, policy based authorization; are they building it for Microsoft, other third party libraries Microsoft is pushing; testing Identity Server; balancing consulting and building Identity Server; release candidate.