no dogma podcast

Summary Andrei Simionescu of the now closed Lavaboom talks to me about the encrypted email service they wanted to make. Details Who he is; a little about Lavaboom; PGP is unfriendly, why did they make it, connection to Lavabit; "but I've got nothing to hide", do I make myself a target by using it; other PGP email initiatives; lawful legal requests; open source for core features, verifying the builds are from the source; how Lavaboom works; is there any clear text ever; losing a password; what kind of encryption is in use; open source problems; hosting; scaling; making money; raising money.

Summary Nicholas Blumhardt discusses Seq, Serilog and structured event logging with me. Details Who he is, what is serilog, Event Tracking for Windows (ETW) and Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB), structured event streams, no more regex; finding events in your log, navigating from one type of event to another; what feedback he gets; datastore; seq, use cases, filtering by type; seq data storage, Microsoft Extensible Storage Engine; making money; releases and new versions; simple install and usage instructions.

Summary Trevor Stricker of Disco Pixel tells me all about indie game development. Details Who he is and what he does; what is an indie game developer; skills needed to be an indie dev; protecting your work; platforms to develop on, naming your child Unity, learning about Unity, technical limitations; importance of partnerships as a game developer, corporate and developer partnerships; learning non games skills to scale your game; making money; book recommendations, Creativity, Inc.

Summary Justin Mills, software engineer at Yesware tells me about their flat organizational structure and development practices. Details Little about Justin and Yesware; team structure, no test team, no defined team leads; no cohesive architecture; shared infrastructure, hierarchy might be needed; getting approval to reduce technical debt; assigning teams to tasks, trying open allocation, ending open allocation; no titles in engineering but other departments have titles; no one in a position to make a tough decision; struggling with agile, speed of development is the goal. **extended interview** SDLC, frequent releases probably break often, Justin's hopes for the company's future.

Summary Eliot Knudsen, field engineer at Tamr talks to me about their machine learning tool and a new way of examining data. Details Who he is and what he does; what is Tamr; working with data sources, the traditional way, the Tamr way, machine learning combined with human guidance;data quality and foreign languages; Thompson Reuters example, curating data, increasing speed; deploying Tamr; how Tamr works, db, java, web client; competitors; future work.

Summary Jason MacInnes, CTO of Draft Kings tells me about their architecture and scaling demands. Details A little aabout Jason; what Draft Kings is, why it's not gambling, how Draft Kings started; controlling growth, SDLC, Agile growing pains, aligning skills; software stack (MySql, RabbitMq, MassTransit), choice of ASP.NET; scaling the system; transitioning to micro-services, dev ops; service level agreements, dealing with unpredictable events; where the statistics and data come from, customer privacy, future work.

Summary Boston was host to the first ever Open Data Science Conference over the weekend of May 30th and 31st 2015. I spent the days wandering around talking to people with interesting stories. I hope you enjoy this episode, it was fun making it. My next podcast will be back to the normal interview format.

Summary Andrew and Bobby Brennan, and I discuss Lucybot and why good API design and documentation lead to good developer experience. Details Who they are; what Lucybot is, more than simple documentation; API economy, easier to work with is more important; easier to use API wins with developers; good vs bad API, good documentation, sandbox, example code; what Lucybot does, auto doc generation, auto code generation, machine readable API description, swagger; client libraries, auto generation; APIs for now developers, API recipes; other tools, swagger and alpaca; future work, repository for APIs, on premises deployment.

Summary Eric Bloom of Manger Mechanics and I discussing how to get promoted in IT and what to expect as a manager. Details Who he is, new book, a productivity cocktail; getting promoted, what got you here won't get you there, staying or going, accidental managers, management is a skill; what if you don't want to manage; advice on getting promoted, get management experience outside the office, nepotism in companies; what changes when promoted, Manager Mechanics; leading without authority, difficult team members, people are for themselves not against you; common problems new managers face; learning to delegate; politics; professional friends come and go enemies accumulate; dealing with superiors, your manager and your manger's manger; you always have a boss; mangers live in fish bowls.

Summary Deb Biggar of Boston Human Factors and I discuss what UX is and why it is important. Details Who she is; a story of why is UX important; what is UX, disciplines in UX - experience design, interaction design, information architect, user researcher, UX unicorns; phases of UX work - concept, design, prototype, validate, implement; what if a company can't afford UX; should you copy from big companies; relationship between UX and front-end, nitpicking and deadlines; agile or fragile, UX stays sprints ahead; books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Deb's UX play book.