

Ladybug Podcast
Emma Bostian, Kelly Vaughn
Back after a two-year hiatus, engineering leaders Emma Bostian and Kelly Vaughn return for Season 7 of the Ladybug Podcast, giving you a deep dive into all things engineering leadership.
With nearly 1 million total listens, Ladybug Podcast covers tech, career, and code, bringing unique viewpoints from a variety of guests and co-hosts.
Check out our website!
With nearly 1 million total listens, Ladybug Podcast covers tech, career, and code, bringing unique viewpoints from a variety of guests and co-hosts.
Check out our website!
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jun 22, 2020 • 40min
Micro-Interactions & Animation Libraries
Micro-interactions are small animations that delight our users and they are changing the way we design and build our applications. Micro-interactions have many benefits like enhancing perceived performance, indicating state change, and drawing users’ attention to something on the page. Today we’ll dive into micro-interactions and the animation libraries you can use to build them.
Show Notes
02:25 - What are micro-interactions?
05:48 - Why are they important?
10:55 - How do we build one?
29:07 - Animation libraries
33:16 - Shoutouts
Resources
CSS Animation Libraries
Eli Fitch’s Perceived Performance
UI Movement
Bad UI
Ladybug Performance
Scott Tolinski React Spring Course
Sarah Drasner
Hover.css
Greensock
React Spring
Framer Motion
Anime.js
Velocity
Three.js
Mo.js
Humble PI
Bon Appetit Test Kitchen
Transcript
Here is the transcript for this week's episode.

Jun 15, 2020 • 54min
Hiring a Diverse Workforce
We’ve talked a lot about interviewing and getting hired in tech from the engineering perspective, and today we’re going to build on that. We have a special guest, Hilliary Turnipseed, the founder of Hill Street Strategies to talk about hiring from the recruiting perspective. She specializes in hiring and maintaining diverse teams.
We also want to give a big shoutout to Black Girls Code, if you're able to, please donate!
Show Notes
01:13 - Tell us about yourself!
08:37 - Tell us about Hill Street Strategies
23:12 - What advice would you give to someone who is looking to get their first role in tech?
35:09 - You focus a lot on hiring a diverse tech workforce, what advice would you give to a company trying to diversify their hiring?
42:42 - You are super involved with the DC tech community, why is that involvement so important to you?
48:48 - Where can people find you online?
50:06 - Shoutouts
Resources from Hilliary
Mental Health
Rise by Jasmin Pierre & Jonathan Thompson
Aweh Support
Founder Mental Wealth
Workplace Culture
Work Bravely
Empower Work
Allyship Reads
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table
Support Black-Owned Businesses
In Common
Job Boards
Diversify Tech
Women2
Books
The Memo
Resilient Management
Hilliary's Contact Info
Hilliary's website
Hilliary's LinkedIn
Hilliary's Twitter
Mentioned in the Episode
Human Design Chart
Basic Concepts Explained of 4 Types
Transcript

Jun 10, 2020 • 34min
Black Lives Matter
Shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020, Louisville police entered the apartment of Breonna Taylor and Kenneth Walker using a battering ram to force open the door. Breonna Taylor was shot at least eight times and pronounced dead at the scene. No drugs were found in the apartment. June 5th would have been Breonna’s 27th birthday.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while he was handcuffed face down in the street. And for the past week and a half protest have been held throughout the world demanding justice for not just George Floyd, but all Black people murdered from police brutality.
Police brutality is not new. It has been happening for many years as the result of systemic racism, and it must be stopped. Too many Black lives have been stolen at the hands of white police officers who walk away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
Today we’re joined by Jocelyn Harper, host of the Git Cute Podcast to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement and to learn more about how you can get involved.

May 27, 2020 • 39min
Outliers
For the month of May we read "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. "Outliers" examines the factors which contribute to high-levels of success and while we often attribute success to circumstance today we’ll discuss our thoughts to see if we agree.
Show notes
1:08 - What does it mean to be successful?
6:12 - How does privilege play into success?
22:12 - Practical intelligence versus analytical intelligence
30:52 - Our thoughts on the book
Resources
Outliers
Nader Dabit's tweet
Goodreads Group
The Culture Map
Open Book
Commerce Tea
Dave Ramsey
Transcript
We provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!

May 25, 2020 • 39min
Networking
Today we're talking about routing and switching, starting with layer 1 of the OSI model. Let's dig in. JUST KIDDING I know nothing about that kind of networking, but we ARE talking about networking today!
Networking is a great opportunity to meet new people in the same industry, learn new skills, and develop your career. This week we’re talking all things networking: why we network, how to network, and what to do if you’re really not that into networking. Let’s jump in!

May 18, 2020 • 40min
Building Developer Communities
Developer community is centered around the idea of nurturing and amplifying community voices within a company and the head of developer community is responsible for leading this effort. Today we’re joined by Kim Maida, Head of Developer Relations and Community at Gatsby. We’ll discuss what her job entails, the ins and outs of developer advocacy, advice for someone looking to get into this field, and more.
Show notes
2:34 - Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
3:27 - What does it mean to be the head of developer relations and community?
6:38 - What is devrel/dev advocacy?
10:45 - Do the skills vary between these 4 roles? What do you need to know?
13:25 - How can you build empathy into your content?
16:40 - Do you need to be a software engineer first?
19:32 - What is your advice for someone looking to get into your field?
24:55 - What’s your advice for becoming a better dev advocate?
29:56 - Where do you see the field going in the near future? How does the current COVID situation impact your day to day?
36:33 - Shoutouts
Resources
Gatsby
Auth0
Kim’s twitter
Compassionate coding
April Wensel
technicalinterviews.dev
Transcript
We provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!

May 11, 2020 • 1h 2min
Level up with JavaScript
JavaScript is notorious for being one of the most popular, yet also one of the most despised programming languages to learn, so today we’re covering some of the intermediate and advanced JavaScript concepts! We’ll discuss convoluted topics like generators, prototypal inheritance, and the rendering engine.
Knowing intermediate JavaScript concepts like the call stack, context, scope, the prototype chain, higher order functions, async programming, and the event loop is invaluable and will help with learning frameworks. The fundamentals won't change even if the ecosystem does.
Show notes
03:24 - Functional Programming vs OOP
06:28 - Prototypal inheritance
20:34 - Higher order functions
25:54 - Callback functions
27:10 - Closures
27:46 - Scope + Context
31:12 - Iterators & Generators
34:26 - Rendering engine
37:54 - Call Stack
40:33 - Event loop
43:39 - Throttle and debounce
46:21 - Asynchronous programming
52:09 - Hoisting
54:44 - Primitive vs reference
56:59 - Debugging
58:48 - Shoutouts
Resources
Functional Programming vs OOP
Lydia Halle’s blog post on the prototype chain
Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby
Ali's What is Functional Programming?
What Tamagotchis Can Teach You About ES6 Generators - Jenn Creighton
CodeNewbie: How do Browsers Work?
What the heck is the event loop anyway? - Philip Roberts
Throttling and debouncing
Debugging Episode

May 4, 2020 • 47min
Advice to our Past Selves
Welcome to season 3 of the LB podcast. This season we’ll cover topics ranging from advanced JavaScript to networking. We’ll chat about Git & GitHub, making money outside your 9-5 job, and many more topics.
For our first episode of this new season, we’ll be reminiscing about our coding history and discussing some advice we wished we had when learning to code ranging from asking more questions to negotiating job offers.
Show notes
01:50 - Our stories
09:29 - Find a community
10:43 - Take breaks - you don’t have to code all the time
13:36 - Ask questions
16:50 - Overcome imposter syndrome
18:09 - Sharing your learning journey can help not only yourself but others too
20:24 - Surround yourself with people who support you
21:33 - Don’t get stuck in the cycle of tutorials
23:28 - Get comfortable with being uncomfortable
25:02 - Ask for feedback early and often
26:23 - Stop being such a perfectionist
28:06 - Document your learning journey
30:00 - Learn how to Google
31:45 - Different ways to learn
32:32 - Try to be honest w/ ur manager
34:42 - Celebrate your small wins
35:20 - Interview to challenge yourself
36:54 - Talk to people who have your dream job
38:04 - Negotiate offers
40:20 - You can be a people person in tech
41:40 - Don’t fall into shiny object syndrome
42:21 - You belong in the industry
Resources
Learning How to Learn episode
Byteconf React Keynote
FreeCodeCamp
Moving Past Tutorials
Cacher
Stay Home Take Care
Transcript
We provide transcripts for all of our episodes. You can find them here!

Apr 6, 2020 • 56min
Web Developer Learning Path
There are so many ways to learn to code, and so many things to know. Today we’ll give our perspectives on different paths you can take. Whether you’re looking for your first dev job or you’re looking to advance your web development knowledge, we’ll be covering a ton of different options for you.
01:50 - What did we know before getting our first jobs?
06:40 - T-shaped knowledge
08:38 - HTML
14:07 - CSS
18:24 - JavaScript
25:00 - Backend
31:00- How the web works
32:15 - Testing
37:13 - Tooling
43:46 - Git
46:12 - Terminal
47:12 - Design patterns
48:26 - Data structures & algorithms
49:07 - How to level up
Read more on our site

5 snips
Mar 30, 2020 • 48min
Learning How to Learn
On our podcast, we talk a LOT about what to learn as a developer. But today we’re switching gears and talking about HOW to actually learn all this information. We’ll discuss the concept of metacognition, or how we learn and retain information as well as some strategies for making the process easier.