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Star Trek fans will know that the Prime Directive is the unbreakable mission statement of the Starfleet. It's a guiding principle, deciding the course and tone for whatever the team encounters. As you’ll learn in today’s episode of The Rabbit Hole, however, the prime directive is an important concept for software developers too! Michael Nunez, Dave Anderson, and Sophie Creutz dive into Norm Kerth’s Retrospective Prime Directive and break it down phrase-by-phrase to illustrate how it applies to an agile workflow. We also share some of the other prime directive texts that we discovered, including the Team Building and Futurospective Prime Directives, and touch on their focus on psychological safety and bringing people together for a specific cause. All this and more when you tune in today!

On a whole, the pandemic has made us, as a society, more anxious about a lot of things, including working in offices with other people where our risk of being exposed to the coronavirus is heightened. Although there are a lot of great tools which have been developed to try to make home offices mirror actual offices, there are various benefits which come from working in the same space as other people which cannot be replicated online. Nevertheless, working from home, at least some of the time, may continue to be part of our reality well into the future.

Today on The Rabbit Hole we are talking about strongly typed and loosely typed languages. There is very little industry consensus about what these terms mean and it is not uncommon to find often contradictory definitions, so we take it upon ourselves to uncover the truth and what we find is rather surprising! Languages that we initially thought of as strong proved not to be as iron-clad as we thought and our previous thinking about loosely typed language also had some holes.

If you think you don’t need a launch plan, you may need to think again. In today’s episode, Alex Bernardin, Lead Product Manager at Stride, joins us to explain the circumstances under which having a launch plan is very important and how you can ensure that it goes to plan. 

After such a wild year, most of us can understand the need to turn ourselves off and back on again. Today hosts Michael Nunez and David Anderson discuss how you can reset yourself and build positive habits. We dive into the topic after a quick reminder that this is the last week to respond to our listener survey. As we explore how you can reboot your brain, we touch on the benefits of being helpful, exercising, maintaining your social connections, eating more healthily, learning something new, and keeping a consistent sleep routine. We apply this advice to the coding environment, showing why and how these general life tips are relevant to software engineers. Later, we talk about strategies to enact change like starting with small habits and recruiting an accountability buddy. Tune in for more insights on starting 2021 with your best foot forward.

As we enter into the new year and bid farewell to 2021, the topic of goals and goal-setting seems like an appropriate one to give some attention to. Today we are approaching it from a slightly different direction, looking at the idea of 'anti-goals', and how these might help you in your work and personal life. Simply put, anti-goals are a way to work backward from an undesirable outcome and use these as motivation and an incentive to avoid the actions or circumstances that might facilitate it. In our conversation, we look at the two different methods for coming up with anti-goals that we can think of and also relate these ideas to other goal-setting approaches we have spoken about in the past. Top tips that arise in our chat include the need for specificity, building a diverse toolkit for achieving success, and the need for different approaches in each situation or project. So to hear it all, make sure to come down the rabbit hole with us, today!

How many coders can you afford to lose to a series of inexplicable bus accidents before your project fails? As morbid as it sounds, your bus factor is an important means of measuring how risky your project is. Today we unpack the bus factor while touching on the top ways that you can boost your team’s capabilities while increasing project resilience. While exploring the topic, we look at the benefits of pair programming, documenting your coding journey, temporarily locking team members out of projects, and rotating coding roles so that your team develops a better sense of your codebase.

Today we will be talking about toasting to failures. We will get into what a toast to failure is and share some stories that pertain to failing and we will, of course, toast to them. We don’t have any drinks or apple juice in the recording session with us, but we will pretend that we have glasses and we will put them in the air as we toast to our failures. A toast to failure is when one fails at his or her particular task or at their job but it’s celebrated, which we feel is very important.  It’s a little counterintuitive and you don’t want to just go out there and fail all the time. So stay tuned as we go over how failures should not only be celebrated, but should also be seen as a learning opportunity so that you and your colleagues can learn from the mistake. All this and more inside today’s episode.

Creating a good piece of content is a bit like pair programming, except you get to steer the wheel without ever having to listen to your navigator. With a bunch of hot Udemy courses under his belt and his book Pandas in Action about to hit the shelves, Stride full-stack developer Boris Paskhaver knows a thing or two about creating content, and he joins us today to give us some better tips than the one you just heard! We start by picking Boris’s brain about just what makes Udemy such a great platform to learn from, and then we dive into the pros and cons of creating content for video versus book formats.

On today’s show, we have the honor of welcoming Jacob O’Donnell as our special guest. Jacob is a consultant at Stride and we are very happy to have such a good friend and experienced programmer join the show this time around.

The reality of the workplace means that entering a new team or having someone enter your team is likely and some of the centering and entering techniques shared in the episode allow for these transitions to be managed smoothly.

Ever wondered whether time away from the screen can lead to any positive outcomes? On today’s episode, we talk about the benefits of vacation, and how they far out way the negatives, while allowing for more productive, alert developers within your team. We touch on all kinds of aspects and kinds of vacation including unlimited vacation, mandatory time off, sabbaticals, and the chaos vacation monkey. Learn how spending time away from work can help your team as much as yourself! Get in touch with us @radiofreerabbit on Twitter and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Catch you guys next time!

In today’s world of rapidly-changing technologies and job descriptions, it can be difficult to know which path to pursue. As a result, it often feels simpler to fall into a pattern where we are funneled down the path of least resistance, rather than taking ownership of what we truly want. That’s where career clarity comes in. Today on the show we are joined by the fantastic Jeff Perry, a talented engineer, leadership coach, career coach, and founder of More Than Engineering, a company that helps engineers make intentional career transitions. 

Whether you call it a Stand-Up, a Daily Scrum, a Huddle, or a Roll Call this daily check-in is a powerful tool you and your team can use to maximize productivity. During today’s episode, you will learn how to do a Stand-Up, what a Stand-Up consists of, and some pitfalls that you may be deterred by along the way. Most importantly, you need to keep a Stand-Up as simple as you can, based on three basic questions. That’s it! Sometimes you’ll include Parking Lots as modifiers. Tune in to hear what that means, along with why there is no reason to ask questions during the Stand-Up. Thanks for tuning in! 

Often, developers will be asked to work on a story, but nobody knows quite how to deal with it. That why, today, we are discussing spiking feature work. We are joined by Rob O’Brien, one of the partners here at Stride, and a self-confessed “strongly opinionated product manager.” Rob was formerly one of the principal product managers involved in building out our product practice, and while he has transitioned into a partner role, he continues to do product management work. 

Companies receive a large number of applications during the recruitment process which places extra pressure on candidates to stand out amongst the masses. How do you present your resume professionally while ensuring you catch the attention of recruiters? In today’s conversation, we talk to two people who work in the world of talent acquisition to give us insider knowledge on how to get the attention of recruiters while presenting your worth to the company. Dan Chessin and Genesis Osorio are both involved with talent acquisition at Stride, with many years of experience in the recruiting sector.

In this episode of The Rabbit Hole, we're talking about The Rules of Simplicity and why you should be following them when building software. We break down the four Rules of Simplicity first laid out in the book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck and discuss how they relate to other rules and principles that we’ve discussed on this podcast in the past. For a quick crash course on The Rules of Simplicity, why you should be practicing them, and how to go about applying them today, don’t miss this episode!

Niko-Niko is a visual calendar tool that can be used to track the emotions of your team members, similar to that of a happiness index or a mood board. It contains a column for your team members’ names and provides them the opportunity to record their emotions at the end of every workday with emoticons and other graphics, allowing you to track patterns and improve the morale of your staff. Tune in today as we discuss all things Niko-Niko: what benefits it may provide to your team, what potential pitfalls may arise from its use, and how it could possibly be improved.

Today on The Rabbit Hole we are talking about extreme programming and to help us with this we welcome our very own Kevin Thomas. Kevin is a consultant at Stride and a strong proponent of extreme programming! During the conversation we’ll cover the values that typify XP and unpack the importance of each of these after looking briefly at a definition for the term.

Welcome back to the podcast everyone and thanks for sticking with us through our little hiatus! Today Michael is riding solo and talking about Tailwind CSS. You can expect to hear his thoughts on the pros and cons of using it, some comparisons, and delivering a verdict on whether he would continue to use it in the future. We also share some thoughts on BEM and offer suggestions on which developers Tailwind might best suit. So, if you want to learn more about this today, make sure to press play!