The Infoq Podcast

In this week's podcast, QCon chair Wes Reisz and Werner Schuster talk to Caitie McCaffrey. McCaffrey works on distributed systems with the engineering effectiveness team at Twitter, and has experience building the large scale services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO. McCaffrey's presentation at QCon New York was called The Verification of a Distributed System. Why listen to this podcast: - Twitter's engineering effectiveness team aims to help make dev tools better, and make developers happier and more efficient. - Asking someone to speak at your conference or join your team solely because of their gender does more harm than people think. - There is not one prescriptive way to make good, successful technology. - Even when we don't have time for testing, there are options to increase your confidence in your system. - The biggest problem when running a unit test is that it is only testing the input you hard code into the unit test. Notes and

In this week's podcast, Barry Burd talks with Wendy Closson. With over a decade of experience immersed in development and championing agile practices, Closson coaches technology leaders to manage effectively, respond reasonably, and navigate the choppy waters of business. Closson's presentation at QCon New York was entitled Syntactic Sugar for English: Pragmatic Eloquence. Why listen to this podcast: - Software is a very abstract experience, so it can be difficult to communicate ideas about software to people outside. - The majority of people in teams want to remain in their comfort zone, so don't want to change. - Many problems that may seem technical in nature have to do with outside experiences. - The algorithmic approach to communicating has to do with creating new habits around our speaking. - With a single word you can elevate a population or destroy a friendship. - Simplicity is divinity, where someone can look at your code and understand your intentions, and the same in real-life communication

In this week's podcast, Barry Bird talks to Courtney Hemphill, a partner and tech lead at Carbon Five. With over ten years of experience in software development, Hemphill has done full stack development for both startup and enterprise companies. Hemphill's presentation at QCon New York was entitled Algorithms for Animation. Why listen to this podcast: - Why developers in startups or enterprise firms should care about creating animations - The interfaces we interact with in software are becoming more dynamic - If you don't know what's wrong, you don't know how to fix it - The most common code smells, according to Llewellyn Falco: Clutter, long lines, long methods, duplication, and inconsistency - How do we make- in an agile way- the architectural work visible, and not ignore it? - How do you have an incremental architecture and get measurements? If you say you're going to go away for six months and figure it out, that's not very measurable. Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/29kq2ds

In this week's podcast Richard Seroter talks to James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. Also on the podcast are Llewellyn Falco, creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests and co-founder of Teaching Kids Programming, and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, inventor of Responsibility-Driven Design, as well as the author of books including Designing Object: Oriented Software and Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations. Why listen to this podcast: - A lot of people know how to do TDD and refactoring for the back end, but not for the font, but the basics are the same. - The basics of Test-Driven Development are the same for the front or back end. - If you don't know what's wrong, you don't know how to fix it. - The most common code smells, according to Llewellyn Falco: Clutter, long lines, long methods, duplication, and inconsistency. - How do we make, in an agile way, the architectural work visible, and not ignore it? -

In this week's podcast Richard Seroter talks to Lisa Crispin who works on the tracker team at Pivotal Labs, and is an organiser of the Agile Alliance Technical Conference. Lisa is the co-author of several books on Agile Testing, and is also the 2012 recipient of the Agile Testing Days award for Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person. Richard also talks to Justin Searls, software craftsman, presenter of "How to Stop Hating Your Tests" and co-founder of Test Double, a company whose goal is to "improve how the world writes software." Why listen to this podcast: - Agile is mainstream, and being adopted by big enterprises, but there's a place to help small companies and startups. - Cloud Foundry pair testers to write production code with the programmers. - Developers have to be focused on right now, testers have freedom to look at more of the big picture - People know testing is good and there a lot of tools for it, but some tools are ill-conceived. - We need a better language for talking about

In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Heather Fleming, who is the VP of product and program management at GILT, where she is responsible for not only the customer-facing website, but also back office things from distribution to order processing. Why listen to this podcast: - GILT treats every person as an individual, with a skillset that is outside their responsibilities. - You should be able to be your authentic self wherever you are. - Google found creating a psychologically safe work environment was key to high performing teams. - You can kill a great team by taking away their autonomy and empowerment. - Great engineers that want to be managers are fearful of losing their skill, and great engineers that don't want to be managers are put in those roles and are terrible managers. Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1U2Wgq9 1m 49s - One of the things that makes the culture at GILT so special is the "ingredients framework" that considers every person an individual, with a

In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Matt Ranney who is the Chief Systems Architect at Uber, where he's helping build and scale everything he can. Why listen to this podcast: - Expanding a company and team at this rate is genuinely hard. Lots of mistakes have been made along the way. - Microservices allow companies to grow rapidly but have a cost in terms of aggregate velocity. - Uber is gradually moving its marketplace development from Node.js to Go and Java. Java is used for the map services. - Aggressive failure testing is used extensively in Uber. - Some early design choices - like using JSON over HTTP - make formal verification basically impossible. Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/1TH8app You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. http://bit.ly/24x3IVq Attend Matt Ranney's session at QCon New York 2016, Jun 13-17: http://bit.ly/1TH75ht

Summary: In this week's podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Mads Torgersen who leads the C# language design process at Microsoft, where he has been involved in five versions of C#, and also contributed to TypeScript, Visual Basic, Roslyn and LINQ. Before he joined Microsoft a decade ago, he worked as a university professor in Aarhus, Denmark, doing research into programming language design and contributing to Java generics. Why listen to this podcast • The overall theme for C# 7 will be features that make it easier to work with data, including language level support for tuples. Roslyn, the compiler and API, allows a much more agile evolution of the language. • The Omnisharp initiative aims to facilitate easier editing of C# code in other editors, including VS Code. • IoT and Artificial Intelligence are emerging as key disruptive trends. • The release may also include pattern matching for type switching. • C# 7 is the first new release of the language to be completely built in the open. More on this • Y

Summary: For our inaugural podcast QCon chair Wesley Reisz talks to Adrian Cockcroft, who works for Battery Ventures where he advises the firm and its portfolio companies about technology issues and also assists with deal sourcing and due diligence. Why listen to this podcast • Over the last year a large number of frameworks and libraries for building microservices have emerged and we're seeing a lot of rapid change. • The stack you choose will often be based on the main language you use, so for example Netflix’s stack is language agnostic but the tooling is very Java-centric. • Architectural choices can have a profound impact on success, so some-thing as simple as an overly long timeout with retries can cause your system to suffer from a congestion collapse problem. Have a large timeout at the edge, and progressively smaller and smaller timeouts as you get deeper into the system. • Start with a monolith and move to a distributed architecture when you need to because of team size or to get better separation