In this episode of the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast, hosted by Dr. McKayla, we delve into the critical aspects of code reviews in software development. Dr. McKayla returns to the airwaves to explore how interpersonal relationships influence the outcomes of code reviews. The discussion highlights that nearly 70% of developers feel that their relationship with reviewers affects the review process, impacting the rigor and tone of the feedback.

In this episode, Abi Noda explains how to measure developer experience and why a good developer experience matters. We also talk about: What factors influence developer experience What developer experience has to do with productivity, performance and even job retention The SPACE framework, and how to use it to measure productivity

Luca Galante runs a vibrant and fast-growing community around platform engineering and today he shares with us why every organization should invest in a platform engineering team. We also talk about: - what is platform engineering - the difference between platform engineering and DevOps - what developer productivity has to do with platform engineering - why self-service for developers is so important

Nadia Zhuk shares how to build a career as a self-taught programmer successfully. She learned to program all by herself and changed her career from being an English teacher to a full-stack developer. We also talk about: - teaching yourself programming - starting your developer career as a self-taught developer - getting your foot into tech - changing your career by teaching yourself how to program - moving countries and taking chances for a better life - how feature flags are used at Intercom - how mentoring, pair programming, code reviews, and also the concept of a buddy can help you ramp up your coding career.

Alexander Serebrenik gives us an overview of his exciting research on emotions and social aspects of software engineering. We also talk about: social aspects of software engineering, what software productivity has to do with your emotions and how you feel, problems such as confusion or frustration in code reviews, how to give respectful, yet candid code review feedback, and how ageism, sexism, and more lead to negative consequences such as drug abuse in software engineering.

Especially in recent years, several attacks on the software supply chain, like the SolarWinds attack or the ongoing Log4j vulnerability, made it clear that our complex software ecosystems are hard to understand and even harder to keep secure. The software bill of material aims at solving this problem. In this episode, Barak Brudo explains what a software bill of material is and why they are important for security and to reduce vulnerabilities. I also question if we are ever going to be able to reach a state where SBOMs are part of every software or library. We also talk about: - security and software regulations like the software bill of materials - software license poisoning - what to do when you face a security breach - human engineering attacks like 2FA fatigue

Heather Reid shares her difficult job search journey and how she overcame self-doubt and kept trying until she found the perfect job. Although Heather had been active in the testing community for over a decade, when she was searching for her newest role, she heard ‌she wasn’t a tester and that she had been gone too long gone. We also talk about: - bad interview experiences - why she was seen as "too long gone" in testing - how to handle job rejections - how she proved everyone that rejected her during job interviews wrong - advice for job seekers and people interviewing in tech.

Let's revisit the top 5 interviews in 2022, which gives us all the opportunity to listen to some episodes you might have already forgotten or missed. Episode Chapters: 0:00 Intro 01:21 Making money with open source 09:08 Profitable small bets 24:15 Career growth and mindset 35:12 Writing tests that find bugs 45:15 Drawbacks of being an engineering manager 55:50 Wrap-up and support the podcast 57:25 Closing song

Michael Lynch shares what he learned by writing code at Microsoft and Google, and how that differs from the software practices that he embraces in his own software company. We also talk about: - what is the root cause when code reviews are evil - how to establish a great code review practice - software engineering practices at Google and Microsoft, - how to balance code quality, time to market, and paying back technical debt - writing software as a bootstrapped business - his lessons learned building tiny pilot, including scaling customer support, software testing.

Lauren Peate shares how engineering metrics can be ethical with Multitudes. We also talk about: - what are ethical developer metrics? - how to best measure developer productivity? - ensuring engineering metrics can not be misused - do developer metrics lead to gaming the system? - how can DORA metrics be used to improve team performance?

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen shares how and why he built Fiberplane, a platform for collaborative debugging notebooks. We also talk about: - the idea behind collaborative debugging notebooks, - how Fiberplane can help resolve incidents faster and blamelessly, - how Fiberplane works together with other debugging, monitoring, and observability tools, and - Micha's entrepreneurial journey building two startups in the developer productivity space.​

Ashley Hunsberger deeply cares for developers, their happiness, and their productivity. After seeing how vital developer experience is, Ashley set-out to work in a relatively new role with new responsibilities: developer experience. Now, she is the Director of developer experience at Tackle.io, and in this interview, she tells us all about what that actually means.

In this episode, I talk to Harshit Chitalia about how we can make security easier for developers. Harshit is the co-founder and CTO of Tromzo, a start-up dedicated to reducing the friction between developers and security. Before that Harshit spent eight years as Director of Engineering at Juniper Networks. We talk about: - why software security is sometimes difficult for developers - how static analysis tools can help developers with security - why Harshit founded Tromzo and - how this start-up journey is going.

In this episode, I talk to Nicolas Dular, a senior full-stack engineer at GitLab, about his experience of becoming an engineering manager. We talk about: - how he became an engineering manager - what he liked about this role - what he did not like about being an engineering manager - and why he decided to move back to an individual contributor role.

From workplace dynamics to code reviews, misunderstandings can arise for a variety of reasons. People have different interpretations of things or of what is said, different assumptions of others' motives, and simply miss out on the information they need to understand something. This can lead to conflict building up over time. But what if there’s a way that people could come to a common understanding through common knowledge and similar wavelength? Jess Rose joins me in today’s episode to share her insights on creating better workplace experiences and how managers can balance contractual duties to the company and the individual ethical responsibilities to the people they manage. We also talk about learning: the process itself and how it’s different for everyone, and how Jess is fostering more equal access to technical education in digital spaces. Jess founded the Open Code meetup series, an international series of weekly mixed-level, language-agnostic study sessions for programmers and aspiring programmers. She also co-founded Trans*Code with the incomparable Naomi Ceder, resulting in a series of community-building hack days for the Trans* community, allies, and well-wishers that have stretched across 4 countries and 2 continents. A developer relations strategy specialist and leader with extensive work in open source spaces, Jess is an established keynote speaker with an education background as well. We’re bringing you another value-packed episode, so tune in till the end!

For engineers feeling stuck and unfulfilled, my guest Dagna Bieda has valuable advice. Dagna is a software engineer turned career coach who has mentored 50+ clients, some of whom worked at big brand names (such as LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Disney), as well as much smaller businesses. Whether it’s for promotion, salary increase, landing a new job, or becoming a CTO, she’s committed to helping her clients reach their full potential. In this episode, Dagna talks about hitting a wall in her engineering career and eventually finding a passion for coaching. She also discusses her perspective on how to navigate cultural differences in the workplace and how engineers can change their mindsets to set themselves up for success.

In the software world, there are a lot of opportunities. You just have to have the right mindset, preparations, and systems. In this episode, my guest Avdi Grimm shares how he found his independence by running a training and consulting business for over ten years. He reiterates the importance of time efficiency, task delegation, and why you should remove yourself as a bottleneck from your business. He also goes in-depth about the work he does on Graceful.Dev and how he is utilizing WordPress for the website. Avdi is a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and has several courses on his website Graceful.Dev (formerly RubyTapas.com).

There is a simpler way to reduce complexity in our systems, and it starts with rethinking data. This is the core of Data-Oriented Programming and, in this episode, my guest Yehonathan Sharvit answers our questions about the paradigm. As an expert in the field, Yehonathan breaks down the basics of Data-Oriented Programming, how it compares to object-oriented programming and functional programming, and how we can apply it in our codebases.

In this episode, I talk to Emma Bostian, who recently started as a software engineer at Spotify. And Emma is the kind of person, that not only applies and interviews for jobs, but at the same time writes a complete book about her interviewing experience hunting for this dream job. This book sold so well, that she could pay back all her medical debt. Before joining Spotify, she worked for LogMeIn, and IBM. She won competitions and moved countries several times. We talk about: - her interview experience with Spotify and Google, - her experience moving countries during a global pandemic, - what makes for a great onboarding experience and - how we can take action to make sure workplaces are friendly and welcoming.

In this episode, my guest, Paige Bailey, shares her experience as a director of machine learning and machine learning operations. We discuss how we can ease the processes of reviewing data science codes through GitHub's codespaces and Copilot.