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Software How-To
**iteration**

A podcast about development and design.

We do our best to be code-agnostic but we talk a lot about Rails, JavaScript, React, React Native, design, business and startups.

Latest Episodes:

➡️ One on One's ⬅️ May 10, 2021

Show notes

Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.
JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer.

What makes a good 1:1 (IC perspective)?

JP a manager who listens
JP clear action items for problems

What makes a good 1:1 (Manager perspective)?

John When reports are honest about motivations (I want more money, etc)
John Clear feedback about my management

What makes a bad 1:1?

JP when 1:1s just become another medium for standup updates
JP when 1:1s become a way for your manager to micromanage

Format

What do you talk about?

Basic framework John follows:

private running doc between manager and report, either party can always add to it, reviewed on a regular cadence. I've found every 2 weeks to be really effective.
This meeting is for building trust, context, sharing progress on goals, professional development things like that.
Principles / concepts
- Focus on the report — 1:1's are primarily for the report, the employee, not for the manager or the company.
- 70/30 — Manager should be 70% listening less than 30% talking.
- Honesty — be direct. Forbidden conversations.
- Objective — Do the work to find objective examples, provide numbers and letter grades.
- Flexible — Don't overthink or over structure, let it flow, let report guide conversation
Moneyball firing clip

Picks

John: https://www.chia.net/
JP: Tailwind is coming out with official React support!

Engineering Management 🔨 May 03, 2021

Show notes

Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.
JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer.

Context:

John ran an agency for a couple years with a few developers + Designers, now runs a team of 12(ish) developers + Designers

Few Topics

IC vs Manager

Code on the side only to show things
Not coding for production
Code outside of your core code

Right sizing a team

Systems Thinking "Stocks + Flows" (Slack)

Mythical Man Month

False premise: More heads = faster results

Remove bottlenecks

Break up the work
- Kitchen Metaphor
Context + Documentation

Safety + Empowerment

Permission + Trust
Access

Leading by example

"Law of the lid"

Don't scar on the first cut

Forbidden Conversations / honesty

Picks

John: https://handmirror.app/
JP: https://freezingcam.com/

💬 Technical Interviews Apr 27, 2021

Show notes

Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design

John has been asked:

When I perform a google search, what happens? Be as specific and accurate as possible including every layer of technology.
Can you tell me what Indexes are and what they do?
What is CORS?

Questions JP has been asked:

What is the difference between something like SQL and Mongo - what are the trade offs?
How does the JS bridge work in React Native?
Describe what Redux is for and how you'd implement it in a React project

Maybe some from our own?

If you could add one feature or change to the Rails framework what would it be?
How do feel about testing? How do you think about testing? When does it make sense to write tests?
If I have a really huge model, let's say 500+ lines, how would you go about refactoring it? Example link: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/models/post.rb

Picks

JP: https://tuple.app/

I used this to pair with Joe and it was SICK

John: YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/)

Different approach to budgeting that sucks less

💬 Interview Screeners: Questions and Answers Feb 15, 2021

Show notes

NOTE THIS IS A RE-UPLOAD AS THERE WAS ISSUES WITH OUR PREVIOUS UPLOAD

> Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

* John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.

* JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer.

# Questions

* What is your testing philosophy?

* Why work on that team specifically? Why are you interested in this job?

* What kind of problems he like's to work on?

* What are some challenges with maintaining a public api?

* If I was your manager, what can I do to get the most out of your contribution? What do you need from me to succeed as a developer?

### Picks

* John M1 MacBook — So throughly impressed

* JP - [https://github.com/procore/handcuffs](https://github.com/procore/handcuffs)

Agile Methodologies and Tools Feb 01, 2021

Show notes

Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

https://www.planview.com/resources/guide/introduction-to-kanban/kanban-vs-scrum/

AGILE!!! SCRUM!!! KANBAN!!!

Different Tools

Jira
Trello John
- Asana John
- Github (issues + projects) John
Zenhub John
Pivotal Tracker
Notion John
Special mention: Canny.io → https://main-street.canny.io/admin

New Blood

Linear App: https://linear.app/
Height App: https://height.app/ (private beta)
Monday? I always see ads for this on youtube: https://monday.com/
BASECAMP

Picks

JP: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
John: https://supabase.io/ (Open Source Firebase)
https://elainewherry.com/2012/06/26/the-recruiter-honeypot/

All About eCommerce Development 🤑 Jan 25, 2021

Show notes

E-commerce Episode

John: Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.
JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer.

What is e-commerce?

Build vs. Buy (roll your own vs. e-commerce software)

Nitty-Gritty

How to model purchases
Model Payments
How to test payments
Gotchas when building e-commerce
Discounts
Sales
Coupons
Refunds
Inventory vs digital goods
Headless vs “full stack”

Stacks / Services

Inventory and More (full stack)

Shopify
BigCommerce
Magneto
Solidus
Spree

Simple / digital only

Instagram + Paypal
Gum road

Saas Solutions

Stripe Checkout
Paddle
Fast Spring
Chargify
https://recurly.com/

Picks

JP: https://hotwire.dev/ (hehe)
John: https://linear.app/

References

🎉2021 Predictions + Trends Jan 11, 2021

Show notes

Approaches to Building Apps

Severless (Lambda functions)
PWA (progressive web apps)
Headless (Ecom / cms)
- Contentful
- Shopify

Tech Trending Upwards

E-commerce (up 37% from last year)
Artificial Intelligence
- (AWS sagemaker, GPT-3)
Voice search
- 66million smart speakers - 1/3 27% of mobile searches are voice based
AMP'd
Apps will continue to ruin the internet
Chatbots
- JP: I personally hate these things. Just get me to a customer service rep ASAP

Picks

JP: https://baratza.com/grinder/encore/

John: A conversation with GPT-3

2020 Look-back Top Development Trends + Goals Dec 28, 2020

Show notes

John: Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.
JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer at a small analytics startup

Our 2020 Goals Episode → Link

✅ 2020 Developer Goals

2020 Review

Goal 1 (JP): Build Elixir App: (C+)
- I did build a really quick proof of concept Rust API that spits out some JSON
- I also followed a tutorial for a full stack Golang app
Goal 2 (JP): System Design (F)
- Did not read the books that I wanted to read
Goal 3 (JP): Algorithms - (C+)
- Just haven't had the time - but I have reviewed some array based algorithms FWIW

John

Goal 1 (John): Blog More (C+) (12+ posts)
Goal 2 (John): (F) System Design (Nope)
Goal 3 (John): JavaScript (B+) 2 Courses, built way more shit in JS Stimulus Mainly
Goal 4 (John): Focus 💯 (Closed agency, no more clients, doubled down on what I am good at)

Top 2020 Trends (From John)

Remote Work 😷
- Remote jobs used to have a requirement of having remote experience... now everyone has this experience
Commercialization of Open source 🤑
- "Open source" that's also a product / company
- https://www.gatsbyjs.com/
- https://nextjs.org/ (Vercel)
- https://www.cypress.io/
- https://www.sanity.io/
- https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
- Even Microsoft acquisition of Github and continued changes there VS Code → Atom
"Niche" frameworks 🍾
- https://svelte.dev/
- https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine
  - This is Tailwinds' go-to for a JS solution
  - bridgetown
"Hey" made server rendered sexy again 👋
JavaScript continued to eat the world 🍽️
- Vue 3 added a composition API that's very similar to React Hooks
Low Code / No Code ✨
Data warehousing 🤓

Picks

JP: https://www.rrauction.com/preview_gallery.cfm?Category=449

John: Rails starters: https://jumpstartrails.com/ — https://bullettrain.co/

The SPA Episode (Single Page Apps) Dec 16, 2020

Show notes

John: Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design.

John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.
JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a software developer at a small analytics startup

https://macwright.com/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html

Topics / Guiding Questions

What's a SPA?

From the article

The main UI is built & updated in JavaScript using React or something similar.
The backend is an API that that application makes requests against.

The more techincal one:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/SPA

An SPA (Single-page application) is a web app implementation that loads only a single web document, and then updates the body content of that single document via JavaScript APIs such as [XMLHttpRequest]() and Fetch when different content is to be shown.

This therefore allows users to use websites without loading whole new pages from the server, which can result in performance gains and a more dynamic experience, with some tradeoff disadvantages such as SEO, more effort required to maintain state, implement navigation, and do meaningful performance monitoring.

Why do developers choose SPAs?

Do end-users care about SPAs?

What SPAs have you worked on / maintained?

0 —

When should you reach for a SPA?

That's the right use case: Desktop app to the web.
- Spotify, Figma, photopea.com
Breaks REST might be a good time to consider
Community

What's wrong with this SPA's?

Increased complexity — Development and deployment

Often times: 2 repositories, 2 languages or frameworks
- (Rails + Vue)
- (Node + Angular)
- (Rails + React)

SEO + Speed — Have to do "Server Side Rendering"

This reminds me of the light switches for "Smart" light bulbs. You've increased the complexity by a factor of 10 to get the exact same results.

Maintainability? Stability?

If not a SPA then what? (Is this a different Episode?)

What's good about server rendered?

How much you get for free
Async fetching
State management
URL's just work
Strong Conventions
Stable minimal maintenance

What's bad about Server Rendered?

Page Reload
Can feel clunky
Less Reactive
Mobile App — Now what? SPA lays a stronger groundwork

What's good about SPA's

Benefits are for the user
Developer Ego's
Data foundations
Breaks CRUD
Community
Pushing technology forward is a good thing.

What's bad about SPA's

How much of a pain in the ass it is to Manage URL's
Complexity — Front end + Back end
Authentication
Image Upload
Multiple API endpoints for a single page
State is way harder in a SPA
Debugging

Closing Thoughts

SPA's are great when you are breaking "REST / CRUD"
SPA's are great when you need multiple consumers of the same data
This is highly personal, you gotta go with what you love.
WiFi

Picks

John — Distraction Free Phone from the book Make Time
- Mobile: Uninstall all "Infinity Pools" put "Parental controls" on for the rest. 3.5 hours down to 1 hour screen time. So much time back. Switched out twitter for Kindle.
- Other tip: Instagram Threads — only the shit you care about with no ads
- Desktop: https://selfcontrolapp.com/ —
JP - https://railsnew.io/

Does Tech Stack Matter? 🥞 Dec 07, 2020

Show notes

In this episode we dive deep on tech stack choices, why they matter, how to choose one, when tech stack doesn't matter and when it makes all the difference in the world.

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iteration

What makes a good 1:1 (IC perspective)?

What makes a good 1:1 (Manager perspective)?

What makes a bad 1:1?

Format

What do you talk about?

Picks

Picks

Welcome to Iteration, a podcast about programming, development, and design

Picks

Different Tools

Picks

E-commerce Episode

What is e-commerce?

Build vs. Buy (roll your own vs. e-commerce software)

Nitty-Gritty

Stacks / Services

Simple / digital only

Picks

Approaches to Building Apps

Tech Trending Upwards

Picks

Our 2020 Goals Episode → Link

2020 Review

Top 2020 Trends (From John)

Topics / Guiding Questions

What's a SPA?

Why do developers choose SPAs?

Do end-users care about SPAs?

What SPAs have you worked on / maintained?

When should you reach for a SPA?

What's wrong with this SPA's?

If not a SPA then what? (Is this a different Episode?)

What's good about server rendered?

What's bad about Server Rendered?

What's good about SPA's

What's bad about SPA's

Closing Thoughts

Picks

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