Software Engineering Unlocked

​This episode is sponsored by Fiberplane. Your platform for collaborative debugging notebooks!

Episode Resources:

• Try Fiberplane here
• Fiberplane website
• Fiberplane Docs
• NP-hard Ventures

About Micha Hernandez van Leuffen
Micha Hernandez van Leuffen is the founder and CEO of Fiberplane. He previously founded Wercker, a container-native CI/CD platform that was acquired by Oracle. Micha has dedicated his career to improving the workflows of developers.

Read the whole episode (Transcript)

[If you want, you can help make the transcript better, and improve the podcast’s accessibility via Github. I’m happy to lend a hand to help you get started with pull requests, and open source work.]

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. I'm host, Dr. McKayla, and today I have the pleasure to talk to Micha Hernandez van Leuffen. He is the founder and CEO of Fiberplane. He previously was the founder of Wercker, a container native CI/CD platform that was acquired by Oracle. Micha has dedicated his career to improving the workflow of developers, so he and I have a lot to talk about today.

I'm really, really happy that he's here today and he's also sponsoring today's episode. Welcome to the show. I'm happy that you're here, Micha.

[00:00:36] Micha: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on the show.

[00:00:38] Michaela: Yeah, I'm really, really excited. So, Micha, I wanted to start really from the beginning. So you are the CEO of Fiberplane and you are the founder of Wercker, which you already sold.

So, can you tell me a little bit about how you actually started to this entrepreneur journey of yours and what brought you to the developer experience area.

[00:01:03] Micha: Yeah, sure thing. So I have a background in computer science and I did my so, I'm originally from Amsterdam, but I did my thesis at USF.

And the topic was autonomous resource provision using software containers. This was all before Docker was a thing, you know, the container format that we now know and love. And I sort of got excited by that field of, of so containers and decided to start a company around it. That company was Worker, so container native CI/CD platform.

So we helped developers build tests and deploy their applications to the cloud. We went, I would say, so we went through various iterations of the platform. You know, eventually, you know, we started off with Lxc as a container format and then eventually ended up, you know, having to, to platform on Docker.

And Kubernetes. But, you know, it was quite a, quite a journey. So that company eventually got acquired by Oracle to bolster their cloud native strategy. And then, you know, spent a couple years in a Bay area as a VP of software development focusing on their cloud native efforts.

Tried to do a little bit of open source there as well, and then, you know, move back to Europe. And so sort of started thinking about what's. Did some angel investing. We're still doing some angel investing as well actually in the sort of same arena. So developer tools, infrastructure building blocks for tomorrow.

So I run a, a small precede seat fund with to other friends of mine. But then also started, you know, thinking about what to build next. And you know, we can get into that, but sort of from our experience at running work or this sort of large distributed. Sort of fiber plane was, was born.

[00:02:26] Michaela: Cool. Yeah. And so how, how was the acquisition for you? I, from the time I'm, you said you were studying at the university, but then did you write out of university, you know, start worker or maybe already while

[00:02:40] Micha: you were Yeah. More or less studying? Yeah. Yeah, more or less just out of university. So it was around 20, 20 12, 20 13.

And then, you know, expanded the team. Of course we got an office in San Francisco and, and London. And then 2017 we got acquired by Whirlpool. Oh,

[00:02:56] Michaela: very cool. Wow. Cool. So, and you were the, you were the founder of that and also probably cto, CEO. At, at the beginning you were one person shop, or was this, or have this idea and I get some funding and I already, you know, have a team when I'm starting out, or was it more bootstrapped way?

How, how was that?

[00:03:16] Micha: Yeah, yeah. We both gates, both fiber plane and, and, and worker. We got some funding early on. Then eventually got a CTO. For worker was one of the co-founders of, of OpenStack. So also, you know, very early in the, in that sort of, mm-hmm. container and, and cloud infrastructure journey.

And then if for fiber plane, Yeah. There, there's no cto. I'm. I'm both CEO and cto, I guess

[00:03:38] Michaela: at the same time. Yeah. Cool, cool. Can you tell me a little bit about fiber plane? What is fiber plane? You know, what does, what does it has to do with containers and with developer experience? What, what kind of of a product is it?

[00:03:51] Micha: Yeah, sure thing. So, so guess coming back to the worker days, right? So we, we, you know, we're running this distributed system cic cd, so we were also running users arbitrary code. You know, any, any sort of job could happen on the platform on top of Kubernetes, inside of containers. So one of the things that, you know, stuck with me was it was very hard to always sort of debug the system, like figure out what's really going on when we had some kind of issue.

You know, we've going back and forth between metrics, logs, traces, trying to figure out what is the root cause of an issue. So sort of that, that was sort of one thing. So we're thinking a lot about, you know, surely there must be a better way to, to, to help you on this, on this journey. . The other thing that I started thinking about a lot was sort of just challenge the assumption of the dashboard, mm-hmm.

So if you think about it, like a lot of the monitoring observability tools are modeled after the dashboard, like sort of cockpit like view of your infrastructure. But I'd say that those are great for the known knowns. So dashboard is great. You set it up in advance, you know exactly what's gonna go wrong.

These are the things to monitor. These are the things, you know, to keep tabs on. But then reality hits and you know, the thing that you're looking at, at the dashboard is not necessarily a thing that's. Going wrong. Right? So started thinking a lot about you know, what, what is a better form factor to support that sort of more investigative explorative debugging of your infrastructure.

And not to say that dashboards don't have their place, right? It's like still that sort of cockpit view of your infrastructure. I think that's a, a good thing to have. But for debugging, you might wanna sort of more explorative a form factor that also gives you actionable intelligence. I think the other thing that you see a lot with dashboards, like everybody's monitoring everything and now you get a lot of signal and a lot of inputs, but not necessarily the actionable intelligence to figure out what's going on.

So that's sort of the other piece where it, then the other, like, the third like I would say is collaboration sort of thing that stuck with. Was also like we've come to enjoy tools like Notion, you know, Google Docs obviously. You know, in the design space we got Figma where collaboration is built in from the get go and it is found that it was kind of odd how in the developer tools and then sort of specifically DevOps.

We don't really have sort of these collab collaboration not really built in. Right. If you think about it you know, the status quo of, of you and I debugging an issue is we get on, you know, we get on a. You share your screen you open some dashboard and we started talking over it or something.

Right. And so it's, and it's, you know, I guess sort of covid accelerated his thinking a bit, but you know, of everybody going remote you know, how can you make that experience more collaborative?

[00:06:22] Michaela: Mm-hmm. . So it's in the incident space, it's in the monitoring space, and you want to bring more collaboration.

So how does it work? Yeah,

[00:06:32] Micha: yeah, yeah, exactly. So what's your solution now? Yeah. Now I've explained sort of the in inception. Yeah. But yeah, but what is it? What is it? Right. So it's, it's it's a notebook form factor. So very much inspired by data science, right? Like rc, like Jupiter. Yeah, we can Jupyter Notebooks.

Yeah. Think of, think of that form factor. Mm-hmm. . We don't use Jupyter or anything like that. We've written everything from scratch. But it's a sort of, yeah, a notebook form factor and you know, built in with collaboration. So you can add, mention people like you would on Slack. You can leave, you know, comments or discussions and all and all that.

But where it gets interesting, we've got these things called providers, which are effectively plugins. So they're web assembly bundles, which we can sort of dive into into that as well. But they're providers that connect to your infrastructure, right? So we have, for instance, a provider for Elastic Search for your logs.

We have a provider for Prometheus for your. And it allows you to connect to these observab

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla, and today I have the pleasure to talk to Ashley Hansberger. Ashley is Director of Developer experience at Tackle io. But before I start, let me tell you about my latest project. Awesome cos.com. Yeah. All my work on Culture Views has now its own dedicated home at awesomecodereviews.com.

You find articles about code review best practices code review checklists, news about the latest research on code reviews and of course workshops and courses I offer around this topic. So please hover over to awesomecodereviews.com and check out my latest work. But now back to Ashley.

Ashley is a vivid speaker and proponent of testing, and she loves to share her experience in conferences during blogging, all about testing and engineering productivity.

Before she was working at Tackle.io, she was the director of DevOps engineering at Black. So I'm super, super thrilled to pick her brain today and, you know, learn all about her experience. Welcome to the show Ashley.

[00:01:08] Ashley: Thank you so much for having me. I'm, I'm so happy to be here. .

[00:01:14] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, really happy.

So I want to start really at the beginning. I know that you have been a tester at the start of your career. Yes. So how, how come that you're now, you know, the director of developer experience, how did you come into developer advocacy and so on, but what's, what's that

[00:01:30] Ashley: path? , I'll try to give the short story, but it might become a long and winding journey, but that's okay.

Yeah, I did start as a tester and, you know, went from manual testing and I'm not even gonna say how many years ago, because it feels like ages ago and it was, but that's okay. . So I started as a manual tester and as many companies go, you know, started to learn automation and really found a passion for leading that effort.

So I went from tester test lead. Test architect into really becoming a technical product owner. How do I start advocating the voice of what is needed technically to balance against the features needed so that we can think about how do we design and create the frameworks and develop the automation that we need to get the feedback loops in place for our code?

That kind of led me down to a path of really thinking about testing and continuous delivery and adopting DevOps principles of like flow and feedback and continuous learning and thinking about DevOps from a culture perspective. And once we had a reorg, I was asked to lead release engineering. Now that became a really interesting experience for me, not knowing a whole lot about release engineering, but being able to lead people and thinking about our infrastructure as code and how do we even test our infrastructure.

And guiding a team of DevOps engineers to be able to do just that. As we develop a microservice oriented architecture, how do we create the, the easiest path forward for a team to spin up a service, develop what they need to, and not have to worry about the underlying architecture behind, behind the microservices that they need to create.

So my team creates the Pav road at that point. But what I really found I was most passionate about was bringing people together, learning how to work together and really focusing on people and their experiences at work. I was also asked you, as you mentioned, I've been speaking in the industry a lot about testing.

But what I really found it was about, at the heart of it, was how do we advocate for these ideas and the ways in which we should deliver software? So I was also asked to start thinking about how do we influence an organization through change for an idea that we wanna implement at, at that point, it was agile and how do we scale that across an organiz?

So I got to start thinking about, well, how do we approach change as humans? And, you know, thinking about the, how our bodies and our minds react to change. How do we move through that change, whether it's positive or negative, we, we need to be able to move through it. And I started really getting interested in the psychology of change and how we do that and influence it through other people.

But at the end of the day, we also have to be effective. And what makes effective. Psychological safety. And so I really started developing not just the, well, what are the things that we're trying to do as a team, but, but how do we do that? And what are the things that we need? And so I really got into a deep dive of looking at Amy Edmondson's work and psychological safety.

How do we apply it and learn about our own teams through those mechanisms and start building the, the underpinnings of having an effective. At the end of the day, what I've decided after a lot of reflection was I'm most interested in our experiences as people in tech, because if we are not having a good experience, how can we truly be our best selves?

And if we can't be our best selves, how can we produce something that is really meaningful in providing positive impact to others? At the end of. We might be able to, but it's not gonna be sustainable. So I've been studying on the side organizational psychology pursuing my master's in network.

And I started developing a program around developer advocacy and thinking about our experiences at Blackboard. But through just luck and circumstance was asked to come implement what I've been building over at Tackle io. So I get the chance to start ground up with a fairly new company compared to my 17 years at at Blackboard.

And just start from scratch. And it is so amazing to have the opportunity to build from the ground up with a team that is excited about this change, excited about how we can think about our experiences in a positive culture and sustain what we need through the growth of the company.

[00:05:40] Michaela: Yeah, that's, I mean, it sounds amazing and I think that what strikes me the most when you describe everything is.

At the heart, you're describing some internal. Focus, Right. Which, yes. Which I often see developer experience and advocacy and so on. And it's always outside focused. It's like we want our, you know, tool to be used by others. So and then, and then you have all these developer experience professionals and people and, and this focus.

But again, it's a customer focus actually, right. and what you are talking about is exactly that. What I'm so interested in is the internal focus. So not how can we, you know, make a good experience for our customers, the developer , but how can we have a great experience for our internal developers? Yeah. You know, that are, that are making whatever, you know, it, it doesn't have to be the developer products.

Again, it can be something, you know, completely, you know, let's say it's healthcare or yeah, it's, you know, whatever software you're actually producing. But how can we look internally that we have great experience and, and, and, and I think from that perspective, it's so natural that you're coming from the testing and DevOps side, right?

Yeah. Because. There is always enough time to program. Well, because you have to. Right. So , you know this, they can't take it away. We have to somehow program, we have to code. Mm-hmm. . But there is not enough time for testing for DevOps, for pipelines, for ci, you know, for, for making sure that we have a good code base.

We don't have technical debt. We have maybe, Good meetings. We have a good culture. We, you know, we understand each other. These are all the things that we can scrape away, you know, and just bare a minimum. Let's code . Yeah. And, and so I think, yeah. So when you describe it like this, it makes sense that you're, as a tester, arrive at a developer

[00:07:39] Ashley: advocacy Yeah.

Role. And think about it as, as a tester early and you know, at the heart of testing, we care about what is the user going to experience, Right? Mm. I got into testing because I cared so much about that user experience. Well, now my users are my, my engineers in the, in the whole program, internal, they are my clients.

And it's not just about the code that's delivered or application that's created. You know, we think about these core experiences that make us effective and productive. And it's not just, did I deliver a. . It's the meaning behind that. Do we understand significance and meaningfulness in our work? Do we understand the positive impact we had?

Do we have variety in the things that we do? That helps us, one, learn and grow first and foremost, but also keep us interested in what we wanna achieve. Yeah, do we have the ability to see it through start to finish? I can't tell you how many projects I started that I've just just ripped off of for somebody else to finish and not be able to see what happened with that.

All of these things that affect like our, our wellbeing and our mental state as workers, you know, really helps drive that experience. And when we can have a good positive experience, we're more committed to our teams and our work and our companies. We become very much tied to the mission of what we want to do.

And we're more likely to stay. So we see higher attrition, we see higher job satisfaction. These are all interconnected things that I'm so deeply fascinated by and want to help just make the best experience possible for anybody. Yeah,

[00:09:16] Michaela: yeah, yeah. I did this study that you, read the paper about it, right?

Last year. About developer experience and what, you know, what makes a good or a bad dev

Book your awesomecodereview.com workshop!

Links:

• Harshit’s Linkedin
• The voice of the modern developer
• Tromozo

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Book your awesomecodereview.com workshop!

Links:

• Nicolas Twitter
• Nicolas’ blog post: about stepping back as an engineering manager to be an individual contributor again
• The engineering manager pendulum

Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Deezer, or via RSS.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Mergify, the faster and safer way to merge your code.

[00:01 - 06:24] Opening Segment 

• Start saving time by automatizing your pull requests and securing the code merge using Mergify!
  • Sign up for a demo at https://mergify.com/
• Get to know Jess Rose
• her reasons for her helping strangers on the Internet

[06:25 - 11:59] Bottom-Up Communication Vs. Top-Down Management

• The challenges of upward communication
• How to balance personal values at work
  • It’s unique for individual circumstance
• Managing the conflict of interest as a manager to upper management

[21:00 - 33:33] Level Up Your Learning

Why Jess’ started an online learning program

In search of the best tool for virtual and distance learning

• The impact of tools on the quality of learning

Mentorship and organizational rank

Establishing healthy boundaries

Resilience in an educational setting

[33:34 - 44:46] Let’s Start Speaking The Same Language

Acing the basics: Why learning the fundamentals is everything

Let’s talk about programming language

How to improve team communication and having a shared language

[44:46 - 49:55] Closing Segment

Dr. McKayla talks about her book in progress and her advice to those who would like to write a book

Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“Sometimes changing jobs is easier than making peace with uneasy ethical decisions.” - Jess Rose

“Nobody tells you, but you're not going to start managing people and get it right right away.” - Jess Rose

“We learn better when we're chill.” - Jess Rose

“I think it's really valuable to talk about the culture of the language we use around programming and really the culture of the structures we build because it's not transparent to people.” - Jess Rose

Connect with Jess Rose on LinkedIn, Twitter, and her website. Go to Github.com/JessicaRose to check out her 1-1s.

Resources Mentioned

• Mergify - Sign up for a demo now!
• freeCodeCamp
• Class Central
• Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• The Intuitive Programmer: Learning How to Learn for Programmers (Barbara Oakley & Zach Caceres)
• Software Engineering Unlocked Episode with Dr. Cat Hicks
• Felienne Hermans
• Dan Abramov

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

_______

Transcription

[00:00:00] Dr. McKayla Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mckayla and today I have the pleasure to talk to Jess Rose. Jess is a technology professional and keynote speaker specializing in community building outreach and developing better processes for talented technology. She is passionate about fostering more equal access to technical education, and digital spaces.  But before I start, let me tell you about an amazing startup that is sponsoring today's episode Mergify. You know, I'm all about code reviews and pull requests. Having your teammates review your code can be super beneficial, but it also can create a bottleneck and slow down your software development. With Mergify, your team can be way more productive with GitHub. Mergify automates all about merging pull requests, you can specify the merge conditions, and Mergify will take care of the rest. Do you want a specific order for merging the pull requests? Should one PR be prioritized? Or do you need a copy of the PR and another branch for bug fixing? No problem. Mergify can take care of all those situations. By saving time, you and your team can focus on projects that matter. Mergify integrates completely with GitHub and your CI pipeline. They have a startup program that could give your company a 12-month credit up to $21,000 of value. Start saving time, visit Mergify.com to sign up for a demo and get started or just click the link in the show notes.  I'm super, super thrilled to have Jess here with me. Jess, welcome to the show.

[00:01:38]  Jess Rose Oh, gosh. And I'm absolutely delighted to be here when you said hey, do you want to come and talk about teaching and learning? Oh, I'm just going to be insufferable. Thank you so much. 

[00:01:48]  Dr. McKayla I'm really excited because I'm following you on Twitter. And I see that you're creating spaces for people to learn to get better to grow. Right. So there are a couple of things that I want to touch base on today with you. One is the 1-1s that you're offering. So maybe, maybe let's get started with that. Because I see you from time to time you say, you know, I have some time available, why not hop over on a call, and I can help you with some career advice? How's it going? What do you do with people? What kind of people are picking up on that?

[00:02:27]  Jess Rose So I've been doing this for about, I looked the other day because I do, I do keep records and privacy-preserving records just like,  oh, what kinds of things am I talking to people about? And I've been doing this for about eight years now. So just broke 1700 folks I've talked to over the years.

[00:02:40] Dr. McKayla Wow. 

[00:02:40]  Jess Rose And you would think oh, it's going to be mostly juniors or mostly people trying to break into tech. But just the absolute vastness of experience is so dazzling and exciting and strange to me. I don't see myself as especially well suited to give great advice. But on these calls, people are almost never asking for actual advice. So a lot, most of it's just, I'd like to be heard and I'd like someone to confirm that my experience is unusual or isn't unusual. Or getting sort of a level check for a different area saying, Hey, I'm based in this region, and I'm looking for work in your region. What's that like? What's the experience like? What's the process like? I actually documented the whole process out because I want, I definitely want other people to be doing this if you feel like it. No pressure. And it's on my GitHub. So GitHub.com/JessicaRose. And it should be right on there as  1-1s.

[00:03:37] Dr. McKayla  Yeah, I saw that. I saw that on your Twitter feed. So it tells us how to do those 1-1s and how to, what questions to ask, and so on?

[00:03:46] Jess Rose  Yeah. And mostly just about the tooling. So how to get it scheduled,  how to get that sorted? And then because I'm a weirdo, how to get the records of who chatted to you deleted if you want to, like, yeah, I wouldn't keep notes on somebody who doesn't want me to keep notes.  

[00:04:00] Dr. McKayla  Yeah. And I think it's good for privacy as well, right?. If people I don't know which topics, they are coming to you, but I mean, some of them might be private, and you know, especially if you're having maybe, like, I think if you need advice, you're very often not such a good place, right? Probably more than being in a great place where you think, well, everything figured out, you know, things are going smooth than you're seldomly reaching out to other people. It would be like I'm bragging now to you. You're more probably reaching out if you have some problems with your team maybe or getting a job or something like this. Is that what people talk to you about in the sessions?

[00:04:41] Jess Rose  So anything from, Hey, am I getting paid right? To, Oh, I'm getting screamed at a lot at work. Is this normal? So a lot of them are sort of, oh, gosh, but a lot of times folks just want to explore what's going on next. I've managed people a lot in my career. And one of the things that I always, I always have a difficult time with, and I hope other managers do, too, is how do you deal with the conflict? And there's always going to be conflict between what's best to the individual person you're managing, and what's best for the company because those are those, And one of the big things I push when I do manage people is, hey, do you have someone external to the company to give you good advice when I can't? Or I shouldn't give you the advice that's best for you?

[00:05:31] Dr. McKayla  Yeah, yeah, it's a conflict, right? Because obviously, you don't want to lose that person. But you see that they're outgrowing, you know, maybe the position?

[00:05:42] Jess Rose  Oh, I really just want to c

This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai – where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

[00:01 - 05:08] Opening Segment 

• Need to generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data for your test environments? Check out Tonic.ai!
  • Head over to https://www.tonic.ai/ and sign up today for a free two weeks trial sandbox!
• Dagna talks about experiencing a plateau in her career as a software engineer
• Realizing the lack of support networks
  • How this led her to set up her own coaching business

[05:09 - 11:26] How Cultural Upbringing Affects Work Performance

• What Dagna is doing to help immigrants like her fit into their American workplace
• Using the Hofstede model to understand the culture
• Cultural differences in the US and other countries
  • Individualism and collectivism
  • Long-term orientation and short-term orientation

[11:27 - 26:14] Engineering Mindset for Success

• Coaching clients on career advancement and finding fulfillment
• The importance of mindset
• Common limiting beliefs engineers have and overcoming them
  • Being your own advocate, your work does not speak for itself
  • Creating a safe space for feedback
• The feedback Dagna received from her superior and how it changed how she was writing code
• Knowing when to move on
• The state of the US and European job market

[26:15 - 29:54] Closing Segment

• Dagna’s advice: Don’t take code reviews and feedback personally
• Know more about the process Dagna uses to take her clients’ careers to the next level at https://www.themindfuldev.com/podcast
• Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“How you think is how you act.” - Dagna Bieda

“What you really have to do is market yourself. You have to talk about your achievements and accomplishments and not expect everybody in the company to just know what it is that you're doing.” - Dagna Bieda

“It's very important to understand how what you're doing fits into the business as a whole, the business that you're working for, and how to communicate about it.” - Dagna Bieda

Resources Mentioned

• https://www.tonic.ai/ - Sign up now for a two-week free trial!
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer - https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
• Dagna’s Website

Connect with Dagna by following her on LinkedIn. Go to theMindfuldev.com and theMindfulDev.com/podcast to learn more about her coaching business.

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

_______

Transcription

[00:00:00] Dr. McKayla: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla. And today I have the pleasure to talk to Dagna Bieda. She's a software engineer turned career coach for software engineers. She's been coding for over 10 years and has been a coach or has been coaching for the past two-plus years.

[00:00:24] Dr. McKayla: And today I will learn everything around how to get a job, how to be successful as a software engineer, and how to advance your career. But before I start, let me introduce you to an amazing startup that's sponsoring today's episode, Tonic.ai, the fake data company. So what does Tonic.ai do? I'm sure you know how complex and cumbersome it is to create quality test data.

[00:00:51] Dr. McKayla: It's a never-ending chore that eats into valuable engineering resources. Random data doesn't do it and production data is neither safe nor legal for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? That sounds amazing, right? 

[00:01:10] Dr. McKayla: Tonic.ai does exactly that. With Tonic.ai, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data because it's made from production. Yet, Tonic.ai guarantees privacy so your data sets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists, heck, even distributed teams around the world. Visit Tonic.ai to sign up today or click the link in the show notes to get a free two weeks trial sandbox.

[00:01:38] Dr. McKayla: Well, Dagna, I'm, I'm so excited to learn everything that, you know, you have been through. in your career as a software engineer and how you actually help software engineers get the most out of their career. So can you tell me a little bit, how did you go about to this shift from, you know, being a software engineer, yourself to being a full-time career coach for software engineers? Why did that happen and how?

[00:02:03] Dagna Bieda: Absolutely. And first of all, thanks so much for having me on your show, McKayla. Essentially, you know, in my own career, I have seen some incredible accelerated progression in my own career. When I started programming, I went from a junior engineer to a senior engineer fairly quickly.

[00:02:22] Dagna Bieda: It happened in less than three years, which, it takes a lot more for a lot of engineers in our industry. And it was all because of the people that were in my corner that supported me, that mentored me. And because I was very relentless about asking them for feedback to tell me how I can improve, how I can do better.

[00:02:44] Dagna Bieda: And as I kind of like, went up in my career in my senior engineering role, what happened is I experienced this plateau, you could say. And I recognized, later on, you know, in hindsight that I was just working really hard on the wrong things, but I didn't have that kind of support that I needed that would have showed me like, Hey, Dagna, what you're focusing on is not going to take you to that next level.

[00:03:11] Dagna Bieda: So after having that aha moment, I recognized like, okay, I was going super quickly, advancing in my career in the early, in the beginning, because of that support. Later on, I didn't have that support. I had to figure it out by myself. And so , it was so much slower of a process when I was trying to figure it out myself.

[00:03:32] Dagna Bieda: So I decided that, you know, this is a great idea for a business because not everybody, being a software engineer, has that support network that they could lean on. So I could step in and become that support network for my clients. And that's exactly what I do today. And it's just amazing. And I've helped so many clients, you know, I've had over the past three years that I've been coaching, I've helped over 50 engineers.

[00:03:59] Dagna Bieda: They had various backgrounds. Some of them work at fan companies. Some of them work for like small mom and pop shops, and they had experience ranging anywhere from 2 to 20 years of experience. Some were self-thought. Some had college degrees, some are boot camp graduates. And you know what I do right now as a coach and that lits me on fire and, you know, brings a lot of fulfillment to my life is to help my clients find that in their life and in their career.

[00:04:28] Dr. McKayla: Okay. And so, what does it take from a junior to become a senior? And why was there no support for you when you were a senior to get, you know, to the next level? Maybe what was your next level? Was it like a staff engineer that you wanted to become, or is it more in a managerial role that you wanted to develop yourself? So what's the next, the next step?

[00:04:52] Dagna Bieda: I wanted to become a team lead and team lead is like a mix of both, right? On one hand, like from an HR perspective, maybe you are not on the org chart on top of like a team, but you are leading your team with your technical expertise. So like it's a mix of the managerial and the engineering responsibilities.

[00:05:09] Dagna Bieda: The big reason why I had the plateaued is because I moved from Poland to the United States. And as an immigrant. I didn't realize that, you know, the way I was thinking and going about work, while it made perfect sense back in Poland, it didn't necessarily set me up for success in my American workplace.

[00:05:30] Dagna Bieda: And also like right now, a lot of my clients are immigrants moving from one country to another. And what I help them is to understand how their cultural upbringing affects their performance at their workplace. Because for me that was one of the blockers, right? I had to really kind of like understand my new situation, my new culture, how I was fitting in what was stopping me, and for example, there's this one situation that I can, that comes to mind is when, when I posted a joke in slack that I thought was super funny and, and being an Eastern European, we have this dark sense of humor.

[00:06:06] Dagna Bieda: And, you know, in this new American company, what happened was I was called to HR and I was told that that was inappropriate. And I was like, what? T

This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai – where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

[00:01 - 07:22] Opening Segment 

• Need to generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data for your test environments? Check out Tonic.ai!
  • Head over to https://www.tonic.ai/ and sign up today for a free two weeks trial sandbox!
• From full-time employment to consultancy
• On why he calls his business the banana stand
  • “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

[07:23 - 21:54] Doing His Own Thing and Gaining Independence

• Avdi on the difference between consultancy versus the banana stand model
• Writing his e-book and getting into screencasts
• How he managed a startup business, consultancy, and being a new father at once
• The reason behind the rebrand: From RubyTapas to Graceful.Dev
• Why Avdi is done subscribing to the corporate culture
• The unconscious bias in recruitment

[21:55 - 31:42] Building on WordPress

• Why Avdi chose WordPress as the platform for his business
  • What are the advantages over the other platforms?
• WordPress plugins: What you need to know
• Keeping track of the changes and updates on the platform

[31:43 - 41:46] Closing Segment

• What’s next for Avdi
• His advice on delegating and building your email list
• Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“There's always the risk. There are no guarantees in this industry. There are no  guaranteed retirement plans.” - Avdi Grimm

“I think a lot of people in software are completely focused on either financial scaling or on like user scaling. The kind of scaling you need to plan for is devolving stuff from yourself, removing yourself as a bottleneck” - Avdi Grimm

“Anything that I'm thinking of delegating or automating, always do it manually first, and do it manually for a while first and get a really good idea of what it is that I'm either delegating or automating.” - Avdi Grimm

Resources Mentioned

• https://www.tonic.ai/ - Sign up now for a two-week free trial!
• Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm - Get a copy of Avdi’s e-book at https://store.avdi.codes/l/NWtnk
• WordPress
• ConvertKit
• LearnDash
• MemberPress
• WooCommerce

Connect with Avdi on his site and on Graceful.Dev! Follow him on LinkedIn, too!

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

_______

Transcription

[00:00:00] Dr. McKayla: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla and today after pleasure to talk to Avdi Grimm. But before I start, let me introduce you to an amazing startup that's sponsoring today's episode, Tonic.ai, the fake data company. So what does Tonic.ai do? I'm sure you know how complex and cumbersome it is to create quality test data.

[00:00:27] Dr. McKayla: It's a never-ending chore that eats into valuable engineering resources. Random data doesn't do it and production data is neither safe nor legal for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? That sounds amazing, right? Tonic.ai does exactly that. 

[00:00:50] Dr. McKayla: With Tonic.ai, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data because it's made from production. Yet, Tonic.ai guarantees privacy so your data sets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists, heck, even distributed teams around the world. Visit Tonic.ai to sign up today or click the link in the show notes to get a free two weeks trial sandbox.

[00:01:14] Dr. McKayla: But now back to Avdi. Avdi has been a developer for over 20 years and runs, similar to me, a training and consulting business. The main difference is that he has been doing this already for over 10 years. So I'm super thrilled to pick his brain today around everything business-related. He's also a consulting pair-programmer and the author of several popular Ruby programming books and has several courses on this subject on his website, Graceful.Dev, formerly RubyTapas.com. So I'm super thrilled that he's here with me today. Avdi, welcome to my show. I'm very excited. 

[00:01:51] Avdi Grimm: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. 

[00:01:53] Dr. McKayla: Yeah, I'm super excited. So I've been following your journey on Twitter and so on for quite some time. Very inspirational as well. And I have a lot of questions around how you run your business and why you're running the business and what we can learn from you, right, a seasoned entrepreneur and self-employed person to also maybe get a little bit more independence in our life, right? So this is probably the main goal for myself, for everything that I do is flexibility and independence. So why are you running your own business and how does this come about? Why are you not a software developer in a company somewhere?

[00:02:32] Avdi Grimm: Right, yeah. I mean, to some degree, I feel like it's almost an inevitable career arc for somebody in software. You know, I know people who have avoided it, but a lot of the people that I kind of looked up to over the years went through, you know, they went through the full-time employment phase and then they gradually kind of moved out to becoming consultants and having various other side businesses.

[00:02:55] Avdi Grimm: And, you know, come to think of it, I never really thought about this much before. I had the example of my dad who worked in software and hardware design, and he was an independent consultant I was growing up. So that was kind of normalized to me to, like, have your own thing 

[00:03:08] Dr. McKayla: Yeah, for me was quite different. Yeah. 

[00:03:11] Avdi Grimm: I think that I, I saw that on the horizon maybe from earlier than some people do, just because it was, it was normalized for me, you know? And it just seemed like that's what a lot of my heroes did in the industry was eventually they became consultants. 

[00:03:26] Dr. McKayla: Yeah. Yeah, it's good if you have like role models. For me, it was quite the difference. I always saw it that I will work at the company for a really long time and, you know, climb the career ladder somewhere. Actually, I started a family that I saw, oh, this is not working out as I expected. And as I would like it to work out, right? And so this was a little bit why I changed the thing. So you call it a banana stand. You don't call it like an enterprise or something. Why do you call it the banana stand? And what's your philosophy for your business? How do you run it? 

[00:04:00] Avdi Grimm: So, yeah., I've started using the term banana stand recently, especially as I've been kind of reflecting back on, you know, over a decade of doing this and, like, my style of, of running the business and writing a little bit more about that. So the, the term banana stand, it comes from, the show Arrested Development in which one of the characters says to another, this character is trying to save the family business and his dad who is in prison keeps telling him there's always money in the banana stand, which he completely misinterprets the message and winds up, burning down a banana stand that's full of literal money in the walls. I apologize if I've spoiled the show for you, but it's been out for a while. But you know, like, that phrase stuck with me. There's always money in the banana stand and that's kind of the way that I look at it.

[00:04:48] Avdi Grimm: So there's kind of two sides to this, this independent business for me. There's the consulting side. And then there's the product side, product being kind of a broad term for selling books, selling courses, selling workshops. It's kind of a loose definition of product, but it's definitely distinct from the consulting side of my business, which is more like, you know, hourly consulting on people's projects.

[00:05:12] Avdi Grimm: And I definitely look at the product side as a banana stand as like something that I kind of run casually, even if I'm putting most of my time into it now. I still run it kind of like lazily and you know, and it's my own banana stand to putter around in. I'm not, like, beholden to any, like, schedules and I'm not on any kind of like track of, I have to, you know, make this much money.

[00:05:35] Avdi Grimm: I have to, like, make sure that my VCs get a payoff and stuff like that. It's just kind of like, you know, I get the putter around in the banana stand and work on whatever I feel like. And, you know, that phrase there's always money in the banana stand is

This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai - where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

Yehonathan is a software developer, author, and speaker. He has tons of experience in full-stack development using various languages such as Java, Javascript, and Ruby. But his favorite language is Clojure. He bundled all this experience and knowledge into his book Data-Oriented Programming, which is already available for beta-readers on Manning Publications and should be finished this summer.

[00:01 – 06:35] Opening Segment 

• Check out my latest project: Awesome Code Reviews!
  • Visit https://www.awesomecodereviews.com/ to find articles about code reviews, best practices, code review checklist, news about the latest research and code reviews, and workshops and courses about this topic
• Want to read Yehonathan’s book, Data-Oriented Programming?
  • Like and retweet today's episode now and get a chance to win a digital copy!
• Introducing a simple way to eliminate the complexity of information systems
• Why should we unlearn objects?
  • Relating meditation and object-oriented programming on how we perceive reality and cause accidental complexity

[06:36 – 17:52]  Data-Oriented Programming Defined

• Data-oriented programming vs Object-oriented programming
  • Separating data representation and data validation
  • The map is not the territory
• Data-oriented programming vs Functional programming
  • Using generic data structures in data-oriented programming instead of custom types
  • The profusion of types creates complexity

[17:53 – 23:17]  Changing Codebases to Data-Oriented Programming

• The four principles of data-oriented programming
• Mixing data-oriented programming with functional and object-oriented programming is possible
• Comparing information systems vs data-intensive applications

[23:18 – 28:21] Closing Segment

• The story behind Yehonathan’s book
  • He shares one of the best experiences in his writing journey
  • Win a digital copy of Data-Oriented Programming!
• Final words

Resources Mentioned: 

• Awesome Code Reviews - Visit for helpful information and courses for you to try!
• Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce Complexity by Rethinking Data - Check out Yehonathan’s book!

Visit Yehonathan’s website and follow him on LinkedIn to know more about data-oriented programming. 

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr. McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Deezer, or via RSS.

Book your awesomecodereviews.com workshop!

Links:

• Emma's Twitter
• Emma's Interview Book
• Ladybug Podcast
• Study on Effects of Technical Interviews by North Carolina University:
  • Blog post
  • Research Paper

You can also help make the podcast more accessible, by helping to edit the transcripts. You can find them on GitHub. Edits can be added trough pull requests (preferred), or by sending me an email.

Paige is the director of Machine learning and machine learning operations, aka MLOps, at GitHub. Before that, she was a principal product manager at Microsoft and also worked on DeepMind and Google Brain. Paige has had over a decade of experience with machine learning and data science as a practitioner. 

Check out my new project awesomecodereview.com workshop!

Links:

• Retweet and like to win access to GitHub Codespace, including Copilot
• Tiferet’s work, using machine learning to detect security vulnerabilities in source code.
• VS Code’s Python extension and Jupyter extension.
• Copilot website (make sure to download the Copilot Nightly extension, to get the latest features!)
• Applied Machine Learning Scientist – Microsoft job opening here!
• Github – Use it for your work and tell us how we can improve!

Shownotes:

[00:01 – 10:53] Opening Segment 

• Check out my latest project: Awesome Code Reviews!
  • Visit https://www.awesomecodereviews.com/ to find articles about code reviews, best practices, code review checklist, news about the latest research and code reviews, and workshops and courses about this topic
• Get a chance to try out GitHub Codespaces and other extensions like GitHub Copilot!
  • Like and retweet today's episode, and for an additional chance to win, you can also leave a comment about what kind of data science work you're currently doing or what you like to do
• The responsibilities of a director of machine learning and machine learning operations
• Demystifying the process of reviewing complicated data science code

[10:54 – 20:54]  A Helpful Collaborator As You Write Codes

• How GitHub Copilot becomes your partner and collaborator when writing codes
  • It is an extension for VS Code and generates source code
• Learning from test cases and how code reviewers can perform a better job
• Acquiring accurate code snippets through understanding the specific requirements
• The strive for consistent performance across every single kind of language

[20:55 – 35:25]  Expanding Feature Capabilities for Optimal Functionality

• The beginning of deep learning techniques application
  • This targets detecting security vulnerabilities through code reviews
  • It also provides recommendations for extracting functions from blocks of code
• Encouraging consistency in names and styles
  • Take note: Microsoft is hiring!
• Striking the balance with deep understanding of data-driven and quantitative approaches
  • Data can tell us about users who are already using our tools, but not about those who haven't tried them yet
  • The key is to remain curious and constantly seek to better understand users

[35:26 – 37:52] Closing Segment

• Paige’s recommendation for you
  • Try out GitHub for your machine learning projects!
• Final words

Resources Mentioned: 

• Retweet and Linke this tweet to win access to GitHub codespaces and copilot
• Awesome Code Reviews - Visit for helpful information and courses for you to try!
• Applied Machine Learning Scientist - Microsoft job opening here!
• Github - Use it for your work and tell us how we can improve!

Tiferet's work, using machine learning to detect security vulnerabilities in source code.

VS Code's Python extension and Jupyter extension.

Copilot website (make sure to download the Copilot Nightly extension, to get the latest features!

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr. McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners.