Welcome back to the last episode of the year! Today on the show we are recapping our top picks for 2019. But first off, we just want to say Happy Holidays to all of your listeners out there and thank you for the incredible year that we’ve had. We also want to thank all our special and regular guests for making this podcast the success that it is. Inside this episode we dive into everything from our 100th episode of the podcast to our most listened to episode. We reminisce about some of the heavy hitter guests that have been featured on the show as well as our most intriguing topics, such as salaries and music to code to. Join in today as we head down memory lane and find out which episodes were the top picks for 2019!
Key Points From This Episode:
Transcript for Episode 142. Stride Picks 2019
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:01.9] MN: Hello and welcome to The Rabbit Hole, the definitive developer’s podcast in fantabulous Chelsea, Manhattan. I’m your host, Michael Nunez. Our co-host today.
[0:00:09.8] DA: Dave Anderson.
[0:00:10.8] MN: And And today we're wrapping up 2019.
[00:00:14] DA: It's that time of the year again. 2019 Picks
[00:00:17] MN: Exactly. If you're listening to this, this was released on the 31st of December, the final day. New Year's Eve. And if you are listening to this right now, that's cool. You're not busy getting piss drunk out there in the wild. Before I continue --
[00:00:38] DA: Everyone has their own ritual to get ready for a nice evening of partying. Some people may ring in the New Year with a nice podcast.
[00:00:48] MN: Yeah. With some programming.
[00:00:50] DA: In a warmly lit room in their house. Like blanket and candles.
[00:00:59] MN: Just want to say, for everyone out there listening, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa. I had to Google some of the rest of these, like Winter Solstice. Happy one of those. And Las Posadas. I'm not sure what that is, but happy to you. [Inaudible], happy to you too. And I think the Chinese New Year, that's a little later in the season, in the holiday, but hey -
[00:01:25] DA: We'll give you a shoutout later.
[00:01:25] MN: We'll give you a shoutout later, shoutout right now. Why not? But yeah, we just want to talk about some of our favorite picks. Right now for me at the moment, I realize when we were doing these picks, I was unavailable for nearly a third of that time. My son was born into the world on January 16th, so I was on paternity leave and that was a lot of fun.
[00:01:52] DA: Oh my gosh, what a wild year.
[00:01:54] MN: It was pretty wild for me. Both Dave and William were holding down the podcast. You guys did a phenomenal job. Greatly appreciate the work you guys did.
[00:02:03] DA: Yeah. We had our 100th episode.
[00:02:05] MN: Yeah, that's crazy.
[00:02:06] DA: That was big.
[00:02:08] MN: 2019. I came back, rather I was able to drop in a little message for the 100th episode, which was pretty nuts. 100 of anything is a lot. If we each had to hold 100 singles, that's a lot. 100 pennies, that's a lot.
[00:02:23] DA: 100 oreos.
[00:02:23] MN: That's a lot to eat.
[00:02:25] DA: Tummy ache.
[00:02:25] MN: It sounds like a challenge if you asked me.
[00:02:29] DA: Yeah. But I mean, that was great. We had a friend of the show, Esther Derby, on.
[00:02:32] MN: That's always good.
[00:02:35] DA: We talked about like different roles we take as we're like mentoring the team in that 100th episode.
[00:02:41] MN: Yeah, you realize that you wear more than one hat when you're at a client or at your job and trying to master through wearing all those hats to bring changes to your organization.
We had old friends of the show, we had some new friends, we made some friends. I'd like to shoutout to both Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, who stopped by the show to talk about the pragmatic programmer 20 year addition, which is pretty dope. That happened in 2019.
[00:03:11] DA: Yeah, a 100th episode seems like small fries compared to 20 year.
[00:03:18] MN: Yeah, and it was dope. We had them rolling like, "Hey, we're just going to have the mic on and we're going to chat." And we managed to get three episodes out of that, which is was pretty dope.
[00:03:26] DA: Yeah, that was the second triple whammy in Rabbit Hole history.
[00:03:32] MN: Oh yeah.
[00:03:33] DA: Other honors go to Jacob O'Donnell for being in the record books with the first triple whammy.
[00:03:39] MN: Oh yeah.
[00:03:39] DA: But Andy and Dave didn't break a sweat. They had so much wisdom to give and we had a great conversation about like feedback loops and how they're really important for a software engineer in the workplace always looking for ways that they can adjust their course as they're going through their day, be it writing code or just living their life.
[00:04:02] MN: I think the one thing I remember vividly about that conversation was the quote, "You either change your organization or you change your organization," which is like, "Wait, what?" Just like using the same words with different emphasis can dramatically change what that means, which is like pretty dope.
[00:04:21] DA: But you know, it's all things that are within your power, so take charge. Be pragmatic, I guess. So yeah, that was pretty great having those guys on.
[00:04:34] MN: Another friend of the show, Sandi Metz. They say "don't meet your heroes", well this hero, yes I met and it was great. It was so cool. It's one of those - it was definitely really dope because it was an opportunity for, we normally don't remote record. I'm usually like at the office, present. There is some times where we record remotely and I remember just like at home, recording for this particular session with Sandi Metz and we were just chopping it up. It was like regular conversation. She knows my brother and was like, "Oh, tell Steve I said hi." And I was like, "Wait, what? You know him too?" Like it was pretty nuts. It was just so cool and then both Dave and William got on the call and we were just chatting. It was amazing. It was a lot of fun.
[00:05:22] DA: Yeah, really looking forward to broader perspectives from her on different programming languages and her new book dropped recently. So that was pretty cool.
[00:05:34] MN: Yeah, I mean it was just great to have like those kinds of conversations. It was really cool. Especially like remote and being able to just chat with Sandi was dope.
[00:05:46] DA: Yeah, so we had two great conversations with Sandi about like functional versus ORP paradigms. So Sandi let us know her opinion on that, being of the OOP school of thought. And we also talked about, more generally, comparing programming languages as she was like writing this book. But amazingly, those two were not the most popular episodes of the year. They were number two and three.
[00:06:09] MN: Okay.
[00:06:11] DA: The most popular episode of the year was actually Salaries.
[00:06:13] MN: Yes.
[00:06:15] DA: With a friend of the show, Steve Thomsen. So, big shoutout to him for trumping the heavy hitters.
[00:06:21] MN: Oh yeah. I think people are interested in the money, bro. Everybody wants to talk about their money. That came out earlier in the year, right? I don't remember being in on that. I was probably on paternity leave by then. But I do remember like, even seeing that news on the Libsyn to see who's listening to what. That was like pretty cool. Because it's like, "I've got to tune into this one because it was pretty dope."
[00:06:41] DA: Yeah, I mean it's one of those topics that - it's a sensitive topic. People don't really want to talk about it too openly so it definitely resonated with people to have a frank conversation about how people are recruiting and how they're trying to evaluate how to pay people.
[00:07:00] MN: Right.
[00:07:01] DA: And, I guess speaking of like things that were surprisingly popular and resonated, the music episode that we just released was very popular.
[00:07:09] MN: Oh, very popular. I've had - there was someone from Stride who was like, "Yo, Bobby, you listen to Infected Mushroom? You must record like this!" And then like took his wrist and just rammed it against his keyboard. And I'm like, "Yes, that is exactly how I program when I listen to Infected Mushroom."
[00:07:30] DA: That's an accurate reproduction. Yeah.
[00:07:32] MN: A lot of people, yeah, even when I have conversations with people and I asked them, "Hey, what music do you listen to?" Considering that it was already popular to individuals who reached out to us. Always strikes an emotion and people really want to share that -
[00:07:44] DA: Right, people have an opinion and this is like a New Year's resolution for us, but we're going to try be better at like engaging with email that we got. We got some really good emails from people with some awesome playlist suggestions.
[00:07:59] MN: Yeah, if you want to keep us accountable, definitely twee @radiofreerabbit and if I see those notifications within a day, I need to respond to them. That's like the rule, I have to do that. I have to hard impose this rule. It has to happen, no matter what.
I think one of the episodes that I enjoy recording now more than at the time was definitely Remote Pair Programming. Because like at the time I didn't have the opportunity to remote pair as often, so I didn't use Tuple at all. So I was like, "Oh, this application, love to have a fellow developer come and talk about his passion project that became a product with Ben Orenstein. That was like a lot of fun.
Now I've had the opportunity to pair program through Tuple a lot and like usually at the end of the session we're like, "Man, this application's really cool." And I was like, "Yeah, I have a podcast episode with that guy. He's awesome too! He's an awesome individual." So that one's like, I listen back to it and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I've spoken to this guy who's really passionate about pair programming and how to do that remotely and I use the product so it's like just really cool to have that in the stash.
[00:09:07] DA: Right. I guess now you're like taking more time to work remotely since you got baby Gio, he's growing up.
[00:09:16] MN: He's growing up. Man -
[00:09:17] DA: Almost first birthday coming up.
[00:09:18] MN: Almost first birthday, exactly. And I think there's some work-life - there's an episode on work-life balance and we talk about that and I'm definitely taking some work-life balance approach where I get to work from home once a week and being able to use Tuple makes that really, really nice.
[00:09:33] DA: Right. You can still like be present and stay true to like things that we value and XP and other things.
[00:09:43] MN: Yeah, well I'm not having to sacrifice the pairing experience because of that. And he was generally a cool dude. He was able to record. Hoping we can have him some time next year to discuss some more things. Last but not least, we have to thank all of the regular guests that came on board and all the guests who have come a long.
I mean, we mention all the heavy hitters, but there are definitely people who have definitely shined on the podcast that we greatly appreciate you coming on down. Thank you so much to both the individuals from Stride and people who listen to the podcast who wanted to join the podcast. I mean, I could scroll down through this list. We have Emmanuel, we have Meredith, we have Veronica, we have Eric, I mentioned Ben before. Many, many, many other people.
I am sorry if I forgot to mention your name, but like ya'll were important on coming on down for 2019. Hopefully, we can get more people down on the list. We've got a workshop that I can get people interested in and coming on down.
[00:10:48] DA: Kevin did a good one on Motivation.
[00:10:51] MN: Oh yeah, Kevin came down.
[00:10:53] DA: Kevin Thomas.
[00:10:54] MN: Talk about the pillars of motivation and Kevin's always great. All our regular guests, special guests, any kind of guest, thank you for coming on down. Most importantly, thank you to the listeners. We really appreciate you listening and any piece of feedback that you guys have will greatly be appreciated come 2020. We hope you have had a happy holiday and we hope you have the best of steps into the new year, into the new decade as we all learn to grow and love the thing that we enjoy doing, which is working, and agile programming, and all sorts of stuff like that. Thank you.
[00:11:39] DA: I pressed the button! I don't know how to turn this off.
[00:11:43] MN: We're fiddling with the fan. We'll learn how to use the fan in 2020. Don't worry about it.
[00:11:49] DA: It's so loud!
[00:11:50] MN: It's way too loud. We've got the fan situation down. But we really appreciate everyone who's out there listening. Please hit us up @radiofreerabbit. I try to do re-tweets on my personal account. If you do find the retweets that are coming out of @radiofreerabbit, you can stalk me and send me direct messages and whatnot. We greatly appreciate it.
We'll see you in the new year, we'll see you in the new decade. Signing off on the Rabbit Hole. See you then!
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:12:18] MN: Follow us now on Twitter @radiofreerabbit so we can keep the conversation going. Like what you hear? Give us a five-star review and help developers like you find their way into The Rabbit Hole and never miss an episode, subscribe now however you listen to your favorite podcast. On behalf of our producer extraordinaire, William Jeffries and my amazing co-host, Dave Anderson and me, your host, Michael Nunez, thanks for listening to The Rabbit Hole.
[END]
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