Alex Robson is a Principled Polyglot

How can you bring change to your organization in an agile way? While on the ScotNetRocks tour, Carl and Richard talked to Chris McDermott about his experiences bringing agile to companies, and how that affected change. The conversation explores the idea that companies are actually highly resistant to change - change represents risk, and risk should be avoided. How do you really embrace change? Chris talks about managing the risk by making the cost of failure small, effectively lowering the risk. That means being able to measure how things are working so you know when you're failing sooner and can change course efficiently. Change is good - you go first!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

23 Helmi 201654min

Geeking out on agriculture? Of course! While food is rarely the number one issue in the western world, food quality and security always bring out a certain level of anxiety in people. So how did we get here? Are we going to run out of food? Is the population explosion going to doom mankind? Or will it be climate change? Can technology actually work through all these problems? Carl and Richard discuss how agriculture started, how it has evolved and what the future could look like going forward - this is a foundational show for even more conversations about how we feed the world and ourselves - be part of that conversation!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

18 Helmi 20161h 3min

Can React make your web pages more reusable? While on the Scot Net Rocks tour, Carl and Richard stopped in Edinburgh to chat with Chris Canal about his work with React. The conversation turns to a stack of tools you may never had heard of for building reliable, maintainable and testable JavaScript code - no really, check out the links! Chris talks about how React creates objects, mixing JavaScript, HTML and CSS together into something that can be reused effectively, but only if you know how to manage it. And that's where the tooling comes in. Check it out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

17 Helmi 201659min

Can Agile scale to thousands of people? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard sat down with Dan North (and a bottle of scotch) and had a deep conversation about the limits of agile and how we can get beyond that limit. Agile naturally lends itself to feature teams - 5-10 people who have a variety of skills that can get a feature out the door. But to build more substantial software, you need more people, typically broken into more teams... and that generates the scrum-of-scrums, etc. Dan talks about organizing teams differently to keep productivity high and the quality where it needs to be - scale agile!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

16 Helmi 20161h 2min

How can you learn what your users like about your application and what you can do to make it better? Enter user research! While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Lily Dart about her approaches to doing user research - guerrilla style! Lily talks about being out on street corners asking passersby to look at an application on a smartphone and give their impressions, all for a Starbucks card. The trick is not to take what they say literally, but to actually watch how they interact with the application, what works and what doesn't. In some apps, the camera is always on so they can record the facial expressions of the tester! Lots of cool thoughts on how to collect data from users!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

11 Helmi 201656min

How do you instrument your applications in production? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Joe Guadagno about his efforts using Azure Application Insights to understand how his web applications run under load. Gathering telemetry from your production applications used to be a very case-by-case scenario, but when working the Azure Web Sites, things get a bit simpler, using Azure App Insights. But its far more than just monitoring your web site - App Insights has agents for every kind of smartphone and desktop client imaginable. You can collect a ton of data from every endpoint your application has - the challenge is sorting it all out!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

10 Helmi 201655min

What patterns make sense with containers? At NDC London, Carl and Richard talk to Ben Hall about some more mature pattern approaches to container implementations, specifically with Docker. Ben talks through a number of key patterns that make containers work the way you expect in production. There are key elements such as immutability, avoiding circumventing the configuration-as-code mindset of containers. Containers should be built, torn down and built again from their scripts, rather than ever updated. Along the way, Ben discusses a variety of tools and resources to support good container patterns - check out the show links!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

9 Helmi 20161h

What does your company do when it brings in new hires? While at NDC London, Carl and Richard talked to Jessie Shternshus of the Improv Effect about how she helps organizations create fun, innovative onboarding processes that actually reflect the culture of the company. Jessie talks about various exercises she uses to help folks get comfortable with a team and communicate effectively. The conversation digs into how every organization has a culture that new people see, the question is only how intentional that culture actually is - is the reality that its a sink-or-swim kind of place? Or do you really support the success of everyone? Lots of laughs and fun while thinking about how to make your company great!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/net-rocks/donations

4 Helmi 201656min