Our workstations are our de-facto tools of the trade. Yet many engineers spend little time investing in or improving their workstations. Having a great workstation can make you more productive, enjoy your time at your workstation, and even create connection with your peers. In this episode, I review what I prioritize in my workstation and the factors that are important to me for every piece so you can get a head start on making a fantastic workstation for yourself.
2 Dec 2025
What Your Company Actually Values
No one tends to think twice about their "company values". They tend to be meaningless words posted on the website or on a poster hung on the wall. They don't inform nor tell you anything about how your company operates. However, your company does actually have values, they're just not the ones they talk about, and knowing how to reveal those values and what they actually are can help us as engineers understand the tradeoffs we need to make, and how to be generally more successful in our organ...
19 Nov 2025
How to Have a Good PR
Pull requests are something we'll make thousands of times in our careers, but it's easy for them to go off the rails. Problems can emerge from the code, to the review comments, to the very concept of the pull request itself, turning what should have been a moment of celebration into a moment of dread and frustration for all. In this episode, I detail an extensive list of strategies for both authors and reviewers to ensure everyone can have a good pull request.
12 Nov 2025
Common Agile Failures and Fixes
Agile, when properly implemented, can be an exceedingly powerful philosophy on software development. But gone wrong, it can often hinder and harm more than it helps. In this episode, I discuss common agile implementation failures and pitfalls across a wide spectrum of concerns, and discuss what implementations of agile I have personally enjoyed and found effective.
5 Nov 2025
What Even is Agile?
Most companies proclaim to "be Agile", but what does that even mean? Are they? Is that a good thing? And what are all these other terms we hear about, like Scrum and Kanban? Are we Agile because we have standups and use Jira? In this episode, we take some time to understand what Agile actually is (and is not) so we have a solid foundation for fixing our Agile processes.
3 Nov 2025
Event Loop: Responding to the Amazon Layoffs
This is a bonus Event Loop episode keeping you in the loop regarding current events. Amazon just announced they are laying off around 14,000 employees. Was it due to AI? Does this represent the beginning of the end for our field? And how should we all respond around the industry?
28 Oct 2025
Preventing Burnout
Burnout is unfortunately something that happens to a lot of us in our industry, and it can be an absolutely debilitating experience. In this episode, I review what burnout is, warning signs of approaching burnout, what makes our industry specifically susceptible to it, and most importantly, I review a large variety of tips and strategies you can implement today to prevent burnout.
21 Oct 2025
The Unreasonable Risk of Rewrites
We are often tempted to rewrite software - who doesn't like a new greenfield project? With all the promise of cleaner code, architecture, and fixing every problem in the past, they can be tempting to recommend. But here, there be dragons. Rewrites are often not the right answer and represent a unreasonable risk to yourself, your team, and your business.
14 Oct 2025
Software Estimation and Other Lies
We are notoriously bad at software estimation, yet we will be asked to do it hundreds if not thousands of times in our careers. Why are we so inaccurate? Can software estimation ever be accurate? Are we just doing something wrong?
7 Oct 2025
Build vs Buy
As engineers, we are often faced with the question if we should build or buy a piece of software. In this episode, I attempt to provide a framework for thinking about and ultimately answering this question.
24 Sept 2025
Engineering is Social
Engineering is fundamentally a social activity. This might sound completely counter intuitive, but it's an important reality for understanding the nature of our work. In this episode, for those whom are in the industry already, I describe various tips for some challenging social situations we often experience, and for those who are not in our industry yet, I explain just how social this field actually is.
8 Sept 2025
Ya Ain't Gonna Need It
One of the most powerful and important axioms in software engineering, in my opinion, is "Ya Ain't Gonna Need It". This axiom tells us that we shouldn't be implementing code on pure speculation of customer needs, but rather wait until we have solid evidence of the need from customers. I explore multiple personal stories of this in action, tips for recognizing when speculation might be occurring, discuss language to combat it, and how we can also apply this to some of the code we write.
4 Sept 2025
The Problem with Technical Interviews
Technical interviews have been broken for a while. In this episode, I discuss how and why our process is broken, how the industry got here, explore how other industries handle their interviews, and discuss what our interview process should look like, and how to get there.
3 Sept 2025
AI is Not Going to Take Your Job
AI is everywhere, but is it going to take our jobs as software engineers? Should we start looking for other careers? Is it safe to enter this industry if you're just entering college? We take a look at historical examples, compare this cycle with others in the past, attempt to understand what AI is good at and predict what likely will happen in the future.
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