On the Code with Jason podcast I discuss technical topics with interesting people. Guests include people from companies like GitHub, Google and Stripe.
On this episode, I'm joined by Adarsh Pandit, Executive Director of Ruby Central. We discuss men's fashion, Adarsh's path to becoming a developer, the distinction between contracting and consulting, defining what you do as a consultant, keeping yourself top of mind to potential consulting clients, how Ruby Central is building community among Rubyists, the current state of Ruby meetups & conferences, and my conference, Sin City Ruby.
On this episode, Landon Gray and I get together for a conversation that touches on AI consulting, backfilling tests in a system that wasn't developed with TDD, generative AI assisting with testing in data science settings, using AI to develop your product vs using AI in your product, getting clients as an AI consultant, the benefits of remaining a solo contractor over starting an agency, work/life balance as a freelancer, whether charging an hourly rate is the best way to represent the value you provide as a consultant, having a north star to guide your decision making in your work life, what actually comprises risk, how marketing yourself is important regardless of whether you're an employee or a freelancer, how the modern hiring process is broken, value created vs compensation received, and Landon's trip to the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco.
On today's episode, I sit down with Eric Normand to discuss how to select good customers, the importance of sales and marketing to a freelancer, the importance of imagination, industry, and optimism, the purpose of consulting, how I structure my consulting services, other ideas for consulting structures, domain modeling, tech debt vs dull knives as a metaphor, how product design influences domain modeling, how having a theory of your product impacts domain modeling, the abundance of bad advice for new consultants, and the pros and cons of masterminds.
On this episode, I'm joined by Joel Hawksley, Staff Engineer at GitHub for a discussion of code ownership with regards to a 3-year WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) project at GitHub, benevolent dictatorship, collective ownability, terrible code vs acceptable code vs the viability of a project, writing good code vs solving problems, defining quality code, quality code resulting from clear conceptualization, the desirability (or not!) of perfect adherence to standards, reducing defect rate, and meaningful testing goals.
On this week's episode, I talk with Allison McMillan to discuss working environments, the importance of getting a remote team together on a regular basis, the benefits of a well thought out offsite, not-so-great offsite types, elements of a worthwhile offsite, and more.
On this episode, I talk to Matt Kirkland, Founder and Designer at Brand New Box. We talk about how to get good clients, the utility of reminding people that you exist, reading science fiction, ChatGPT as highly advanced autocomplete, reading history, The limits of ChatGPT-style AI as compared to AGI, and Matt's Dracula read-through newsletter Dracula Daily.
On today's episode I talk with Nate Clark, founder and principal software engineer of Brand New Box. We discuss Brand New Box's early days and what it's like to found an agency, the different ways Nate and I think about acquiring new business, marketing yourself, how big picture thinking can sharpen your day to day plans, deciding to build a product, the difficulty of finding a problem to solve where it makes financial sense to do so, and how personal relationships beget opportunities.
On today's episode, I talk with Alex Bunardzic about TDD (Test Driven Design), separating IO from business logic, configurable dependencies, TCR (Test and Commit or Revert), making many small commits rather than trying to write the whole program right the first time, distributed cognition, order dependency and imperative vs declarative programming, coding speculatively, and coding without shipping.
On today's episode, I'm joined by Alan Ridlehoover and Fito von Zastrow for a deep dive on flaky tests.
Today Rich Steinmetz returns for a discussion that touches on switching between languages, both spoken and programming, structuring tests, getting the most out of reading a book, buying an existing business, struggles with CircleCI and GitHub Actions, my project SaturnCI, and the need for better APIs.
On this episode, I talk with Paul Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Tito. We discuss the origins and early days of Tito, trends in current web design, Parkinson's Law, my project SaturnCI, using LLMs in the coding process, the need to understand universal programming principles rather than superficialities, and the quest for dejankification.
Your feedback is valuable to us. Should you encounter any bugs, glitches, lack of functionality or other problems, please email us on [email protected] or join Moon.FM Telegram Group where you can talk directly to the dev team who are happy to answer any queries.