#42 - Building The World You Want To See, with Jeff Atwood

Published on October 31, 2021

Whether you are new in the tech industry or are a veteran developer, chances are that you’ve used a product that Jeff Atwood worked on. I’m talking about Stack Overflow and Discourse, of course. When it comes to building communities and fostering good conversations, Jeff took an unusual position - steer the conversation towards finding the best in people, argue ideas and not people, and ultimately, contribute to a world that’s just a bit better. How does it all work? Jeff elaborates in this episode.

The Show

For this episode, we did not record a video - it’s an audio exclusive.

You can listen to the audio directly:

Or listen via Spotify’s player:

You can find Jeff on the following sites:

As called-out on the show, you should check out Discourse, along with the Meta and Boing Boing communities.

The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.

Listen

You can also use the official podcast RSS feed, and add it to any podcast application or service.

Feedback

If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!

Transcript

Coming soon!

Check out other episodes of The Work Item podcast that discuss similar topics.

#80 - Web Development Is Theatre - Miriam Suzanne (CSS Working Group, OddBird)

June 12, 2024

One of the things that Miriam Suzanne realized early in her developer journey is that web development is a tool - she wanted to build a website for her theater company and ended up building a career and a company around it. And not just that, but she also joined the CSS Working Group - the official standards body that determines how the CSS stack evolves. In this show, we talk about her early discovery of the power of the web, how she joins creativity with technical prowess, and how CSS is really like poetry written in the browser.

#79 - How To Get Promoted To Tech Executive - Lena Reinhard (VP Engineering, CircleCI, Travis CI)

May 28, 2024

We often talk about promotions and growth, but the moment the conversation shifts towards paths to staff or executive positions, the advice goes blank. There is very little actionable information out there that can tell you how you can get to the highest echelons of leadership. To get a clearer picture on this topic, I sat down with Lena Reinhard, a seasoned executive with an extensive track record at CircleCI, Travis CI, and more.

#78 - I Left Hawai'i To Work In Startups, With Katie Fujihara

May 14, 2024

One's journey from their early career to working at startups in Silicon Valley can take many forms. Some folks take the more traditional route of joining a company right after college. Others get tired of their corporate life and decide to try something different. Katie Fujihara, an engineer and a technical program manager amalgam, decided that her journey to the heart of "startup land," San Francisco, would be an impromptu one - she just packed up her bags and set out on an adventure.