Discover the collection of The Work Item podcast episodes with the Engineering tag. Go to the Episodes page to listen to the latest releases, find interesting guests, or navigate through the history of the show.
Engineering Podcast Episodes
#62 - Building Sustainable Practices, with Jason Fried
October 23, 2023
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey. I chat with Jason about his path to entrepreneurship, the lack of value in a lot of meetings, and generally building sustainable practices that enable businesses and their employees to thrive.
#61 - Career Moats And Beyond, with Cedric Chin
October 9, 2023
In this episode, I am chatting with Cedric Chin - the founder of the CommonCog blog and business series. You might've read some of Cedric's writing on career moats before.
#60 - Defining A Force Multiplier, with Sam Saccone
December 28, 2022
When we choose our career path, we often try to optimize for one specific bucket - you're a product manager, or a project manager, or a UX designer, or any other variation of an expertise area in tech. Sam Saccone defies the expectations of a single role and instead believes in being a "plumber" - doing whatever work is necessary to enable others to do their own version of great work. I sat down with Sam to learn more about his path to a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, what it means to brute-force your way through problems, and what the best avenues are to become a force multiplier for your team.
#59 - Building On Your Own, with iOS Developer Donny Wals
December 22, 2022
Leaving your full-time job behind and starting your own business based on your own brand is a somewhat scary proposition. And yet, this is exactly what Donny Wals, a prolific iOS developer and technology teacher, is doing. In this episode I sat down with him to talk more about his work, what was his thinking in going solo, and what one needs to learn quickly in an ever-changing technology space.
#58 - Becoming a Game Studio Co-Founder, with Moon Studios' Gennadiy Korol
November 2, 2022
Working on games is hard. It's even harder to go from an engineer to a founder of a game studio that is able to produce two blockbuster titles in a row. In today's show I chat with Moon Studios co-founder Gennadiy Korol about his work on Ori (if you're near an Xbox or a PC - the game is worth your time), learning the complexity of graphics engineering, and navigating the uncertainty that comes from starting a zero-to-one effort where you have nothing to fall back on.
#57 - From Turbo Pascal to CodePen, with Chris Coyier
October 28, 2022
If you are a web developer, chances are that you used CodePen more than once. You're also probably very familiar with CSS-Tricks for, well, more than just CSS tricks. The man behind these experiences, Chris Coyier, actually started his journey some time ago with a programming language called Turbo Pascal - many steps removed from web development. I sat down with Chris to talk more about his career, lessons in getting CodePen out into the world, and so much more.
#55 - Open Source and Web Development, with Monica Powell
August 27, 2022
What does one need to do to make open-source code more approachable? How do you figure out which teams to join for maximum positive impact on your communities? And how do you build communities? These questions and more are the topic of my conversation with Monica Powell, software engineer extraordinaire, who also happens to be a GitHub Star - an exclusive group of contributors recognized for their outstanding work in the open-source software space!
#54 - From Apple to Netflix, with Carola Nitz, Sr. Software Engineer at Netflix
May 20, 2022
Carola Nitz is a seasoned engineer who has been involved in a variety of complex projects - from VLC, to Apple Maps, and now working at Netflix on their iOS app experience. She also started her career by learning medical computer science - what a way to jump in! In this episode, we're learning about her career, what helped her be successful, and how she thinks about the importance of jumps between projects and companies.
#53 - Find Your Mentor And Complementary Skills, With Nicole Zhu, Senior Engineer At Vox Media
April 21, 2022
There are a few things in your engineering career that you should focus on relentlessly, but few as impactful as finding yourself a guide through the journey, as well as develop a set of complementary skills that can help accelerate your own trajectory. I chatted with Nicole Zhu, Senior Engineer at Vox Media, about the importance of mentorship, peer feedback (or any feedback, for that matter), and how skills that are not directly related to writing code can be more helpful to success than you anticipate.
#52 - Grow Your Career in Data Science, with Nick Wan, Director of Analytics for Cincinnati Reds
March 25, 2022
I don't talk about data science enough on this show. To remedy that, I brought in a remarkable analytics and data science expert - Nick Wan, who is a director of analytics for the Cincinnati Reds. Yes - the baseball team. We chat about his track from academia to working for a sports team, and how to build a career outside your typical FAANG (or is it MANGA) scaffolding.