Episode 300 | Richard Taylor - Full Throttle

Guest:

Richard Taylor

@rightincode

Richard Taylor talks with Dave Rael about community involvement, leading teams, influencing teams in better directions, and managing time to live and deliver

Richard L. Taylor Jr. is a 25 year software development and technology professional living in Huntersville, NC. His experience includes the design and development of small to enterprise class applications. He currently serves as Director Of Engineering at SentryOne. Richard is a believer of using the right tools for the job and has leveraged ASP.NET (Web API, MVC), SQL Server/MongoDB, Angular, Bootstrap, JavaScript/NodeJS, KendoUI, and Xamarin (just to name a few) to deliver solutions. He has a great deal of experience but likes to explore new technologies, tools, and techniques to help create better software. Richard has a passion for the software development community. He serves as one of the organizers of the Modern Devs Charlotte meetup group and is the founding organizer of the Charlotte Xamarin Developers meetup group. Both groups try to create environments where developers of all skill levels can come together and learn about the latest technologies, tools, and techniques to create software. These groups also provide a venue to network with fellow developers in the community. In addition to serving the local software development community via meetup groups, Richard also speaks at regional, national, and international technology users groups and conferences. His speaking schedule can be found here: http://www.rightincode.com/page/speaking-schedule Richard recently received the Progress (Telerik) Developer Expert designation. DE’s are highly skilled, visible, and elite industry leaders who write, speak, help, and code using Progress (Telerik) products. There are 44 DE’s in 13 different countries who are ambassadors for Progress Products to the tech community. When not developing software, Richard is focused on spending time with his lovely wife Shondrecca (she gives the best hugs!!) and their five children (Richard III, Ayanna, David, Jonathan, and Stephen).

Chapters: 3:13 - Dave introduces the show and Richard Taylor5:49 - Richard's relationship and history with writing software and attitude toward creating value7:18 - Different types of users and meeting their needs10:02 - Richard's busy life and time management13:08 - Richard's community involvement16:10 - Benefits of organizing developer communities18:45 - Richard's experiences with building for web and mobile and history with different language and platforms25:13 - Richard's story of failure - forgetting his role - too much focus on code when he should have been managing a team29:13 - Richard's experiences with leading teams and being an individual contributor31:04 - Richard's success story - Successfully moving an organization to Scrum and changing a culture to something much more effective35:46 - How Richard stays current with what he needs to know41:01 - Richard's book recommendations42:08 - The things that Richard most excited44:20 - Richard's top 3 tips for delivering more value45:42 - Keeping up with Richard

Resources: Richard's Blog Richard's Speaking Schedule Modern Devs Charlotte Charlotte Xamarin Developers Greg Shackles on Developer On Fire Microsoft Azure Blog Xamarin Blog The Clean Code Blog Channel 9 Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin on Developer On Fire SentryOne

Richard's book recommendation: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Robert C. Martin The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers - Robert C. Martin Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design (Robert C. Martin Series) - Robert C. Martin

Richard's top 3 tips for delivering more value: Listen, listen, listen Take an iterative approach to solving problems Don't let value sit on a shelf