021: Listener Questions #2

This week, the crew responds to questions shared by our wonderful, wonderful audience! Nathan Strutz - who called the Working Code Hotline - shares his exciting journey into feature flags; Ryan Mueller wants to compare and contrast Kanban and Scrum style project management; and, LD2 covers the gamut with questions regarding staying-up on new technology, the importance of having a GitHub profile, and whether the hosts prefer having a deep knowledge in one area (ie, a technical expert) or a shallower knowledge across a variety of areas (ie, a Jack or Jill of All Trades).

This week's sponsored shout-out is Grace Hopper Celebration - an event, inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper - that brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.

And finally, don't forget that we are going to have our first book club episode on May 12th for Clean Code by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Feel free to read-up and follow along!

Triumphs & Failures

• Adam's Triumph - After feeling like Gatsby wasn't performing well enough (at least on the old version that he's using), Adam's decided to start porting his blog over to Eleventy (11ty). This new static blogging engine is proving to be much faster and will allow Adam to build-out more of the features that he used to have in his older, dynamically-rendered blog engine.
• Ben's Failure - Piling onto some previous failures, he's been in a bit of slump lately. More specifically, he feels disconnected from the programming community. Having nothing to do with the pandemic, he longs for the time that he used to spend reading blogs, watching videos, and - generally speaking - being "part of the conversation." He fears that his hyper-focus on work problems may be holding him back. And, he wants to figure out how to make learning (for the sake of learning) part of his every-week routine.
• Carol's Triumph - She got vaccinated! Woot woot! And, after last week's episode, Carol is really crushing it! With one 4-hour Udemy course about AWS under her belt and she already has her AWS lambdas running on a SAM local stack, all while seamlessly integrating with Google Auth and GMail. All in all, she's quite pleased with how well all the pieces are coming together; and she feels like she's unlocked a lot of potential value in her future development efforts!
• Tim's Triumph - After triumphantly releasing a new product last month, Tim held a retrospective with his customers to get a broad sense of how things are going. And, so far, everything seems to be going swimmingly. Yes, a few obscure edge-cases have presented themselves (and have been promptly dealt with); but, for the most part, payments are getting processed and people are very pleased with the new functionality! In fact, motivated by the current success, he's now planning to release this new product offering to a wider customer-base.

Notes & Links

• Adam Tuttle - Dead Code - An exploration of when it makes sense to comment-out code.

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