Monthly Archives: August 2023

Nathaniel Schutta (or Nate) is a software architect focused on cloud computing and building usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written multiple books and appeared in various videos. Nate is a seasoned speaker, regularly presenting at conferences worldwide, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, meetups, universities, and user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace (and evaluate) technical change. Driven to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate co-authored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough. Nate has published Thinking Architecturally and Responsible Microservices both available as free downloads from VMware.

Topics of Discussion:

[5:12] How Nate decided he liked development and architecture, and who was Dr. Evil?

[7:10] Nate worked at a software company for a brief period and spent a lot of his time building enterprise web apps.

[10:13] Is it possible to think and talk about software the same, regardless of language?

[14:17] Nate Defines circuit breaker.

[15:56] The importance of having good observability and monitoring in place to see what is going on.

[22:35] Nate gives some categories of architects and where he thinks it changes in responsibility and scope.

[26:14] To quote Ralph Johnson, "Architecture is the important stuff, whatever that is." While we may have different definitions of "IT," Nate thinks that it has the decisions that are hard to change later, and the ones we hope we get right in the first place. The "IT" is also what matters to the application at hand.

[36:14] Are we currently at another inflection point?

[38:03] The current landscape and challenges of inventing things on the fly.

[45:22] What can we expect from Nate's new book?

[55:54] Engineers often overlook soft skills, and the Dale Carnegie books on leadership are a great place to start.

Mentioned in this Episodes:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net

Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Architect Tips — Video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Nate Schutta Twitter

Nathaniel Schutta Website

Thinking Architecturally

Fundamentals of Software

Dale Carnegie

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

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This episode on the AI DevOps Podcast site

Bob started as a .NET Developer back in the early days of .NET 1.1 with the goal of converting ASP pages to ASP.NET web applications. During that time, his career progressed from .NET Developer to Lead Developer, to Architect, to where he is today. As a technical director at Octopus Deploy, he helps solve complex customer problems as Octopus Deploy. As a team, we help answer both technical and non-technical questions. Bob has been a fan of making it easier to deploy software since the early 2010s, when working for a company the only time to deploy to production was 2 a.m. Saturday. That has led him down the path of CI/CD, DevOps, TDD, and automating all things. He was exposed to Redgate tooling and Octopus Deploy while working at Farm Credit Services of America and has been a fan ever since. In his current role, Bob gets to work with a variety of technologies every day.

Topics of Discussion:

[1:41] One of the biggest high points in Bob's career was being one of the champions of automating database deployments, and seeing that spread across all these other teams.

[3:51] Also, he adopted test-driven development and was able to improve the speed of his application from 500 milliseconds per request to 50 milliseconds.

[5:20] Bob talks about test-driven development.

[7:00] The rules of thumb for people to get right to make running their software system more painless.

[8:14] The problem of database management.

[10:10] There are two schools of thought: state-based management and migration approach.

[12:59] Distributed source control and having a build server are two of the main tools to consider.

[15:28] The critical ingredients of monitoring and recovery.

[22:07] The two ways to define a tenant.

[24:11] One of the advantages of multi-tenancy applications is having a shared application and a shared database, where all the data of all the customers is intermingled with one customer's data.

[27:29] Managing complexity in the cloud.

[33:53] I's all about improving a little, every day, and practicing to get better just a little bit more.

Mentioned in this Episodes:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net

Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Architect Tips — Video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Bob Walker Twitter

Bob Walker LinkedIn

Blog — Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Download this episode (MP3, 34:50, 34.0 MB)

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This episode on the AI DevOps Podcast site

Damian Brady is a Developer Advocate Manager at GitHub. He's a developer, speaker, and author specializing in DevOps, MLOps, developer process, and software architecture. Formerly a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft for four years, and before that, a dev at Octopus Deploy and a Microsoft MVP, he has a 25-year background in software development and consulting in a broad range of industries. In Australia, he co-organized the Brisbane .Net User Group and launched the annual DDD Brisbane conference.

Topics of Discussion:

[2:12] How did Damian get into the field?

[5:50] What is GitHub Copilot, and what are some of the most impressive and time-saving features?

[8:38] What is the model that GitHub Copilot uses?

[10:32] How have they decided what code is appropriate for this model?

[12:13] Damian talks about both the prompt engineering and the server side.

[17:30] How do you know if your code is good code?

[19:50] Damian shares some cool prompts he has seen in Copilot Chat.

[26:10] Github Copilot Voice is an experimental tool, useful for people who find it hard to type or who can't type.

[32:48] The aim of Copilot is to basically increase your productivity, but increase your happiness as a developer as well.

[34:40] Will this eventually take the job of all developers?

[38:14] Whether it's GitHub Copilot or a competitive tool that does AI programming, it's just going to be the way that you do software engineering.

[43:07] The difference between junior and senior developers.

Mentioned in this Episodes:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net

Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Architect Tips — Video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Damian Brady on Twitter

Damian Brady website

GitHubNext

CoPilot for Docs

GitHubNext | Copilot for Pull Requests

Copilot for CLI

CoPilot Voice

DDD Brisbane

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Download this episode (MP3, 49:09, 41.9 MB)

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This episode on the AI DevOps Podcast site

Glenn Burnside is the Principal Engineer at Skimmer. For 11 years, he was the Executive Vice President at Headspring until they were acquired by Accenture. Before that, he held a number of development management positions as well as leadership roles in the Boy Scouts and other community roles. Glenn holds an Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and a Computer Engineering degree from Texas A&M University, where he held leadership positions in the Corps of Cadets, Company B-1. You can find more about Glenn at glennburnside.com.

Topics of Discussion:

[3:48] Glenn shares a funny story of threatening to quit if he became a manager, and what it feels like to bug people about filling out their timesheets.

[5:13] What Glenn realized about software team management and paving the way for others to grow.

[9:03] Glenn talks about his thought process of adding someone to the team, whether it's from scratch or adding someone to an existing team.

[10:08] A concept from The Ideal Team Player, of finding someone that is humble, hungry, and smart.

[13:14] Why Glenn asks to look for demonstrated ability or demonstrated actions from their prior history rather than answering a hypothetical question.

[14:05] The STARR method: Situation, Task, Action, Resolution, Retrospective.

[17:44] The importance of finding someone that can improve with you and learn as they go.

[19:46] The younger generation of developers has skills but lacks confidence.

[21:54] Gathering data points of the industry as a whole from outside your inner circle and place of employment.

[23:07] You've got the great people on your team, now how do you get them to stay?

[25:02] Keeping everybody aimed at the higher mission.

[31:11] Having respect for the whole team, not just thinking of yourself as an individual player.

Mentioned in this Episodes:

Clear Measure Way

Architect Forum

Software Engineer Forum

Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us programming@palermo.net

Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

Architect Tips — Video podcast!

Azure DevOps

Glenn Burnside on LinkedIn

Glenn Burnside

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Download this episode (MP3, 34:58, 34.1 MB)

Watch this episode on YouTube

This episode on the AI DevOps Podcast site