The Stack Overflow podcast #71 has finally bubbled to the top of the queue. It is kinda two different podcasts smooshed into one. The first half is clips from the speakers from the SF DevDay event, and the second half is the usual gang of suspects goofing off around a microphone. The redeeming part of this particular episode was Jeff Atwood’s on-stage portion. Here are the bits you should care about. (Or at least I did…)

  • An interesting interview idea – Prepare a list of the smartest people in your field and present that list to the candidate. How many people can they identify? Do they argue for people you missed or that shouldn’t be present on the list? Seems like an interesting way to weed out the people who do the job just for the mortgage
  • The Stack Overflow Team Motto: Feel free to fail early, often and frequently as possible in really painful ways
  • Don’t phone in
  • Be passionate for the ‘craft’. But not just the craft of constructing the software, but for delivery of the solution
  • Would you sign your name on the product? The Amiga 1000 hardware developers did.
  • Jeff recommends Coders at Work and provided some of the rationale behind it through quotes:
  • Before you ask for help on something talk through the problem to a stuffed animal first
  • Can you deploy something new everyday? Do you make it even a tiny bit better every day?
  • The Train of Shame – the error logs, in real-time(ish) to show you what is busted. So important that you figure out and implement this first before you do any production code. Start and end you day by watching this.
  • Take bits from different stacks as necessary. Don’t just stick with only one solution family
  • The big engineering problem is going from 1 to 2 servers. After that, it is ‘easy’ to add more.
  • With technology, use the lightest thing you can get away with