Interview 2 - Movi

Kalman Bekesi - CTO of Movio but still a very hands on kind of guy agreed to be interviewed for my second podcast.

We range in this discussion over hiring practices, how they release, how the developers machines are setup, what technology stack they use, what led them there and so forth. In all, a really very interesting interview for me, and Kalman was gracious to take time out of his busy calendar to grant it.

This time I turned up on time, but while it wasn't apparent during the interview, there was a lot of reverb coming from the room.

Interview 1 - Yellow

Welcome to the first recording!

In this episode, some of the development team at Yellow agreed to talk to me about how they take requirements through the development, build, test and deployment lifecycle. As I explain in the recording, I managed to arrive early but couldn't find parking - poor planning on my part!

You will notice that there is a slight skip at the start - I realized I wasn't recording so at the end I asked everyone to introduce themselves again and dragged that back to  the start.

They hung around, and were great to talk to - the interview went pretty well. Please feel free to post questions on Google+ for Michael and the team.

Its the first one I have done outside of Chez Derricutt (the "recording studio") for some time, and so the levels weren't too good.

Almost forgot to mention - Music by Snake Eats Electric Blanket - For Teetering Bulbs - you can download it and the rest of the album here.

Welcome to Cadence Cast

For a while now, while doing Illegal Argument, I have wanted to have an idea what other developers out there are really using for their Development Stacks - how do they solve problems? What tools are they using? Has the panacea of Continuous Deployment been reached? Do they have test teams? How do they work with them? Support? Operations? All of these questions really get to the heart of what it is like doing Software Development day in and day out. The rhythm of Development, its Cadence if you will.

This podcast isn't about Methodologies - although they will come up. It isn't about Maven, although some may use it. It isn't about Java, or the JVM, although some may use it.  It isn't about "Architecture". It isn't even about Customers.

Richard Vowles works for Blue Train Software, a software mentor who develops in Java and Groovy on the JVM, doing AngularJS/CSS/HTML5 on the client side. Richard is interested in making teams work better, communicate better, deliver better and look forward to where software needs to be. All those things that happen not just because a Customer wants it, but because they need to happen.

Mark works for SMX Email - and he came up with the name (as he always does) after I described what I wanted to do. He may join me sometimes. He may do the interview sometimes. He is often busy being awesome.

We are looking for people and teams to interview - it will probably be quite hard as often, particularly in larger companies, people can't talk about their development, often people get embarrassed if they aren't doing all of the CMMI levels, but thats not really what its about. Interviews when done will get put together and sliced by myself (or Mark if he is in the mood to help) and presented to the interviewees. They can listen, take it to their bosses, whatever they like - they have final say in the cutting process.

Here's looking forward to some real software developers talking about real software development.

Richard, a rainy wintry August night, 2013.