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Episode 10: The Journey So Far

We've reached the end of Season 1! In this final episode, Alex and Brian take some time to reflect on what we've learned so far, what themes tend to keep coming up across episodes, areas we're targeting for personal growth, and finally, what you can expect from Season 2. Thanks for being a part of our first season! We'll be back in 2024 with all new guests, insights, and stories from the Staff Engineer's Journey. 
Picks & Plugs
Alex:
Email vs Capitalism, or Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Brian:
“Everything You know about latency is wrong” from Brave New Geek
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Transcript
Episode 10 Transcript

Episode 9: Security Priorities

Is your platform secure? How do you know? How do you even know all of the machines, networks, software, and data that make up your platform in the first place? We're joined by Amirali Shahinpour, Head of Security Data Platform at Twitch to discuss driving security priorities across your organization. 
Amir's Framework for addressing vulns:
Prepare (Requires Asset Inventory)
Identify (Threat intel: what’s affected?)
Analyze (Prioritize: use extra context from Inventory)
Communicate
Treat (take action)
Picks & Plugs
Amir:
The Art of the Start 2.0, by Guy Kawasaki
Alex:
The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr
"Git Hidden Gems", by Enrico Campidoglio
Brian:
"Don’t Ask Forgiveness, Radiate Intent", by Elizabeth Ayer
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Transcript
Episode 9 Transcript

Episode 8, Part 2: Empathy and Inclusion

Part 2 of our discussion with Lee McKeeman, Staff Engineer at Google, on empathy and inclusion. Why do companies struggle to prioritize efforts around inclusion and accessibility? And what can we, as technical leaders, do about it?
Picks & Plugs
Lee:
LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmckeeman
Substack, https://leemckeeman.substack.com
Alex:
Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore
Brian:
Build and deploy full stack web sites with SvelteKit and Vercel
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Transcript
Episode 8, Part 2 Transcript

Episode 8, Part 1: Empathy and Inclusion

Lee McKeeman is currently a staff engineer at Google, who’s also spent time at Amazon and Meta. Lee is passionate about how we as technical leaders can influence our work environments to be more empathetic and inclusive so that people of varying races, genders, creeds, ages, and neruodiversities, all feel empowered to contribute their best ideas to the work that we do. 
Picks & Plugs
Lee:
LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmckeeman
Substack, https://leemckeeman.substack.com
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Transcript
Episode 8-1 Transcript

Episode 7: Community Building

Think about the roles you play in your community. Social planner, Little League coach, Dungeon Master. Did anyone explicitly give you that authority? Or did you just gravitate towards your interests and put yourself out there? Can we do that at work, too? Are we defined by the title given to us by our companies, or can we put ourselves out there to take on broader roles that align with our strengths? David Cunningham, Sr Engineer with The New York Times, joins us to discuss how to do both.
Picks & Plugs
David:
New York Tech & Beer socials (https://meetup.com/nyctnb) and New York AI User Group tech talks (https://meetup.com/nycaiu)
CEO of Meetup David Siegel and Tech Talks coming up in September
The 1-Page Marketing Plan
Alex:Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Thirteen ways of looking at a Turtle -  Scott Wlaschin
Functional Design Patterns - Scott Wlaschin
Brian:Simple Made Easy, Talk by Rich Hicky (creator of Clojure)
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Transcript
Episode 7 Transcript

Episode 6: Evaluating New Technologies

How do you decide whether that shiny new frontend framework or that highly performant, memory-safe backend language is really going to solve your problems? Join our guest Eric Justusson, as we talk about how to leverage quick experiments, tracer bullets, greenfield projects, and hackathons to responsibly evaluate the benefits and costs of onboarding new tech for your team. 
Picks & Plugs
Eric
Hacker News
Random engineering idioms:
Yak Shaving
Bike Shedding
Spike
Rubber Duck Debugging
Cargo Culting
Others
Alex
Design Patterns, Gang of Four
Brian Ogilvie
Unidragon Puzzles
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Transcript
Episode 6 Transcript

Episode 5: AI Madness

Will AI fundamentally change the way we as engineers interact with our work and our world? Or is it mostly hype? We’re joined today by David Ashe-- Senior Software Engineer with American Express--to explore the benefits, risks, practical uses, and downright bizarre results of AI.
 
Misc Show notes
AI has even made some contributions to this Podcast. For instance:
All Artwork for this podcast is generated by AI using Midjourney.
The captions for this episode were initially generated by AI on Podbean.com, and corrected by yours truly. 
Picks & Plugs
David
HackTheBox.com
Alex
Staff Engineer, by Will Larson
Brian Ogilvie
Find a real language tutor at verbling.com
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Transcript
Episode 5 Transcript

Episode 4: Technical Vision and Strategy

How do you establish a vision of the future that addresses a specific business need for your company? And how do you turn that vision into a concrete strategy to execute? Our guest Brian Jones is an engineering manager in Central Security at Meta, and he'll share his techniques for building vision and strategy at scale. 
Acronym Glossary
CISSP: Certified Information Systems Security Professional
DAU: Daily Active Users
GRC: Governance Risk (Management) & Compliance
HSM: Hardware Security Model
MSSP: Managed Security Service Provider
NFT: Non-Fungible Token
OKR: Objectives and Key Results
PCI: Payment Card Industry
SOC: Systems and Organization Controls
TL: Tech Lead 
TPM: Technical Program Manager
XFN: Cross-functional Team
Picks & Plugs
BrianJones
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
Radical Candor, by Kim Scott
Alex
Test Driven Development, Where did it all go wrong
The Art of code 
Fireship Youtube channel
How to Reassess Your Chess, Jeremy Silman
Brian Ogilvie
Pete Hodgson blog: Creating and sharing Strategic Architectural Initiatives
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Transcript
Episode 4 Transcript

Episode 3: The Cake Analogy

This episode is a tasty one. Today’s guest introduced me to an analogy that illustrates beautifully the progressively growing scope and responsibilities of an engineer from Junior to Senior to Staff and beyond. I love this analogy so much that I invited him onto the show to share it with you. So get out your aprons, prep your mixers, and welcome our guest Andrew Preece, as we whip up: "The Cake Analogy."
Picks & Plugs
Andrew
Radical Candor, by Kim Scott
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High, by Grenny, Patterson, McMillan, Switzler, and Gregory
Linux and the Unix Philosophy, by Mike Gancarz 
The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter
Alex
Grokking Algorithms, by Aditya Bhargava
The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman
A Philosophy of Software Design, by John K. Ousterhout
The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
Brian
The First Rule of Prioritization: No Snacking (blog)
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Transcript
Episode 3 Transcript

Episode 2: What is a Staff Engineer Anyway?

So... what is a Staff Engineer anyway? What even is the job description? In this episode, we’re joined by Abhishek Mistry–Staff Engineering Leader at Hudson River Trading–to discuss exactly that. What is this job ICs aspire to? How is it different from management? How do you influence and lead people when you actually have no real authority? Is it better to go broad or to go deep? How does the Staff Engineer scale their impact and provide, like Tom Brady, tremendous value above replacement? Abhishek has been in the tech industry for many years. He has tons of insight, and he’s genuinely a very fun guy to talk to.
Plugs
JammText.com: text-to-screen software to use at your next party. 
Resources
LifeLabsLearning: classes on influential communication
The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
JavaScript Jabber Podcast, on Top End Devs
Refactoring, by Martin Fowler
Functional Programming Simplified, by Alvin Alexander
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Elasticsearch Documentation
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