Podcast #001

Podcasts – Strictly Professional

This is the inaugural Strictly Professional podcast, hosted by Chas Emerick and joined by Gerard Gualberto, Doug Martin, Chris Miles, and Lou Franco.

You don’t know us, but we’re software developers (and occasional software company founders) that have met through the Western Massachusetts Developers Group‘s biweekly meetings. We can all jabber on forever, and it seemed like a crime to deprive the rest of the world of our wit and wisdom.

Notes & Topics:

• Chas thought a good starting topic would be Joel Spolsky’s recent article on Inc.com, where he laments the “slow growth path” that FogCreek has taken over the years, and DHH’s response to it. This leads into a discussion about bug trackers, what is and is not a network business, and other various nonsense, including a sidebar about the
• Lou mentioned Chas’ recent blog post, “Reducing purchase anxiety is a feature“, and how you’d better offer refunds, because your customers will get them if they want them anyway.
• On the way to talking about why we’re software developers and what the nature of work is, Lou ran us through the outlines of Noam Wasserman’s “Rich or King” choice.
• Doug exposes top-secret national security information.
• We trail out with some brief software language philosophy. Miles mentioned Rich Hickey’s near-metaphysical discussion of time (first in Rich’s keynote presentation at this year’s JVM Language Summit [slides], and then in the Artima interview Time is the New Memory), and then said that Brainfuck is philosophically anarchist existentialism…which makes sense to me.

Comments, criticism, raves? Comment below, and maybe we’ll do another one.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/strictly-professional/sp-podcast-001.mp3