Leeor Engel

I’ve blogged about why software podcasts are awesome and why you should listen to them in the past. In this post, I’m giving an update on my favourite podcasts in 2017.

Software Engineering Daily

This podcast is still my goto podcast for all things software. The majority of episodes are worth a listen and many are essential listening.

The New Stack

There are a few New Stack podcast series. Makers, Analysts, & @Scale. Great podcasts for learning about new technologies, but also about the different and emerging players in the industry. There’s also some great coverage from some interesting conferences like KubeCon, etc.

Cloud Podcasts

Are we moving into a hybrid cloud future? Who knows, but keeping up with the developments of the major public clouds is definitely a glimpse into the future. These podcasts are all really good and overlap with a lot of what is happening in the open source world anyway. Another good avenue to hear about those things too. Also, they’re a great place to learn about best practices, both for a specific cloud and for cloud architecture in general.

In terms of best practices and more in-depth coverage, AWS re-invent, the annual AWS cloud conference is released in podcast form each year. Here’s the podcast from 2016. You might want to pick and choose your episodes from this one as there are lots.

Software Engineering Radio

This podcast has been bumped down my list due to the slower pace of new episodes, but they can still bust out a great episode from time to time. Some recent highlights are an episode with John Allspaw on system failures and another with Michael Feathers on legacy code.

Other Favourites

Manager Tools

This is my goto podcast for all things management. Excellent advice on how to approach or how to handle a variety of situations. I can’t believe this stuff is free! There’s also another pretty good podcast from the same guys called career tools. Some overlap in the content.

Exponent

I love this podcast. Ben Thompson & James Allworth discuss recent developments and news in the tech industry. Excellent punditry on the subject, and highly entertaining. They are great at framing things and putting them in broader context. It’s really fascinating to hear about the strategies the tech giants are pursuing as they compete with each other.

Conversations with Tyler

A fantastic podcast. It does cover many topics relevant to programmers like technological developments in other disciplines like biology, economics, sociology, etc. Frequently fascinating discussions. Basically like being a fly-on-the-wall for a conversation between two brilliant people, talking about something likely to be super interesting.

TL;DR Wikis are awesome tools. When used poorly, they’re like black holes; documents disappear into the ether. When used intelligently, they can be powerful, self-organizing knowledge centers for your team.

On most large software projects, organization is key. Developers aren’t always the most organized people in the world (I’m no exception) and project managers tend to focus on the project schedule. This can leave something to be desired or tracking the team’s progress and keeping everyone on the same page in terms of technical decisions and understanding of the larger system architecture as the project progresses.

Most projects hit a speed bump or two along the way, and it isn’t uncommon to have people scrambling trying to remember what was agreed to and when or struggle to remember why or how a certain decision was made.

Continue reading “Reign in the madness: Intelligently using wikis for your dev team”