As the end of the year is approaching, it’s a good tradition to look back at what the year’s been like. In these times of uncertainty, it’s reassuring that one thing remains certain – tuning in to some of your favorite podcasts and hearing familiar voices.
2021 has been an amazing year for Semaphore Uncut. This year, we released 26 episodes and welcomed engineering leaders from a wide range of backgrounds, from CEOs and company founders to framework creators and industry thought leaders.
While every episode of Semaphore Uncut is an insightful conversation on a whole bunch of topics, you, our listeners, favored some of the episodes more than others. We collected the top 10 episodes of 2021 that you listened to the most during this turbulent year. Cheers to 2021 and look forward to seeing you all next year!🥳
Unicorn Developers with Filip Hraček
In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcomed Filip Hráček, developer relations engineer at Google, and talked about what’s great about Flutter, how to out as a developer, and the importance of keeping your motivation up.
Filip shared some great thoughts about the art of finishing projects. Developers are great at tinkering and optimizing, and then it’s really hard to finish unless there’s some outside pressure. This comes especially true for side projects: one might just keep working on that side project forever and never finish. According to Filip (and we can only agree), it feels much better to finish and launch something, even if it’s a side project.
I think that’s important to realize that it feels much better if you actually launch and finish something, even if it’s a side project, but a lot of people will not do that because it means a lot of, kind of self-discipline and sometimes pain that you have to go through.
-Filip Hráček, former developer relations engineer at Google
Adam Gordon Bell on Better Builds with Earthly
In this episode, we welcomed Adam Gordon Bell, Developer Advocate at Earthly, host of CoRecursive podcast. We talked about what Earthly is and how teams can adopt it. We discuss whether being a late adopter is a good or bad thing. Adam also shares his experience with starting his own podcast.
With Earthly, you can use whatever tools you’re currently using. We tried to give people the benefits of a big tool but that would be more approachable for everyday people.
-Adam Gordon Bell, Developer Advocate at Earthly
Adam talked a lot about why and when one should start using Earthly, how it works, and how easy or difficult it is to start with. Adam’s story as a developer is inspiring, and even more so is his podcast – CoRecursive. “There’s things to learn from people’s stories”, says Adam. “I like to focus on the experience, the experience of software development”.
Co-creator of Ionic Framework and StencilJS Adam Bradley on How to Make Fast Websites
In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we had an insightful conversation Adam Bradley, co-creator of Ionic Framework and Stencil, currently Director of Technology at Builder.io. We talked about Ionic and Stencil, Adam’s new projects Qwik and Partytown as well as how Builder.io works and how is it different from other drag and drop website builders.
Builder.io has that sweet spot where marketers and designers can go and build great landing pages, chnage around whatever they need, hit publish and get the page to go live immediately – but inside of their existing sites.
-Adam Bradley, Director of Technology at Builder.io
Adam speaks passionately about the new project that he’s working on – Builder.io. From the conversation, you’ll learn how the team managed to solve complex problems like making websites load fast with a new framework called Qwik and the Partytown library.
Lyft’s Keith Smiley on How to Scale Code with Bazel
Keith Smiley is a Principal Engineer and Lead Maintainer of Bazel’s iOS support at Lyft. We sat down with Keith to talk about what Bazel is, how the team at Lyft adopted it and when and how to get into Bazel in the first place.
If your team is thinking of switching to a monorepo or adopting Bazel as a technology, this insightful conversation with Keith will help you to understand how to navigate this project.
The benefit of using Bazel is that you don’t have to use exactly what Bazel provides out of the box. You can abstract it so that the interface that your developers use is more specific to you
-Keith Smiley, Principal Engineer at Lyft
Brandon Bayer on Creating Blitz.js, the Fullstack Framework for React
In this podcast episode, we welcomed Brandon Bayer, creator of Blitz.js, CEO of Flightcontrol. Brandon talked about his project Blitz.js, a Next.js fork and a fullstack, batteries-included framework for React. We spoke about the inspiration for the project, the challenges along the way and what’s planned for this great framework’s future.
Gleb Bahmutov on Why Testing Pyramid Makes Little Sense
Testing pyramid is a concept that’s familiar to many developers and QA engineers. But what if we told you it makes little sense?
In this podcast episode, Gleb Bahmutov, Senior Director of Engineering at Mercari US, explains why we as engineers should rethink our approach to writing tests and what we could use instead of the traditional testing pyramid.
People write so many unit tests and so few end-to-end tests because by the time they get to end-to-end tests, they just run out of time.
-Gleb Bahmutov, Senior Director of Engineering at Mercari US
Mapping the World and Testing Against Reality with Eric Bowman
In this podcast episode, we welcomed Eric Bowman, CTO at TomTom, former VP Engineering at Zalando, and a developer behind the game “The Sims”. We discussed how mapping technology has changed the world and how CI/CD practices have made real-time mapping possible.
Eric talks about his work at TomTom, how technology helps our daily lives, and the importance of feedback.
People so often they think of value flowing one direction, but the reality is that to do anything interesting value has to flow both directions, kind of all the time. Anyplace in technology now where you’re not getting feedback, it’s a missed opportunity.
-Eric Bowman, CTO at TomTom
Multi-platform Development with Co-creator of Flutter, Eric Seidel
In this Semaphore Uncut episode, we meet Eric Seidel, co-creator of Flutter and Director of Engineering for the Flutter team at Google. We chat about the Flutter developer experience, the Dart language that powers it, and the transition Flutter is making from mobile to desktop.
Dart is fantastically easy to learn. It’s an intentionally small language. It has few pieces in it to try and make it easy to learn, easy to use.
-Eric Seidel, co-creator of Flutter
Dave Thomas on Testing Past, Present and Future
In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we talk with Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, and many other well-known software engineering books. We discuss how software engineering has changed over many decades and how Dave’s experiences have informed his attitudes to testing.
You’ll learn how the Internet of Things is transforming software architecture, why software is both abstract and yet it changes the world, and why we should treat software testing as a tool, not a religion.
Nader Dabit on How Managed Services Turbo-Charge Startups
In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we meet Nader Dabit, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. He gives us his perspective on managed services in cloud development, tells us about AWS Amplify, and gives his predictions on the future of cloud computing.
Among other things, you’ll learn about the 80-20 rule of cloud apps, how Infrastructure as Code allows incremental design of your production environment, and Nader’s future in decentralized finance.
I think the core bread and butter for almost every app is authentication, data, and storage. So, you need authentication for user management. You need a data layer, which is essentially a combination of an API and a database. And then you need some type of file storage, typically for images and videos.
-Nader Dabit, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS
On Our Way to 2022
We have great plans for Semaphore Uncut in the upcoming year, bringing your way conversations with industry leaders, book authors, and international speakers. Is there anyone who you’d like us to invite to the podcast? Let us know!
Happy listening and see you in 2022.