Consulting, Heuristics, and Engineering w/ João Rosa

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HTML All The Things is a web development podcast and discord community which was started by Matt and Mike, developers based in Ontario, Canada.

The podcast speaks to web development topics as well as running a small business, self-employment and time management. You can join them for both their successes and their struggles as they try to manage expanding their Web Development business without stretching themselves too thin.

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What's This One About?

In this episode Matt and Mike sit down with João Rosa, host of the Software Crafts Podcast, to discuss his unique career in the development industry. João fulfills interim positions, such as CTO, at various companies as apart of his consultancy practice. He advises on strategic technology implementation and has also worked as a coordinator, software engineer, technical team lead, and more. He also has a passion for heuristics, which is uses alongside other design problems to challenge guests in his own podcast.

Guest Introduction

João is a Principal Consultant at a company called Xebia. As part of his consultancy practice, he fulfills interim positions, such as CTO, and also advises on strategic technology implementation. He has worked as a coordinator, CTO, software engineer, software architect and, technical team lead across different industries. He has also done numerous talks on topics such as Domain-Driven Design, DevOps, property-based testing, and many more. Then to top it all off, he is also a podcast host of his own show - the Software Crafts Podcast where he interviews guests on each episode, challenging them with a variety of heuristics and other design problems.

João's Links: (Software Crafts Podcast | Twitter | LinkedIn | Website)

Show Notes

3:00 - What is it like to jump into a CTO role?
10:00 - Engineer vs Coordinator?
15:30 - Minimum requirements for leading/mentoring as you become a senior engineer?
19:00 - How important are technical skills vs soft skills?
28:40 - Is it important to put in extra time for talks, blogs, etc?
35:30 - How do you go about handling the software delivery experience?

Key Takeaways

Senior Engineers should be able to teach/mentor. They don't need to lead teams but at least explain concepts and help developers ramp up.
Create an environment that allow for reteaming. Great documentation, onboarding process and readable code all allow for new team members to spin up quickly.
Companies should allow employees to experiment and allow employees to do developer outreach