Dave Rael’s Developer On Fire podcast has quickly become a favorite.
Dave gives a great interview and he’s getting some astonishingly good guests. So many technologists I’ve long admired keep showing up here. It’s impressive.
I could recommend dozens of episodes as a good first taste. Esther Derby, Scott Hanselman, Chad Fowler, Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, etc, etc. But I’ve tried to narrow my list of favorites down and write about three shows in particular, to pique your interest but not overwhelm you:
Jessica Kerr
This is the episode that drew my attention to Developer On Fire to begin with. Jessica is one of my favorite technical speakers and public technologists in general. Her enthusiasm for learning and teaching about technology and her deep humility and bravery were inspirational to me long before I listened to this episode, but they come across in it, too. Check her out on Ruby Rogues (which is about way more than Ruby) and on Twitter, too.
Gerald Weinberg
Jerry’s book Becoming A Technical Leader changed the way I think about my work at a fundamental level. Then his Secrets of Consulting and More Secrets of Consulting did that again. His work has been huge for me. It’s some of the first stuff I’d recommend to a developer looking for professional growth resources. So I was extremely excited to see he was on the show. And he did not disappoint. He tells some great stories in this episode, and you get the sense that he has countless more, all illustrative of hard-won wisdom. I would subscribe in a heartbeat to a podcast where Weinberg just tells stories about his decades and decades in the software business.
Michael Feathers
Michael wrote one of my all-time favorite technical talks, The Deep Synergy Between Testability and Good Design. He also wrote the book on dealing with legacy code. This episode and the blog posts he mentions in it have me excited: He’s been thinking and writing about not only better ways to build software, but about how to improve the systems around the construction of software: how software helps organizations, and how organizations can adjust themselves to really capitalize on the value software can provide them.
