529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing

529: The Narwhal Looked Amazing
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Chris Svec returns to the show to discuss the messy, non-linear realities of engineering management and onboarding new college graduates. We explore why companies should bother hiring fresh grads in the first place, how to prevent junior developers from going dark when they get stuck, and why admitting ignorance publicly is an absolute workplace superpower. Along the way, we dive into managing genius firmware engineering hires, battling technical debt and software entropy, and why your development team shouldn't communicate solely through pull request comments.

Chris Svec is the Director of Embedded Software Engineering at Insulet. If you're looking for an experienced leadership or management thought partner to help scale your development team, Chris Svec offers private coaching and consulting. You can reach him directly at the email given in the show (or hit the contact link and we’ll forward your message along).

Recommended Books for Engineering Managers & Tech Leads

  • The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier – A guide for navigating tech leadership and managing engineering teams.

  • Resilient Management by Lara Hogan – A book dedicated to the human side of engineering management.

Software Architecture & Embedded Systems Resources

  • A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout – A high-level philosophical perspective on software engineering and architecture.

  • The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas – A classic text on software development best practices.

  • Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky – Insights on software development methodologies and managing tech teams.

  • Making Embedded Systems by Elecia White – A comprehensive guide to firmware design patterns and embedded architecture.

  • Embedded for Everyone by Nathan Jones – A curated repository of accessible embedded system learning resources.

Educational Programming Games

  • Shenzhen I.O. by Zachtronics – An interactive puzzle game for learning assembly programming.

  • Typer Shark! Deluxe – A classic game to improve typing speed and precision for developers.

Mentions and Episode Context

If you want to dive into Svec’s previous appearances on the podcast, be sure to check out:

Transcript 

520: All Sorts of Interesting Facts About Teeth

520: All Sorts of Interesting Facts About Teeth
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Chris and Elecia apologize, discuss uses and abuses of chatbots, reach out to an uncertain manager, try to help someone out of their professor’s draconian rules, and extol the joys of reading. 

Chabot Space & Science Center is in Oakland, CA, US. It is wonderful!

Some suggestions for UncertainManager:

Audio books are great! In the US, many libraries have digital libraries with extensive audio collections. There are several apps with different catalogs for the same library Libby, Kanopy, Hoopla, and Palace (check out the California shelf at Palace!).

And since you are probably going to ask about the games Elecia doesn’t play:

  • Turing Complete shows how logic and logic gates work, building up a processor.

  • Zachtronics’ TIS-100 is another logic and processor design game. It is a little ugly in spots (too real world) but it is a really deep dive into learning assembly. It is the precursor to Shenzhen IO but harder to finish.

  • Zachtronics’ Shenzhen IO is about circuits and how they work .

  • Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation is about optimizing resources, it turns out to be a lot like assembly programming.

Should you have gotten here because you wanted facts about teeth, Elecia had been enjoying Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans.

Transcript