Good Code Podcast

We talk to Badri Rajasekar about how engineering practices differ in large teams vs. small teams; the role automation plays in ensuring good code quality, and how a Microsoft executive stormed into the room with a baseball bat when a Windows build broke!

Badri has spent almost 20 years building software now. He started his career working at companies like Microsoft and then became the CTO of Tokbox in 2014, where he led the core WebRTC based streaming video cloud platform. He's now the founder and CEO of Jamm, a video collaboration app that helps you work better with your teammates remotely.

We talk to Brent Bradbury, Head of Software at STOKE Space Technologies, about writing code for re-usable rockets. Brent offers a unique contrast on how building enterprise SaaS is different from building software that goes on a rocket.

STOKE is a rocket company that delivers satellites directly to their final orbit at 20x lower cost. They do this using 100% reusable rockets designed to fly daily.

We talk to Harminder Virk, author and maintainer of AdonisJS, a Node.js framework highly focused on developer ergonomics, stability and confidence. We talk about writing frameworks and libraries with a focus on developer experience, first principle thinking and the ecosystem around Node.js development.

We talk to Cheuk Ting Ho about her experience in coming from academia to working in an open-source company and building a community of contributors, code review practices in the TerminusDB project, and the importance of communication while building a healthy open-source community.

Cheuk spent 5 years researching theoretical physics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, before moving to build a career in data science. She's worked with a bunch of startups before joining TerminusDB, where she's working on building a revolutionary graph database. She's contributed to a number of open-source projects, such as Pandas, Keras, scikit-learn. She also maintains a bunch of popular open-source libraries of her own and has been on the organizing team of many meetup groups and conferences, like EuroPython.

In this episode, we talk to Shabda (@shabda) about the nuances of API design and how to think about things like URLs, implicitness vs. explicitness, and security when starting to build a new API from scratch. We also explore the differences in approach between REST and GraphQL API design, contrasting the choices one has to make for either of them.

Shabda is founder of Agiliq, a web and mobile application design consulting firm. In the past 10 years, Shabda has led his team to build applications and APIs for some of the world's largest organizations.