Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

Does the tech industry have an alcohol problem? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Does the alcohol have a place on the job? At parties? How far does one go? Scott talks to Victor Yocco about a way to think about drinking in the workplace.

Scott talks to Data Scientist Safia Abdalla about the rise of python notebooks and new ways to think about interactive computing, both online and off. What is "interactive literate coding" and how does it change computing for both the technical and not-quite-technical user? All this and Safia teaches Scott about the "nteract" project.

You've pair programmed but have you tried Mob Programming? Woody Zuill and his team "discovered" programming as a group and it changed their whole process. Woody joins Scott and explains how they stumbled on this, how they refined it, and how Mob Programming may make your programming life better.

Sandi Metz and Scott explore the art and science of teaching. How to people learn? How can we be better teachers? When presenting information, what's the best way to get it from your brain into the students? Why am I phrasing everything like a question? All this and more on this week's episode.

Iheanyi Ekechukwu is a Product Engineer with Digital Ocean. He has a background in both design and development. Are such people unicorns? How closely should designers work with developers? Are these truly separate practices...and how separate?

What is Infrastructuralism and how can it help you think differently about software and large problems? Scott sits down with Everett Harper, CEO of Truss. They talk about how applying some old ideas in new ways helped them fix healthcare.gov.

We first interviewed Paul Stovell a few years back when he started a micro-ISV he was calling "Octopus Deploy." Now it's a fully formed and successful company whose flagship product Octopus Deploy is used all over. Damian Brady joins Scott and explains why deployment is more subtle then you think.

Patrik Svensson had an idea in 2014 for a build automation system that had C# at its heart. Fast-forward to 2016 and Cake Build has a thriving group of core contributors, a large group of "contrib" plugins, and it's joined the .NET Foundation. How does Cake work, and how does one build an open source project into a success?

Linda Liukas is a Finnish computer programmer, children's writer and programming instructor. In 2014, her Hello Ruby coding book for children raised $380,000 on Kickstarter becoming the platform's most highly funded children's book. She talks to Scott about how it all started and where teaching coding to kids is going!

Scott Anderson works at Funomena on Virtual Reality games. He's currently working on Luna, a unique tactile VR puzzle game. Do you need many thousands of dollars and a super-powered computer to experience VR? Scott Anderson gives us a tour from Google Cardboard to Oculus and beyond.

Luvvie Ajayi has been writing. She's been writing for YEARS. She has been blogging for 13 years! She's a noted humorist, techie, digital strategist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She's spoken all over (including The White House!) and taught classes worldwide. Today she joins Scott to talk about her brand, her tech, and her hilarious new book "I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual"

Jason Scott is the internet's historian and archivist. He is the creator and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. In 2011 he proposed that the MAME arcade emulator be ported to JavaScript and the next half decade changed how we think about old software and hardware on the internet.

Daphne Chong has had a great year. While she's been a professional developer for many years, this year she's organized user groups, spoken at a number of conferences, and generally pushed herself out of her comfort zone. How did she do it?

Felienne is always learning. In exploring her PhD dissertation and her public speaking experience it's clear that she has no intent on stopping! Most recently she's been exploring a large corpus of Scratch programs looking for Code Smells. How do children learn how to code, and when they do, does their code "smell?" Is there something we can do when teaching to promote cleaner, more maintainable code?

Scott sits down with Dan Driscoll to talk bots. What happened in 2016 that made bots more intelligent and more relevant than ever before? Why now, and what can YOU do with your own bot written in Node.js, .NET, or using their REST API?

Stephanie Hurlburt and her co-founder at Binomial see a problem with how graphics and assets make their way from the CPU to the GPU and on to your screen. Now they're creating a new texture compressor and GPU Transcoder that will improve how your games look and play!

Andrea Goulet and her business partner Scott Ford love legacy code. No one is supposed to LIKE legacy code, right? Andrea and the team at CorgiBytes believes people are more than just makers - they are also menders. So how does one approach an old code base?

Frank Krueger is well known for his popular iOS applications like iCircuit and Calca. Frank creates his apps with Xamarin and C# or F#. But why not write these apps for the iPad *on the iPad?* Frank just released the incredible new apps Continuous for iOS. You CAN write .NET on an iPad, productively. Today. Scott asks Frank how he did it!

Rachel Simone Weil thinks in 6502 Assembly and loves to program on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Yes, that's the NES and yes, it's 2016! She's created a number of amazing NEW apps including the world's first connected Twitter client for NES.

The open source Orleans project is behind some massive systems including Halo itself. Is the virtual actor model the revolution it appears to be? How does this relate to the models of the best, as well as things like Akka and Service Fabric? Richard Astbury does his best to set Scott straight in this episode.

Andy Kitchen is a consultant and researcher in machine learning specializing in neural networks. He sits down with Scott and explains why Machine Learning matters, and why you and I should start learning it ourselves, right away, with TensorFlow!

Jessica Lord works at GitHub on the Electron framework. Is Electron "just Chrome in a frame" or is it so much more? Jessica sets Scott on the right path and explains exactly where the Electron platform fits into your development world.

Karolina has often been on remote teams. Whether it's working from Europe or Australia, working 10 time zones away or just a few, she's developed a number of tips and tricks for surviving (and thriving!) while working remote. Can we build our tech teams "remote-first?"

With all this talk of Big Data, this episode we go smaller. Oz du Soleil has built his career on Excel. He feels that there isn't enough data literacy in our industry. While you're writing SQL queries, do you know where you data comes from? Is it clean and is it valid? Where does Excel and tools like it fit into the data-focused world of 2016?

Gina Marie Maini is a functional programer. She's the most totally amped functional programmer I've ever met, and she told me that OCaml was wonderful. Today Gina tries to get me to accept OCaml and functional programming as the way and the light.

NativeScript lets you build truly native iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps with Javascript and CSS. How is it different from Xamarin? What about Cordova? How can we tell what's "native" and what's not, and honestly, when should we care? Scott talks to Jen Looper about the NativeScript OSS project.

Aniyia L. Williams saw a gap in the market and a product that needed to be created. Tinsel creates tech jewelry to ensure that fashion-savvy women can enjoy technology without sacrificing their style. How did Aniyia bootstrap her hardware startup? She explains the concept, funding, prototypes, development, and manufacturing on this episode.

Rob Eisenberg is the creator of the Aurelia JavaScript framework. This open source framework is a reimagining of how we create rich apps in the browser. Is this the framework that you were looking for? How does it compare to others?

There's so much talk about containers as it's clearly the buzzword today. Rather than doing a deep dive into container tech, Scott talks to Aja Hammerly about what containers really means to us as developers. How do containers change our workflow? Is the promise of cloud portability real?

Scott sits down with software developer and development manager Louise Elliott about her ideas around "Punishment Driven Development." Why is this such a common way to run a project? Does it work and is it ever appropriate?

Former VC Nadia Eghbal is exploring the world of open source and how tech gets funded. Her investigative work is currently supported by The Ford Foundation as she explores the way that the public infrastructure of the Internet gets built. She talks with Scott about how Open Source Software gets funded!

Arlan Hamilton is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a seed investment fund that backs high-potential, underrepresented startup founders. She talks to Scott about how starting a fund works, how much money one needs to invest, and demystifies many of the buzzwords around investing in tech today!

Nick Farmer is best known for developing the Belter constructed language (conlang) for Syfy’s The Expanse. What's involved in creating a convincing constructed language? How real are these languages?

Scott talks to web developer and entrepreneur Kronda Adair about her business and her recent failure. How do projects fail and what do we do with that failure? Can failure be a motivator or does it slow us down? How can we turn lemons into lemonade as technologists?

Scott sits down and talks with Lyza Gardner, CTO of Cloud Four and long-time web expert, about her recent explorations into hardware using the Johnny-Five Framework. You can control Arduinos and other devices and make robots with brains written with Node.js and JavaScript! Is this the framework we've been waiting for?

Erin Tomson left Pixar after 13 years to pursue something totally new! Her hardware startup called "Modulo" brings plug and play flexibility to the world of microcontrollers like Arduino and Particle. How did she get started and make the move from 3D software to modular hardware?

This week Scott talks to to electrical engineer Laura Hughes from Arrow.com. Laura specializes in lighting and power supply design and can solve pretty much any problem with an LED. Laura schools Scott on a number of electrical issues and they come up with an epic new project idea!

Simone Giertz is a Maker, a robotics enthusiast and surprisingly (her words!) a non-engineer. She's become somewhat of an expert in sh*tty robots and we love her for it. Also, she happens to be Swedish but sounds totally American just to confuse us. Scott talks about how she gets her inspiration and how she got started!

Captain Brent Chapman has a BS from the West Point, an MS in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon, and has been tearing electronics apart since he was four. Today, Cpt Chapman works for the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) at Moffett Field and puts those skills to work. In his spare time, he tinkers, creates, and helps others do the same.

Scott talks to Lauren Tan, a Senior Developer at Dockyard, about her excitement with the Ember Framework. Her talk on "Ambitious UX for Ambitious Apps" covers new techniques like Reactive UX that are made easy with the Ember.js framework.

Afua Richardson joins Scott for this creative episode. Afua is a comic artist who has worked for Marvel, Image Comics, Top Cow, and many more. Her work on "Genius" was nominated for a Glyph Award. She's also a singer/songwriter and an accomplished musician. Afua and Scott explore how comics are made, who owns them, and how creators can express themselves in the digital age.

Scott sits with fellow Type 1 Diabetic Dana M. Lewis about the Open Artificial Pancreas System that she and her husband Scott Leibrand created. As other commercial entities race to "close the loop" for diabetics, how did two regular folks control diabetes with off-the-shelf parts? Dana demystifies the technology behind this software-managed diabetes solution.

What's it like building and scaling a mobile game to millions of users and billions of transactions? Does the cloud really allow you to "not worry about scaling" and just focus on the game? We'll hear from Kalle Hiitola, the CTO of Next Games, about their experience scaling The Walking Dead, an app that got over a million downloads in its launch weekend!

Scott talks to Kris Rothe about the best way to get started making your own video games! How technical do you need to be? Should you start with Unity, GameMaker, or something else? We'll hear about all this and more from an experience game creator!

Scott talks to Damian Edwards about ASP.NET Core 1.0 (previously ASP.NET 5). How freaked out should developers be? What's changed and what hasn't for this new version of .NET and the ASP.NET Web Framework?

Scott talks to enterprise developer, now tech CEO, Tiffany Mikell about the challenges and rewards of software development in a startup. What's it like to transition from large teams to smaller agile teams? How do you manage security and ops without dedicated teams? What are architectural discussions like with non-technical cofounders?

Scott talks to Ben Adams, the CTO of Illyriad Games, about their new massively multiplayer space game "Age of Ascent." Why is it interesting? It's massively bigger than any other game and it's written with web technologies like JavaScript and WebGL. Can they pull this off and scale?

Stacy Kirk is the CEO of QualityWorks, a node.js-focused QA company, a 20 year software development veteran, and the creator of nodeqa.io. Stacy is a graduate of Stanford and also coaches two Lego League Robotics teams! Scott and Stacy talk about the lack of respect that Quality Assurance has been getting over the last several years.

Scott talks to Data Visualization expert Irene Ros. When she isn't contributing to the Miso Project, teaching her d3.js class, or working on making OpenVis Conf the best data visualization conference it can be, she's working on projects that focus on creating engaging interactive visual displays of information.

John Henry is with Cofound Harlem, a startup accelerator dedicated to building 100 new companies in Harlem by 2020. What does an accelerator look like today? Do companies just need startup cash, or is there a more innovative and effective way to bootstrap tomorrow's companies today?