We have an illusion of control when things go our way, and a bias to shift the blame when things don't go our way. In retrospectives, we also believe we know all of the variables at play.
In today's episode, we talk about these tendencies, and provide a model for thinking about our efforts as functions, and different variables as inputs. We categorize these ... Show More
Mar 3
AI Moves the Bottleneck - Are You Ready for What That Means For Your Career?
AI is bringing massive changes to our industry, but it's not just about how fast you can write code or use agentic flows. In this episode, I explore how AI is fundamentally shifting the economic bottleneck of software development, and how you can use your systems-thinking enginee ... Show More
29m 52s
Feb 24
Listener Question - Abdul Asks About How to Balance Career Strategy Between Money, Meaning, and Skill Transitions
Today, we are tackling the natural tension between the desire to make more money—getting a raise, finding financial stability—and the desire to have meaningful, purpose-driven work. We are diving into a fantastic listener question from Abdul, a front-end engineer with 10 years of ... Show More
34m 35s
Feb 18
AI-Era Employability and Job Security for Software Engineers - Mental Models for Finding a Competitive Advantage Without Selling Out
I've been delaying this episode for a long time because the topic is genuinely difficult and, for many of us, scary. AI is threatening not just to our livelihood, but to our sense of self-worth as creators.In this episode, I don't offer false guarantees about job security. Instea ... Show More
40m 31s
Jun 2024
Episode 196 - Breaking the typecast: Growing beyond frontend and backend labels
In this episode of Front End Happy Hour, we dive into the topic of being typecast as a frontend or backend engineer. Is it really a bad thing? Our panel discusses the implications of these labels, how they can limit growth, and share strategies to break free from these constraint ... Show More
51m 16s
Sep 2018
Press Start: How Gaming Shapes Development
Before the terms 'open source' and 'internet' were even coined—there were gamers. They created proto-open source communities, sharing and building upon each other’s work. For many programmers, gaming led them to their careers.
In this episode, we explore the creative free-for-all ... Show More
27m 31s
May 2024
Episode 282: Human Connection in Products with Evelyn Gosnell
What design interventions can help improve human connection in your software product? Our guest today is Evelyn Gosnell, behavior scientist and managing director at Irrational Labs. You’ll learn what behavioral design is, the foundational principles of human connection, how AI pr ... Show More
27m 16s
Apr 2024
Next-Gen Gaming: AI Souls, Real-time Culture, Personalized Avatars
<p>Over 3,700 companies applied to a16z’s SPEEDRUN. In this episode, we meet the founders pushing the boundaries of what games can be.</p><p>From the fusion of traditional gaming elements with modern tech-twists, a16z General Partner Andrew Chen and Partner Josh Lu discuss the ch ... Show More
30m 36s
Jan 2023
Amjad Masad - The Future of Software Creation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.310]
My guest today is Amjad Masad. Amjad is the founder and CEO of Replit, whose mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. Replit has built a browser-based coding environment that makes coding more fun, collaborative, and approachable. We discuss how that is poss ... Show More
1h 3m
Mar 2023
Dear startups, your developers and engineers are on an island
This week, Natasha interviewed Lizzie Matusov, the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, which wants to fix the "leaky pipeline problem" in tech onboarding that doesn't set up engineers for success. Yes, that's right, this week we're talking about the work needs, habits and aspirations ... Show More
31m 31s
Jun 2023
Episode 361: Get git and non-tech ramping up
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Schtolteheim Reinbach III asks, Hey soft skills engineering, love you guys. I work at a company you wouldn’t hear much about, on a product that you wouldn’t think about as having much tech involved- suffice it to ... Show More
28m 5s