Relevance, Inc. | Agile Software Design & Development

ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Episode 005 - Michael Parenteau

Ever since I began thinking about doing a Relevance podcast, I knew that I was going to want to have Michael Parenteau on the show. Michael is head of our design department, and a designer himself. He has a great attitude, and brings both that and his considerable talent to everything he does. I happened to be down in Durham the week that we released the new website, which Michael had a big hand in bringing about, so I knew the time was right to have a conversation with him about it.

In this episode, we talk with Michael Parenteau about being a designer at Relevance, Sanskrit, the importance of remembering the human part of software, and washing feet at Burning Man. Enjoy!

Download the episode here.

The show is finally available on iTunes! You can also subscribe to the podcast using our podcast feed.

You can send feedback about the show to podcast@thinkrelevance.com, or leave a comment here on the blog. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

• Our guest, Michael Parenteau
  • @parenteau
  • Michael on GitHub
• We have a brand new website! You're probably looking at it right now.
  • Note the hand-drawn illustrations on the team page
  • And the How We Work section
  • Plus the neat background image
  • And don't forget about the interesting typography
  • Check out what unmatchedstyle had to say about the website, too
  • Please send us feedback about the website
• People we mentioned during the podcast
  • Jen Myers @antiheroine
  • Kevin Altman @itg
• Other things that came up on this show
  • ClojureScript One
  • Pair programming
  • Git
  • GitHub
  • HAML
  • Slim
  • Jekyll
  • Ruby
  • Liquid
  • Agile Principles
  • Clojure
  • Software Craftsmanship
  • Sanskrit
  • Devi Mandir
  • Burning Man

ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Episode 004 - Aaron Bedra's Valedictory

When I heard that Aaron Bedra was leaving Relevance, I was surprised and a bit saddened. But I also thought, "Hey, we should have him on the podcast." And that's just what we did. I think it's great to work at a place where it's cool to record an interview with someone who has decided to move on.

In this episode, we talk to Aaron about what brought him to Relevance, some of the things he's worked on while he was here and even a bit about what the future holds for him.

Download the episode here.

ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Episode 003 - Brenton Ashworth on ClojureScript One

I was particularly excited to record this, our third episode of ThinkRelevance: The Podcast. That's because on today's show, we talk with Brenton Ashworth about ClojureScript One, which was released just this week. As Brenton will explain, ClojureScript One is a project aimed at helping people learn how to use ClojureScript quickly and effectively.

Download the episode here.

As a reminder, you can subscribe to the podcast using our podcast feed. I'm still working on getting the show added to iTunes, but that should happen pretty soon.

You can send feedback about the show to podcast@thinkrelevance.com, or leave a comment here on the blog. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

• Our guest, Brenton Ashworth
  • @brentonashworth
  • Brenton's blog
  • Brenton on GitHub
• Music
  • The intro song on this episode is Fight Fire With Fire, by Metallica.
  • The outro song is Paranoid by Black Sabbath.
• People
  • Luke Vanderhart: @levanderhart, GitHub
  • Jen Myers: @antiheroine, Blog, GitHub
  • Kevin Altman @itg
  • Michael Parenteau @parenteau
  • Rich Hickey: @richhickey
  • Fogus: @fogus, Blog, GitHub
  • David Nolen: @swannodette, Blog, GitHub
• Links
  • ClojureScript One
  • ClojureScript itself
  • Google Closure
  • Domina - A ClojureScript DOM manipulation library
  • Hiccup - A fast library for rendering HTML in Clojure
  • How We Pair- A bit about pair programming at Relevance
  • The "Hammock Talk" - Rich's excellent talk about how to solve hard problems

ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Episode 002 - David Liebke on Avout

Hello, and welcome to the second episode of ThinkRelevance: The Podcast. We had so much fun last time that we thought we'd do it again! This time, we talk to David Liebke (@liebke), a developer here at Relevance. The main thrust of our conversation centers on Avout, a Clojure library for managing distributed state in a consistent manner. Avout is pretty cool, and we get to hear David explain it, as well as talk a bit about the source of the names of all David's projects, the book Anathem.

Download the episode here.

In other exciting news, the show now has an actual feed, just like a real, grown-up podcast. You can find it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/thinkrelevance/podcast. I'll work on getting the show added to iTunes as the next step.

Also, I believe I forgot to mention this last time, but please send feedback about the show to podcast@thinkrelevance.com. Thanks for listening!

Show Notes

• David Liebke on the Internet
  • @liebke
  • David's blog
  • David on GitHub
• The intro and outro music today both come from IOLET by David Stutz. The CD is inspired by some of the concepts and themes in Anathem. The intro song is Deriving the Quadratic Equation, and the outro is Approximating Pi.
• Avout can be found on the web at http://avout.io. You can ask questions on the Clojure mailing list.
• Some of the technologies we talked about on this episode:
  • Zookeeper
  • Hadoop
  • mongoDB
  • Amazon SimpleDB
  • Microsoft's Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)
  • menagerie
  • Clojure Protocols
  • Clojure Pods
• The people we mentioned today include:
  • Rich Hickey: @richhickey
  • Stuart Sierra: @stuartsierra, Blog
  • Neil Stephenson

ThinkRelevance: The Podcast - Episode 001

Relevance is a fascinating place to work. The primary reason for that, in my opinion, is the great people that work there. I find I'm constantly having interesting conversations with my coworkers, and it's not always about tech stuff. More than once I've had a random hallway conversation and thought, "Wow, if I had recorded that, it would make a pretty good podcast episode."

So that's what I'm doing. On a roughly weekly basis, I'm going to be releasing conversations with the people I am privileged to work with. We've got no set agenda: just have an interesting conversation about whatever people want to talk about.

As this is our first episode, I'm still figuring out how to do all the usual podcast stuff, like getting it on iTunes, creating a feed, and all that jazz. So for our inaugural episode, we're just going with a simple download link. I'll get all the fancy podcast stuff figured out, soon, I promise.

In this episode, I talk with Justin Gehtland, who's sort of our CEO (he explains the "sort of" in the episode). As is always the case when talking to Justin, it was a fun conversation. I hope you'll agree.

Show Notes

We mention a lot of people in the podcast. Here's a list of where to find them on the web:

• Justin Gehtland: @jgehtland, Blog
• Alan Dipert: @alandipert, Blog
• "Scary" Ron Sumida: Current web whereabouts unknown
• Don Box: @donbox, Wikipedia
• Chris Sells: @csells, Blog, Wikipedia
• Brent Rector: Website
• Keith Brown: @keithbrown42, Website
• Stu Halloway: @stuarthalloway
• Tim Ewald: Current web whereabouts unknown
• Glenn Vanderburg: @glv, Blog
• Jason Rudolph: @jasonrudolph, Website
• Rob Sanheim: @rsanheim
• Rich Hickey: @richhickey
• Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas are The Pragmatic Programmers

Other notes:

• The intro to the podcast is the song Jet City Woman by Queensrÿche.
• The outro to the podcast is the song Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits.
• Justin, Stu Halloway, Tim, and I all used to work at DevelopMentor.
• Relevance's Fridays policy.
• You can find out more about B Corporations at www.bcorporation.net.
• Justin's books:
  • Better, Faster, Lighter Java
  • Java Enterprise in a Nutshell
  • Spring: A Developers's Notebook
  • Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer
  • Rails for Java Developers
  • Effective Visual Basic: How to Improve Your VB/COM+ Applications
  • Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET
• Band Together is on the web at www.bandtogethernc.org.
• Read about Fan, the obscure programming language. Apparently it's called Fantom now.
• Programming Clojure, by Stuart Halloway.
• Ruby on Rails.