Engineers and QA are sometimes at odds with each other. In this episode I had a chance to catch up with JP Fairfield about the frustrations QA can encounter when engineers finish some code, only to then throw it over the fence at QA to test. This behavior is counter-productive and often leads to tensions between QA and engineers. We discuss how to change this paradigm and what the engineer/QA relationship should look like.

Katie and Shelby are both passionate about functional programming and Kotlin! Both recently made the move cross country from the west coast to the east coast to start their new roles. Shelby is starting a new job as a software engineer at Twitter. She will be working on the search infrastructure team focusing on backend development. Previously, she worked at Intuit. Katie is a software engineer working on a backend service providing fit recommendations for Amazon Fashion. Katie also previously worked at Intuit on TurboTax Online. In this episode we discussed with Shelby and Katie how best to effect change across an organization, especially when the goal is to introduce functional programming. We had a chance to learn from Shelby and Katie how they brought functional Kotlin to Intuit, and effective methods to level up on FP principles. We also had an interesting discussion around whiteboards and the interview process, and had the chance to hear their thoughts on microservices.

A chat with Michael Snoyman, VP of Engineering at FP Complete, author, speaker and creator of multiple open source libraries including Yesod and Haskell Stack. We were very curious to hear about FP Complete's recent foray into Rust. We talked about Haskell, monads, why a Haskell programmer might want to consider Rust, “bullet-point programming” and “smart compilers”.