Freelancing is a lot of work. One of the hardest parts is finding clients. I've been getting a lot of work lately and I'm going to explain where I get most of my work from. Podcasts and Screencasts – I've had several people come to me after listening to my podcasts or watching a screencast and…

I got asked the question “When do I stop testing in order to get stuff done?” My answer was “I go faster doing TDD.” Here's why I get more done with TDD. It forces me to think through the problem. This allows me to tackle the programming problem and solve it more quickly. I can…

David Heinemeier Hansson sparked a debate on Twitter about Ruby testing frameworks. A lot of people saw it as slamming RSpec and others saw it as constructive conversation about what tools you use and why. This is how I view to see it and where I come down on this debate. I also discuss why…

At Mountain West Ruby Conference, Mike Moore brought up that many members of the Ruby community have lost part of the community roots. Particularly, the acronym MINASWAN, which stands for “Matz is nice and so we are nice.” There are a lot of people out there who, rather than looking to help, are looking to…

  This week's episode is an interview with Chad Fowler—author of The Passionate Programmer.

This week I go into hiring developers and how you determine whether or not they'd make a good employee. The hard thing with hiring is that you really don't know what you're getting until you've made the hire. You can look at their code, pair with them, and talk to them to get a feel…

This turned out to be a great interview with David Heinemeier Hansson. He's the creator of the Ruby on Rails web framework and a partner at 37 signals. We discussed what inspired him to build Ruby on Rails and work in Ruby. We talked about how 37 signals approaches things. We went into the Rails…

I've been reading the Software Craftsmanship mailing list where they were discussing whether software is a craft. Someone brought up the concept of what makes a “Master Craftsman” in software and I started thinking about how to determine if someone is an expert or master. There are a few concepts out there including these: Someone…

Michael Hartl put together a free rails tutorial online. We met at RubyConf and determined to talk about his tutorials. His path into Rails development has been interesting to listen to. Similarly, his thoughts on business are inspiring. We talked about a great way to support Teach Me To Code. And that is by purchasing…

So, between family stuff, more work than I can realistically handle, and being sick, I'm afraid I fell behind on the podcast. However, not to worry, I have big plans for 2011 including dedicating a full day to getting all of the podcasts, screencasts, blog posts, and other stuff out the door and into your…

Feel free to leave feedback at (801)753-8279 or [email protected] You can also reach me on twitter at http://twitter.com/cmaxw. Our guest this week is Dave Hoover. He's a member of the Software Craftsmanship movement. He's the Chief Craftsman at Obtiva. He's also written Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software CraftsmanThe most exciting part, was learning about apprenticeship from…

There are a lot of opinions about what makes code readable. This was a short discussion of a few of them. I also recommend checking out these links. What is Code Readability? How to write readable code? 5 Tips to improve your code readability. Stack Overflow discussion on Implementing Readable Code Download this Episode