Hanselminutes - Fresh Talk And Tech For Developers

Gene Luen Yang is an writer of graphic novels and comics, including the Eisner Award winning "American Born Chinese." He's also written the comic continuation of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and much more. He also is an engineer and teaches software at a local high school! He and Scott talk computers, creativity, and comics. He's creating a new book, "Secret Coders," about the magic of computers.

Erica Joy is an engineer at Google. She talks to Scott about her experience growing up, when she first started to love computers, and the demographics and environments of the various companies she's worked at over the years. They talk about stress, what it really means to have a diverse workplace, and finding your authentic self.

Scott talks to nerdcore musician Sammus, aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo. She's doing a PhD at Cornell but also pursuing a music career. Her lyrics are complex and multilayered, touching on topics of popular culture, gaming, computers, history, and much more. She tours, raps, produces, and much more. How does she do it all?

Scott sits down with podcaster, radio host, and advocate Elon James White. Elon is the founder of TWiB (This Week in Blackness) and an award-winning blogger. He recently went mobile and took his show to Ferguson, Missouri. How does social media and accessible digital tech change how we receive our news?

Musician, artist, and inventor Moldover creates, tours, and explores new frontiers in electronic music and also coined the term "Controllerism." He's currently creating a new original album packaged in a playable circuit board instrument! Moldover explains Controllerism to Scott, how it differs from Turntablism. How does Moldover make his instruments and mold his sound?

Scott and Damian need better laptops. They need the Ultimate Developer Laptop. i7, 8 to 16 gigs, 256G+ SSD, and under 2 pounds. Does it exist?

Scott's at Blendconf and sits down with Val Head to talk about CSS Animations. Val is the author of "The CSS Animations Pocket Guide" and explains the essence of CSS Animations to Scott in this episode.

"A Dark Room" was the #1 App in the Apple App Store for weeks and weeks. Surely that's made its creator, Amir Rajan a millionaire, right? Amir explains exactly how the finances work, shares tips on how to make a #1 app, and sets YOU up for success.

Claudina Sarahe is a Front End Developer, educator, conference organizer, and an expert on the Sass CSS preprocessor. She shares her love of Sass with Scott while at @blendconf. Why was Sass needed? What makes Sass powerful...and should you start using it right now?

After starting along a medical path, Saron Yitbarek switched directions, did a bootcamp at the Flatiron School and is now well on her way in a new career as a programmer. Saron also started CodeNewbie, a welcoming community of beginner and developing programmers.

Scott talks to Craig McKeachie about his new book the Javascript Framework Guide. There's lots of talk about frameworks, but not a lot about HOW to choose a framework and WHY? What kinds of things do I value, and does my framework of choice value those things as well?

Scott sits down with Richard Campbell to talk about the Apple iPhone 6 and Apple Watch Announcements. Will wearables finally happen? Is this the fitness wearable we've been waiting for, paired with the ultimate watch? NOTE: There is VIDEO of this show on YouTube, the link is below on this site.

Scott talks to Tom Soderstrom, the IT CTO at JPL, a NASA Center. What's going to happen in the next IT decade (which is shorter than you'd think!)? What kinds of systems do they use at JPL and NASA, and where does Tom think the next big innovation is coming from?

Transgender people face discrimination, unemployment, homelessness, and a myriad of social problems. Dr. Kortney Ziegler is an activist, academic, artist, and filmmaker who created Trans*H4CK as a response to help tackle these problems through education, empowerment, open source, and advocacy.

Scott chats with Michael Yarichuk about RavenDB. Michael works with Ayende and the RavenDB team on their document database. Scott is trying to learn about document databases and Michael helps him along the path, exploring those computer science concepts that make document databases unique.

Kal Ahmed and his open source team have created a great .NET-based NoSQL solution called BrightstarDB. Brightstar is an RDF triple store. What does that mean? It does not require the definition of a database schema, and with the RDF data model you can easily add and integrate data of all shapes. Kal talks to Scott about RDF, NoSQL, and the whens and whys of using a database like BrightStarDB.

Jessie Shternshus takes comedy and improve to the next level and applies it to Lean Startup and Agile Software methodologies. Can't believe it? Jessie sits down with Scott and they chat about how thinking quickly on your feet is a muscle and a skill that must be exercised.

Lara Swanson is the Engineering Manager of Performance at Etsy. She sits down with Scott to explain how to design for page load time, including optimizations to images, fonts, markup, and more. How important is having a culture of performance and executive buy-in? Is a two-second page load time reasonable? How important is A/B testing?

David Catuhe is the primary author of Babylon.js and an expert in WebGL. Are 3D games really happening on the web? There are more possibilities than you may realize! WebGL really lights up with libraries like three.js and babylon.js.

A collaborative group from Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital is working together to make automated blood glucose control a reality, and they have announced their results from the Bionic Pancreas study. Scott, who is also a 20 year+ Type 1 Diabetic on an insulin pump, sits down with Dr. Steven Jon Russell, MD, PhD to talk about this project and it's ramifications.