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This is the first in a new series of podcasts from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences - the Engineering Culture Podcast. 

In this podcast, Wes Reisz, chair of the QCon conferences in San Francisco, London and New York talks to Phil Haack, an Engineering Director at GitHub focused on software pushed mostly to the desktop.   He’s shipping software like GitHub Desktop, GitHub Extensions for Visual Studio and the Atom text editor.  Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .Net community.  At Microsoft Phil was core to shipping NewGit and ASP.NET, MVC.NET.

Why listen to this podcast:

 - There is often too much focus on the nitty-gritty details of software development practices but as you scale out to larger projects and teams the challenges are not technological- they are sociological.
 - Research shows that teams which are more diverse are more effective.
 - Engineers shifting to management should consider it a discipline like any other technical field; it’s not something that you should “just wing”.
 - Building an effective team requires trust and that allows candid discussions and healthy debates without disrupting the relationships.  One-on-ones can be an effective way to do that.
 - To be an effective coach for engineers, a manager needs to be seen as a strong technical leader.  Someone without technical credibility is generally not received well.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3

5m 10s The big problems we have are sociological, and frequently companies and engineers don’t pay enough attention to these problems because they try to focus on the technical practices instead; but the root cause is how people interact with each other and how they are working together.

5m 40s The talk covers some personal lessons learned and the research that backs those personal lessons. There is validated research that shows certain things make for more effective teams.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

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Here is Phil Haack's talk on Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016: https://bit.ly/2QPEU9D

Engineering Culture by InfoQ

Github’s Phil Haack on Moving from Engineering to Management

Martin Fowler chats about the work he’s done over the last couple of years on the rewrite of the original Refactorings book. He discusses how this thought process has changed and how that’s affected the new edition of the book. In addition to discussing Refactors, Martin and Wes discuss his thoughts on evolutionary architecture, team structures, and how the idea of refactors can be applied in larger architecture contexts.

Why listen to this podcast:

 -    Refactoring is the idea of trying to identify the sequence of small steps that allows you to make a big change. That core idea hasn’t changed.
 - Several new refactorings in the book deal with the idea of transforming data structures into other data structures, Combine Functions into Transform for example.
 - Several of the refactorings were removed or not added to the book in favor of adding them to a web edition of the book.
 - A lot of the early refactorings are like cleaning the dirt off the glass of a window. You just need them to be able to see where the hell you are and then you can start looking at the broader ones.
 - Refactorings can be applied broadly to architecture evolution. Two recent posts How to break a Monolith into Microservices, by Zhamak Dehghani,  and How to extract a data-rich service from a monolith by Praful Todkar on MartinFowler.com deal with this specifically.
 - Evolutionary architecture is a broad principle that architecture is constantly changing. While related to Microservices, it’s not Microservices by another name. You could evolve towards or away from Microservices for example.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2QbdHej

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2QbdHej

Show Notes

Martin Fowler Discusses New Edition of Refactoring, Along With Thoughts on Evolutionary Architecture

In this podcast recorded at the Agile 2018 conference Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dominic Price from Atlassian about his opening keynote at the Agile 2018 conference.

Why listen to this podcast:

•	Agile is an answer to teams working together effectively, but it is not the only answer
•	A lot of large-scale “transformations” are about AGILE being thrust around as a compliance regime where the measures of success are the following of rituals
•	The example of an organisation who moved from “agile transformation” to “new ways of working”.  The difference is that “agile” is not the only answer and in a “transformation” there is an expectation of an end-state whereas new ways of working are continually evolving
•	Many of the things we call “soft skills” are in fact very hard and they are the key to success in making change in organisations
•	The need to focus on the mental health and wellbeing of people in the organisation – we believe we are custodians of our people

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2AxhT1o

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2AxhT1o

InfoQ Podcast

Dominic Price on Why Agile is Not Always the Answer

Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to build better, high performing teams by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 500,000 downloads in the last 3 years.