Avdi Grimm
Co-Host of Greater Than Code
In his 20-year software development career, Avdi Grimm has worked on everything from aerospace embedded systems to enterprise web applications. He’s a consulting pair-programmer, the author of several popular Ruby programming books, and a recipient of the Ruby Hero award for service to the Ruby community. Since 2011 he has been teaching developers how to work more effectively (and have fun doing) it at RubyTapas.com.
He spends his theoretical spare time hanging out with his kids, hiking the Smoky Mountains, and dancing to oontz-oontz music.
Avdi Grimm has hosted 19 Episodes.
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215: Gathering Data in Machine Learning with Abeba Birhane
December 30th, 2020 | 1 hr 1 min
In this episode, Abeba Birhane talks about why predicting how people behave and act via machine learning is ethically flawed, and how examining its models and data makes us inherently bias as a human race.
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207: Investigation and Influence with Chelsea Troy
November 4th, 2020 | 55 mins 45 secs
Chelsea Troy talks in-depth about her Techtivism blog series: coding in investigation mode, engineers considering the actions and impact of their work systematically, the power of influence, making a connection between values and your work as an engineer, and individual vs collective action.
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199: Toxicity in Tech with Amy Newell
September 9th, 2020 | 55 mins 14 secs
Amy Newell talks about toxicity in tech, specifically male toxicity and hierarchies in engineering roles. She and the panelists discuss measuring skill advancement, the concepts of congressive vs ingressive, how to unlearn ingrained beliefs, and recognizing and feeling value.
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179: Conference Magic with PJ Hagerty
April 22nd, 2020 | 1 hr 13 mins
In this episode, PJ Hagerty talks about Developer Relations, having online vs in-person conferences, making conferences both diverse and inclusive, talking about mental health, and conference accessibility.
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178: Data Science and Sponsorship with Emily Robinson
April 15th, 2020 | 59 mins 49 secs
Data Scientist, Emily Robinson, talks about her journey into the data science field, the idea of passion, dealing with failure, the ideas of sponsorship vs mentorship, and the fact that companies should be training their senior people to be mentors.
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169: Career Elbows
February 12th, 2020 | 1 hr 1 min
The panelists discuss career transitions and share information about job searching, interviewing, and resilience.
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156: Authenticity in Interviewing with James Edward Gray II
November 13th, 2019 | 1 hr 2 mins
James Edward Gray II talks about why “Just Be Yourself” is terrible advice, being authentic in an interview, turning your interviewer into your advocate, intrinsic motivation, technical interviews, storytelling in the interview, and management techniques.
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151: Off Meta with Amir Rajan
October 9th, 2019 | 1 hr 10 mins
Amir Rajan talks about having sensitivity to development pain, developer productivity, optimizing local maxima, and game development.
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131: Poo-Covered Rocks with Cat Swetel
May 22nd, 2019 | 52 mins 59 secs
Cat Swetel joins the show to talk about managing a platform with ancient value, exploring systems, Wardley mapping, and looking for poo-covered rocks: the importance of observation and reflection.
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127: Hope and Suffering with Amy Newell
April 24th, 2019 | 1 hr 6 mins
Amy Newell talks about suffering and sustaining hope and faith in the face of what feels like no hope and no faith, living a valuable life vs a happy life, bringing your “whole self” into the workplace, changing culture in organizations, and bipolar disorder.
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125: Everything is Communication with Sam Aaron
April 10th, 2019 | 1 hr 8 mins
Sam Aaron chats with the panel about creating Sonic Pi, the importance of patience and delayed gratification, logging, and fixed tempo, clocks, and time.
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124: Navigating Neurodiversity with Helen Needham
April 3rd, 2019 | 52 mins 28 secs
Helen Needham, an autistic person and an advocate of promoting the value of neurodivergent thinking, talks about decoding people, the intersection of empathy and neurodiversity, being deliberate as a survival skill, and paying attention to EQ: emotional intelligence.
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122: Surfing with Michael "GeePaw" Hill
March 20th, 2019 | 1 hr 5 mins
Michael “GeePaw” Hill talks about autopoiesis (say what??), the cost of certainty, doubt vs narrowing, thin and thick culture, and occupational game playing.
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121: Emergency Communication with Thai Wood
March 13th, 2019 | 54 mins 30 secs
Thai Wood is a developer turned EMT turned developer again. He talks about resilience engineering and closed-loop communication, his experience as an EMT and the lessons he’s brought from there to his work as a developer, incident response, the normalization of deviation, and asking questions to get helpful answers.
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120: Expect The Unexpected with Andy Hunt
March 6th, 2019 | 1 hr 7 mins
Andy Hunt talks about iterative development and continuous learning and how we should become comfortable with uncertainty. He also talks about his personal mantra of feedback, context, and learning, as well as adaptability and making groups more effective. Andy also talks about his personal software development journey and his dalliances in writing science fiction.
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114: Theory of Mind with Jean-Francois Cloutier
January 23rd, 2019 | 1 hr 16 mins
In this episode, Jean-Francois Cloutier talks about theory of mind: his Elixir-powered robots, predictive processing, object-oriented programming, intuition and emergent properties, and the ineffability of Smalltalk.