In this episode, Ian is joined by Transistor co-founder and engineering lead Jon Buda, as well as product person and senior engineer Jason Pearl. It’s an appropriately software engineering focused episode, as they discuss successful pull requests, annoying spammers and attackers, setting up apps for local development, thoughtfully using artificial intelligence tools, and the programming language Ruby.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:37) - HIGH
• (11:51) - LOW
• (20:35) - PICCOLO
• (33:47) - Wrap-up

• transistor.fm
• podstandards.org
• Ruby

Ian discusses Weeks 12 and 13 at Transistor, which included some real actual contributions to podstandards.org (cleaning up CSS and visual bugs), as well as wildfire smoke affecting him in his real actual environment. And finally, he reflects on the different mechanisms through which Customer Support people identify systemic problems.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:46) - HIGH
• (03:48) - LOW
• (05:55) - PICCOLO
• (10:04) - Wrap-up

• CSS
• podstandards.org
• BC Wildfire Map
• transistor.fm

In Episode 6, Ian is joined by his supervisor: Helen Ryles, Transistor’s Head of Customer Success!

Both are excited about the start of new projects; Helen is planning the company’s annual retreat, and Ian has just finished the first phase of work on updating a WordPress theme for the Podcast Standards Project.

They also reflect on how hard it is to find time for these projects, given the rapid product changes and complex customer queries that have been coming in lately. The fight to reach “inbox zero” and keep documentation up to date continues!

Helen also tells of some recent side projects and the quest to update her technical skillset, which she is starting to do by building small, useful, local apps. And finally, Ian presents a peculiar case where data is stored in a file name.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:39) - HIGH - Helen
• (05:24) - HIGH - Ian
• (10:38) - LOW - Helen
• (15:52) - LOW - Ian
• (23:39) - PICCOLO - Helen
• (29:02) - PICCOLO - Ian
• (32:20) - Wrap-up

• The Podcast Standards Project: podstandards.org
• Transistor.fm

P.S. — This description is not AI-generated, because I like to practice synthesizing my ideas ;) (the same goes for all HLP episode descriptions)