Coffee with Developers - Robby Russell

What if your biggest technical problems aren't code, but people? Learn how to empower developers and manage technical debt without waiting for permission.

#1about 4 minutes

Getting started in software development by solving problems

The journey into development began not with theory, but with a practical need to build a website for selling stickers, leading to incremental learning of Perl and PHP.

#2about 5 minutes

The origin story of the Oh My Zsh framework

Oh My Zsh was created to standardize shell configurations for coworkers, making pair programming more efficient and the command line less intimidating for new developers.

#3about 2 minutes

Curating a successful community-driven open source project

With over 93% of the code contributed by the community, the project's success relies on curating contributions rather than creating everything from scratch.

#4about 2 minutes

Improving developer experience for efficiency and well-being

The motivation for building better tooling was to improve personal developer experience during pairing, increase team efficiency, and reduce physical strain from typing.

#5about 7 minutes

The mission to maintain and improve legacy applications

Planet Argon's focus is on helping organizations with mature applications avoid costly rewrites by tackling technical debt and making incremental improvements.

#6about 3 minutes

Why developers struggle to prioritize maintenance work

Common challenges in legacy projects are often people problems, where developers feel they need permission to refactor, get their requests deprioritized, and eventually leave.