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Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers

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Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers

The Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers are focused on a mix of Java, Knowledge, and Remote topics.

The parabolic growth of podcast content is both a blessing and a curse. It’s wonderful there’s so much great content. The curse is finding what we’re looking for amidst all the noise.

Here are some of the best podcasts out there covering topics that might be of interest to fellow Remote Java Devs. Enjoy!

Java / Tech

A Bootiful Podcast

Josh Long is a Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal. He covers a variety of topics around the Java Spring, Spring Boot, and Pivotal(now VMWare) ecosystems. He’s also a Java Champion, prolific author, and all-around expert when it comes to Java, Spring, Spring Boot, and Cloud.

Josh puts out a ton of content across various platforms including Spring Tips on Youtube. If you want to keep up to speed on the latest in Java, Spring, and Cloud, Josh is a great person to follow.

Java Off Heap

Another great resource for the latest happenings around the Java world. Freddie, Bob, Michael, and Josh all focus on different parts of the ecosystem so there’s rarely a dull moment.  Which is no mean feat considering talking tech can be a little dry.

Java Pub House

Another Freddie Guime and Bob Paulin production who are both very engaging and knowledgeable. This podcast tends to focus on more granular subjects which is a great way to expand your world as a developer.

We tend to get locked into a tech stack wherever we’re working and so listening to Freddie and Bob go deep on a library or framework that we haven’t used yet provides some great information. Or even to further expand on the capabilities of tools that we do use, but may not have been aware of their full power.

Cloud Engineering – Software Engineering Daily

Jeff Meyerson does a great job in his Software Engineering Daily podcast. He’s very skilled at methodically explaining complicated ideas and is a natural teacher. I’ve been listening mostly to his Cloud Engineering podcasts lately and they’ve been very thorough and informative.

You’ll find expansive coverage of Cloud topics surrounding AWS, Kubernetes, and much more. Jeff interviews experts in the Cloud domain and with his own wide-ranging knowledge makes for a very interesting listen.

Knowledge

The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish has created an invaluable resource with his Farnam Street blog and companion podcast, The Knowledge Project. Anyone and everyone can benefit from the pearls of wisdom found here.

Even if you were to only read the Mental Models section of Farnam Street you would be far more resilient to the endless complexity faced in our daily lives. A simple paragraph truly doesn’t do Shane’s resources justice. Check it out for yourselves if you haven’t already.

North Star Podcast

David Perell has built a great collection of writings and podcasts. He routinely interviews some of the smartest people in the world on the North Star Podcast.

You’d be hard pressed to not take away some valuable insights from David and his guests. I’d also highly recommend following David on Twitter where his Tweetstorms are always a wealth of thoughtful information.

Naval Podcast

If you’ve never heard of Naval Ravikant, you’re missing out. If I had to list a top ten best podcast episode list, Naval would be the only multiple entrant. He is more of a philosopher than he is an entrepreneur or venture capitalist both of which he’s excelled at.

Follow his Tweetstorms or his recently launched podcast with bite-sized excerpts from some of his interviews. If you like money, Naval has great insights on how to get it in the new economy.

Remote

Tropical MBA

The Tropical MBA podcast is centered around the location independent lifestyle. If you’re a Remote Java Dev or aspire to be full time Remote some day, then this will be of interest to you. Dan and Ian share a wealth of location independent information.

You’ll also find much of the content focused on entrepreneurship and how to build a location independent business. You can follow Dan and Ian all the way through their business journey including the challenges they faced when selling.

Location Indie

The Location Indie podcast focuses heavily on location independence and the digital nomad lifestyle. Definitely check this one out if you’re interested in building an online business you can run from anywhere.

Jason Moore and Travis Sherry have regular 30 minute podcasts as well as some longer interviews with their community members detailing their journeys towards location independence.

It’s a great podcast to hear the diverse ways in which people are living and working remotely. It’s easy to get tunnel-vision in our lives and fail to appreciate the countless permutations that are available to us in the world. The Location Indie podcast will help take those blinders off.

Summary

Choosing the best podcasts for remote java developers is a daunting endeavor. While there are no doubt many others providing great content, we only have so many hours in a day.

I hope you’ll enjoy these great resources as much as I have.

Engineers are Always the Smartest People in the Room

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"Engineers are Always the Smartest People in the Room"

I was on a conference call a few weeks ago when our Project Manager said “engineers are always the smartest people in the room.” He said it touch-in-cheek about a know-it-all engineer from another team.

I’m sure you know the type. He thinks the business people are clueless, other engineers are neophytes, and management is full of engineers who couldn’t hack it technically.

Thankfully, the developer world is not completely full of arrogant engineers like this. Ultimately this thought process comes from a lack of perspective in my experience. That is, a failure to appreciate the wide range of skills and tasks necessary to successfully deliver useful software.

There’s no question that our work as engineers and developers can be immensely complex. However, that alone is not going to deliver real business value. Our myopic engineer misses this crucial point.

In the enterprise, building technically perfect software, if there even were such a thing, is meaningless without the expertise of product development, sales, customer service, logistics, management, and many other concerns. Engineering the software is fundamentally useless without the other concerns irrespective of task complexity.

Does it Matter?

Engineers may even be the “smartest” people in the room by some arbitrary metric like IQ.

Does it matter? No. Not in the business world where we need to collaborate to deliver real business value.

If you think it does matter, you’re better off finding a hackathon or some other contrived environment where you can measure your smarts against others.

However, good engineering skills are incredibly useful and valuable. There’s just a big difference in business value between arrogant engineers and humble ones.

Nobody wants to work with a jerk. Arrogant engineers put themselves at an immediate disadvantage when their colleagues naturally avoid having to deal with them.

They drag down team morale. Likewise, team focus inevitably strays from delivering business value and turns towards avoiding the egomaniac whenever possible.

Time Sink

Arrogant engineers can also be a tremendous time sink for the team. How often have you seen engineers like this fight tooth and nail over meaningless technical minutiae? Far too often if you’ve been in the tech world for any length of time.

Code reviews are one of their favorite battlefields. The Smartest Guy in the Room loves to show his value by picking nits out of other developers’ code. “You used a plain old foreach loop instead of a Stream in a legacy codebase? What a fool you are!”

And so we waste huge amounts of time placating or avoiding the imperious one. He derails meetings to pore over irrelevant technical details that add no value. Ultimately, we spend less time delivering valuable business software and more time appeasing the malcontent.

Real Business Value

In the Enterprise Java World, real business value creation requires far more than engineering alone. On any reasonably large project we developers and engineers benefit immensely from our colleagues.

We need the product owner to provide direction on what to build. A good project manager can remove obstacles in our way and insure dependencies are delivered.

Management can make sure we can focus on the project at hand and not have to deal with a barrage of other competing priority requests.

The sales team delivers paying customers to the business without which everything collapses.

Customer Service bridges gaps between what the software does and what its end users think it should do.

The list could go on and on. It’s easy to see how a myopic engineer misses the forest for the trees when viewing things in the global context.

Summary

I look forward to the day where project managers can no longer correctly opine that “the engineers are always the smartest people in the room.” This kind of engineer attitude is without question a significant detriment to the business and his team.

Even if it were true, it doesn’t matter in any meaningful sense. Engineers like this are a big time sink for his colleagues as they’re forced to deal with his misdirected priorities.

Real business value results from the collaboration of many different concerns only one of which is engineering.

Hello World

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Hello World

Obligatory

It wouldn’t be a proper Remote Java Dev site without kicking it off with a “Hello World” post.  

Stay tuned for content in no particular order on topics such as:

  • Remote work
  • Consulting
  • Java rants and raves
  • Effective communication
  • Adapting to different work environments
  • Tools of the trade, both hardware and software
  • Legacy tech
  • Learning new tech
  • And much more

We're Already Working Remotely

Working as a Java Developer these days means you’re already working remotely at least part of the time.  It’d be far more uncommon to work entirely with people who are in the same room as you.

Any significantly sized project will see you working with people spread out over at least the same country and frequently across the globe.  This is our new reality and the more we can embrace it the more we’ll be able to shape it into something that works better than the old paradigm.

This site is dedicated to exploring a range of topics relevant to Java Developers and more specifically to working remotely in this capacity.