The podcast train continues.

In the fall of last year I shared a behind the scenes post on a podcast interview with Greater than Code.

If you prefer to take your media in audio format, that podcast interview might be of interest to you. As of a week ago, we’re back at it with some more auditory content: I got to join Todd Nief on his podcast about…I dunno, everything?

This time, like with Greater than Code, I had a preexisting relationship with the show host: Todd owns the crossfit gym where I work out in Chicago.

As you’ll see, he puts a lot of thought into these conversations. He alternates between fitness-related and non-fitness-related episodes, and I find them all interesting.

Here are his notes on our conversation, for your perusal:

A lot of people have a nagging feeling in the back of their minds that they should “learn to code” or undertake some other sort of technical self-education in order to improve their carer or become more effective at what they’re doing.

Chelsea Troy has a background in international relations and wanted to be a spy – but has self-educated and informally learned to code in more than a dozen languages and has also self-educated in machine learning and data science.

While this is impressive in and of itself, Chelsea also blogs regularly and shares her experiences and advice on coding and professional “leveling up” at http://www.chelseatroy.com.

Check out the full conversation with Chelsea to hear:

• Why feeling stuck and frustrated is where you will spend most of your time when learning software development – and why learning more tools to get “unstuck” is how you level up
• How to make the decision-making process of artificial intelligence less opaque and “human legible” – and what the future of machine learning means for human work
• How technology companies can improve diversity in their workforces and handle the associated internal friction and discomfort that comes along with increased diversity– both in terms of tangible actions for employees and managers as well as higher-level organizational changes to improve viewpoint diversity

If you like listening to this kind of thing, you might also like:

The other podcast interview (mentioned above)

This half-recorded talk about refactoring (the audio from the whole technology section is intact)

This screencast on risk-oriented testing (I think the visuals are necessary, but there is audio involved)