It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great software developer.

Katherine speaks with Demetris Cheatham, the Chief of Staff to the CEO of GitHub, about her unique perspective on the open source landscape. The discussion covers her experiences in various sectors and the impactful 'All In' project created to elevate developers from underrepresented backgrounds. They highlight the significance of community, the power of relationships, and the pivotal role of natural language and AI in making coding more accessible globally. The talk also addresses critical challenges like the digital divide, funding for diversity programs, and the importance of evolving diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in tech.   00:00 Introduction00:26 Connecting Through Open Source02:02 Role and Responsibilities at GitHub05:06 Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives09:16 Challenges in Computer Science Education12:51 Equity and Systemic Change16:21 The Journey to a Billion Developers24:07 Building Relationships in Open Source31:37 Final Thoughts and Takeaways   Sitting on GitHub’s Executive Leadership team, Demetris Cheatham is currently the Chief of Staff for the CEO of GitHub, where she acts as the CEO’s trusted partner to move all of software development forward. Demetris is particularly passionate about the evolving nature of open source in the age of AI. Before her time as COS to the CEO, Demetris was Senior Director for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy at GitHub, the Global Diversity and Inclusion at Lead at Red Hat, and was the first woman and youngest Executive Director to lead the National Bar Association, the United States’ oldest and largest international network of over 65,000 predominantly African-American attorneys and judges.

This week Jonathan chats with Lori Lorusso and Steve Hoffman, the Head of Community and SVP of engineering at Percona, the open source database experts. - You can join the conversation in , watch live or get the video version of the show on , as well as getting the full story and show links from . Oh, and follow ! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, Omkhar chats with Mike Hanley, Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, Mike was the Vice President of Security at Duo Security, where he built and led the security research, development, and opera...

and talk about Chrome unexpectedly going EOL on Ubuntu 18. Keeping old things alive is really hard to do, and in open source it's becoming more common to just run the latest version rather than trying to keep old versions alive for long periods of time. Show Notes

Justin Garrison, Director of Developer Relations at Sidero, joins Corey to discuss Justin's experience transitioning from large companies like AWS and Disney to a more agile company like Sidero, the benefits of using simplified Linux distributions like Talos OS for running Kubernetes, and the...

This week on The Business of Open Source I have an episode I recorded on site at AI-Dev in Paris with Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker. We finally get around to talking about AI at the very end of the episode, but otherwise we talked business and open source and how Docker manages both. Here’s some...

Sarah Christoff discusses her experiences and challenges as an open source maintainer with a focus on her work with the Porter and Zarf projects. Sarah shares insights into the frustrations and isolation often felt by maintainers, and emphasizes the importance of community and human connections in navigating these roles. We chatted about of Porter and its function in simplifying complex DevOps tool integrations. Additionally, Sarah talks about Zarf, a project recently donated to the OpenSSF aimed at facilitating air-gapped Kubernetes deployments.  00:00 Introduction 01:29 Challenges of Being an Open Source Maintainer 03:12 The Human Element in Software Development 05:45 Advice for Aspiring Maintainers 08:42 The Porter Project 11:10 The Zarf Project 13:09 The Importance of Community in Open Source 15:31 Women in Tech and Role Models 21:45 Animal Rescue and Community Building 26:10 Final Thoughts and Hot Takes on Open Source   Guest: Sarah Christoff is a software engineer at Defense Unicorns who loves making complex code more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not bugbusting, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.  

What if your infrastructure diagram was responsible for the actual infrastructure?! John Watson & Scott Prutton from System Initiative join Justin & Autumn to discuss.