Episode Details

Steph is joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtbotter, Rob Whittaker.

Rob shares how he became the Software Development Director for Launchpad II, thoughtbot's Europe, Middle East, and Africa team. They also dive into what it's like to be a Development Director, the differences between mentoring and coaching, working with GitHub Codespaces, and strategies for boosting your creativity and problem solving capabilities.

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Transcript:

STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. And today, I'm joined by a very special guest and fellow thoughtboter, Rob Whittaker.

Rob has been in the software business for the past 15 years and spent the last five and a half years at thoughtbot. Rob is the Director of Software Development for our Europe, Middle East, and Africa team and, in his spare time, likes to hunt down delicious beers and coffee. Rob, welcome to The Bike Shed. It's so lovely to have you on the show today.

ROB: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you for that lovely introduction and my far too complicated job title. It sounds more serious than it actually is.

STEPH: Well, you do have a fancy job title, yeah, Director of Software Development. [laughs]

ROB: Yeah, it's the added on bit where it's Europe, Middle East, and Africa where I feel like there's about 20 of us maximum. But that sounds more grandiose than it actually is.

STEPH: Yeah, that's something that Chris and I haven't dug into too much on previous episodes are all the different teams that we have at thoughtbot. So the shorter way of saying that is Launchpad II, but not everybody knows that. But I'm going to circle back to that because I would love to talk a bit more about that specific team and the dynamic. But before we do that, I'm realizing I'm not familiar with your origin story as to how you came to thoughtbot and then how you became this very fancy grand title of Director of Software Development for Europe, Middle East, and Africa team.

ROB: Yeah, there's a bit of history about thoughtbot London as well that kind of ties into this. So before thoughtbot Launchpad II, it was thoughtbot London before we went remote. And initially, we had the plan of setting up a new studio in London to help expand thoughtbot outside of the Americas, but that plan fell through. But he knew some people from another agency called New Bamboo, and so we merged with or acquired that agency, and that agency then became the thoughtbot London team. I'm actually the first hire or...not the first hire, that's not true, the first development hire for the thoughtbot London team that would then become launchpad II.

I was at the Bath Ruby Conference six years ago, I guess. And there was just an advert up on the hiring board that Nick Charlton, who's a Senior Developer and Development Team Lead at Launchpad II now, had put up. And I saw it, and I was talking to somebody who was my mentor at the time that I'd worked with at a previous job at onthebeach.co.uk, a guy called Matt Valentine-House who now works at Shopify who, actually, fun fact, his face appears at the top of Ruby Weekly this week. If you open up this week's Ruby Weekly, you can see Matt Valentine-House, who said to me, "Yeah, apply for it, why not? You see what happens." And I was lik