Eric Lawrence talks with Dave Rael about making tools, turning Fiddler into a career, methods of development, learning, and making the right move
Eric Lawrence (@ericlaw) is best known as the developer of the Fiddler web debugging platform, used by web professionals worldwide. After building websites and browsers for over a decade at Microsoft, Eric joined Telerik to develop Fiddler full-time. Outside of work, he blogs at textslashplain.com and develops and maintains the freeware tools at bayden.com.
Chapters:
- - Dave Introduces the show and Eric Lawrence
- - Eric and making tools and the genesis of Fiddler
- - Adding filtering and new featuers to Fiddler
- - Eric and the Internet Explorer team
- - Fiddler selected for the Engineering Excellence award at MIcrosoft
- - Exploring selling Fiddler
- - Writing the Fiddler book and the book as a source of finding places to improve the product
- - Eric's early association with Telerik
- - Cross platform Fiddler
- - SSL support in Fiddler
- - Eric's definition of value
- - The importance of the cost in assessing value
- - The business of the Fiddler sale
- - Learning from articulation and how Eric creates: Book-Driven Development, Conference-Driven Development, Embarrassment-Driven Development, and Ignorance-Driven Development
- - How Eric stays current with what he needs to know
- - Eric's story of failure - painful learning experience - inability to use infrastructure code and needing to reimplement it, lack of source control
- - The things that have Eric most excited
- - The greatest sources of pain in Eric's life and work
- - Eric's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Eric
Resources:
- Eric's Blog
- Fiddler
- Microsoft Engineering Excellence Awards
- Bayden Systems
- SlickRun
- See Eric with Bill Gates
- Eric's Fiddler Book: Debugging with Fiddler: The complete reference from the creator of the Fiddler Web Debugger - Eric Lawrence
- Telerik
- Mono - Cross platform .NET
- Gary Wisniewski on Developer On Fire
- The Martian: A Novel - Andy Weir
- Bulletproof SSL and TLS: Understanding and Deploying SSL/TLS and PKI to Secure Servers and Web Applications - Ivan Ristic
- HTTP: The Definitive Guide - David Gourley, Brian Totty, Marjorie Sayer, Anshu Aggarwal, Sailu Reddy
- Hernán Cortés and Burning the Ships
- Broken windows theory
Eric's top 3 tipes for delivering more value:
- Dogfood it - You must use your product
- Be incredibly passionate about getting feedback
- Curiosity - Don't be satisfied with not knowing