Working Code

255: AI in the Streets

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:00:19 +0000

You spend all day steering AI through code. Then you step outside and it's steering everything else. AI is listening to therapy sessions and suggesting treatments to your therapist. Your spouse is arguing with a chatbot about where Savannah, Georgia is. You call a company for help and get handed from one AI pretending to be human to another AI pretending to be human. The crew has been noticing it everywhere, and this week they compare notes on what it actually feels like when AI stops being a tool you chose and starts being a thing that just happens to you.

Links mentioned in the show:

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

254: Claudependent

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:00:17 +0000

The productivity gains are real. So is the nagging feeling that something else might be happening. The crew use AI every day, and this week they sit with a question they can't quite shake: when the tool handles more and more of the thinking, what does that do to the person using it?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

253: The Adversarial Agents Are Arguing Again

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:00:06 +0000

What if the best way to get good work out of AI is to stop being nice to it? Adam and Tim have both landed on the same uncomfortable discovery: when you pit AI agents against each other, with fake points, opposing incentives, and competing models, the output gets dramatically better than anything a single polite prompt can produce.

Adam's bug-hunting pipeline hands fake rewards to sycophantic agents and then throws the scores in the trash. Tim made Claude and ChatGPT argue for twelve rounds straight until they both said "ship it".

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

252: Meet Showbot

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:00:04 +0000

Tim spent a single Sunday afternoon with Claude and built Show Bot -- a sarcastic Discord bot trained on every Working Code transcript, complete with a Dungeon Crawler Carl personality, fallacy detection badges, and a talent for roasting anyone who tries to prompt-inject it. The conversation turns into a deep technical walkthrough of RAG pipelines, local models, cross-encoder reranking, and what happens when you just start building things that make you laugh.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

251: Ben vs. Tests

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:00:43 +0000

Testing sounds simple until you actually try it. Private methods that can't be reached without hacks. Dependency injection that doubles your architecture's complexity before a single assertion runs. Production code that slowly warps around your test suite instead of the other way around. Ben has spent his entire career shipping code without tests, and this week he decided to change that. The crew walks him through every trap he steps on, and a few they've been stuck in themselves.

250: Stuff, Things, WIP: Commit Messages

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:09:21 +0000

Do commit messages even matter anymore, or did pull requests kill them? Ben works one commit per PR and thinks the commit message is the PR description. Carol and Tim put all the context in the PR and treat commits as disposable breadcrumbs. Adam's somewhere in between — when he's not pushing thirty knife emojis and "nope, still not working" to QA. Meanwhile, Tim's back from emergency eye surgery with a gas bubble floating around his eyeball.

Links

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

249: 10 Years of Tech Debt

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:00:44 +0000

For ten years, Adam's codebase has carried an ORM layer that everybody knew was wrong and nobody was touching. Nine hundred functions. Fifteen hundred files. The kind of job that gets solemnly nodded at in architecture meetings and quietly dies on the roadmap — every single year. So he stopped waiting for a volunteer and handed it to an AI agent instead. Claude's problem now.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

248: AI All the Way Down

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:48 +0000

Ben had been riding high on vibe coding—throwaway scripts, zero attachment, pure productivity magic. Then he tried the same approach on a project he actually cares about and watched that 10x feeling crater to something closer to 10%. The bottleneck, it turns out, was never the typing.

The hosts dig into what it feels like to let go of code you used to care about, whether "write-only code" is actually the future, and the growing gap between building software and keeping it alive.

247: Trust Me Bro - LLM Security

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:30 +0000

Adam built a Claude Code skill for his Taffy REST framework and wanted to share it with the CFML community. Simple enough—create a GitHub repo, add some markdown files, done. But somewhere between "this is cool" and "anyone can install this," a familiar chill crept in. These skills are just text files. No checksums. No digital signatures. No verification that the thing you're installing won't quietly exfiltrate your code to some server in Eastern Europe. Sound familiar? It should. We've been here before—back when passwords lived in plain text and "security" meant hoping nobody looked too hard.

The hosts dig into the unsettling parallels between today's LLM plugin ecosystem and the wild west of early internet security.

246: Ben's Feeling the Vibe

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:00:50 +0000

Ben's been circling vibe coding for months, kept at bay by a simple fear: what if he spends more time fighting the AI over formatting than actually building anything? What if he has to bolt on linters and test runners just to babysit the output? Then his work handed him a Claude plan, and he decided it was finally time to take the plunge. And then something unsettling happened—the code looked like his code. Same line lengths. Same method ordering. Same obsessive formatting. Nobody told it to do that. It just... knew.

Meanwhile, Adam has gone full mad scientist. His "Ralph" workflow runs Claude in a loop, feeding it tasks from a JSON file while he walks away to eat dinner. When he comes back, features are done. Tests pass. The machine just keeps building. It's the kind of setup that makes you wonder why you're still manually typing commands into a terminal.

245: Browser Passwords? You're Doing It Wrong

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:00:07 +0000

Tim stores his passwords in the browser. There, we said it. But before you grab your pitchforks, it turns out he's got an ancient password vault program backing him up—so he's not completely feral. Still, the hosts can't resist a good-natured intervention. What starts as a gentle roasting turns into a deep dive on password managers, shared family vaults, and why your retirement account deserves better than Chrome's autofill. Carol reveals her galaxy-brain solution to her husband constantly forgetting his master password: she just signed him into her account. He still doesn't know he doesn't have his own 1Password.

244: Ben vs 2026

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:00:41 +0000

It's a new year and you've probably got a mental list of things you want to learn. But how do you decide what's worth the investment? Ben explores the difference between "just-in-case" learning and "just-in-time" learning, while grappling with AI anxiety and the fear of falling behind. Along the way, Tim shares his own struggle—turns out, saying goodbye to something you built hits different.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

243: Oops, All Aftershow

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:00:58 +0000

It's the holidays, and the Working Code crew has a gift for you: a peek behind the velvet rope. In the spirit of Captain Crunch's "Oops! All Berries," this week's episode ditches the usual format entirely. No triumphs, no fails, no structured topic—just pure, unfiltered aftershow energy.

Tim unpacks Cory Doctorow's concept of "reverse centaurs"—what happens when you're not assisted by AI, but reduced to its peripheral? Meanwhile, Adam drops a perspective on humanity's place in the universe that reframes everything you thought you knew about time. That, plus Carol humbling an AI chatbot, the death of the golden age of television, and whether the books you loved as a kid were actually any good.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

242: All I Want for Christmas Is Faster Builds

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:00:58 +0000

It's that time of year—each host reaches into Santa's sack of topics to see who's been naughty and who's been nice. Ben returns from visiting his employer's manufacturing headquarters in Georgia with some philosophical musings. Carol is on a mission to slash CI/CD build times. Adam has cautiously optimistic news about passkeys finally working (sometimes). And Tim reflects on a TLDR article suggesting that the management skills you've built—knowing what to build and what not to build—might be exactly what AI-era coding demands.

Plus: December blues, mushroom tea for focus, and jQuery as peak imperative JavaScript.

Links mentioned:

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

241: Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 11:00:01 +0000

How do you teach an LLM to write code you can actually trust? Carol's federal government team has been tasked with exploring unattended AI code generation, so she came to Adam and Tim for advice. Their first piece of guidance: whatever tools you pick today will be obsolete by the time you're done evaluating them. The real goal isn't adopting a specific workflow—it's building the skills to ride the wave.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

240: Memento Mori with Shawn Oden

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 11:00:30 +0000

Remember that you will die. That's the meaning behind "Memento Mori," and it's the theme of this week's episode. Guest Shawn Oden, joins Adam, Ben, and Tim to discuss digital death preparedness for geeks. Inspired by clearing out his grandmother's house and buying his late best friend's computers to protect his digital legacy (and potentially lost Bitcoin), Shawn advocates for documenting passwords, creating wills, setting up power of attorney, and having honest conversations with loved ones. The hosts explore practical steps like using 1Password with shared family vaults, the importance of organ donation documentation, and the philosophical tension between honoring a deceased person's wishes versus meeting the needs of those left behind.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Links & Resources

In Case You Get Hit by a Bus (book)
eol-dr - End of Life Digital Resources on GitHub
EOL-RalphHightower - Another digital estate planning resource
NOLO - Get Your Affairs in Order - Legal self-help resources

Full show notes and transcript here.

239: Welcome to the Feature Factory

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:00:02 +0000

How do you stay motivated when you're stuck building features you don't understand? Carol brings a conversation she's been having with her team about feeling like a "feature factory"—churning out work without clarity on what problem they're solving or what value it adds. When every standup is "is this done?" instead of "have we made anything better?", burnout follows fast. The hosts explore the tension between customer-driven features, competitive pressure, arbitrary boss decisions, and the human need to feel connected to meaningful work.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

238: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:00:54 +0000

What happens when your passion project becomes so successful that you have to shut it down? Advent of Code creator Eric Wastl announced he was scaling back from 25 days to 12 and removing the global leaderboard. The reason? People were feeling bad at their jobs because they couldn't solve puzzles in 45 seconds like the leaderboard speedrunners.

Quiet UI launched with excitement, garnered incredible buzz, and shut down three weeks later when the demands became overwhelming.

This week, the hosts explore how good intentions collide with bad behavior—where success becomes punishment, communities ruin what was made for them, and the people who just wanted to share something cool are forced to walk away.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

237: The Internet Is Eating Itself and We're Just Watching

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:00:10 +0000

When you use ChatGPT instead of Google, you're not just getting a faster answer—you're cutting out the content creators who made that knowledge possible. In this week's episode, we explore the economics of AI search, the death of Stack Overflow, the junior developer problem writ large, and why capitalism keeps pushing moral responsibility onto individuals who have the least power to change anything.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

236: Trunk or Treat

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:00:28 +0000

In this week's episode the gather round and share what they've been up to for trunk or treat. Adam shares his waning motivation for his Jump Run side project, we explore sustainable motivation, the rewrite temptation, and whether it's okay to just... do the fun thing sometimes. Meanwhile, Tim provides a reality check on AI coding tools—he spent real hours comparing GitHub Copilot and Codex on actual work, and the results are messier than the hype suggests.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

235: When Romance Becomes a Database Problem with Sean Corfield

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:10:06 +0000

How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale.

Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance scams), database architecture at enormous scale (700GB databases with 250M+ row tables), custom domain-specific languages for writing business rules without touching SQL, real-time scoring systems with hundreds of rules, zero-downtime deployments and schema migrations, and the constant cat-and-mouse game between scammers and detection systems.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

234: The Multitasking Mind

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 11:44:21 +0000

Can you really multitask, or are you just rapidly switching between contexts and hoping your brain doesn't lose track? This week, we dig into the cognitive load of deep work, the impossibility of maintaining multiple large projects in your head simultaneously, and the ADHD patterns that shape how many of us think and work.

Carol returns from the chaos of federal government planning meetings with renewed energy and alignment. Adam finds flow in his Jump Run project while navigating compliance season. Ben discovers the exhausting reality of writing actual specification documents for the first time in his career—and realizes just how taxing deep thinking can be.

reCAPTCHA Migration: https://privatecaptcha.com/blog/recaptcha-migration-to-google-cloud-2025/

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

233: Cheating on Work with Work

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 11:06:38 +0000

How do you resist the siren call of shiny new features when you're months into a project that really matters?

Adam finds himself six weeks into a 12-week build when his boss floats a couple of juicy AI integration ideas. Ben relates this to his own tendency to get distracted by massive refactors mid-feature. They dig into strategies for staying disciplined—like using future work as motivation, finding small wins along the way, or accepting that sometimes work just has to feel like work..

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

232: Are we Idiots or Maniacs?

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 10:00:03 +0000

In this week's episode the crew is back to discuss the never-ending journey of self-improvement in the tech industry, are we idiots to ignore it or maniacs to go along with it? Ben and Tim are back from CF Summit to recount there experiences where a big topic of discussion was... you guessed it, AI.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

231: Good Friction

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:00:11 +0000

In this week's episode the whole crew is back, and Ben brings our attention to "good" friction. It's all too common in business to hear about reducing and eliminating friction, but some forms of friction can be positive in ways we take for granted.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

230: The Myth of Common Sense

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 13:59:58 +0000

Common sense isn't so common, or maybe it's a myth entirely? On this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Carol discuss common sense in programming.

What may be common sense to a programmer may not be so simple to a user, and it's important, in these contexts, to deploy empathy and understanding rather than frustration. The hosts discuss this and more.

A Hermeneutic of Generosity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovrzKCQ2JTM

Ten Thousand https://xkcd.com/1053/

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

229: Our Correct Opinions, Subjectivity in Coding

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:00:30 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Carol dive into the nuanced world of software development as they explore the subjectivity inherent in coding.

How do personal preferences, team cultures, and individual experiences shape the way code is written, reviewed, and maintained. From debates over naming conventions to the art of code reviews, we unpack the many ways that subjectivity influences technical decisions and the collaborative process.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

228: Soft Deletes and Other Crimes

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:00:53 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Tim discuss the never ending rabbit hole that is implementing soft deletes in a database. What starts as a simple solution cascades into countless challenges and pitfalls, such as referential integrity, data consistency and compliance. This and other coding crimes in this week's episode.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

227: Stop, Commensurate, and Listen

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:14:52 +0000

In this week's episode, Ben, Carol, and Tim are back to discuss picking the right tool for the right job. More specifically, the value of proportionality in effort and resource allocation, questioning when it's appropriate to cut corners versus maintaining high standards, when you should stick to what you know versus learning something new, and when you should pay more attention to context when making decisions.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

226: To Sync or Not To Sync?

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 10:00:25 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam asks the question: To sync or not to sync? Sparked by an exploration of a competitor's API approach, the team share their thoughts on handling long-running tasks efficiently.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

225: The Value of Open Source in the Age of AI

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 10:00:01 +0000

In this week's episode, the crew discuss the relevance and significance of open-source software in the age of AI. The open source community offers domain expertise, rigorous testing, responsive bug fixing, and community support. But when AI can generate code with proficiency, how does the value calculus change when deciding to install a new package, generate code with an AI, or simply do it yourself?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

224: Skin in the Game

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 10:00:41 +0000

To be a good producer you have to be a good consumer. In this week's podcast, the whole team is back to delve into the concept of 'skin in the game' in product development and how consuming your own product, known as “dogfooding”, and empathizing with users can influence the development process.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

223: The Six Month Autonomy Rule

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:30:08 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam and Ben discuss the notion of “If I'm still telling you what to do in six months, then something went wrong”, a take heard in a recent episode of Lenny's Podcast.

How can a company orientate itself to encourage autonomy throughout the career of an engineer? What are reasonable expectations of a junior engineer? These questions and more are discussed in today's episode.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

222: Gemini CLI Test Drive

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 12:14:13 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam and Tim delve into Gemini CLI, a command line interface tool for AI by Google, test-driving it on real code to find its capabilities and limitations.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

221: Life in the Trenches of Replatforming

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:05:33 +0000

In this week's episode, the full crew is back to talk about practical replatforming. In past episodes we've discussed replatforming in a more abstract sense, but Adam has much to share about ongoing real-world replatforming at AlumniQ. When the rubber meets the road, certain realities and complexities, which may not be obvious, may affect decision-making and replatforming strategy.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

220: Embracing AI with Dan Wilson

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:54:06 +0000

In this week's episode, the team gets into it with special guest Dan Wilson, an AI & tech consultant that has recently created free and paid courses on using AI in daily workflows. They also dig into the ins and outs of creating Udemy courses and their viability in the tech space.

Dan's courses:

Master ChatGPT: Build AI Assistants That Know Your Business (FREE)
Generative AI for Developers: How To Use AI In Your Workday (Use code quackquack for a special discount)

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

219: Potluck: AI Ego, Feature Flags, Customer Feedback

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 16:20:22 +0000

In this week's episode, the team dives into a potluck of topics including the effective usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) by feeding their ego, the excitement of implementing feature flags in development cycles, and further developments and opportunities with Adam's side hustle app "Jump Run" the journey of building a side hustle with 'Jump Run'.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

218: Rethinking Values in the Age of AI

Thu, 29 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the crew is back to discuss and question quickly shifting values in the world and their implications for developers. Will AI erode the importance of code craftsmanship? When old values are quickly discarded, what does that say about the legitimacy of the new values? Is human coding obsolescence the elephant in the room?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

217: More Svelte Than You Can Shake a Stick At

Thu, 15 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam puts the spotlight on Svelte, and takes us on a deep dive of Svelte features, latest developments and some of his own applications of Svelte in recent projects.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

216: Ben's New Job

Thu, 08 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the team discusses Ben's new job in a radically different domain, the common difficulties when joining a new team with a new 'language', and the unique challenges of working at a manufacturing focused business as opposed to a start-up style tech business.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

215: New Endeavours, New Challenges

Thu, 01 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the full crew is back to discuss the challenges and strategies of managing development teams. Tim shares his new role as Director of Development and his approach towards improving developer experience and scaling applications.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

214: Is Tech the Bad Guy Now?

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Tim discuss the evolving perception of technology, shifting from an optimistic view in the 80s and 90s to a more critical stance today due to its potential negative impacts.

They delve into the consolidation of tech power among major companies like Facebook and Amazon, contrasting it with ideas like Amazon's two pizza teams for maintaining team efficiency.

Adam also has some authentication issues that Ben and Tim weigh in on.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

213: Staying Motivated Through Long Projects

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Tim discuss strategies to stay motivated during long-term projects or repetitive tasks.

If you've been at the same company or working on a project for a very long time, how do you stay motivated doing the same thing for a long time?

Mentioned Links:

Ze Frank - An Invocation for Beginnings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYlCVwxoL_g
Cat Purr Generator - https://purrli.com/

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

212: You Are Not a Coder

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Tim tackle the intriguing and timely topic of AI and its implications for the future of coding.

They delve into how AI is currently being used, including the hype around LLMs, its perceived threat to coding jobs, and the limitations of AI in professional software development.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

211: Roast My Desk, Rate My Clean-up

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In episode 211, Adam, Carol, and Tim play 'Roast My Desk, Rate My Clean-up.' Listeners submitted before and after photos of their desks, and the crew roast their setups and rate their clean-up effort.

The photos and reactions can be viewed on our Discord, Instagram, and BlueSky accounts.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

210: Free as in Speech, not as in Beer

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In week's this episode, the crew explores the often confusing phrase 'free as in speech, not as in beer.'

They discuss the differences between software that's free in terms of cost (beer) and free in terms of user freedoms (speech). The conversation delves into open-source licensing, the implications for users and developers, and comparisons to various software models.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

209: MVP Therapy

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam seeks support from Ben and Tim as he ventures into creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a new app designed to digitize the operations of drop zones.

The discussion centers on the importance of developing a solid hypothesis, engaging potential users early on, and navigating the emotional hurdles associated with bringing a side project to market.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

208: Real or Fake? Esoteric Programming Languages

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the crew play Real or Fake for esoteric programming languages. Are Whitespace, JSF***, Cow or DeadFish real or fake? Listen to find out.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

207: Potluck and Fun Facts

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Carol discuss a variety of topics including "disagree and commit", responsive design, and feature flags. We take a trip through time with some fun facts from internet and web development history.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

206: The Most Impactful Books

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode of the podcast, Adam, Ben and Tim discuss various books that have significantly influenced their careers and coding philosophies. The conversation ranges from classics like 'Clean Code' and 'The Phoenix Project' to unexpected titles such as 'Fight Club' and 'The Four Agreements'.

The discussion underscores the value of continuous learning and how different types of books can offer unique perspectives and practical wisdom.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

205: Lessons Learned Along the Way

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the team discusses various software development topics and how their opinions on these subjects have evolved over time. Key topics include the benefits and challenges of testing, the balance between microservices and monoliths, the role of static typing in code, and the practicality of semver versus other versioning strategies.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

204: Relaying Requirements

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:12 +0000

In this week's episode, the full crew is back to discuss the complexities translating user requirements to developers and the importance of clear communication to avoid wasted efforts.

The conversation also touches upon the roles of project managers and developers, emphasizing the significance of a clearly defined problem statement and well-structured processes to ensure efficient project execution.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

203: The Hard Problem of Naming Things

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. (Leon Bambrick)

In this week's episode, the crew discuesses the complexities and nuances of naming conventions in software projects. The team reflects on their own practices, shared challenges, and the real-world impact of terminology and structure on software development and maintenance.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

202: Um, Actually!

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Tim and Ben go head-to-head in a trivia game inspired by Cunningham's Law, answering questions, with points awarded for correct 'um, actually' corrections.

The game reveals lesser-known facts and recent updates in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser functionalities. Source material for all questions came from this article.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

201: LLMs vs StackOverflow

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

We're back! and in this episode of the Working Code Podcast, the crew returns to dive into a thought-provoking discussion on the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT on technical communities such as Stack Overflow.

They explore how LLMs are changing workflows, the ethical considerations of using AI for coding assistance, and personal experiences with these tools.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

200: The Power of Pause - We're Taking a Break

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:46:40 +0000

In this special episode, we celebrate reaching our 200th show by discussing the critical importance of taking breaks and avoiding burnout.

We share our thoughts on mini-retirements, the differences between sabbaticals and mini-retirements, and the surprising benefits of doing 'drudgery' work. We also delve into the upcoming hiatus for the podcast and what each of us plans to do with our extra free time.

Join us for a candid and insightful discussion on how stepping away can actually help you come back stronger and more motivated.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

199: Is .io Out?

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the hosts discuss the potential discontinuation of .io domains, the historical and geopolitical nuances of TLDs like .tv and .io, and the complexities of managing and pricing domain names.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

198: Battling Build Complexity

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

In this episode, the hosts discuss the complexities and frustrations of deployment automation and DevOps, particularly focusing on the challenges faced with makefiles, continuous integration (CI) processes, and build systems.

They explore tools like ZX from Google and Oclif from Salesforce to find better solutions for running and organizing commands. The conversation also touches on the difficulties of maintaining older legacy systems like ColdFusion.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

197: AI, The Innovation Dilemma, Promotions and More

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the hosts discuss the value of focusing on a single top priority during challenging times and the implications of AI on the workplace, emphasizing the importance of maintaining human connections and individual reflection.

They explore career progression, advocating for both skill quality improvements and the need for organizations to focus on their most critical tasks. Additionally, they touch on personal habits such as the impact of constant connectivity, the value of solitude, and the challenges of balancing productivity with personal well-being.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

196: Building Better, Developer Experience

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam, Carol and Tim discuss Developer Experience (DX) and its importance in creating a comfortable and efficient workflow for developers. The hosts highlight various elements that impact DX, such as the ergonomics of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), debuggers, and browser tools.

They emphasize the need for faster build and deployment times to minimize context switching and improve productivity. Strategies for managing development, QA, and production environments, including the use of GitHub Actions, source-controlled database schemas, and automated deployments, are also explored.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

195: When the Juice Isn't Worth the Squeeze

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the hosts discuss situations where the effort put in is not worth the results. They cover topics like the inefficiency of tracking every minute, the high cost of striving for 100% code coverage, and handling lengthy build times during deployments. The team debates the importance of releasing features incrementally versus deploying massive changes and highlights the inefficiencies in requiring extensive requirements documentation.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

194: Manifesting a New App

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam consults with Carol and Tim about various aspects and challenges involved in the development of an app intended to streamline and digitize the process of organizing skydiving jumps.

They discuss overcoming technical difficulties, such as integrating drag-and-drop functionalities, managing data efficiently, and incorporating features like login systems, billing, and user authentication. They also explore potential UI/UX improvements, including touch interface adaptations and notifications for jumpers.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

193: Bonds Built in the Foxholes

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this episode, the hosts delve into the idea of whether bonds formed in moments of workplace trauma and high-stress situations are uniquely irreplaceable. The discussion also touches on how team-building activities can simulate the bonds formed under duress, the cultural differences in work stress, and challenges faced in the workplace.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

192: The Best of Code and The Worst of Code

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this episode, the hosts discuss their experiences with different codebases, from the best they've worked on to the worst. They explore the complexities of evolving and maintaining legacy code, the challenges of debugging, and the importance of clean architecture. Key points include the pain of working with ORMs, and the impact of early design decisions on long-term project health. They also touch on reactivity concerns in modern frameworks and share personal anecdotes of both successful and problematic coding practices.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

191: Processing Processes

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, the crew discuss finding the right balance in implementing processes within software development teams. Processes often originate from reactive measures to past mistakes but it is crucial to emphasize the importance of periodically reassessing the necessity and efficiency of these processes.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

190: Career Advice For Our Younger Selves - Ben & Carol Edition

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Ben and Carol of the Working Code Podcast reflect on career advice they would give to their younger selves, touching on the importance of simplicity in coding, continuous learning, and maintaining work-life balance. They emphasize the significance of learning from mentors, leveraging database constraints, and avoiding premature optimization.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

189: Career Advice For Our Younger Selves

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:26:19 +0000

In this episode, Tim and Adam discuss career advice for their younger selves, including the importance of job changes for salary increases, focusing on programming tasks rather than managerial roles, and the hazards of tying one's identity to a specific programming language.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

188: Yeeting Changes to Production - Code Reviews

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Tim returns to the podcast for a discussion on code reviews, touching on the importance of providing constructive feedback, tailoring reviews based on the developer's experience level, and discussing the merits and drawbacks of tools like GitHub.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

187: Is it Possible to be a Solo Developer in 2024?

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, Adam and Ben talk about the feasibility of being a solo developer in 2024, considering industry pressures, tools, and personal strategies for balancing simplicity and complexity in the development process.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

186: Warm Blankies For Your Work Insecurities

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode Ben and Carol delve into their personal and professional insecurities. The discussion includes feeling the need to justify one's value at work, struggles with validations. They also talk about the emotional impact of customer interactions and the importance of human connections. The conversation highlights broader issues regarding job promotions, industry expectations, and the myth of constant innovation.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

185: Adam's A/B Testing MVP

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 22:32:01 +0000

On this week's show, Adam and Ben explore the complexities of implementing AB testing in email campaigns.

The hosts tackle the challenge of integrating AB testing into existing systems without causing disruptions and examine methods for experimenting with various elements like subject lines, calls-to-action, and email contents. They also discuss strategies for automating the selection of winning variants based on metrics such as opens and clicks.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

184: Solving World Peace with Code Comments

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, Adam and Ben talk about their respective strategies for leaving comments within code. Each of them inhabits a different end of the spectrum, with Ben erring on the side of viewing comments as an inherent value-add; and, Adam believing that the urge to add a comment is more akin to a "code smell", indicating a need to refactor the underlying code structure. They disagree on a lot in this conversation; but, it turns out, they actually agree on more than you might expect.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

183: Who's Got the Beans? Carol's New Project

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 17:04:48 +0000

In this episode, the team discusses various aspects of starting new projects, dealing with both personal and professional challenges, and the excitement and fears around initiating new work.

Carol shares her idea for a new web application to help organize event contributions, and the group explores initial steps and considerations for starting such a project. They touch on security, data management, and different frameworks and platforms for development

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

182: Coffee Talk and Catching Up

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, Tim and Carol share personal updates while Adam and Ben are away. Carol discusses her challenging workday involving a difficult rebase and adjusting to a new routine after moving to Texas.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

181: More Laws of Software

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we continue our discussion of the entries outlined on the website, the Laws of Software. Topics include McKinley's law on boring technologies, Doerr's law on aligning team vision, and Fitt's law on target touchability.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

180: The Laws of Software

Wed, 29 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we discuss a few of the entries outlined on the website, the Laws of Software. Topics include Atwood's Law on JavaScript, Cunningham's Law on getting answers, Parkinson's Law on getting things done, Goodhart's Law on taking measurements, Hofstadter's Law on inevitable failure, and the Peter Principle.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

179: AI Sells You on AI

Wed, 22 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, Tim gears-up for a farm insurance conference out in Nashville where he's hoping to educate farmers on the pros and cons of artificial intelligence (AI). But, ahead of his talk, he'll be using AI voice technology to call the conference attendees and convince them to attend his presentation. And then, hopefully, weave statistics and sentiment analysis insights—from these automated calls—back into his slide deck.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

178: Upgrading From Node 0.10

Wed, 15 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

This week on the podcast, we touch on a variety of topics. Ben has been incrementally building a data export feature for his customers; and, he's gotten to a point in which he can see a viable light at the end of the tunnel. Carol has discovered that if she doodles circles with her non-dominant hand, it occupies the ADHD portion of her brain and frees her up to focus on reading. Tim is continuing to improve his AI voice-agent, using a listener-suggested approach to loading Spanish language voice models on demand. And, Adam is battling some pretty steamy code rot; and is attempting to upgrade a series of interconnected Node.js Lambda functions from v0.10—released in 2013—to v20.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

177: Infinite Invisibility Timeout

Wed, 08 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Adam uses the new CSS color functions for HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) in order to create a heatmap for the number of dollars raised by his platform. Ben dives into the Algolia search service as a way to provide a search feature on his blog. Carol is trying to alleviate performance concerns around an N+1 SQL problem using an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) that has decided to use an N+1 selection strategy as "the way" with no escape hatch. And, Tim is getting some great feedback regarding his AI-powered call system that will alert customers to upcoming renewal dates.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

176: Triumph and Fail Safe Space

Wed, 01 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Tim was suffering from a "carding" attack (aka, a "credit card stuffing" attack) and had to build an internal CAPTCHA system in order to protect his web-based payment forms from bad actors. Adam created an open-source JavaScript library for mocking ES modules (see Mockable) that makes it possible to swap implementation details at runtime. And Ben falls back in love with ColdFusion—again—continuing to find that even the small language details bring him great joy.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

175: Build Times, Overcompensating, Mentoring and More

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Ben talks about overcompensation at work; and, how we often swing way too hard in one direction as the first signs of a challenge. Carol talks about how her current task got away from her; and, how she suddenly founder herself creating a Pull Request with 84 files in it. Tim talks about the generation smoking ban going into effect in England. And Adam talks about the challenges of mentoring junior developers; and, how hard it is to have enough "right sized" tasks ready for them to work on.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

174: When Your Software Has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we talk about incidents and outages at work. Incidents are a fact of life. If you depend on a file system or a database or a third party vendor, at some point, something will break and your service will be degraded. Customers freak out (rightly so); and, it becomes a cross-team effort to try and find the problem, fix it, and effectively communicate updates back to your customers. There's no right way to do this. But, one could argue that there are definitely wrong ways to do this.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

173: Shopping for Solutions - Payments and Compliance Auditing

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Adam picks Tim's brain searching for the perfect solution for payments and compliance auditing.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

172: Building Your Own Standard Library

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In a world where many programmers instinctively reach for an existing solution in "user land", Ben poses the question: is there value in building out and maintaining your own standard library? This would be the collection of commonly-used functions and classes that you enjoy using; and, which are tailored to your use-cases and programming paradigms. Doing so would be a vibrant mixture of pragmatism, vanity, ego, efficiency, and compensation. But, would it ultimately be a net befit?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

171: From Tactics to Strategy

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Tim just completed his quarterly strategy review meeting at work. As such, he's in the perfect head space to teach Adam and Ben what strategy is; how strategy differs from tactics; and, how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be used in order to ensure that the work to be done actually rolls-up to one of the company's core strategies. In the end, Ben still has no idea what's going on (as per usual); but, Adam is down to clown.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

170: Thinking in UX with Thelma Van

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we talk to Thelma Van about integrating design into the product development workflow. This includes User Experience (UX) design, User Interface (UI) design, scope negotiation, and user validation through interviews. It turns out, even if you can only talk to five of your customers, having this amount of feedback can have a massively out-sized impact on your overall design and development trajectory.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

169: Buffer Overflow, Tabs vs Spaces

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 02:44:33 +0000

Several years ago, Stack Overflow noticed a small but surprising trend within their 2017 Developer Survey data. Even when attempting to adjust for several factors, it seems that the programmers who indent their code with spaces (as opposed to with tabs) have a higher earning potential. As an example of programmers who love using tabs, the hosts of the show offer up theories about this strange finding.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

168: Memory Safety Mandate

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we talk about two major announcements relating to the technology world. First, the government released a report calling on programmers to start using memory safe languages (see: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe). Second, Apple announced that it will halt work on Titan, its autonomous electric vehicle project. We also talk about the pros-and-cons of a Computer Science degree in relation to the web development industry.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

167: Everyone Likes Their Own Brand

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered. - Oscar Wilde

You may never think about it or even be aware of it; but, you have a personal brand. A brand is not something you can opt into or out of. It simply exists. The only choice that you have is how you manage - or choose not to manage - your brand in relation to other people. On today's show, we talk about our own personal brands; how they can help us; how they sometimes hurt us; and, how the goals of brand-building can change over time.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

166: What's "Onboarded" to You?

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 12:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we respond to a listener question from Kamil Maraz:

I have started a Developer experience initiative in our company. We started with a survey, which led to many 1-on-1 meetings; and, one thing that came up a few times was onboarding. Long story short: it's not ideal. I was wondering if this topic could be an inspiration for one of the episodes. For example what is an onboarded colleague to you?; do you care about time to first commit?; what does the onboarding process in your company look like? And so on. As I say often, in our company we love our users, and our developers should get the same treatment. Often the journey starts with onboarding. Thank you for hearing me out.

We love the fact that Kamil is taking an iterative product mindset; and, is trying to apply those same principles to the company, treating engineers as the recipients of the product experience.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

165: Agile Methodology with Brian Sadler

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

For the most part, software engineers like the concept of Agile methodology; and, they have a sense that agile development practices are the best way of getting work done. But, that doesn't mean we know how to put these agile practices in place (especially at scale). Today, we talk to Brian Sadler (@brian_sadler) - a seasoned software developer and Agile coach - about what Agile is, what parts of it work the best, and where teams often go wrong in their interpretation of best practices.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

164: Solo Programming, Chrome Monoculture and More - Potluck

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On this week's show, we explore a variety of topics. Ben wants to perform a mini retrospective on his desire to support the legacy platform at work. Carol is feeling isolated as the only engineer on her team - her dog is a good listener, but isn't very helpful when it comes to brainstorming. And, Adam wants to talk about the browser landscape; and see which browser(s) everyone is currently using.

Also, Ben offers up some high praise for Lenny's Podcast - a show in which Lenny Rachitsky interviews top Product and Marketing leaders in our industry. This show is absolutely dripping in value!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

163: Exposing Yourself, to New Tech

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In web development, we tend to hold learning as a virtuous activity that's worthy of our spare time. In fact, there can be a lot of pressure on us to always be learning; and, to some degree, those of us who don't ride the wave of cutting-edge tech are "othered". But, is dabbling in new technology really moving the needle? Does learning a little of this and little of that really make for a more robust engineer? Or, is there more value to be gained from depth of understanding? And, at the end of the day, does the biggest impact on what we know actually come from switching jobs and joining new teams?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

162: A Question of Time

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Ben never has enough time to accomplish everything that he wants to accomplish. On its own, this isn't necessarily a "bad thing". But, it can quickly lead to feelings of guilt: is he not good enough, is he not effective enough, is he letting everyone down? So much of this angst is emotional. And he knows this. But, he doesn't have the wherewithal that he needs to evolve his own perspective. The crew tries to help him out.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

161: 2024 Goals

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

As we jump into the new year, the crew talks about their new year's goals—both for the podcast and for themselves. We strongly believe in the power of "learning in public". And, to that end, we've created a Google Form in which you can submit suggestions on how to improve the show: what do you like, what do you not like, what can we be doing better? No suggestion is off limits, so long as no people or animals are harmed!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Full show notes and transcript here.

160: Design Systems and Coding Philosophy

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year! This week, we ease into 2024 with a variety of topics. Adam is building a new design system at work using Svelte and Tailwind CSS. Ben wonders if there's any way to create an "Overview Effect" in the world of programming. And Tim discusses a few philosophical fallacies in a work context: planning fallacy, overconfidence effect, automation bias, and plan continuation bias (aka, the sunk cost fallacy).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

159: No Effort December Returns

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

After a stressful year, we happily ease into another round of "No Effort December" in which the conversations flow without concern or constraint. Carol is excited to go ice skating for the first time in her life. Tim is trying to teach his kids about financial literacy. Ben shares his limited ability to fantasize. And Adam wonders why his computer gets so sticky.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

158: The Premortem Premortem

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In episode 154, we discussed the concept of a project premortem. That discussion inspired Carol to schedule her own premortem for a new 2-year project that her company is about to undertake. Given the fact that her team's work won't be sharable for at least 18-months, she's wants to make sure that her premortem is as effective as it can be. As such, we're going to have ourselves a little premortem premortem discussion on the show.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

157: Dead Man's Snitch Deep Dive with Adam Cameron

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On this week's show, Adam Tuttle and friend-of-the-show, Adam Cameron, go in depth on Dead Man's Snitch - a software service that triggers an alarm if your application doesn't "check in" with high enough frequency.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

156: JSON, StackOverflow, Testing - Hot Takes

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we cast off the social filters and lay down some hot takes! This journey of spice serves up the separation of concerns, the future of StackOverflow, the value of comments, the necessity of testing, the role of extracurricular coding, the beauty of clean code, the meh of JSON, and the challenge of building truly great products.

Some of these hot takes are clearly wrong; but, I'll never tell!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

155: Software We're Thankful For

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Coming out of the Thanksgiving holiday (and still recovering from our food comas), we wanted to have some fun today and talk about all of the software that we're thankful to have in our lives. These aren't sponsors of the show (yet); but, we love them so much that we wanted to share them with the rest of the world. Topics include Dead Man's Snitch, Overcast podcast player, git source control, GitHub, Snagit and Skitch screen capture tools, 1Password for password management, PlexTV for media management, video chat, IDEs and code editors, and basically everything that enhances the day-to-day lives of us developers.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

154: What Could Go Wrong? Pre-Mortems and Log Levels

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we continue reflecting on the 4-part series on "Failure" produced by the Freakanomics radio podcast. This time, we talk about Premortems; and, about how important it is for a company to create a safe space in which people can talk about failure and about the reasons failure might occur. We also dig into Logging strategies, structured logging, and role of different log levels. And, how we can best consume logs in a way that makes them valuable without being too noisy.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

153: Our Biggest Failures

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:31:42 +0000

Inspired by a 4-part series on "Failure" produced by the Freakanomics radio podcast, we went around the table and talked about our own failures. This helps to remove the social stigma associated with failure; and, helps other people process internal conflicts of emotion. Tim talks about failing to sell websites in the early dot-com boom; Adam talks about failing to create a ColdFusion package manager; and, Ben talks about the years he lost trying to learn Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

152: Cron Heatmaps, Harvard AI, and Ben's Book - What's On Your Workbench

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, the hosts talk about what they have going on. Adam is trying to better understand the cadence with which his scheduled tasks are executing; and, has built a visualization tool using Svelte and D3. Tim has signed up for CS50 at Harvard - an online course introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Python. And, Ben has a working draft for the first half of his Feature Flags book; and, is now considering some sort of pre-sale (if he can figure out how to turn his Markdown files into something consumable).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

151: Async Human Solutions

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

When you build a system that is wholly contained within a single process, life is quite clean and predictable. But, the moment you reach outside of your process in order to get work done, you realize how messy the world is. Communication between systems can breakdown for any number of reasons. Often times, we try to create resiliency within the chaos by apply technology. But, sometimes, it makes more sense—and is far less expensive—to fix these problems using a human-oriented solution.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

150: What's on Your Workbench #3

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week we go around the table and see what the hosts have going on. Carol got a promotion in her first week back at work, despite the fact that she's had to emotionally suppress everything she once knew about dotnet. Adam is now - finally - at 100% SOC compliance (and is awaiting a 3-month review period). Tim has been wrestling with APIs and bending them to his will (to receive JSON payloads). And, Ben is considering different ways in which to package his Feature Flags book.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

149: Margin For Error

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Adam and Tim talk about margin for error in various aspects of software development, business and our personal lives.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

148: The Day The Code Stood Still

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In this episode, the crew speculate on what would happen if every coder just stopped coding.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

147: Potluck #9

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week, we go around the table and talk about a variety of topics. Ben talks about Transactive Memory Systems Theory and how it might be applied in an engineering context. Carol—having moved into a new home and a new job—talks about the joys of starting something new in her life. Tim talks about the short-comings of a ticketing system; and, Goodhart's Law (which states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). And, Adam considers what his life would look like if he took on more of a leadership / force-multiplier role at work.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

146: Resiliency is Hard

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

The products that we build can become quite complex and involve many interconnected parts. Due to this complexity, and to the properties of the natural world, these products will begin to fail in new and exciting ways. There's really no way to stop a system from failing; but, we can build systems that are more resilient to failure. That said, this is oftentimes much more challenging than we expect. On today's show, we talk about the complex systems that we've built personally; and, how we attempt to keep them online in the face of uncertainty.

As a funny aside on the topic of complexity, checkout Tom Scott's video: The Problem with Time & Timezones.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

145: Shiny New Things - Bun, Svelte, Skeleton

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Adam, our early-adopter in residence, talks to Carol about Bun, Skeleton, and Svelte. With a focus on introducing new tools to an existing team, the two mainly talk about Bun, a hot new all-in-one JavaScript toolkit that is simultaneously a runtime, a server, a package manager, and a test runner. Come find out why its feature-set and speed leave Adam singing, My application don't want none unless you got Bun, hun!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Full show notes and transcript here.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

144: The Power of One

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

In a perfect world, we always do our best. But, our capacity for "best" changes on a day-to-day basis. On some days, doing our best means jumping out of bed and absolutely crushing the day! On other days, doing our best means that we rallied just to get out of bed. And, that's OK. When we're in the slog - when our "best" is degraded - it can be helpful to identify a single, small challenge for the day; a challenge that can be accomplish and celebrated. This technique is what Carol calls the "Power of One".

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Full show notes and transcript here.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

143: Moving On, Rewriting, Replatforming

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

While change is inevitable, managing and adapting to change is always a challenge. Change represents the end of something we knew and - at least for some period - loved; and, ushers in the start of something completely unknown. On today's show, we explore the difficulties in "moving on" using several different contexts: Jobs, tech stacks, video games, API implementations, front-end frameworks, and more.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

142: Tangents All the Way Down

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

When Carol's not here to keep us in line, the show quickly flys off the rails. So much so, in fact, that we never made it to the intended topic - it's just tangents upon tangents upon tangents. We touch upon "vendoring" of our external libraries, installing dependencies with apt-get, dictation app differences between macOS and iOS, the regret of not building features sooner, building the perfect demo for clients, and the "trap" of having to innovate. And that's not even everything! Carol - we need you! You're our only hope!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

141: Building Stuff So You Can Build Stuff

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Inspired by an article from Dimitri Glazkov: Build a thing to build the thing, we talk about the importance of consuming of our own products. Often referred to as "Dog Fooding", this means that we must try and build something in the same way that our customers would be expected to build something. And, in doing so, better identify the feature gaps and the points-of-friction. In order to best meet our customers where they are, we have to - in a sense - become our customers.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript.

140: Fraud, What is it Good For?

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

If a property is exposed on the internet, people will try to take advantage of it. This might be in the form of sending spam through a communications portal, scamming cellular providers via SMS tolling, or using payment forms to validate stolen credit cards. And that's just to name a few possible attack vectors! It appears there's no hurdle too high nor process too tedious for the fraudsters to circumvent. On today's show, we share our own war stories about detecting, preventing, and dealing with the aftermath of fraud on our own web-facing applications.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

139: New Tables vs New Columns

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Early on in his career, Ben's default behavior was to add new database columns to any existing table that felt "similar enough" in nature. After years of evolving an application, however, this has lead to relatively wide tables with only a loose sense of cohesion. More recently in his career, Ben has started to err on the side of creating new tables in order to house new columns. While this approach adds complexity in some ways, it also reduces complexity in other ways and creates a more clearly defined data model. Or, so he hopes.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

138: Ben Goes Streaking

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

As Ben builds-out Dig Deep Fitness, he wants to include an "Activity Streak" indicator as a way for people to feel good about the consistent effort that they've been putting into their workouts. "Streaks", however, are bucketed by "day"; and, said "day" is specific to the user's current timezone experience. Historically, Ben has stored all of his application dates in UTC time; but, he senses that this won't be appropriate for "Activity Streak" tracking. As such, he turns to his brilliant Working Code co-hosts for their sagely advice.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

137: The Grug Brained Developer

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, we have Tim—our only host with screen acting experience—read from The Grug Brained Developer, "A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained". This guide uses fun, caveman'esque language to point out the challenges and missteps that we often take in software development. And, how keeping things simple - for easy smol brain consumption - will often lead to better software outcomes.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

136: Words, Do They Matter?

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Words aren't just the tools that we use to describe the world around us - they are rich layers of abstraction that carry our cultural histories, our education, and our social norms on their shoulders. When we have a shared understanding of a what a word or turn-of-phrase means, our ability to communicate with each other is robust and unparalleled. But, when our differences our great, we end up talking past each other and going around in circles. Words aren't just effective, they're magical. Take, for example, a simple analogy: "It's the movie JAWS, but with cats!" — this will immediately conjure up entire worlds within the mind of the listener. So, do words matter? You bet your donkey they do!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

135: Note To Self v0.3.0

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's episode, we invite you into another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Ben's mind. Ben's sick, twisted cavern of decay and depravity wherein we gain insight into what actually makes this man tick. Topics include the slippery slope of the "Shift Left" mentality; over-complicating life with JWTs (JSON Web Tokens); dangerous public-on-public method invocation; and, the inherent cost of everything.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

134: Ben Goes to a Conference

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0000

After a multi-year global pandemic, preceded by a dearth of ColdFusion conferences in the U.S., Ben finally made it out to Munich, Germany for CFCamp 2023 - Europe's premier CFML-oriented conference. At 130 attendees, it was the perfect place to re-enter society and talk tech with like-minded engineers. Going into it, Ben was anxious. But, by the end of the 3-day event, he ended up having a great time and was privileged to hang out with some truly wonderful people!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

133: The Final Stretch

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Starting a new project is always exciting: there's so much potential, so many visions of grandeur. Completing a project, on the other hand, is always a challenge. In the engineering world, we often joke that the last 90% of a project takes just as much time as the first 90% of a project. Inspired by the GitHub Guide: Finish Your Projects, we wanted to talk about why finishing a project is always such a slog; and, how we can keep the momentum moving forward in order to get our projects over the finish-line.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

132: Virtual Reality

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

After watching the release event for Apple's new Vision Pro headset, Tim wants to talk to us about both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR); and, get our general take on where this all fits into the future of computing. We each have a different level of exposure to this kind of technology. But, certainly none of us is using any type of headset in an ongoing way.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

131: Starting From Scratch

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

After years of wanting to build a fitness tracking application, Ben has finally started to write code for Dig Deep Fitness. But, starting a new project from scratch isn't something that we engineers do very often; and, all of the features that we take for granted - session manage, error logging, rate limiting, email delivery - those foundational aspects all need to be created when we start something new. On today's show, Ben walks us through the pragmatic choices that he's made in order to try and keep progress moving forward even if it comes at the cost of elegance.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

130: Book Club - The Phoenix Project

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we have our first book club discussion about The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. We review chapters 3-6 and talk about how Adam's recent compliance work has given him a fresh perspective on the 190-page spreadsheet of vulnerabilities portrayed in the book. It's interesting how a security team can have a deeply collaborative relationship with a company that feels, at least for some, to be purely adversarial.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

129: New Features vs Maintenance

Wed, 31 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

When Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) come together to create the first version of a given piece of software, it feels like everyone is on the same page and has the same priorities. But, once that initial implementation ships to users, the Product and Design departments tend to move on, leaving engineers to maintain the software. This creates an uncomfortable tension between the existing user experience (UX) and the underlying technical details. On today's show, we talk about that EPD tension and how we might work to mitigate it.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

128: Potluck #8

Wed, 24 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, we discuss a variety of web and web-adjacent topics. Adam is feeling dubious about recommending a career in web development to his children (is it still worth it)? Ben legitimately wants to understand why we - the web development community - don't approach Testing with a YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) mindset. And, Tim wants to consider different ways to handle errors in a RESTful API.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

127: How Tech Interviewing is Broken with Sean Corfield

Wed, 17 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we talk to Sean Corfield about his take on the "Tech Interview" process. With over 40 years of experience at companies like Macromedia, Adobe, and World Singles, Sean has been on both sides of the interview table; and, has been personally responsible for hiring countless engineers. His perspective that most tech interviews are "broken" might be taken with some apprehension if it weren't for the fact that, in 30-years of hiring, Sean has never once had to fire an engineer for lack of ability. So, he's clearly figured out how to hire the right people using a proven and repeatable process.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

126: Documenting Decisions

Wed, 10 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, we talk about documentation. And not just the "how" of software, but the "why" - the decisions that we've reached, as a team, regarding the technologies that we use and the architectures that glues everything together. Of course, writing the documentation is only part of the challenge; keeping the documentation up-to-date is a whole other source of friction for most teams.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

125: What's on Your Workbench? #2

Wed, 03 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, the crew discusses a variety of topics. By which, I mean, Ben waxes philosophical on the subjective nature of everything; and, how he wants to live in a world where those who choose to indent code with 2-spaces may peacefully coexist alongside those who choose to indent code with tabs. Also, Adam body-slams his younger brother into a concrete floor. And then, gets in trouble because he let blood get on the carpet. Be sure to listen for Adam's pro-tips for removing blood stains.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

124: We Are Juniors For Life

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we reflect on the YouTube video, 15 Years of Dev in a Nutshell. A few years ago, people were complaining about "JavaScript Fatigue" - this sense that there was a new JavaScript library or framework coming out every day; and, that the race to stay up-to-date in the industry was simply overwhelming. Now, take that feeling, and expand it to include everything in a web development career, from front-end frameworks to databases to server-side rendering to edge-computing. It's a lot! And, it's easy to feel that we engineers are "Juniors for Life": always learning, always evolving, and — perhaps — never really mastering anything?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

123: Negative 10x Developers

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

In episode 58, we weighed-in on whether or not 10x engineers actually exist. On today's episode, we go hard in the other direction, talking about the much less mythical -10x engineer: those engineers that seem to actively work in opposition to the greater good, holding unnecessary meetings and flooding the team with a massive amount of documentation. This discussion was directly inspired by the post, How to be a -10x engineer.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

122: Coding Hot Takes

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, we talk about stuff we've been working on or thinking about lately. Adam dazzles us with his use of 1Password's Secrets Automation feature to drive key rotation in his production app. Ben misses the beautiful agony of having to support IE11 (and how it make the web more predictable). And, Carol shares her frustration with React and, especially, with JSX. It turns out, not everyone loves JSX or - clutches pearls - the idea of single-file components!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

121: Ben's Testing Tribulations

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ben was recently tasked with removing an old feature from one of his services. As he did this, he kept breaking tests that were tightly coupled to the rendering of user interface (UI). In his mind, these tests were unnecessarily "brittle" and appeared to be testing the underlying front-end framework more so than the underlying business logic. When he brought this up in the podcast's Discord server, people disagreed. As such, we decided to dig into the topic of "what to test" more closely.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

120: Freelancing with Nolan Erck

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

As Carol launches her Freelancing career, we thought it would be valuable to interview Nolan Erck, Owner and Director at South of Shasta. For the past 15-years, Nolan has been a Freelance web developer, a mobile developer, and a polyglot technology trainer. He knows the ins-and-outs of attracting clients, setting up a business, and sub-contracting work in order to keep the coffers flush. If there's anyone who can guide Carol into the pit of success, it will be Nolan.

Links discussed on the show:

Book: The Business Side of Creativity
Video: Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

119: Potluck #7

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, we all bring something juicy to consider. Carol kicks things off with some trepidation about becoming an independent contractor; Tim shares an article on Technical Debt and digs into the subtle differences between tech debt and bad code; Ben is befuddled by the fact that "common sense" is apparently wildly subjective; and, Admin introduces us to Bloom Filters.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

118: Things We Should Be Doing But, You Know... Reasons

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

As web developers, we're all high-functioning, motivated people. And, we certainly have a good sense of what we should be doing with our time (both personally and professionally). But, theory rarely survives contact with reality. And, on today's show, we talk about all that sweet, sweet stuff we ought to be doing and why we can't quite motivate to get any of it done! Topics including backing up computers; creating reproducible systems; reading educational books; upgrading all the things; learning analytics; and, meeting other hoomans!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

117: Champions of Truth

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On episode 114 of the show, in effort to balance out the somber tone of Carol's unfortunate layoff, we decided to have a little fun and play Two Truths and a Lie. On today's episode we review the listener submissions and crown the one winner who correctly selected all of our lies. And the prize goes to.... listen to the show!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

116: The State of Developer Conferences with Brian Rinaldi

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly and long time friend of the show, recently wrote a blog post that was picked up in the TL;DR newsletter. His post, titled The State of Developer Conferences, shares a theory as to why both online and IRL (In Real Life) conferences are struggling to reach pre-pandemic attendance. Brian, who's been running conferences for 15-years, has a keen understanding of who attends events; and, why the demographics of attendees might be shifting. Conference organizers around the world are reading Brian's post and are nodding in strong agreement.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

115: Self-Care For Developers

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

After drinking close to 12 Mountain Dews in a single day, Adam started to wonder if — just maybe — he was using caffeine as a way to self-medicate. Upon discussing this with his doctor, Adam was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder) - a condition very common in the world of programming (a fact that we inspect on the show). In light of these findings, we thought it would be nice to reflect on how we've all changed during the pandemic; and, share the little things that we do in order to keep our wits about us.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

114: Carol Got Laid-Off

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Amid the frenzy of industry lay-offs, we here at the Working Code podcast were devastated to hear that our very own Carol Weiler has been affected by a down-turning real estate market. A few weeks ago, while attending a virtual All Hands meeting, her Slack account was suddenly locked, momentarily followed by her computer. It turns out that she, along with a majority of her engineers, were part of an unexpected reduction in force (RIF). On today's show, Carol graciously and courageously joins us to talk about her experience, the ensuing emotional roller coaster, and some of the fascinating steps that she's taken to help improve her outcome.

We love you Carol! You continue to inspire us - and our listeners - every week!

To help lighten the mood of the episode, we close out by playing Two Truths and a Lie. If you can guess who's lying about what, Tim might just send you some free podcast merch! Submit your guesses over on Google Forms.

Also, Adam finally finds a ToDo list that he loves; and - wait for it - it comes from Microsoft!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

113: Surviving A Layoff

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Lay-offs are trending in the technology world. And, it's not just the scrappy start-ups being hit - goliaths such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all recently announced large reductions in force (RIF). Getting laid-off can pose a serious financial burden on an individual; but, there's also the psychological burden of self-doubt: Why did this happen to me? Did I deserve this? Will I ever find another tech job? On today's show, we talk about the state of the industry, share tips on becoming more resilient in uncertain time, and talk about what do if and when the pink slip commeth.

ASIDE: In this episode, Adam makes a few comments about what it means to take responsibility as a leader (See comic by Threddy). And, accidentally misspoke about a few CEOs not taking a pay-cut (which apparently they did).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

112: Listener Questions

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This week, we reach into our bag of Listener Questions and pontificate on such curiosities as: Who would we want to be and what skills would we want to learn if we could step into an alternate reality? Would Danny DeVito make an intriguing Wolverine? Which are the best programming-related movies and shows? And, we all laugh a little nervously as Tim shares just how much time he's clearly spent figuring out how to get rid of a dead body.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

111: How To Learn Stuff Good

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Learning something new - whether it be a language, framework, or library - can be challenging. And, if you're already an expert in some ways, it can be both humbling and frustrating to suddenly feel like a novice in other ways. On top of that, our expectations are often distorted by time; and, we forget how long it took us to amass the understanding that we have today. This can lead to unrealistic expectations when it comes to learning something new. Not to mention that our strategies for learning might change in relation to our experience. On today's show, we share our respective approaches to learning from the ground up, including reading the manual, building applications from scratch, and everything in between.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

110: Measuring Impact At Work

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Not all days are created equal. Some days, you show up and just crush it non-stop. Other days, it can feel challenging to even type good. On today's show, we look at what goes into making those good days "good" and those bad days "bad". Getting into the zone, meetings, switching modes, interfacing with customers, responding to incidents (and other interruptions) - every little thing has the power to push the needle one way or the other.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

109: Best of 2022

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

On today's show, Matt Cavender — the man who turns our incoherent babbling into meaningful thought — is gonna share a selection of his favorite clips from the past year (2022). Adam, Ben, Carol, and Tim are taking the week off to recover from our families and work off some of those food babies. But, fear not dear listeners, the team will be back next week to ring in 2023 - Working Code style. Here's hoping y'all had a lovely holiday and a happy new year!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

108: 2022 Year In Review

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year! We did it! We survived 2022! This has been a rather hard year in many ways and a decent year in some ways. On this episode, the crew reflects on the past year in terms of fitness, technology, personal growth, and reading goals; and, celebrates some wins and laments some losses.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

107: Through The Wormhole

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Happy Festivus, dear listeners! Welcome to our last show of 2022! Closing out "No Effort December", we truly run the gamut this time: Ben talks about the crippling attachment he has to his own fingers (and why he won't work with wood); Adam talks about how excited he is for the v1.0 release of Svelte Kit; and, Tim reflects on the blinding speed with which people seem to be to making science and technology breakthroughs - I mean, we're talking some serious Sci-Fi-level stuff here!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

106: A Cascading Cataclysmic Christmas

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

This week, we continue to lean into "No Effort December", talking about a hodgepodge of both tech and non-tech topics. Since we're heading into Christmas, we start off talking about how challenging it is to buy gifts, especially for the grown-ass adults in our lives. We also share some of our favorite Christmas movies; and, the movies which have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, but which we love to watch in the winter anyway. We also dig into some modern CSS advances; including our fear that CSS selectors will quickly become more like Regular Expressions: fun to write but impossible to read!

Links discussed in this episode:

Super Useful CSS Resources

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

105: No Effort December

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the start of No Effort December! That's the time of the year in which we gather 'round the mics and talk about whatever the heck comes to mind. We just passed two years on the Working Code podcast, it's the holidays, we've been peopling super hard with our families, and we all need a little jolly relaxation. On today's show, Carol wonders if she can use Hackathons as a means to "improve community outreach" - one of her team's new OKR (Objectives and Key Results). And, Ben discusses the difference between deploying on Friday vs. deploying during the holiday (and why these are not the same thing).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

104: Alexa Make A Podcast About AI

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Tim recently read that, "1 in 10 AI (Artificial Intelligence) engineers think that AI will be the downfall of our civilization." But, it's not all doom-and-gloom; he's also been reading about some exciting advances in AI and Machine Learning (ML) such as Amazon Alexa being able to come up with novel bedtime stories for kids, Cosplay stars trying out new outfits using personalized "generative art", and complex software modules being created from simple prompts.

It seems that AI/ML is advancing at a breakneck speed, leveraging a rich Venture Capital (VC) space driven by a "move fast and break things" mentality. This can be really effective at creating change; but, we're also seeing lots of AI models becoming so big and so complex that no one really understand how they work. Which is problematic when such models take on the inherently biased tendencies of their creators and moderators.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

103: Birdsite Go Boom

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Back in April, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 Billion. He then spent months talking about how terrible Twitter was before finally taking control in October. Everyone knew it was going to be a landmark moment; but, no one quite knew how things were going to play out. With mass lay-offs, a voluntary exodus of talent, threats of "extreme" work hours, and a series of fraudulent accounts that created a swing in the stock market, it's safe to say that it's been a poop show. It's also pulled-back the curtain, revealing Elon Musk to be more "toxic boss" and less "technology genius".

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

102: Upgrading MySQL For Poop Emojis

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Migrating data is always complicated. And, the more data that you have to migrate, the more complex your migration process becomes. This week on the show, Adam shares the lessons that he learned while performing a large, multi-client, multi-cluster, week-long database migration for AlumnIQ. This included moving roughly a dozen different databases from Amazon Aurora (MySQL 5) to Aurora 8. Late nights, indexes, and UTF-8 character encodings, oh my!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

101: Error - Error Message Not Helpful!

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Web application developers are notoriously bad about building resilient applications. All too often, we implement the "happy path" and then forget (or simply ignore) that many things can go wrong for any number of reasons. However, even if we do account for the "sad path", and we do catch and handle errors, it's not always clear how those errors should be presented to the user. Luckily, Tim has some very practical guidance on the matter that he shares with us on this week's show:

Error messages sent to the end user need to have an appropriate tone, be free of tech jargon and shouldn't pass the blame. They say what happened and why, provide reassurance, be empathetic, tell them how to fix it (if possible) and give them a course for remediation (customer service, support ticket).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

100: The Spicetacular!

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

View the video version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykhX08w4yRI

It's hard to believe that we made it to episode 100! When we, four, started out on this journey almost two years ago, we were convinced that we'd either get sick of each other or quickly run out of topics to discuss. But, here we are, still loving it and having a great time. And, to celebrate this milestone in the most masochistic way possible, we've decided to ignite our guts and destroy our butts with a Hot Ones-inspired Spicetacular! Come for the AMA (Ask Me Anything) and stay for the schadenfreude!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

099: Technical Debt Isn’t Always A Choice. Or Is It?

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week, we're super excited to be getting the band back together! After several weeks of personal and professional obligations, Adam, Ben, Carol, and Tim are all back at it again. And today, we're talking about Technical debt. When engineers talk about technical debt in public, they often try to use financial metaphors; such as taking out a loan in order to buy a house.

These financial metaphors romanticize the notion of technical debt, elevating it into the realm of calculated decision making. But, if we're being honest without ourselves, is any kind of calculation really taking place? Or, are we just trying to do the best that we can with the knowledge and experience that we have? In other words, isn't most technical debt really just the result of engineers writing janky code at the limit of our capabilities?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

098: In Defense Of Working On The Legacy Platform

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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If you've listened to the Working Code podcast for any period of time, you've no doubt heard Ben mention the fact that he works on maintaining a legacy platform at InVision. His role on the legacy team was originally focused on security, stability, and bug-related fixed. However, over the years, he's become increasingly aggressive about adding features and actively improving the legacy experience. This has caused no shortage of controversy both internally to the company, and more broadly within the Working Code community. In this episode, Adam plays Devil's advocate and gets Ben to justify a mode over operation that seems to be - at times - in opposition to his company's larger goals.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

097: Expectations Of Professional Software Engineers

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew reviews Mike Acton's talk, "Everyone Watching This Is Fired", by way of Adam Johnson's article, Expectations of Professional Software Engineers. This talk outlines 50 characteristics - both technical and non-technical - that go into making you and your team fit for building products and dealing with customers. Some of these line-items makes us feel seen while others leave us feeling attacked. Listen to find out which ones are which!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

096: Why Do You Write?

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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A year ago, on Episode 36, we talked about blogs and digital gardens. Today, Adam and Ben, our resident authors, dive deeper into how they got started writing, what keeps them writing today, and how the act of - and the engagement with - writing has changed over the years. The advent of Social Media, along with the doubling of new programmers every 5-years, has certainly created a contentious relationship with long-form content. And, is at times, antithetical to our hope of bringing readers along for the journey.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

095: Potluck #6 - Unpopular Opinions Edition

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, we tip our hats to the Go Time podcast and have ourselves an Unpopular Opinion potluck. This means sharing ideas for which we feel strongly; but, which may not be so popular in the broader programming community. Topics include password rotation policies (which are dumb), relational databases (which are stupendous), the technical ability of an executive leadership team (which is important), the user experience (UX) of forms (which is often over-thought), automated deployments (which should be based on tags), and code duplication (which can certainly be the right approach).

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

094: Disagree And Commit

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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People don't burn out because they have too much work to do, they burn out because they feel powerless. And, for Ben, feeling powerless correlates strongly with doing work that he doesn't believe in. Which is why he's never understood the notion of, "Disagree and commit". After all, in order to quell the feelings of dissent, he has to numb a fundamental part of who he is; and, he's convinced that such a technique can't be good for the overall creative process.

To quote Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

So what is the opposite of disagreement? Is it agreement? Or, is it indifference?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

093: Sounds Easy! Sure Isn't

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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On Adam's team, whenever anyone uses the phrase "just" to describe a level-of-effort, everyone jumps in and echoes "just" using air-quotes. Because, as many of us have learned over the years, nothing is ever as simple as it seems, especially in the world of web development. On this week's show, we talk about some of those tasks that end up being way more complicated than they should have been. Topics include: vertically aligning content, using JavaScript in 2022, logging data with sufficient context, tracking who made changes to a database, and storing notification flags for users that may never come back to your application.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

092: The Power of No

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew talks about the Power of No. For many of us, saying "No" is usually a challenge. Saying "Yes", on the other hand, is usually the path of lease resistance. Saying "Yes" also feels good. In fact, saying "Yes" has so much appeal that we often rush into saying "Yes" to work before we even understand what that work entails or how urgent that work actually is. And, in many cases, that eager "Yes" ends up leading to a future failure. Which is why getting to "No" - or "No, But" - can help us maintain both our sanity and our professional relationships.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

091: Side Project Therapy

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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On last week's show, we talked about "Side Hustles" - those extracurricular activities that we do in order to earn a little extra income. On this week's show, we want to talk about the flip-side to that coin: the coding that we do on the side because we freakin' love coding! Carol celebrates the WordPress site that she's built and now maintains for her son's band, including the ability to accept payments and donations. And, Ben talks about trying to build a feature flag system using Lucee CFML and Angular. He also confesses that his blog has historically had a negative impact on his resolution to do more exploratory work. We also get to argue a bit about just how sexy TypeScript actually is.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

090: Passion Projects and Beer Money - Side Hustles

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew talks about side hustles: the very American desire to be making money on the side. While many people in this world need side hustles in order to make ends meet, those in our industry (technology) often incur side hustles as a voluntary affliction. Of course, there's a fixed number of hours in each day; so, you're either earning passive income; or, your taking time away from your other interests (and commitments). This isn't always healthy. Nor should it be seen as a rite of passage - we on the show have a lot of respect for people that are simply content and can live their lives without grinding themselves down to a nub.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

089: What Makes a Good Roadmap?

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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Like Michelangelo with a block of marble, we engineers often like to dive right into the code and let the application reveal itself to us. And while this may work on a very small scale, this extreme bias-towards-action isn't prudent for larger teams or companies with a growing client-base. Mature companies have roadmaps. They weigh the benefits of building one feature against the opportunity cost of not building another feature. Mature companies get buy-in both internally and externally. They then evolve their vision based on that feedback when it make sense; or, they apply grit when it is required.

Or, at least that's the hope. Because, in reality, building a roadmap isn't easy. There are so many competing interests and such a limited amount of time. And then, there are Black Swan events like Covid-19, that force us all to stop and completely re-evaluate everything.

This week on the show, the crew talks about what goes into a good roadmap; how we can avoid certain pitfalls; and, we question how far into the future a company should be looking on their roadmap.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

088: //todo: documentation

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew talks about documentation. Yay! As developers, there's no doubt that we all love consuming great documentation - especially for APIs. But, nary a one of us enjoys the process of creating documentation. Except maybe Adam, who's oddly passionate about communication. For the rest of us, however, documenting our choices and our subsequent outcomes feels a bit of a slog. It's never clear when we should be writing documentation; it's never clear what we should be documenting; and, it's never clear just how much detail we need to include. Sometimes, ironically, it seems that the more thoroughly we document a topic, the more likely it is to be misunderstood. So, that's awesome!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

087: Note To Self v0.2.0

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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On today's episode, we get to pull up the floor boards and once again peer into the dark recesses of Ben's brain: all the random and, frankly, sometimes incoherent chit-cat that Ben has with himself. Listen to him call B.S. on flaky tests; shake his first at overly-specific CSS selectors; preen about GulpJS build scripts; pontificate on the ROI (return on investment) of personal growth; and, theorize that building - not buying - can sometimes be the smarter (and less bureaucratic) move to make.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

086: The Working Code Test

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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Twenty-two years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote an article titled, The Joel Test, which outlines 12-steps for evaluating the quality of a software team. At the time, Joel was working with Microsoft, building products that were delivered on CD-ROM. As such, his day-to-day workflow was somewhat different than the kind of work many of us are used to doing today. That said, much of what he had in his 12-point litmus test still holds true! Which I believe is a testament to how fundamental his insights were. This week on the show, the crew reviews Joel's list, gives each item our personal Yay or Nay, and then adds a few requirements of our own.

Also, if you want a quick run-down of what we discussed, Adam summarized much of what we talked about in The Working Code Test over on his blog.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

085: Shipping Complexity

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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The less code you write, the easier it is for people to review, the less likely it is to contain bugs, and the more likely it is to merge cleanly into your main integration branch. The converse of this tends to also be true: the more code you write - particularly within a long-lived feature branch - the harder it is to review and the more likely it is to contain bugs that cause production issues. We all basically hold this to be true; however, that doesn't mean that we can simply choose to do the former. Shipping less complexity is a byproduct of both team and technology constraints. This week on the show, the crew talks about how they try to reduce the complexity of their code shipping process.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

084: The Architectural Support Team with Jason Henriksen

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, we interview Jason Henriksen who works alongside Carol as a Software Architect at Clear Capital. According to Jason, every engineer does some degree of architecture, whether they know it or not. In fact, there's a lot of overlap between what Jason does and what your average web developer does. Which is why he calls his team the "Architecture Support" team. Their goal isn't to hand down edicts and pass out proclamations. Instead, Jason's goal is to build bridges between teams, help identify common pain points, propagate best practices, and lovingly guide the company in the right technical direction.

Also, special thanks to Tim for only asking great questions!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

083: Alternate Timelines

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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We all love writing code. Honestly, here on the show, it's hard for us to imagine doing anything other than building beautiful digital products for our beloved customers. But, as a thought experiment - in these post-pandemic times - the crew wanted to share some of the other professions that could have been. From ice cream truck driver to organic chef to movie theater entrepreneur, we dive into the untapped world of alternate realities.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

082: GitHub Copilot - Is It Worth It?

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew talks about GitHub Copilot. After being in private beta for several months, this "AI pair programmer" is now generally available as a paid product for $10/month or $100/year. But is this something people want to pay for? Will a price put the kibosh on grassroots adoption? Are there pros-and-cons to different pricing models? And, is there ever going to be a world in which Ben can get past his own fanatical formatting tendencies?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

081: Total Randos

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew shares some of the random stuff that they've been dealing with at work. Carol is about to submit a PR (Pull Request) that accounts for 8-weeks worth of commits; and, she's already warning her engineers that it's gonna be beefy! Ben wonders if he's been fooling himself into his love of Lucee CFML's "Tag Islands"; or, if there's something fundamentally more enjoyable about the developer ergonomics of the CFQuery tag. And, Tim's been working on remaining PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant by scrubbing credit card numbers out of his customer's "name" fields; because, as it turns out, customers will jam a credit card number in just about any form field that they find!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

080: Other Duties As Assigned

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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In each role, there are the responsibilities that get listed on the job board; and then, there's all the random stuff that they ask you do to once you show up. On today's show, the crew discusses the latter: those strange and wondrous "extras" that sometimes get rolled-up into an honest day's work. Topics include: buying nipple cream, picking up cigarette butts, cleaning bathrooms, taking out trash, driving to remote server locations, restocking photocopiers, and - perhaps worst of all - getting pushed into Sales.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

079: Potluck #5

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, Adam and Ben examine a variety of random topics: Adam loves watching conference videos on YouTube; Ben is feeling terribly insecure about falling behind in the field of web development; neither of us can believe that Elon Musk is forcing his employees back into the office; and, how is it possible that some people seem have so much free time - what the heck is their secret?!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

078: UX - Pushing Users Into The Pit of Success

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, Adam and Ben talk about the "unhappy paths" in software design. An unhappy path - also known as a "sad path" - is anything that can go wrong during the consumption of a product. Some unhappy paths are nothing more than unanticipated edge-cases in the code while other unhappy paths are caused by poorly designed user interfaces (UI) that lack necessary constraints and affordances. But of course, it doesn't much matter why something is breaking, if our customers are unhappy, it is our job to fix it.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

077: Mid-Manager Blues

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week, on the show, we check-in with Carol to see how she's adjusting to her new role. Carol was recently promoted to a position in which she is a Manager some of the time and an individual contributor (IC) the rest of the time. This setup has a lot of advantages; but, it is not without its challenges. Just last week, she was deep in the coding zone, on the cusp of solving a hard problem, when she had to stop what she was doing and jump into a meeting. This left her with a residue of resentment (in the moment), especially when the first few minutes of the meeting were nothing more than water cooler banter. To be clear, Carol absolutely loves what she is doing; and, she loves being a force-multiplier for her company; but, she's still in the process of finding a comfortable equilibrium.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

076: Ben Needs A Minute

Wed, 25 May 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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If Ben crushes it in the woods, and no one is there to see it, is he truly crushing it? Such are the philosophical questions that go through Ben's brain as he continues to pour his heart and soul into a legacy product that no one else at the company cares about. That is, except for the customers that still log into the legacy platform on a daily basis. Don't those customers deserve something? Ultimately, Ben just wants to hear that he's doing a good job.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

075: What Problem Does This Solve?

Wed, 18 May 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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Carol - who has recently stepped into a managerial role - is facing an interesting situation: her company wants to start implementing process changes across the board. However, Carol's own team is kicking ass and taking names; and, she can't understand how any of the proposed changes will actually make her team more effective. In fact, she believes that some of the changes will be counterproductive for her team. So, the question becomes: how does she push-back against the proposed changes without looking like an antagonist or a contrarian?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

074: What's On Your Workbench?

Wed, 11 May 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew talks about what they've been working on recently. Adam is exploring the use of AWS (Amazon Web Services) message queues and S3 in order to manage nightly data processing in a way that won't crush his application servers. Tim has been approved to use the national "Do Not Call" list and is now working to integrate this list into his communications workflow. Ben is dealing with post-deployment depression, which is often what happens when he's at the end of his R.O.P.E. And, Carol is de-scoping a massive project down into an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that can be shipped within a single sprint in order to demonstrate the value-add of the concept!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

073: Our Golden Parachute

Wed, 04 May 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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In the 20+ years of Ben's career, he can't remember ever seeing a person in a leadership position get fired. He's seen plenty of people leave a company to "explore other opportunities", typically accompanied by much praise and congratulations. He assumes that at least some of these people were actually fired; but, were allowed to depart under friendly terms. He poses this question to the crew: assuming that his assumption is valid, is suppressing this information healthy for the company (perhaps an effort to keep morale high)? Or, is it a form of gaslighting that creates confusion and dissent within the organization?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

072: Too Many Hats

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew discusses a topic submitted by Mingo Hagen: Do developers wear too many hats, do they spread themselves too thin, and does the work suffer because of it? There are clears benefits and drawbacks to wearing a lot of hats. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things can cut down on communication overhead and enable teams to move faster. But, without specialization, solutions will almost certainly be sub-optimal; and, "best practices" may not even be known to the engineer. Ideally, a team should consistent of both generalists and subject-matter experts. This kind of balance creates a "healthy tension" that tempers perfectionism with pragmatism and keeps everyone moving forward at the right pace.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

071: Potluck #4

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew discusses a potluck of tasty topics. Ben is trying to figure out what project he wants to use as his vehicle for learning Docker and container-based deployments. Adam wants to completely overhaul his data synchronization workflow, but is having a lot of trouble getting excited about the work (despite all of the exciting ingredients). Carol is being worn-down by the analysis phase of a project and just wants to start doing the work and accruing some wins for her team! And, Tim just can't wrap his head around Functional Programming (FP) - I mean, how the heck can you possibly program anything without IF-statements?!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

070: Self Reflections

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew looks back on the first 70 episodes of Working Code and reflects on what's working, what's not working, and what we'd like to see in the future. I think we all agree that we've made it a lot farther than we thought we would. And, thanks to Matt at Z-Cross Media, we always end up sounding totes profesh' on tape even when we sounded like bunch of monkeys in the recording studio. We've also been super thrilled to see our Discord community become such a lively and diverse forum, even if half of it is just people mocking Ben for not having any tests. We're all excited to see how the show evolves; and, we hope you come on this adventure with us!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

069: Now I'm Catching Events

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week, Carol talks to us about how her Support team manages communication with their customers. And, how she'd love to find an easy way for one Support engineer to know that another Support engineer is currently working on a given ticket. She's been exploring the use of WebSockets and "presence channels" as a means to provide feedback within the Support platform. And, more generally, she's been looking into the concept of Publish and Subscribe (often referred to as Pub/Sub) as a means to push information from one service to another. We talk a lot about Pusher - a fully-managed WebSocket SaaS offering; and, consider other techniques that might be helpful.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

068: Hire Women, Inspire Women

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, Carol leads a discussion about communication styles, recruiting, and the power of seeing female role models at all levels of an organization. From the onset of her career, Carol has both been witness to and been taxed by a general lack of female leadership in the engineering world. From the college advisor who steered Carol away from computer science to the boss that sent her pictures of his genitalia, the last 12-years have made it abundantly clear to Carol just how important it is to hire women and cultivate a diversity of thought, perspectives, and backgrounds. And, this isn't only for the sake of women - it's also a way to drive more successful outcomes for companies and the products that they build.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

067: We Have Feelings On Logging

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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Under the right circumstances, application and error logs can be magical. They can shed light on how a system is behaving - or misbehaving; and, they can provide a path forward in an emergency situation. But, logs do come at a cost. Not only is there an actual dollars-and-cents cost to aggregating and storing logs, having too many logs can end-up reducing the signal-to-noise ratio which can make it harder to debug a running application.

This week on the show, the crew talks about different categories of logging, why some logging is required for regulatory purposes, how you can replace certain logs with telemetry and metrics, and why you should absolutely never ever email yourself errors... except for when you should; because it's easy; and because we never learn from our mistakes.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

066: Make Meetings Suck Less

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 11:00:00 +0000

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For many of us, meetings feel like a necessary evil. We love to complain that we have too many meetings; and, that most of them are useless. However, forgoing meetings and attempting to solve problems and reach consensus asynchronously can feel like even more of a drain on our time and effort. We all have some degree of meeting PTSD. But, none of us is really sure what to do about it.

This week on the show, the crew talks about their love-hate relationship with meetings. And, demonstrates that we're all a little different when it comes to right-sizing our meeting agendas. Carol, with her team of 20, burns through her standup in under 30-minutes. Ben, with his team of 3, spends the first 20-minutes of each stand-up just talking about movies. And, both of them are happy with their stand-up experience.

That's part of the problem - there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to good meetings. That said, we do all agree on a few things: silence can be golden; it's OK (but hard) to leave irrelevant meeting; and, no meeting attendee should ever have to prepare for a meeting a head of time - don't be giving people homework!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

065: TDD In the Trenches with Scott Stroz

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Testing code is like taking out insurance: until you need it, it can be hard to understand why it's so important; it can be hard to understand what everyone is raving about. And so, you continue writing your code without tests. And, everything is fine, until one day it isn't. And in that moment, you finally see for yourself what value automated testing could have brought to the table.

On today's show, the crew talks to Scott Stroz about his experience with Test Driven Development (TDD); and, about how he has come to understand that testing makes possible what would have otherwise been impossible. With solid testing practices in place, Scott was able to refactor an exceedingly convoluted intake form that rendered 25 buttons, 6 unique workflows, and took the user through up to 28 steps. Crunch those numbers and try telling me that the chance of making a mistake isn't absolute. And yet, thanks to a rigorous test-first coding methodology, Scott was able to completely refactor this workflow - from the ground-up - and delivery it on-time and without error!

Notes & Links

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

064: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Gone is the era of the life-long employee. It's hard to even imagine rising up through the ranks, grinding out the decades, and then retiring - with a pension - all at a single company. Companies don't see their people that way anymore - a perspective that is, no doubt, shared in both directions. But, if you're not going to plant your flag and hunker down for the long-haul, how long should you stay at your job?

This week on the show, the crew talks about the pros-and-cons of various employment tenures. Sure, you might get paid more by moving to a new job. But, is money everything? What about the relationships you build and the opportunity you have to really go deep on a given set of technologies?

Of course, staying in one place too long may lead to stagnation in your skills and your ambition. If you say at one place for a decade, is that a decade of growth? Or, is that the same menial tasks executed year after year ad nauseam?

There's no correct path. And, there's no reason that your personal journey has to be uniform. Sometimes, as Adam points out, it can be quite beneficial to have a few shorter jobs before settling in for a longer stint. Just about the only thing we all agree on is that you shouldn't hop from job to job to job. At some point, you have to demonstrate some grit.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

063: Nobody Makes It Out Alive!

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Van Wilder reminds us to enjoy the moment, warning us "Don't take life too seriously, you'll never make it out alive." And while this is a jocular take on our own mortality, the truth is such that the total cost of death isn't levied against the dead, it's wrought upon the living - the ones left behind. To ease their transition in the wake of loss, we can prepare for own departure; and, provide a plan for our own digital landscape and social networks.

This week, inspired in part by a post-mortem checklist created by Chrissy LeMaire, the crew shares their thoughts and experiences with death. And what steps they've taken—or not yet taken—to ease the terrible, yet inevitable, burden on our loved ones.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

062: Note To Self

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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This week on the show, the crew peers into the deep, dark recesses of Ben's mind and tries to understand what exactly makes him tick. Composed of equal parts rant and dialogue, the topics range from throwing errors on delete operations, handling bulk operations idempotently, feeling guilty about using backup cameras, keeping large task backlogs, reprioritizing tasks on-the-fly, transpiling JavaScript to ES5 for legacy browsers, the benefits and drawbacks of a robust QA (Quality Assurance) phase, and the cargo culting of let and const in the greater JavaScript community.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

061: Software Is For People

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Many companies are seeded from the same basic concept: customers have a problem to be solved and the people on the Product team know how to solve it. This customer-centric approach is what gives a product much-needed early traction, helps build a loyal community, and lets customer-and-company alike feel as though they're moving in the same direction.

As a company matures, however, the distance between the Customers and the Product team can begin to grow: it's no longer engineers jumping on Zoom calls with customers, it's a Support Team translating issues into a ticketing system which the engineers will then consume weeks later in an adjacent vacuum. This gap - this layer of abstraction - can create a breakdown in customer empathy and can quickly lead Product teams astray.

This week on the show, the crew talks about their own experience dealing with customers. And, how hard it can be to manage expectations in either direction, whether it be the little customer with the "high urgency" tickets; or, the lone engineer who's super excited to build a custom feature even if it's not on the roadmap. None of it is easy; and, the less communication we have with our customers, the harder it seems to become.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

060: Technical Debt

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Every software application has "technical debt". Some of that debt is acquired through meaningful consideration: short-term value gained in lieu of longer-term ease-of-maintenance. And, some of that debt is obtained incidentally through a lack of experience and a dearth of business knowledge. This week, the crew discusses technical debt in their web applications. And goes so far as to say that taking on technical debt is a necessary negotiation within every successful product development life-cycle.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

059: Everything Old Is New Again

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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It's easy to be flippant about how often our industry seemingly "discovers" the programming practices and paradigms that experienced engineers have been talking about for decades. But, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. The landscape of the web is evolving at a breakneck speed; processing power and storage capacity are going up while costs are coming down; and, the needs of different applications are beginning to diverge massively.

As an industry, we're not "rediscovering", we're "Yes, and'ing". We're constantly learning up on timeless techniques and then trying to apply them to the new constraints and pressures of the modern web. Some of these experiments are going to seem familiar; but, each step in this journey is an attempt to answer a new question or speak to a new problem. Everything old is new again because the context is always changing and is in need of new consideration.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

058: Do 10x Developers Exist?

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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Sometimes, people on the internet are wrong. And this week, that person is Tim, who said something inaccurate about the .net (dotnet) framework. Thankfully, our de facto .net ambassador, Nathan Strutz, sent us a recording that shed light on the current state of .net, its open source architecture, its ability to run on many platforms, and its sweet, sweet modern features. Thank you so much Nathan for keeping us honest! And, keep those recordings coming!

For our main topic, we discuss the concept of the "10x Developer". This notion has its roots in bona fide research; however, much of the nuance has been lost in translation. When many people talk about the 10x Developer, what they imply is that there are great developers that are 10-times more productive than the average developer. This is where the reality parts way from the research. What the research found is that, in software engineering, the best engineers are 10-times more productive than the worst engineers. Which is, perhaps, a much more palatable and relatable comparison.

Of course, few developers work in a vacuum. And, when you're part of a team that is part of a company that is driven by a given culture, there's so much more to being productive than one's ability to jam out code. If you're not working in an environment that actively caters to and encourages agile practices, no amount of coding velocity can escape the gravity of inaction.

Also, is TJ Holowaychuk even a real person? Or, is he an artificial persona concocted by a consortium of elite programmers who were keen to show the world what a 10x Developer might look like? We may never know!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

057: Goals for 2022

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

New Year's Resolutions may be considered a bit cliche by some; and even a bit silly by others; but, there's always value in any opportunity to pause and take stock of your own situation. On this week's show, we share both our tech and our non-tech goals for the new year. As it happens, we all want to be in better shape - shocking, I know. But, when it comes to technology - and tech-adjacent interests - we all have different areas in which we wish to increase our proficiency: build systems, continuous integration, photo editing, TypeScript, mentoring, and product management, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, Tim couldn't be with us on this episode because he and his whole family came down with the Flu! But - spoiler alert - by the time this episode is published, he'll already be back to his wonderful, normal self. And, we sure can't wait to get the band back together!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

056: Best of 2021

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 12:00:00 +0000

With a year of Working Code episodes behind us, our podcast has come a long way. But, we're still trying to figure things out: we are continuing to play with the show format, we are each growing into our own voice, and hopefully we're putting together some content that adds a little something, something to the boarder web-development conversation.

If, in our ramblings, we ever sound like we know what we're talking about, it's due in large part to the skillful audio editing and engineering provided by Matt Cavender and ZCross Media. Each week, Matt manages to magically cut and splice our pontifications into meaningful, coherent thought. Working with Matt has been a true pleasure - one that we can only afford because of our very generous Patreons!

As a year-end wrap-up, Matt offered to gather up some of his favorite clips from the show and put together a retrospective on the last 30 episodes. Thank you Matt! And, thank you to all of our listeners! Let's make 2022 a fantastic year!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, record an audio message on your phone or computer and email it to workingcodepod@gmail.com.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

055: Sales Fails

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

When you consider the hourly-rate of everyone in the room, meetings can be shockingly expensive. And, if it's a sales meeting, both actual and opportunity costs are on the line. Which is why we practice our sales pitches and offer up a sacrifice to the Demo Gods. But sometimes, that's not enough. On today's show, Tim and Adam share their sad tales of sales fails; and illustrate why it's so important to go into any meeting with a rock-solid plan-of-attack.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633 (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

054: We're So Quacked

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

At 3:30 AM the day before Thanksgiving, Ben received an emergency page about a failing API end-point. Rushing to his desk, groggy-eyed and in various states of undress, he jumped into the #incident channel on Slack to see what was happening. What unfolded over the next 30-hours was the manifestation of Ben's worst nightmare. The moment he had been dreading for the last 4-years had finally come to pass: two of his database columns had run out of storage space! Using feature flags, emergency hot-fixes, shadow tables, and a database migration being performed over a transient and unstable terminal session, he and his team somehow made it through to the other side just in time to enjoy Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie!

"Hug your data engineers - they are amazing people!" — Ben Nadel

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

053: Product Management with Adam Lehman

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

On this week's show, Tim interviews Adam Lehman, the Director of Product for Marketplace Core at Spotify. Of course, many friends-of-the-show will know Adam more intimately as the former Director of Product and Engineering at Adobe where he helped drive the Adobe ColdFusion product and community forward. Or, as Tim puts it, where Adam "lead by throwing grenades". Like most Product Managers (PMs), Adam never quite envisioned himself as a PM. He started out as an engineer who ended-up falling backwards into the PM role when he maxed-out his ability to exert change as an individual contributor (IC). Adam believes that engineers ultimately make the best Product Managers because of their ability to bring a holistic set of skills to the table. Which is why he's always on the look-out for engineers that gravitate towards a management mindset.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

052: Starting Your Own Business, with Steve Rittler

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

On this week's show, Adam interviews his long-time friend and boss Steve Rittler, founder and CEO of AlumnIQ. Once a software engineer himself, Steve discusses his journey from individual contributor (IC) to business leader; and, how he sees his role as the boss from both a practical and a philosophical standpoint. For Steve, it's always been about changing the world using whichever tools he had at his disposal. And, when those tools were no longer effective, that's when he started to grow a team, a business, and a collection of trusted advisors - so that he could continue to take on and solve larger, more complex problems.

"What starts us as software developers in the first place is wanting to fix the world with whatever lever we have that we can put our hands on." — Steve Rittler

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

051: You Are Replaceable

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Engineers like to believe that they are non-fungible. That is, that they are not replaceable - that they are special and bring a unique set of skills and perspectives to the table. And, for some engineers at early-stage companies, this may be true. However, as companies grow and evolve and become more sophisticated, the cold truth sets in: we are all replaceable. Even Apple - at this point in its trajectory - continues to innovate without the iconic Steve Jobs.

This week on the show, the crew talks about their own relationship to the notion of being replaced. On one hand, it can be very humbling. But, on the other hand, it can be very freeing, allowing us to do crazy things like "take vacation" and not have to deal with every single emergency that crops up at work.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

050: Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:00:00 +0000

This week on the show, the crew talks about where they each see themselves in 5 years. This is not an easy thought-experiment, especially in a technology landscape that changes so rapidly. Are we getting better at the things we do today? Or, are we changing our focus, our role, and maybe even our job? Do our personality traits of introversion and extroversion influence our career trajectory? Or, can we learn to lean into and enjoy any type of position? Should we be following our "passions"? Or, should we be focusing on our natural abilities and affinities? Is it even worth thinking this far into the future? Or, should we just concentrate on making the next few weeks as effective as possible? All of us (hosts) love what we do today. But, we each have different perspectives, passions, and insecurities that affect how we look forward into the future.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

049: Revisiting Replatforming - There Is No Correct Answer

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 12:00:00 +0000

One of our fans on Patreon is about to embark on a large "replatforming" endeavor. His team has decided to move away from their "traditionally coded" application (think hard to maintain, big ball of mud); and, will soon rebuild the server-side aspect of their application using a new language. The team isn't yet sure what language they'll use (this is how the topic came up in Discord); but, they know that they want a statically typed language with a strong separation of concerns in the MVC (Model, View, Controller) layers.

In episode 25, we talked about breaking up with your tech-stack. But, this discussion of replatforming has rekindled our interest in the topic. On today's show, we talk about the choices that we'd personally make if we had to rebuild our application using a new language. Based on historical trends, it feels like a gamble no matter what you do. As such, we also talk about how we might go about validating some of our choices.

Notes & Links

Rich Hickey: Simple-Made-Easy

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

048: // TODO: Microwave ToDo List

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Surgeons and pilots have known for years that checklists literally save lives. And, while programming is rarely a life-and-death stakes situation, the humble ToDo list continues to serve as a powerful tool in the developer toolbox. This week on the show, the crew talks about how they manage their ToDo lists using comments, software applications, and physical notebooks. And, while we each have our preferred methods of organization, it's clear that even in a predominantly digital world, there is something deeply satisfying about using pen-and-paper in our respective workflows.

"Let chaos reign; and then rein in the chaos." — Rich Armstrong

Note: We feel obliged to mention that NONE of the products mentioned in this episode in any way compensated us for discussing them. We mention products that we like only because we like them.

Notes & Links

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

047: Email Ruins Everything

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0000

With an increasing amount of work being performed within a distributed or hybrid team model, there's a push to move more and more communication into an asynchronous workflow. Whether through email or collaborative document editing, there's a growing perception that collaboration becomes more efficient when each person can participate in their own time. But, is this really true? Or, are we fooling ourselves into thinking that the cost of "homework", "email fatigue", and extended delivery timelines are outweighed by one's ability to go "heads down" at work? This week on the show, the crew talks about different communication styles, Inbox zero, email as a delivery mechanism, and the not-so-surprising surprising way that Zoom calls can supercharge our ability to get stuff done!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

046: Secrets Management vs. Premature Optimization

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

When two systems have to communicate with each other, the security of transmitted messages is typically enforced through the use of shared secrets. Whether with encryption or one-way hashing, the receiving system can use a shared secret to verify that a producer's message has not been tampered with or spoofed. Rotating these shared secrets can be complicated; and, may even have to take place over an extended period of time depending on what's considered to be an acceptable window of backwards compatibility. This week, the crew talks about how they manage secrets, mistakes they've made in the past, and what best practices they'd like to put in place going forward.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

045B: The Aftershow

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 11:05:00 +0000

Because this week's episode was short, and because we've wanted to give the public feed a taste of what's in the aftershow, here's a bonus episode. This is the aftershow from episode 43.

045: Join Our Discord

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week's episode is all about the podcast's Discord server going public. We're now inviting all listeners to join us and participate in the community chat. Why would we want to do that, and what's in it for you? Answers to these questions and more now available as sound waves for your ear holes.

Join our Discord here: https://workingcode.dev/discord/

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

044: Facebook's No Good Very Bad Week

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Between Frances Haugen's testimony, a meta outage of Facebook properties including Facebook.com, Instagram, and What's App, and a $7 billion drop in Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth in a matter of hours, it's safe to say that Facebook has been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time of it. There have even been rumors that Facebook's "work from home" policy is being rescinded; though, such claims have been denied by the company. Today, the crew talks about everything that's going on in the Facebook universe. And, Tim shares his own harrowing experience with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) catastrophes and why Facebook's networking woes were a little too triggering for his own comfort.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

043: Relay Race Programming

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 11:00:00 +0000

You might think that "programming" is a relatively straightforward concept: take abstract ideas and codify them into lines-of-code (LOC). But, within this broad abstraction, there are a multitude of implementation details. Some engineers love to hunker down and write code inside a metaphorical bubble; mob programmers love to dog-pile on the same machine, blitzing the problem until it's obliterated; and, pair programmers methodically alternate responsibilities between a "driver" and a "navigator" in cooperative pairing sessions.

On today's episode, Carol shares her team's approach to product development which sounds more like "Relay Race Programming." First, her team does some up-front design and planning in order to orient the work. Then, her team divvies up the tasks, processes the work in parallel, and keeps a constant line-of-communication open such that they can unblock each other as soon as issues arise. While this approach takes some getting used to, Carol believes that it has increased her productivity, decreased her Pull-Request review latency, and opened the door to many more mentorship opportunities.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

042: Potluck #3

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics: "Strong opinions, loosely held" - is this a statement with noble intent? Or, does it encourage people to dismiss past evidence and the experiences that have shaped their current view of the world? When is it time to upgrade old technology choices? When the time it takes to upgrade is time not spent on building features, at what point is that cost justified for the business? GitHub Copilot helps you write code, but who gets credit for that? Is it even legal? Have engineers demonstrated enough responsibility in the past to merit an even more powerful copy-paste programming paradigm? And finally, why don't we see more employee-owned software companies? If engineers had more material skin in the game, wouldn't they be more motivated to ship product?

All that and more on this week's show!

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

041: The Third Age of JavaScript, with Shawn @Swyx Wang

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Shawn Wang - known as "swyx" online - is a financial investor turned software engineer and journalist. With a passion for history and a knack for "trend spotting", Shawn uses a keen analytical sense, honed through years of financial due diligence, in order to organize the world of web development into a series of epochs, each with its own theme. He's recently codified these observations in a blog post titled, The Third Age of JavaScript. Today, we're thrilled to have Shawn as a guest on our podcast to discuss the past, present, and future state of JavaScript as well as the world of developer ergonomics and the magical possibilities of effortless platform management.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

040: Automaticity Is a Weird Word

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The other day, Ben was listening to an episode of the MongoDB podcast in which Mat Keep shared a story about the adding of atomic transactions into the MongoDB product. Mat said that the engineer who spearheaded the effort used to joke about the fact that his team was spending a huge amount of time working on a feature that 90% of developers would never need. For Ben - who leans heavily on transactions for referential integrity - this sounded like an crazy statement. But is it? Are database transactions overrated? Or, is it more so that the type of use-cases that work best in a document database are also the type of uses-cases that don't really need transactions?

On today's episode, the crew talks about how they use databases; the role of atomic transactions in the reduction of application complexity; and, whether or not they've ever felt "held back" by the limitations of a relational database management system. Full disclosure, all of the hosts have far more experience with traditional databases when compared to NoSQL databases.

NOTE: In the show, Ben mentioned that a document database like MongoDB can't enforce schemas like a relational database. And while this was true in earlier versions of the MongoDB product, it is no longer true. In recent updates, MongoDB has added schema validation and enforcement.

Notes & Links

MongoDB Podcast: Episode 67 - MongoDB Evolved with Mat Keep

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

039: Ben's Future at InVision

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

For last 8-years, Ben Nadel has poured his heart and soul into InVision, a product that drives design collaboration. During this period, his area of expertise has focused on the (now named) "legacy" platform - the ColdFusion and AngularJS monolith that has built the business into what it is today. Soon, however, the "legacy" platform will be wholly subsumed by the "modern" platform - a distributed, microservices architecture built on Go, Node.js, and React.

In today's episode, Ben opens up about the emotional struggle that he's facing as his role on the legacy platform comes to a end. He wonders what it's going to be like to start over; to go from a big fish in a CFML pond to a novice in a Go ocean; and, to find a way to not feel like a complete failure when his productivity drops significantly.

One of the scariest things for Ben is that he's not sure if he'll be able to trust his gut. While the fundamentals of programming will certainly transfer from the legacy platform over to the modern platform, it's hard to know if future "feelings" will be true indicators of potential problems. Or, if it's just a byproduct of his lack of familiarity with the new architecture and language constructs.

Only time will tell. And, until then, he intends to grind hard and deliver as much value as he possibly can on the legacy platform while he still has time and the skills necessary to get the job done.

ASIDE: While not mentioned by name in the show, Travis Heinström - the SVP of Engineering at InVision - is the person who wanted to make sure that Ben has all the room he needs to "feel his feelings" when the legacy platform is shut down. This is perhaps one of the most emotionally-intelligent things that Ben has ever heard a manager ask about.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

038: Holding Developers Accountable

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Recently on Facebook, Hal Helms —highly respected author, speaker, and computer programmer— shared some of his views on the use of "Sprints" to drive engineering work on a product team. In short, he despises the idea of asking engineers to commit to achieving a goal within an estimated time frame. He likens this to asking prisons to build their own gallows. Everyone is terrible at estimating everything. So when companies start to use each "estimate" as a "contract" with which to punish engineers for under-delivering after over-promising, all it does is set the entire team up for a toxic cycle of disappointment.

This is the full text of Hal's post:

"We have to be able to hold developers accountable."

A friend and I were discussing the idea of "sprints" — a system where developers commit to achieving certain results within a specified time frame — usually two weeks.

I hate and detest sprints. I despise asking developers to "commit" to achieving a goal within an estimated time frame. My friend disagrees. He's wrong.

The first flaw in this system is what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman termed "The Estimation Fallacy". When people are asked how long a goal will take to achieve, they predictably and chronically underestimate the time. And this is true even when they have considerable experience in being wrong in their previous estimates.

A good estimate is one that's over half the time and under half the time. So, estimates are not really what developers are asked for. They're asked to commit to a date after which they can be held to blame if they have not achieved the goal. Every such "estimate" holds an implied threat. ' Asking developers to provide their own deadlines is a bit too much like asking prisoners to build their own gallows.

But let's say you have a taste for a bit of sadistic irony. It's still not a good idea — not if your goal is to actually increase the throughput of the system.

Developers are not, by lot, stupid. So while inexperienced developers may believe their own deadlines are realistic, those of us with more road behind us are not so quick to be led to slaughter.

If the boss demands a deadline that a more experienced developer thinks is probably five or six days, the deadline become two weeks — three if they can stretch it.

And when they actually complete the work ahead of time — well, would you be quick to voluntarily re-enter the arena only to place yourself at risk again any earlier than you have to?

It gets worse: you may know one part of the sprint goal while I know another, of which you're clueless. Can I help you? Sorry, I have my own deadline. How is this good for the developer, much less the organization?

And so I circle back to my conversation with my friend. "We have to be able to hold developers accountable." One needs to hold people accountable for things they don't want to do. Developers, on the other hand, like to develop. Most of the ones I know do it in their spare time as well as their work hours.

If I want you to do something you already want to do, what is the sense behind "holding you accountable"?

Eat this ice cream — and I'll need to see status reports of how much you've eaten, accompanied by proof that you're actually eating it (to make sure you don't just dispose of the ice cream).

I recently had a long discussion with a CEO who asked for what might be termed my "philosophy of management" when it comes to managing developers.

I told him it was really quite simple: give developers what they need and protect them from upper management.

CEOs don't produce software. CTOs don't. Product Managers don't. When upper management tries tricks like sprints to force their developers into deadlines — as if such a thing could be done by fiat — they effectively tell developers: we neither trust nor respect you.

I'm not sure what genius management consultant had the flash of insight that disempowering workers and placing obstacles in their way was a surefire way to get the most out of them.

Inspired by Hal's post, we wanted to talk about how we view—and experience—developer motivation; how we employ Sprints at our respective offices; and, what we think an organization should be doing to help drive a project to completion. There's the idealized approach that Hal puts forward:

Give developers what they need and protect them from upper management.

Amen! But, there's also the practicalities of running a business, building a road-map, organizing marketing campaigns, and keeping users interested and excited in your product. None of it is easy. But you can be sure that treating people with professional respect is certainly one of the necessary ingredients.

Notes & Links

Daniel Kahneman: The Planning Fallacy

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

037: Brian Klaas Talks Cloud

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

As we alluded to in Episode 20: Carol Needs a Consult, there are a lot of different products under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) umbrella. In fact, the number of products is somewhat mind-boggling. It can be overwhelming just figuring out where to start, let alone understanding which service is right for which job, how to configure that service, and how to get that service to integrate with all the other AWS services. Thankfully, we have Brian Klaas as a very special guest on today's episode.

Brian Klaas (@Brian_Klaas) is a Senior Technology Officer and instructor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; he runs a team that builds a Learning Management System (LMS) running on a hybrid cloud; he's been using and extolling the value of Amazon Web Services since 2009; and, he's a well known and respected speaker and leader within the ColdFusion community. According to him, the overarching value that AWS provides is the outsourcing of "undifferentiated heavy lifting": AWS builds the infrastructure that you don't want to, allowing your team to focus on your own business-critical product-lines.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

036: Blogs and Digital Gardens

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Blogging is a win-win activity. Not only does the act of writing help burn knowledge into your long-term memory, it also acts as an easily searchable repository of your own thoughts. Furthermore, it helps other people solve similar problems when they stumble upon your blog in the future.

The value-add of blogging is obvious; the way start blogging is less clear. This week, Adam, Ben, and Tim talk to Carol about her desire to start blogging. The discussion touches on tooling, platforms, hosting, content, and strategy which Adam sums up nicely as:

Do whatever it takes to get started soon. Just get into the habit of writing.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

035: Being a Swamp Guide

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Software is never "done". And, as it continues to evolve over time, it often gathers a lot of accidental and essential complexity. This makes it harder to on-board new engineers into a legacy application (and a legacy organization). Enter swamp guides: the aged and battle-hardened staff who know where all the bodies are buried. These guides can hand-hold new team-members as they walk fresh-eyes through the fog of war, helping them to understand where everything lives and how everything works. And, hopefully, leave the swamp a little cleaner than they found it.

Notes & Links

Stack Overflow for Teams
Big Ball of Mud
Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

034: Some of My Best Friends Are React Developers!

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, Adam talks about his "obnoxious optimism": his general tendency to believe that all problems can be solved and that everything will just sort of work itself out. This optimism allows him to take action and make decisions quickly. However, it also means that he may not be fully considering the future cost of his choices.

This is not uncommon in the programming world. Engineers are often criticized for choosing technologies based solely on their merits and almost never on their drawbacks. Of course, we don't want to be so cautious that all productivity grinds to a halt. The best possible scenario is to have a team with diverse personalities that can all temper each other. Every team needs an Adam; but, every team also needs a few curmudgeons.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

033: Software Patents

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Do you write "new and original" code that is "useful" and has a "non-obvious function"? If so, your code may qualify for a patent. A patent can help prevent other people from using or selling your software. That said, which engineer among us isn't write new and original code every day? Software patents are weird and fuzzy and open for way too much interpretation. And, in the software industry, they seem to give "patent trolls" a lot of unpleasant leverage.

This week, the crew - which has absolutely no legal training whatsoever - talk about patents, copyrights, research & development tax credits, building software, job hopping, and best practices. And, if you don't care at all about software patents, level-up your view of the world with this quote from Adam:

People don't burn-out from too much work, they burn-out from too much unfulfilling work.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

032: What Comes After Senior Developer?

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The world of web development is still a nascent industry. According to Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, the number of programmers roughly doubles every 5-years. Which means that most of the developers that you interact with are relatively new and relatively young. It's not often that you look around and see developers in their 40s, 50s, and beyond; because, frankly, the web - as we know it - isn't even that old.

Because of the ongoing evolution of our field, it can be unclear as to what a web developer's professional journey can or should look like. A lot of engineers seem to end up in management; but, for those of us that want to continue coding, what comes after Senior Developer? And, is climbing that technical ladder even something that you want to do?

This week, the crew talks about the career path of web developers; how some positions allow you to be a "force multiplier" and have a bigger impact; and, how dopamine affects your sense of work satisfaction.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

031: To The Cloud! But Why?

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 11:00:00 +0000

There is no one thing that is "The Cloud". Instead, there are a set of general characteristics that underscore cloud technologies: we can provision, deprovision, and scale resources at will; we don't need to manage those resources; and, we only pay for the resources that we use. But, even within this definition, there is a broad spectrum of technologies that more-or-less fit the bill. From Geocities, to managed hosting, to elastic clouds, to distributed edge-computing, lots of things kind of look like "The Cloud", depending on how hard you squint.

This week, the crew talks about what The Cloud is and why people are so keen to adopt it. And, of course, since nothing is truly free, we'll also take a look at the drawbacks of cloud-based architectures.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

030: Carol's Consult Catch-Up Conversation

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Ten weeks ago, in Episode 20, Carol described a problem at work in which her customers were using Support Tickets as a means to look-up information in lieu of logging into the customer dashboard. This email-based workflow has been putting a large burden on the Support staff. And, Carol wanted to brainstorm on ways in which she could improve the overall situation and the efficiency of her team. Today, we circle back with Carol to see how it's going. Which is to say, to see just how hard Carol is crushing it!

It's amazing to see how much Carol has accomplished in just a few months. Topics include natural language processing, AWS SAM, AWS Lambda, AWS S3, AWS SNS, AWS EventBridge, AWS CloudWatcher, AWS Parameter Store, Sumo Logic, and much more! It's kind of mind-boggling to see it all coming together so quickly.

Notes & Links

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

029: Potluck #2

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics: What would you do as an engineer if you knew you couldn't get fired? What conscious and unconscious fears might be holding you back from executing on tasks that you know are important? What does a healthy work-life balance look like after Covid-19? Are you one of the estimated 40% of employees that are considering quitting their job now that they've had the opportunity to work from home? In an increasingly remote-friendly culture, how are you taking care of your employees and making them feel wanted? How do you stays focused at work when you're feeling stuck? What strategies for success can you employ when you hit a wall and can't seem to motivate?

All that and more on this week's show!

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

028: Buy vs. DIY

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Engineers love to build things. Materializing an abstract concept into the form of a working piece of software is one of the most thrilling experiences available on planet earth. As such, we engineers often favor building new software over buying existing solutions. However, doing so takes time and energy; and, incurs a potentially-large opportunity cost for the business. It can be difficult to know if such a trade-off is worthwhile for the business in the long-run. This week, the crew examines the "build vs. buy" dilemma; and, reflects on their own general tendencies.

Notes & Links

Kent Beck: Test Driven Development By Example - a book that teaches programmers by example, so they can painlessly and dramatically increase the quality of their work.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

027: Giving Technical Presentations

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

As Jerry Seinfeld joked, when it comes to funerals, most people would rather be the one in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. Because, public speaking isn't easy. And, for many, it's a source of great anxiety. A technical presentation takes that anxiety and compounds it by layering on a need to provide complicated information in an engaging way. Part deep-dive, part story telling, a compelling technical presentation has to present enough information on a topic so as to deliver meaningful take-aways while, at the same time, keeping the information light enough so as not to overwhelm the audience. This week, the crew discusses presentations that they've given. And, shares tips and tricks for making your presentation a real winner!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - Adam was keen to get into testing as a life-style. And, by golly, he's done it! His current project has 100% passing tests with 95% test coverage! He's also been writing blog posts on the topic of testing in order to help keep this momentum going.
Ben's Triumph - It doesn't necessarily feel like a "triumph" in the moment; but, Ben is excited to be giving his first tech presentation in maybe a decade. He has a lot of social anxiety. But, he wants to feel more connected to the larger programming community and he thinks that giving a presentation will help take him a step in that direction.
Carol's Triumph - Carol is winning life! She was selected to run in the Peach Tree Road Race and she's super excited to crush her previous race times! Go Carol!
Tim's Failure - Tim is struggling to bring operational readiness and predictable performance to a legacy system whose architecture and behavior seem to defy reason. He's at the point where a "big bang" rewrite feels like the most viable path forward. This is generally considered a taboo move in the tech industry; but, he's not sure how else he can stabilize the product and provide a good Service Level Agreement (SLA) to his customers.

Notes & Links

Patrick Winston: How to Speak - this talk, 40-years in the making, is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

026: Passwords

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew talks about passwords. Web applications store a great deal of sensitive information. But, there is something categorically different about storing passwords. Because—if compromised—a password from one application may grant a malicious actor access to another application. As such, it is essential that we store our customers' passwords using modern, one-way hashing algorithms that protect the underlying payload against increasingly powerful compute resources. And, that we have a way to evolve our password hashing strategies in order to stay a step ahead of potential attackers.

Of course, sometimes the best password hashing strategies is to not store a password at all. Using a "passwordless login" allows you to defer the responsibility of password storage off to another, trusted vendor.

Also, we've been doing this podcast for half-a-year! How awesome is that! Yay for us!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Failure - While Adam has been quite keen on Testing code, he recently ran into a testing scenario that he found very challenging. And, he ended up taking half-a-day to refactor already working code just so that he could add the tests. In the long run, it wasn't a waste of time; but, it was a very humbling experience in the moment.
Ben's Triumph - After weeks of struggling to debug an authentication issue within a Sketch plug-in, Ben and his team finally figured out what was going wrong! As fate would often have it, Ben was the engineer that originally wrote the problematic code - so, that was unfortunate. But, at least they figured out how to fix the user experience!
Carol's Failure - Carol has been having trouble walking away from problems even when she feels stuck. So, instead of stepping back and clearing her head, she continues to beat it against the wall (often to no avail). She knows this is counterproductive; but, sometimes she gets lost in the details.
Tim's Triumph / Failure - Tim finds himself coasting this week. Nothing has been all that note-worthy; either in triumph or in failure.

Notes & Links

OWASP Password Cheat Sheet - industry standard best practices for storing passwords - covers Argon2, BCrypt, SCrypt, and PBKDF2.
Have I Been Pwned - a service that tells you if your password has been exposed in a data breach.
1Password - the world's most-loved password manager.
Authy - a user-friendly two-factor authentication app.
Shibboleth - an identity provider solution.
OAuth - a standard for granting access to a website or application without having to provide it with your password.
SAML - a standard for exchanging authentication between parties.
Diceware - a method for generation secure, random passwords using playing dice.
NIST Password Guidelines - Auth0 explains new passwords guidelines from NIST.
Single Sign-On (SSO) - an authentication scheme in which one login grantes access to several, unrelated applications.
Netlify Identity Management - a solution for user management in a Netlify app.
Firebase Identity Management - a solution for user management in a Firebase app.
XKCD: Password Strength - A web comic about how we make passwords hard for people but easy for computers.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

025: Breaking Up With Your Stack

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

There's no one reason that companies move away from or onto a technology stack. Sometimes a given technology is no longer actively updated; sometimes the pool of developers that uses a technology shrinks, making it hard to hire new engineers or find community support; sometimes people just like the new hawtness; sometimes licensing costs become prohibitively expensive; sometimes there's a leadership change at your company; and, sometimes a team just believes that a new technology will solve all of their problems (spoiler alert: it won't). This week, the crew meets to talk about reasons that they've move on from or stuck with a set of chosen technologies.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - All of our recent talk of testing and "clean code" has had a very positive impact on how Adam is writing his own code. He's become much more cognizant of his application's boundaries and modularity; which, has enabled him to organize dependencies in order to make them more testable (and mockable). In fact, he's been so motivated by this new-found perspective that he's even gone back and refactored a mission critical portion of a legacy application that didn't have any tests at all.
Ben's Failure - He fancies himself quite good at debugging software. And yet, for the last 2-weeks, he's been completely baffled by a bug in a portion of his application. No one on his team can reproduce the issue. So, all he's been able to do so far is add new logging statements and then comb through his log aggregator looking for clues. It's maddening!
Carol's Triumph - In episode 020 - "Carol Needs A Consult" - Carol laid-out her plans to build an email-based integration with her company's ticketing system. Now, only a month-and-a-half later, she's thrilled to see this product really coming to life. It hasn't always been easy; and, they've hit some significant bumps along the way; but, so far, they haven't faced anything that they couldn't conquer together as a team. She's feeling lucky to be working with so many wonderful people!
Tim's Failure - He created a Pull-Request titled, "OMG, I can't believe I left this in the code". Apparently, while writing code for a new API-workflow, Tim hard-coded a failure-response into a network request so that he could test the "sad path" control-flow logic. And then, he forgot to remove it. For 3-days, he had production API calls all hard-coded to return failures. Fortunately, the code would fall-back to returning the correct result on a subsequent retry. But, he's definitely feeling some acute Shame over this turn of events.

Notes & Links

Semaphore - A minimalist Feature Flag engine for CFML apps.
Strangler Pattern - A technique in which a new implementation slowly takes traffic from an existing implementation.
JAM Stack - JavaScript, APIs, and Markup stand as the pillars in this newly-coined architectural approach.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

024: The Archetype of an Effective Developer

Wed, 26 May 2021 11:00:00 +0000

We all love the Hollywood portrayal of the "brilliant programmer" who can step in and just crush it at a moment's notice. We've probably all fantasized about being that programmer. But, that's not how people work. And it's not how teams work. Highly effective developers don't just "crush it" - they cultivate good habits that they then apply consistently, day-in and day-out, for years. This week, the crew discusses which habits make - or break - the most effective developers.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - After struggling to get several Java-based feature flag services configured correctly in ColdFusion (which is one layer of indirection above Java), Adam decided to pull the ultimate power move and created his own open-source, ColdFusion-based feature flag library: Semaphore. While still in active development, it's already feeling very "feature complete". Pull-requests welcome!
Ben's Failure - Without being able to point at anything in particular, this week kind of just kicked his butt. Without a Product Manager (PM) or an Engineering Manager (EM) on his team, he's felt as though noone is "protecting" him or his people. And, even though an EM may not have actually made a the week better, there's an emotional cost to feeling so exposed. One saving grace, however, is that he received a stellar review from someone on the Customer Facing Team (CFT). So, he must be doing something right.
Carol's Triumph - She totally survived a mercury-based allergic reaction to something she ate! That which doesn't kill Carol only makes her bolder when it comes to that sweet, sweet shellfish.
Tim's Triumph - He recently built a custom solution for one of his customers. However, he built it with clean boundaries and multi-tenancy in mind. Which means, now that he's successfully rolled-it-out to his first customer, he's ready to cash-in on that work by using the same solution as an upsell opportunity for his other customers. He's even gone back and refactored some of the architecture using the Clean Code tips from our earlier book review.

Notes & Links

Semaphore - A minimalist Feature Flag engine for CFML apps.
Taffy - A low friction, extremely simple way to build REST-ful end-points in your CFML apps.
FW/1 - A family of small, lightweight, convention-over-configuration frameworks, primarily for CFML apps.
Oh My Zsh - A delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

023: Book Club #1 Clean Code by "Uncle Bob" Martin (pt2)

Wed, 19 May 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew meets to finish their review of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). This book is filled with so much thought-provoking information that it took us two episodes to get through it! And, while some of the practices in the book didn't quite connect with the programming languages that we use or the types of applications that we build, our general consensus is that most of the suggestions in this book are spot-on.

All-in-all, I'd say that our first attempt at a book review was a smashing success!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - He took a SQL query that was running for over 3-minutes, refactored it, and brought the execution time down to 30 milliseconds. For those of you following along at home, that's a "4 orders of magnitude" improvement! There's nothing quite as thrilling as query optimization! But, anytime you get to describe an improvement in terms of "orders of magnitude", you are already winning!
Ben's Triumph - After spending weeks of his personal time building a ColdFusion custom tag DSL (Domain Specific Language) for generating HTML emails; and, then using said DSL in a company Hackathon to rebuild a bevy of transactional emails; he finally starting applying the approach at work! And, it's all going very smoothly!
Carol's Failure - She was so focused on putting together the mother's day plans (for her mothers) that she completely forgot that her son was coming home from his Freshman year of college. So, instead of going to get him, he had to rely on his friends (and their parents) to help him move back home. Of course, isn't a big part of going to college all about becoming more independent and self-reliant?
Tim's Failure - He is terrible at negotiating. And, the very act of "countering" an offer makes him feel like a bad person. In a contentious situation, his primary goal is to figure out exactly what he can say to bring the situation to an end. This is something he always wishes he was better at.

Notes & Links

Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In - Offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict.
Never Split the Difference - A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

022: Book Club #1 Clean Code by "Uncle Bob" Martin (pt1)

Wed, 12 May 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew talks about Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Recommended to us by friend-of-the-show Adam Cameron, this book outlines a series of "best practices" that programmers can use in order to create applications that are easy to understand and easy to maintain. Just imagine if applications became easier to understand over time - not harder; that is the goal of this book.

A lot of the approaches feel obvious once you see them articulated. However, they're not always easy to apply in your own applications. And, some of the practices feel at odds with each other. For example, sometimes we want small, reusable classes that "do only one thing"; and, sometimes, we want a large mama-jama class that has 2,000 lines of code in it because it's the very collocation of the logic that makes that class maintainable.

And, of course, we don't all agree on all the concepts. But, that's what makes the discussion so much fun!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - Adam's son broke both of his wrists (what the doctors refer to a "bilateral ouchie") while playing on the monkey-bars. Thankfully, his family has great insurance and lives very close to one of best children's hospitals in the country: the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. So, while it has been (and will likely be) a rough recovery period, Adam feels like he has much to be thankful for.
Ben's Triumph - His big hairy goal for 2021 was supposed to be learning about "Design Systems". But, in the first 4-months of the year, he didn't follow-through on that goal in any way whatsoever However, in just the last few weeks, he's finally started to piece together some reusable components for his AngularJS application. Eventually, he might move to something like Google's Material Design; but, he feels like he needs to "fail first" before he can truly understand the problem that robust Design Systems are solving.
Carol's Failure - Despite what felt like an effortless start in her adventure with Amazon AWS, Carol hit a brick-wall while trying to get AWS Lambda to communicate with GMail. After struggling for 3-days to no avail, she finally got in touch with her Google Cloud Account support; and, not even they can figure out why it's not working.
Tim's Triumph - While reading Clean Code in preparation for this episode, he's already feeling more cognizant of the way that he's writing his applications. And, things are feeling pretty, pretty, pretty clean.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

021: Listener Questions #2

Wed, 05 May 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew responds to questions shared by our wonderful, wonderful audience! Nathan Strutz - who called the Working Code Hotline - shares his exciting journey into feature flags; Ryan Mueller wants to compare and contrast Kanban and Scrum style project management; and, LD2 covers the gamut with questions regarding staying-up on new technology, the importance of having a GitHub profile, and whether the hosts prefer having a deep knowledge in one area (ie, a technical expert) or a shallower knowledge across a variety of areas (ie, a Jack or Jill of All Trades).

This week's sponsored shout-out is Grace Hopper Celebration - an event, inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper - that brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.

And finally, don't forget that we are going to have our first book club episode on May 12th for Clean Code by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Feel free to read-up and follow along!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - After feeling like Gatsby wasn't performing well enough (at least on the old version that he's using), Adam's decided to start porting his blog over to Eleventy (11ty). This new static blogging engine is proving to be much faster and will allow Adam to build-out more of the features that he used to have in his older, dynamically-rendered blog engine.
Ben's Failure - Piling onto some previous failures, he's been in a bit of slump lately. More specifically, he feels disconnected from the programming community. Having nothing to do with the pandemic, he longs for the time that he used to spend reading blogs, watching videos, and - generally speaking - being "part of the conversation." He fears that his hyper-focus on work problems may be holding him back. And, he wants to figure out how to make learning (for the sake of learning) part of his every-week routine.
Carol's Triumph - She got vaccinated! Woot woot! And, after last week's episode, Carol is really crushing it! With one 4-hour Udemy course about AWS under her belt and she already has her AWS lambdas running on a SAM local stack, all while seamlessly integrating with Google Auth and GMail. All in all, she's quite pleased with how well all the pieces are coming together; and she feels like she's unlocked a lot of potential value in her future development efforts!
Tim's Triumph - After triumphantly releasing a new product last month, Tim held a retrospective with his customers to get a broad sense of how things are going. And, so far, everything seems to be going swimmingly. Yes, a few obscure edge-cases have presented themselves (and have been promptly dealt with); but, for the most part, payments are getting processed and people are very pleased with the new functionality! In fact, motivated by the current success, he's now planning to release this new product offering to a wider customer-base.

Notes & Links

Adam Tuttle - Dead Code - An exploration of when it makes sense to comment-out code.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

020: Carol Needs a Consult

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

At Carol's company, Support emails are sorted, labeled, and processed using a manual - and very expensive - workflow that won't be able to scale with the increasing demand. As such, Carol is looking to build a robust auto-reply system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using machine learning (ML). At least, that's the long-term goal. In the near-term, she'd be thrilled just to get more users to log into the existing web-portal instead of using email as their primary means of communicating with Support.

But, where to begin? This week, the crew meets to commiserate with Carol on the complexity of email management; and, to help her brainstorm on ways that she might use AWS - and other service providers - to increase Support efficiency while also providing more customer value.

Pro-tip from Carol: Did you know that GMail ignores dots in the email username? That means that foobarbaz@gmail.com and foo.bar.baz@gmail.com are the same address. Carol uses this to her advantage by signing-up for services using different email variations which she can then use for filtering in the future.

This week's sponsored shout-out is TechGirlz, whose mission it is to inspire middle school girls to explore the possibilities of technology to empower their future careers through the creation of free, fun, interactive TechShopz led by industry professionals, leaders, and students.

And finally, don't forget that we are going to have our first book club episode on May 12th for Clean Code by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Feel free to read-up and follow along!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - He just transfered ownership of an old open-source project to fellow ColdFusion enthusiast, Dan Switzer. This project hasn't been touched in about 5-years; and, Adam is thrilled to have the project continue to live-on and remain useful under Dan's watchful eye.
Ben's Triumph - In an attempt to be more agile and bias towards action, he had an idea on Tuesday, implemented it on Wednesday, and then deployed it on Thursday. He cut out all of the "analysis paralysis", over-engineering, and hand-wringing that often accompanies product design. And gosh-darn-it, people are already using it and getting value out of it! It feels like a victory.
Carol's Triumph - After using a Windows computer for most of her career, she recently switched over to using a Mac for development. The Mac is nice; but, when she has to switch back to her Windows computer briefly, the key-combinations feel all janky. To remedy this, she remapped her Windows' modifier keys to work like her Mac's modifier keys. She now has a seamless experience no matter which operating system she's on.
Tim's Triumph - After deploying a brand new product, he half expected a lot of bug reports to start rolling in. But, nope! It's been surprisingly smooth sailing. As such, he finds himself just watching the analytics and seeing those sweet, sweet payments get processed appropriately. He was even able to leverage those analytics to drive a 10% increase in conversions through targeted improvements for certain cohorts.

Notes & Links

AWS Lambda - Serverless compute resources that scale automatically.
AWS SNS - Simple Notification Service, a fully-managed messaging service.
AWS SQS - Simple Queue Service, a fully-managed message queue service.
AWS Polly - A robust text-to-speech service that offers realistic, life-like sound.
Postmark - An industry leading email delivery and inbound processing service.
say - A text-to-speech synthesis program that ships with MacOS.
Seth Bling: Machine Learning for Video Games - An example of a computer that learns to play Super Mario.
Google: Natural Language - A service helps you derive insights from unstructured text.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

019: Makefiles

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Adam Tuttle first came into contact with makefiles (pronounced "make files") back in high school when compiling code. But, at the time, he didn't really understand what they were or how they worked - he was just a consumer. And, after high school, years went by in which he never gave makefiles a second thought. That is, until, one fateful conversation with Mark Mandel.

Mark explained that he used makefiles to create aliases for complex Docker commands. This piqued Adam's curiosity; and soon, Adam went down the rabbit hole! Today, he uses makefiles extensively for complex shell commands that he shares across his entire team: building containers, deploying code, generating Pull Requests - and, he's only begun to scratch the surface!

Today, the crew listens to Adam wax poetically about what makes makefiles so great. And, we get to ask him all sort of questions like: can they be used to create git aliases? Can this be used with npx commands? Is this like npm run scripts? And, why are you still using "boring technology" that was built in the 70s?

This week's sponsored shout-out is Wonder Woman Tech, whose mission it is to highlight, celebrate, educate, and amplify Women, BIPOC, and the Underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, Math (STEAM), and Innovation.

And finally, don't forget that we are going to have our first book club episode on May 12th for Clean Code by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Feel free to read-up and follow along!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Failure - In what can only be described as unbridled enthusiasm for his team's switch to GitHub Packages, Adam tried to incorporate a few too many changes into what was originally supposed to be the simple swapping of URLs in various package.json files. In the end, the migration wound-up including a bunch of test automation and QA deployments which cost his team an additional day in person-hours. But, he did get it done!
Ben's Failure - He feels like his muse has been on vacation for the last few weeks. Usually his brain is awash with a chaotic symphony of ideas; but, lately, it's just been quiet. These things run in cycles for him; so, he's confident that he'll be back to normal in the near future.
Carol's Triumph - She just finished her first 2-week rotation on Zendesk duty. Her company rotates all engineers through the Support team twice a year in an effort to build customer empathy and to help educate the engineers on the full landscape of their product-suite. Carol walks away from her rotation with a deep sense of gratitude for her team; and for her customers!
Tim's Triumph and Failure - After months of mothering his "skunk works" project from ideation and development through to deployment and release, he's suddenly struck with a case of "coder's empty nest syndrome". Without any fires to put-out or customers to consult with, he's not exactly sure what to do with himself. That said, Tim is thrilled to have finally gotten his first hater! And while this shade is almost certainly being thrown in jest, it definitely made Tim's week - his heart is overflowing!

Notes & Links

gh - GitHub's command-line interface (CLI).
npx - Run local and remote binaries from the command-line in your Node application context.
npm Run Scripts - Run arbitrary scripts from your package.json file.
Homebrew - A popular package manager for Mac and Linux.
grep - A shell command for searching files and input streams.
find - A shell command for searching for a file within a file tree.
awk - A shell command for pattern scanning and processing language.
sed - A shell command for stream editing and text transformation.
xargs - A shell command for building other command-line executions using the input stream.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

018: Feature Flags (Finally!)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

For Ben and his team, few things have fundamentally changed the product development life-cycle as much as LaunchDarkly, a feature flag management platform. Feature flags allow software engineers to separate the "deployment" of code from the "releasing" of code. Which means safer deployments; instantaneous roll-backs; smaller Pull Requests (PRs); incremental feature development; load-testing with real-world traffic; and - generally speaking - a big bowl of awesome sauce that you didn't even know you needed! And, once you have it, you realize that you can't live without it.

Mic drop!

But, while Feature Flags may seem magical, they aren't magic. And, moving feature flags through a product development life-cycle requires a certain degree of discipline. Because if you leave feature flags in your code for too long, your application logic can quickly devolve into an unclear, unpredictable maze of control-flow spaghetti.

In other news, the Working Code crew is also about to embark on their fist book club adventure, starting with Clean Code by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). We intend to review this book in the May 12th episode. Feel free to follow along!

And just when you thought things couldn't get any better, the Working Code Podcast now has a party line! Just kidding; but, we do have an answering service at (512) 253-2633 (That's 512-253-CODE!). Please leave us a message with with your comments, questions, and anything else you feel like sharing. We miss hearing your voices!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - Historically, when his team needed to host a private npm module, they've stored it in a private GitHub repository and then used git URLs within the package.json file. And, this worked most of the time. But, it was wonky and there were lots of quirks and edge-cases and they've been on the lookout for a better solution. Enter stage left: GitHub Packages. These allow you to "officially" store npm modules right alongside the rest of your GitHub hosted code - no hacks, no troubles.
Ben's Failure - He's generally very regimented about the hours that he keeps. But, in the wake of losing both his Project Manger (PM) and his Engineering Manager (EM), he's been struggling to properly prioritize all the work on his plate. And, instead of being smarter, he's opted to work harder by putting in a few extra hours here-and-there. He understands that it's a slippery slope; and, not the life-style that he wants to live; but, if he can just get ahead of it, he's confident that he'll get back on the right track.
Carol's Triumph - She's been wanting to build something with React as means to level-up on her front-end skills. And she finally finished going through a Udemy course on React! Next step: React side project (possibly to track her water intake).
Tim's Triumph - He's launching a skunk works project that is based on a previous skunk works project. It feels a little bit rogue; and a little bit cowboy; but, it also feels kind of amazing and is something that Tim recommends to everyone (assuming that they have some free time to commit).

ASIDE: A "skunk works project" is a secret project that the rest of (or most of) your company doesn't know about until there's a big reveal. These types of projects may or may not be authorized by the company itself.

Notes & Links

LaunchDarkly - an amazing platform for feature flag based application development.
Flagsmith - a feature flag service that has hosted, cloud, and on-premise solutions.
Split IO - a feature flag service with a free tier option.
Ben Nadel: My Personal Best Practices For Using LaunchDarkly Feature Flags - on opus on how Ben's team uses LaunchDarkly and feature flags.
Ben Nadel: Viewing The LaunchDarkly Feature Flag Evaluation Process As A Pure Function - a helpful analogy for understanding how user targeting works in LaunchDarkly.
Adil Aijaz: Managing Feature Flags - an O'Reilly book on feature flag management.
StatsD - the de facto standard for recording application metrics in web development.
FusionReactor - an application performance monitoring (APM) solution for the JVM.
Loggly - a log aggregation service that requires no proprietary agents.
Datadog - a modern (and totally awesome) platform for monitoring, logging, and StatsD metrics.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

017: Premature Optimization

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew talks about "premature optimization". As Ben explained it to his wife, this is when you "solve problems that you don't have yet". But, what kind of problems are we talking about? Missing features? Missing methodologies? Missing performance characteristics? It seems that every aspect of the development life-cycle offers up potential pitfalls in which we may chase "perfection" needlessly when all we really needed was something that was "good enough." In the best case scenario, premature optimization is a waste of time. But, in the worst case scenario, premature optimization can kill a project before it ever gets off the ground.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - For a long time, he and his team have been correcting a recurring data corruption issue by manually opening a record in their administrative user interface (UI) and then re-saving that record. It's easy to do; but it's tedious and frustrating. After recently completing some of his high-priority work, however, Adam was finally able to locate and fix the underlying cause (a race condition between two asynchronous API calls). This removed a small point of friction; but, it had an outside effect on the team morale!
Ben's Triumph - After feeling gut-punched over the poor performance of his HTML Email DSL (Domain Specific Language) when running inside of a Docker container, he deployed a sanity-check experiment to production and found that ColdFusion custom tags ran 68-times faster in production when compared to his local development environment. This completely removed his fear of using ColdFusion custom tags to generate HTML emails; and meant that it was totally game on!
Carol's N/A - Unfortunately, Carol was out sick. Feel better Carol! We miss you and we hope you feel better soon!
Tim's Triumph - He's been working hard to find common ground with his customers during the ideation phase of Product development. And although he sometimes feels like a marriage counselor, he knows that the best way to achieve success is to include and consult with his customers, even if he suspects that the final outcome will be the same. Ultimately, customers just want to feel heard; and to feel like their needs are being addressed in some form or fashion.

Notes & Links

Go Time: Episode 172 - An interview with Bill Kennedy discussing best practices around the design of Go software.
Meme: Science vs Engineering - A meme that pits the elegance of science against the brute-force pragmatism of engineering.
Sandi Metz: The Wrong Abstraction - a blog post in which the cost of a little duplication is compared to the cost of the wrong abstraction.
Rule of Three - a code refactoring rule-of-thumb that states an abstraction should be created only on the third time duplicate code is needed.
Kent C. Dodds: AHA Programming - DRY vs. WET vs. AHA - several different rules-of-thumb for refactoring code.
Adam Tuttle: Errors Are Best When Emailed... Said Nobody Ever - a presentation on how to effectively monitor errors within your web application.
MongoDB is Web Scale - a meme poking fun at the web scale fanatics that showed up after Document Databases were first introduced.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

016: Interviewing

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, the crew sits down to talk about interviewing, both from the side of the interviewer and from the side of interviewee. What are we looking for? What are the red flags? What kinds of questions should we be asking? Are we putting too much faith in the sanctity of the interview process? And, why the heck does Zappos offer to pay you $2,000 not to work there?!

This discussion is particularly insightful because Carol shares her perspective as a female which includes things most men will have never considered. For example, did you know that you can ask ahead of time who will be interviewing you? And, that it's even OK to ask for a woman to be present on the interview panel? This underscores the importance of creating and hiring for a diverse team: everyone's perspective is different; and, everyone's perspective is valuable. And, when we only hire people that look and act like us, we only see the human experience through a small window.

Each week, our top Patreon supporters get a sponsored shout-out. And, today's shout-out goes to Girls Who Code, an organization who's mission it is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - In 2014, he wrote REST Assured, a no-nonsense ebook about architecting RESTful APIs. Now in 2021 - by popular demand - this digital work is finally coming to a paperback near you! And of course, we're all demanding signed copies!
Ben's Failure - this past week just left him feeling destroyed. Between the "Spring forward" clock change, an absurd number of meetings, and the abysmal performance of his ColdFusion custom tag DSL inside a Docker container, this whole week has felt like a kick in the gut. Not every week is going to be a winner; and, he just hopes that next week is better!
Carol's Triumph - she bought a daily-planer to help her keep track of what she's done today; and, what she needs to get done tomorrow. Part optimization, part self-care, writing everything down allows her to see a clear record of what she's accomplished; which, in turn, allows her to embrace her own success and feel good about stepping away from her desk when she needs to take a break.
Tim's Triumph - his plan is really coming together! After months-and-months of consulting with customers, writing business plans, organizing marketing campaigns, collecting testimonials, obtaining budgets, running things by Legal, and working with Quality Assurance (QA), all the pieces are falling into place. And, for him, it's been a truly humbling experience. As engineers, we can be lulled into thinking that we are the center of the universe; but, when one see just how many people are involved in bringing a product to market, it becomes clear that we are just small cogs in a massive, harmonious machine.

Notes & Links

The MEGA Interview Guide - a humble guide to give developers the tools they need to nail technical interviews!
Awesome Interview Questions - a curated list of lists of technical interview questions.
Cracking the Coding Interview - the 6th edition of the book's crowd-sourced solutions guide.
MOVA - a fake programming language created to help weed-out nefarious recruiters and engineers.
How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects - a breakdown of different work personalities and how to work effectively with them.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

015: Potluck #1

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

This week, we're trying something new: each host has brought with them a topic for the crew to discuss. Topics range from considerations about data-context; what does and does not make for a good manager; code that we're proud to have written; and, what it looks like when a team develops a strong bias for action. One particularly thought-provoking matter is the fact that 20% of Tim's clients prefer to make payments over the phone even when given a web-based option. This is a great reminder of the "bubble" that we can live in, often forgetting that what seems like an odd, archaic choice to us can actually be the "preferred choice" for others.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - His desk is normally an obstacle course of empty Mountain Dew cans, thumb drives, pens, papers, and whatever else piles up and refuses to be thrown away over time. But, he finally cleaned up his office and even vacuumed the floor. And, heck if it doesn't feel good; well, at least for the next 6-hours.
Ben's Triumph - He fixed some bugs! On a small team, there's always a tension between new feature development and fixing bugs. And, unfortunately, building the "newness" tends to win out. In the last few weeks, however, he's really focused on allocating time to grooming the backlog and fixing long-standing issues, each one of which represents a real user that's experiencing real frictions.
Carol's Triumph - Her communication style can be a bit too curt. In a professional setting, she tends not to mince her words, which can ruffle feathers. Lately, however, she's been making an effort to "people" better, pushing back against inaccuracies with questions instead of just showing people where they went wrong.
Tim's Triumph - Building a successful software product is far more than just writing the code. As Tim puts it, you have to be a "bridge builder". Which means, spending time getting everyone else on board: finance, legal, engineers, and the leadership within the corporate hierarchy. Everyone needs to understand why something is being created; and, why it's worth the time, money, and investment. Historically, Tim has not felt very effective at this consensus building. But lately, he's been really crushing it. He can't share too many details at the moment; but, when the time comes, we won't be able to shut-him-up!

Notes & Links

Girls Who Code - an organization focused on building the world's largest pipeline of future female engineers.
Go Time podcast - a Changelog podcast focused on Golang.
BFF: Backends For Frontends - an architectural pattern in which backend APIs are built for specific frontend clients.
Tef: Write code that's easy to delete - an article espousing the virtues of code that is written to be deleted.
Ward Bell - co-host of the Web Rush podcast.
Dark Matter Developers - the quiet majority of engineers that do their job but don't necessarily participate in the greater web development community.
IGROW - Issue, Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward: a model for mentoring and coaching.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

014: Zen and the Art of Pull Requests

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Ben has "feelings" about many aspects of web application development. And, after working with git and GitHub for the last 10-years, he's formed a lot of strong opinions - oftentimes strongly held - about how Pull Requests (PRs) should be created and managed within a team context. For example:

Code completed is more important than code being written. As such, if an open PR sits around for more than an hour, your team has failed to review said PR in a timely manner.

And:

If a PR takes more than 15-minutes to review, the PR is too large. The author of said PR has failed to decompose the problem into smaller, independently-deployable changes.

As you can imagine, Ben's "PR Commandments" don't work for every one or every team. This week, the crew meets to discuss his approach to Pull Requests, reaching consensus on some concepts and pushing-back strongly on others. And, of course, this is totally fine - every team has its own set of constraints that have bearing on how that team operates. Your mileage my vary!

Plus, we find out that Carol can be bribed with tacos... sweet, sweet tacos!

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - He just had his 9-year work anniversary at AlumnIQ! And, as he reflects on the last 9-years, he's amazed to realize that he never wanted to quit. Every day seems to be a stream of challenges; which is exactly what makes the work so invigorating! When he thinks back to prior jobs that he has quit, they were always boring jobs building "forms over data" type products. He's looking forward to the next 9-years!
Ben's Triumph - He gets a little nostalgic this week, recalling a thought he had 15-years ago about how amazing it would be to create a software system that worked like the human body, with cells that acted independently and communicated via hormones. At the time, he dismissed the thought as being crazy; but, fast-forward to today, it turns out that his instincts were actually spot-on. Though, instead of hormones, we have event-streams, message queues, and pub-sub mechanism; and, instead of cells, we have distributed, independently-scalable systems that are kept up-to-date through "eventually consistent" communications!
Carol's Triumph - Her team has moved all thirteen of their pending-work branches into testing. This is the culmination of weeks of hard work. And, to top it off, she's proud of the fact that she was able to buckle-down and maintain a high standard of quality for her coding all the way to the very end! No cutting corners for this engineer!
Tim's Triumph - He was required to participate in a coaching and mentoring workshop at his company. And, though he was initially frustrated about having to put pressing-work-matters on hold, once the workshop started, he found it be quite helpful. And, he was even able to find the solution to a problem he's been wrestling with for some time! It turns out that if you open yourself up to opportunities in front of you, you never know what you're gonna find!

Notes & Links

git - the most popular source-control system on planet earth.
GitHub - a very popular source-control solution, built on git.
BitBucket - another popular source-control solution from Atlassian.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

013: Do What You Love And You'll Never Work A Day In Your Life

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 12:00:00 +0000

A friend of Ben's once said, "If you hate your job, you'll spend 5-7ths of your life waiting for the weekend." This is a dark way to think about existence. And, to address the flip-side of that coin, Mingo Hagen suggested that we talk about the phrase, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." This is a significantly more optimistic view on the human experience; but, does it hold up to scrutiny?

This week, the crew talks about the privilege of being able to choose work that we truly enjoy. Not everyone has this opportunity; and, even when we do, loving your job doesn't always make it feel any less like work. In fact, as Tim illustrates with some scripture, the challenge and hardship of work can be what makes it lovable and fulfilling:

Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it. - Matthew 7:13

Bringing a different sort of scripture to the conversation, Ben shares one of his favorite poems, "Our Deepest Fear":

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. - Marianne Williamson

The conversation examined the "do what you love" concept from a variety of different levels, with each host coming at it from a different angle. What becomes very clear is that the quote means different things to different people. But, the one thing we think we can all agree on: don't commit to work estimates that you don't believe in! Doing so will only make you your own worst enemy.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Failure - he spent many person-hours trying to reduce the size of a Docker container image. And, while he eventually reduced it quite a bit (mostly by moving to Alpine Linux), he wasted far too much time on what turned out to be a simple little typo in his make file. The most frustrating part of all of this is that he just assumed that the line-in-question could not possibly be the issue; so, he kept debugging the lines around it without addressing the actual problem.
Ben's Triumph - he and a co-worker, Jackie Ewald, were recently called-out as the embodiment of "customer empathy" at work because they built a custom feature for one of their clients. What made this so rewarding is the fact that they did not ask for permission to build this feature; and, it was a feature that they almost-certainly would not have been allowed to build had they asked for permission.
Ben likes to keep this quote from Stephen Gates - the former Head Design Evangelist at InVision - on hand during all ideation meetings:

".... for most companies, right now, because of the way their processes are—because of how afraid they are of so many things—the innovation that they need will probably not be authorized.... When I look back at all the work that was innovative, it was only innovative in hindsight—it almost got me fired on the way there."

Carol's Triumph - She's loving life in Lake Tahoe! Woot woot! Rock on with your bad self!
Tim's Triumph - as a manager, he usually finds himself in a constant state of "meeting". However, he recently blocked-off 7-hours of heads-down time on his calendar so that he would not be interrupted; and, the amount of work that he was able to get done was refreshingly preposterous. He even received a compliment from one of his clients who thanked him profusely, at the end of the day, for everything he was able to complete!

ASIDE: Managers, consider this story when it comes to scheduling meetings for your engineers! We need focus time to get our work done!

Notes & Links

Mingo Hagen - listener who suggested the topic.
Matthew 7:13 - Enter ye in at the strait gate...
Marianne Williamson - author of the poem, Our Deepest Fear.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

012: Idiomatic Code

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Many programming languages have a sense of idiomatic code: the "blessed way" to solve a particular set of problems with a language's native constructs. These patterns exist to help people work more effectively together; and, to help new developers adapt to the language. But, unfortunately, the expression of idiomatic code in some communities shifts from "carrot" to "stick", getting used to separate the "right" way from the "wrong" way, thereby creating an implicit division between the "good developers" and the "bad developers".

The ColdFusion / CFML community has never had a sense of "idiomatic code". And, ColdFusion developers are never burdened by the homogeneity of solutions that bubble up to the surface (such as they do in other languages). This can lead to a kind of "beautiful chaos" in which teams find the right tool for the job and spend their time focusing on the needs of the customer rather than worrying about any particular standard.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

This week, the crew talks about idiomatic code, what they think it really means, and how it can serve to both help and hurt a programming community.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - He's not on call this week! And that feels like a sweet, sweet triumph!
Ben's Triumph - The moment he realized that he was going to miss a deployment deadline, he took a step back and figured out how to properly "descope" the work such that he could meet his deployment deadline by releasing a smaller - yet still meaningful - set of features. He saw this as a victory in the agile development mindset.
Carol's Triumph - She's going on vacation to Lake Tahoe for some fun in the snow - something she rarely has a chance to do in hot, hot Georgia.
Tim's Triumph - For his entire life, Tim has been parting his hair left-to-right. But, in a recent moment of brashness, he threw caution to the wind and tried parting his hair right-to-left. This seemingly small tweak ended up being a total game changer! And, just as Clark Kent transformed into Superman with a change in part, so has Tim transformed into a more stunning, beautiful version of himself!
He also figured out why his Redis code wasn't working. Ironically, it had to do with how his tests were running (and how they were mutating the shared data).

Notes & Links

Guido van Rossum - author of the Python programming language; and, a big proponent of idiomatic code (in Python).
Rick Waldron: Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic JavaScript - an opinionated guide to writing JavaScript.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

011: Listener Questions #1

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Cunningham's Law states:

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

The crew recently experienced a bit of this law first hand in response to their episode on Testing. Adam Cameron - friend of the show and long-time friend of the hosts - posted a scathing (but loving) rebuttal of basically everything that Ben said in episode 009. This week, the crew meets to discuss Adam's post; and, to dig more deeply into how testing gets applied in real world scenarios.

Thew crew also attempt to pick apart the relationship between DevOps and engineering - a question posed by @LD2. Just don't ask us (or anyone) to define what exactly DevOps is; you ask 10 different people and you'll get 15 different answers.

Oh, and Adam totally built a website for the show! So, heck yeah! It's built on Eleventy and is generated based on Markdown files.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph / Failure - His application had a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability that was exploited. Which is definitely unfortunate. However, he was able to take a bad situation and turn it into an opportunity to practice transparency, clear communication, and a sense of urgency with his customers. In fact, in the end, he was commended by his customers for how well he handled the situation.
Ben's Triumph - He attached some analytics to a user interface (UI) within his application and suddenly a part of the application which has historically been a blackbox was transformed into a rich, emotional experience in which he could "see" users actually consuming the tools that he built. This recent adoption of analytics (into his workflow) has forever changed the way that he will think about what is and is not an important part of the application that he's building. It's amazing how powerful "user empathy" can be to an engineer's motivation.
Carol's Triumph - Her company is over-committed in terms of the work that they have on their schedule. But, instead of making the engineers freak-out over this planning problem, her managers are doing their job right and are protecting their reports from the organizational chaos. It's rare to see managers that understand how to manage both up and down within a company hierarchy! As Adam says in the episode, a good manager is worth their weight in gold.
Tim's Triumph - His frustration over debugging an issue in Redis had grown to the point where he was walking around his house angry. But, instead of trying to "just muscling through it", he decided to step back, be kind to himself, and take a break.

ASIDE: You won't know this from the current recording but this break gave him the opportunity to rethink the problem and ultimately come back and figure out what was going wrong. Such is the magic of mental rest and relaxation!

Notes & Links

OWASP: XSS - consistently on the Top 10 vulnerabilities outlined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
Data Breach Response Plan - an organizational play that outlines how a company responds to data breaches, how quickly they have to notify users, and what immediate and longer-term steps they have to take to mitigate such breaches in the future.
Shattered Glass - a movie in which Hank Azaria's character demonstrates excellent managerial skills.
Segment - a popular data pipeline and aggregation platform.
Amplitude - a popular analytics platform for digital teams.
Eleventy - a simpler static site generator.
Adam Cameron: Thoughts on Working Code podcast's Testing episode - the rebuttal that we discuss on the show.
Cunningham's Law - states, "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
Test-Driven Development - a test-first methodology for software application development.
Singleton Pattern - a software design pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to one "single" instance.
Cory Haines - a well known programmer in the Ruby and testing worlds.
Ben Nadel: Singleton vs. Single Instance And A Decade Of Unnecessary Guilt - the realization that everything he thought about the "Singleton Pattern" was wrong.
DevOps - who the heck knows what it actually is - platform things mostly? Code++? A mindset? A job title?

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

010: Scaling

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0000

An engineer at SquareSpace once referred to his company as "an overnight success, 7-years in the making." This cheeky insight pays homage to the marathon of work that is often required when building a successful product and / or business. Which begs the question: when is it appropriate to start thinking about scale? Should you be taking it into account during early ideation and the construction of your MVP (Minimum Viable Product)? Or, should you kick the can down the road with the assumption that you can always throw money at the problem later (either by hiring smart people or by vertically scaling your existing compute resources)?

This week, the crew talks about their experience in scaling web application systems; what they have - and haven't yet - had the need to consider; and, how they calculate the return on investment (ROI) when it comes to adding complexity to a potential solution ("innovation tokens", anyone?).

If you like this episode about scaling, you may also enjoy our previous episode on Monoliths vs. Microservices.

Triumphs & Failures

Adam's Triumph - After switching to a new platform, his ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) code stopped working for "reasons". And, instead of spending a whole week trying to figure it out, he just spent a single day replacing the problematic ORM queries with native SQL statements. This was a veritable "Master Class" in pragmatic problem solving.
Ben's Failure / Triumph - This week has been kicking his butt! He's exhausted and stressed out - even his feet hurt. This is due, primarily, to the HTML emails that he's been crafting at work. That said, he's been able to take his "failure" and transform it into a "triumph" by channeling that frustration into an exciting new approach for building HTML emails that's powered by ColdFusion Custom Tags. It's still early, but he's hella stoked on the concept!
Carol's Triumph - She wrote some rather complicated code that dealt with edge-cases in her application that weren't really ever going to happen. And, when her teammates discussed this with her, she did the honorable thing and removed her code, leaving in its place a much simpler solution. The real triumph here is that she was able to overcome the "sunk cost fallacy" we engineers often succumb to when having to confront the questionable value of our own solutions.
Tim's Failure - What started out as a thrilling exploration of Redis has turned into a battle for sanity! For reasons that he has not yet been able to understand, the data that he's been writing to a Redis cache isn't always available for immediate read. This is in his local development environment and he's the only one hitting the code. It just doesn't make any sense!

Notes & Links

Redis - a blazing-fast in-memory data structure store.
CFRedis - a ColdFusion client for the Jedis Java driver for Redis.
Jedis - a blazingly small and sane Java client for Redis.
Mango Blog - an extensible blog engine released under the Apache license, built with ColdFusion.
CockroachDB - a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store.
Dan McKinley: Boring Technology Club - a spoken word version of Dan's essay, "Choose Boring Technology".
Ben Nadel: "Enterprise" is not a dirty word - a blog post discussing the merits of "enterprise" software.
FrameworkOne (FW/1) - a light-weight conventions-over-configuration framework for ColdFusion web applications.
Blocking-Request Budget - a concept in which serving a user's request can only entail a limited number of blocking requests.
AWS Fargate - services compute for containers.
AWS Lambda - a "functions as a service" (FaaS) platform.
Mailgun - an email service provider (ESP) built for developers.
Let's Encrypt - a nonprofit Certificate Authority that has brought free TLS certificates to the masses.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

009: Testing

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0000

There are very few people in the programming world who will argue against the idea of testing software. But, when it comes to the mechanisms though which code is tested, the conversation starts to get interesting. There are those who feel that TDD - Test Driven Development - is "the way"; and, that any divergence from TDD is not only laziness but is, in fact, borderline malfeasance. At the other end of the spectrum are the people who perform all their testing manually; often, relying on QA (Quality Assurance) teams and smoke tests to find regressions before each deployment.

Most people sit somewhere in the middle of these extremes. This week, the crew talks about their own views and experience with testing; and, how they currently implement testing at work. Ben swings heavily towards the manual testing end of the spectrum; Adam and Carol swing heavily towards the automated end of the spectrum; and Tim, who often feels very hypocritical, sits somewhere in the middle.

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Triumph: He's been working hard to get his company's application migrated over to a new open-source software stack. And, as of this recording, he's successfully moved 9 of his 13 production servers over to the new setup; and, everything seems to be running smoothly! He's feeling very strong on hitting his goals of migrating the rest of the servers by the end of January.
Ben's Failure: This week has been kicking his butt! He hasn't been sleeping well, he can't get comfortable in his chair, and everything seems to hurt. He's carrying a boat-load of tension in his neck and shoulders and he just can't seem to get past it. The only saving grace is that he can use his "standing desk" controls to select the perfect height for sitting.
Carol's Failure: She's also having a tough time getting comfortable! Her body hurts from her tail-bone up to her head; and, the heating pad she's using just ain't doing it. She's currently on the hunt for a new chair that might help offer some relief. But, being the Amazonian warrior that she is makes things a bit more challenging. As she says: "I can't help it - I have six feet of legs and they have to go somewhere!" And, as the icing on the cake, she accidentally deleted the configuration settings for all seven of her home networks. She had automatic backups configured; but, she accidentally turned them off 3-months ago.
Tim's Triumph: It's been a while since he was able to get into a groove; but, this week, he finally achieved flow state: that moment when the world disappears, time loses meaning, and all you can see is the code in front of you as it appears to pour out of your hands without effort or thought. He summed this feeling up quite nicely: "I feel less like I'm pushing a stone uphill and more like there's a river just flowing through me." I mean, come on, he even wrote a Regular Expression!

Notes & Links

Pure Function - a function that produced no side-effects; and, whose outputs are determined entirely by its inputs.
CFML - ColdFusion Markup Language, a language specification for one of the most powerful web application runtimes.
Jest - a popular JavaScript testing framework.
Unit testing - a low-level test of an individual unit of code.
Integration testing - a mid-level test of a group of software units running together.
End-to-End / Functional testing - a high-level test of an entire software system, typically looking at happy paths through an application.
Manual testing - using human to run tests on a piece of software.
Automated testing - using computers to run tests on a piece of software.
Static testing - evaluation of code without having to execute it (think linters and strongly typed languages).
Testing budget - a concept in which the tests that can block a deployment have to run within a certain time window.
Rich Hickey: YouTube - please, just go watch all of his videos.
Software regression - a bug that appears, and often breaks, a previously-working piece of code.
Guillermo Rauch - CEO of Vercel.
REST Assured - a testing framework for application APIs.
Gatling - load testing software.
Feature flags - tooling that allows you to turn parts of an application on or off without having to redeploy it.
Strangler pattern
Ben Nadel: My Personal Best Practices For Using LaunchDarkly Feature Flags - a tome that Ben wrote on how he uses feature flags.
Kent C Dodds: Testing JavaScript - a popular online course about about testing JavaScript.
EggHead.io - a popular subscription service that provides tutorials on web application development.
MockBox - a module within TestBox that allows the internal execution of a software module to be observed.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

008: Origin Stories Pt 2

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0000

All super heroes have an origin story. And, so do nerds. Many of us can remember back to that moment when we realized that there was magic in the world - magic that we could be part of; and, magic that we could help create. This week, we get personal with the crew and learn more about where they came from, what kind of stuff makes them tick, and what it is that they love about being web application developers.

This Part II of a two-part series. Part II will includes Carol and Adam. Part I was Ben and Tim.

But (drum roll please) thank you to our first patrons! You are helping us make this podcast better. For anyone who wants to know more, check out our Patreon listed at the end of the show notes.

Triumphs & Fails

Ben's Failure - He, like many of us, just doesn't "people" well at times. He makes an effort to improve this by staring emails with the goal being a reply. But with weeks of stared emails lacking replies, the effort feels a tad null. Maybe he should accept this flaw and consider it a feature. And... if he hasn't replied to your text message yet, don't feel bad, yours is only 1 of 1248.
Carol's Triumph - She mentioned last week that she was feeling a tad bit down at work, struggling to learn the business side as fast as she expected herself to. The self-induced kind of worries. This week during her 1-on-1, she was provided feedback which put that worries to rest. She is feeling less stress and more fresh.
Tim's Failure & Triumph - Boy oh boy, has Tim failed. He turned the chipper marketing team at work into a slightly less chipper set of people by avoiding delivering of a marketing approach he was on the hook for. No sweat team, he will get around to it. His Triumph for the week stem from our previous episode about 2021 Hopes and Goals. He wrote his own blockchain! The man is non stop! He also revels a great idea for using his new found blockchaining power. Perhaps a podcast coin?
Adam's Triumph - He's seesawing on if his triumph is a real triumph or not, and it is! He made it an entire day without sitting down. He is making an effort to stand more with the assistance of an electric sit/sand desk.

Notes & Links

Tinker - Means: to work in the manner of a tinker especially : to repair, adjust, or work with something in an unskilled or experimental manner
The Oregon Trail - A popular game for kids of the 90's to play. The game was released in 1990 and was developed by MECC.
Tent.io - Was a suite of distributed networking protocols which had a goal to provide a consistent data layer that any app could tie into. In 2019 they closed shop due to funding.
Our first search engines: Carol: Ask Jeeves, Tim: Altavista, Ben: HotBot, Adam: Dogpile
Welcome to the Machine
Terminal Velocity
Teach yourself VB4 in 21 days - Adams entry book into learning how to write code.
Church of Mountain Dew - Web archive to the original church of mountain dew webpage
First stop to find the church of dew
Another relic to the church of dew
12 year old Adam created his own Church of Mountian Dew in a notepad text editor.
The token ring network - A token ring network is a local area network (LAN) in which all computers are connected in a ring or star topology and pass one or more logical tokens from host to host. Only a host that holds a token can send data, and tokens are released when receipt of the data is confirmed.
REST Assured - If you think rest is napping, pick up Adams book to understand Rest and API Design.
Taffy - Adams REST Web Service Framework for ColdFusion and Lucee
Christian Ready - Christian Ready is a great friend of ours. We all love his work and listening to him present any chance we get. Check him out on YouTube.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

007: Origin Stories Pt 1

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

This Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 1 includes Tim and Ben. Part 2 will include Carol and Adam.

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Triumph - He moved mountains of data using "pivot tables" in Google Sheets in order to build summaries of his newly-rolled-out test coverage at work! He's a hair's breadth away from fully converting his codebase over to an open-source platform.
Ben's Triumph - He totally built something without JavaScript! I know, it sounds crazy: in the age of Single-Page Applications (SPA) and JavaScript frameworks, reaching for JavaScript is the default. But he managed to build something useful with just HTML and CSS!
Carol's Triumph / Failure - She just passed the 4-month mark at her new job, like a boss! But, she been a little bit down in the mouth, concerned that she's not getting enough done and that she's not learning enough. She managed to turn the week around, however, getting some productive "Design Buddy" work (think "pair programming" for the planning phase) done.
Tim's Triumph - He checked his old Coinbase account from 2015 and the $15 he left in there is now worth $85. He's about to wine and dine himself!

Notes & Links

:target - CSS selector that matches elements whose id matches the URL fragment.
Coinbase - a place to buy, sell, and manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.
Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes - New York Times article about a millionaire who has two more chances to remember his password for quarter-billion in Bitcoin.
Google Sheets: Pivot tables - creating and using pivot tables in Google Sheets.
Aqua Data Studio - a versatile database IDE with data management and visual analytics for relational, cloud, and NoSQL databases.
ELIZA - an early natural language processing computer program.
Zork - one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games.
Kaypro - a computer manufacturer from the 1980s known for their line of rugged, "luggable" computers.
dBase - one of the first database management systems for microcomputers.
CP/M - an early operating system.
Ultima Online - one of the first MMO (Massively Multi-player Online) games.
Adobe ColdFusion - a modern web development language.
Lucee CFML - the leading open-source CFML application server / engine - it's so good you might just freak out!
Sierra Entertainment - game company famous for King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.
Hackers - one of the best movies in the computer / hacker genre - Hack the planet!
X-Files - 1990s tv drama about the FBI's paranormal phenomena research - the truth is out there!
QBasic - an early programming language and interpreter.
TI-82 - a programmable calculator.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Your heart matters.

006: Hopes for 2021

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Oxford Dictionary included "doomscrolling" in their "word of the year" report for 2020; we're all feeling pandemic fatigue; many people still believe in wide-spread election fraud; the Georgia senate race was a nail-biter; and - oh yeah - we recorded this show the day after the storming of the United States capitol building.

It's all been more-than-a-bit surreal.

But, in the face of such physically and emotionally trying times, we look forward to a new year of possibility. Whether it's taking control of our finances, finding ways to be more active, building up our personal brand, or becoming the blacksmiths that we always knew we could be, the crew shares their personal and professional / technical goals for this burgeoning new year. As the Phoenix rose from the ashes, so too - we hope - 2021 will rise from the smoldering dumpster fire of 2020.

We'd also like to give a huge shout-out and thank you to Monte Chan for being our first Patreon supporter! You are a beautiful, beautiful person; and we hope to make you proud!

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Triumph - With 2020 just behind us, the Georgia Senate run-off keeping us on the edge of our seats, the insurrection, and plenty of "doomscrolling", he managed to kick off 2021 with a somewhat productive week. He's reminded of a quote from Cory Doctorow's latest book: "I'm not OK, but I'm going to be OK. I'm coping, but I have a lot to cope with."
Ben's Triumph - Coming off the two-week "deployment freeze" at work, he managed to rebase, merge, and deploy the 20-something small git branches that he had amassed over the holiday. It took a few days, but everything went swimmingly!
Carol's Triumph - She accidentally discovered her son (16yo) and his best friend listening to our podcast; and, they loved it! Woot woot! We are totes connecting with the youths!
Tim's Triumph - In the aftermath of the insurrection and storming of the US capitol building, he managed to not curl up in a ball and rock back-and-forth in the corner. Given the context, this was a pretty momentous effort.

Notes & Links

Cory Doctorow - science fiction author, activist and journalist.
You Need a Budget - award-winning software that teaches you how to manage your money.
Mark Drew - a rather amazing chap from the CFML and web programming world.
Devil Forge - full-service metal melting and blacksmithing tools supply company.
Max Cunningham - YouTube channel, blacksmith and forge enthusiasm.
Forged in Fire - reality show featuring world-class bladesmiths re-creating historical edged weapons in a cutthroat competition.
Alec Steele - blacksmith and YouTube star.
Primitive Technology: Forge Blower - awesome YouTube video in which a guy "invents" the force blower using primitive tooling.
AlumnIQ - world-class software for alumni and donor engagement.
Brad Frost: Atomic Design - book about building design systems.
Material Design - design system and general design platform by Google.
Angular.js - modern application framework for building Single Page Applications (SPA) from Google.
Storybook - an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, Angular, and more.
* Helios - design system used at InVision.
async / await - modern JavaScript technique for making asynchronous code read like synchronous code.
Snowpack - a lightning-fast front-end build tool, designed for the modern web, allowing you to load JavaScript modules from URLs.
Promise - a proxy for a future, asynchronous value in JavaScript.
Redis - an awesome open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.
BitCoin - is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money.
DogeCoin - an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.
Cryptocurrency - a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange.
Blockchain - the world's most popular way to buy, hold, and use crypto currencies.
A.I. - intelligence demonstrated by machines.
AWS Machine Learning - a machine learning as a service platform.
Machine Learning - the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.
Boston Dynamics: Do You Love Me? - absolutely mind-blowing video of robots getting their groove on!
Dependabot - automatic dependency and security updates in your GitHub repositories.
Kent C. Dodds: Testing JavaScript - online course for testing JavaScript applications.
TypeScript - popular extension to JavaScript that adds types and other advanced features.
Scala Play Framework - framework that makes it easy to build web applications with Java and Scala.
JSON: JavaScript Object Notation - the de facto data exchange format for many networked applications.
Let's not be monsters - adorable toddler telling us to be better!

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

005: Monolith vs. Microservices

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Monoliths are bad! Microservices are good! These are the "obvious" truths that many engineers hold close to heart. So, why is it that Ben Nadel has been slowly merging some of his Microservices back into his Monolith? It turns out that a Monolith - like a Microservice - is a valid architectural choice that carries its own set of pros and cons. And, for him, his team, and their particular set of skills, the Monolith is proving to contain the right set of trade-offs.

This week, the crew talks about Ben's journey; why InVision started using Microservices in the first place; and, what made him realize that it was time to start pulling services back into the core Monolith. There are no hard truths here - only thoughtful, context-aware considerations.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Triumph - He took the week off! He's usually not that good about taking time off; so, taking a whole week off between Christmas and New Year's was actually quite relaxing.
Ben's Triumph - He managed to stay production at work during the "deployment freeze" that takes place during the holidays! This meant creating lots of small, parallel git branches tied up in a bow, ready and waiting for the 2021 deployments to begin.
Carol's Triumph - She stayed up until 3am writing Unit Tests! She doesn't often work in an environment that does much testing; so, this was a new and thrilling experience. Who knew that one could be so happy thinking about the unhappy path!
Tim's Triumph - He also took the week off (his company always takes Christmas week off)! But, he's not used to taking so much time off; and, he started to get bored by Thursday (such a classic engineer).

Notes & Links

GitHub "Draft" pull-requests - it's just like a regular Pull Request (PR); but, it's intended to be a "work in progress" (WIP).
Silento - Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) - official music video.
Archer - a wonderfully raunchy animated series about spies (for adults). Sploosh!
Microservices - an architectural choice, write-up by Martin Fowler
Monolithic application - an architectural choice.
Conway's Law - how organizational structure relates to programming structure:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Single-Tenant architecture - configuration in which one customer shares no resources with another customer.
Multi-Tenant - configuration in which many customers share the same set of resources (such as all existing in the same database).
Single Page Application (SPA) - a common front-end application architecture in which the front-end dynamically re-renders the UI based on data-fetches.
Distributed Monolith / Microlith - an architectural anti-pattern in which you combine the worst properties of both monoliths and microservices while reaping none / few of the rewards.
ColdFusion / Lucee CFML - a modern web programming language for dynamic server-side rendering.
Mark Richards - The Rise and Fall of Microservices - presentation from O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2019.
Sam Newman - Building Microservices - the canonical book on Microservices.
Sam Newman - Monolith To Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns To Transform Your Monolith - Sam's follow-up book to Building Microservices - it should be required reading.
Simon Brown - Modular Monoliths - presentation from DevNexus 2016 that famously had the slide:
If you can't build a well-structured monolith, what makes you think microservices is the answer?
Amazon AWS Lambda - serverless compute services.
Amazon AWS Fault-Injection Simulator - aka, Chaos Monkey as a Service.
Amazon Cloudwatch - a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution.
Kevin Conway - Principal engineer at InVision and a strong proponent for microservices.
Chris Richardson - he was doing Microservices before there were Microservices. He's the maintainer of microservices.io.
Hype Cycle - from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" to the "Trough of Disillusionment" and every emotion in between, this is how the technology world experiences new technology.
Reactive Manifesto - an approach to building robust applications.
Lagom Reactive Microservices framework - an opinionated microservices framework.

004: Impostor Syndrome

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Impostor Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which people doubt their skills, talents, and accomplishments. Most of us have felt something like this in our careers, whether it's a fleeting moment or a persistent fear that we're going to be discovered as frauds. These feelings can be overwhelming, even debilitating; but, they can also drive us towards self-improvement.

This week, the crew talks about their own mistakes, feelings of fraud, insecurities, and how Impostor Syndrome manifests in their own careers.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Failure - Adam accidentally destroyed a database by running a migration script on the wrong database! Thankfully it was a QA (Quality Assurance) database which could be restored - no critical client-data was lost.
Ben's Triumph - He's deleted 200K lines of unused vendor code. That means shipping less code to production with every deployment. He also merged one of his unnecessary microservices back into the monolith.
Carol's Triumph - She's not dying! Woot woot! She had gotten COVID-19 right on the heels of a kidney infection; but it is currently feeling much better (and is nursing her sons back to health as well).
Tim's Triumph - He's been playing around with Redis as a means to make his applications more resilient. One thing he wants to do is centralize his Session management such that he can pushed new code to production without having to reset user-session data.

Notes & Links

Breaking Bad - critically acclaimed TV drama.
Adam Sandler's Click - comedy about appreciating your life.
Redis - blazing fast in-memory database and data-structure storage.
PM2 - a production-grade process manager for Node.js.
Amazon ECR - Elastic Container Registry.
Amazon Fargate - serverless compute for containers.
GitHub Actions - automation tools for your GitHub workflows.
The Push Train - Dan McKinley's presentation on managing the human side of continuous delivery.
Lagom Framework - an opinionated microservices framework for moving away from the monolith.
Little Bobby Tables - classic XKCD comic.
Multi-Stage Builds in Docker
Mike Cannon-Brookes: TED Talk on How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit
WTFs per minute - Coding Horror comic on code quality.
1 Corinthians 10:12 - "Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he does not fall."
GoTime podcast - one of the ChangeLog podcasts.
Mythical Man Month - iconic essays on software engineering.
99 Bugs in the code - grumpy cat's take on the 99 Bottles song.
Perfect is the enemy of the good - trap that many product companies fall into.
Neil Gaiman's address to the University of the Arts Class of 2012 - "Make good art".
The 10x programmer - toxic programming myth about unicorn developers.
Ruby Rogues EP 220 with Laurent Bossavit - discusses the book, "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering", which covers among other things the myth of the 10x programmer.
Radio Lab: Lying to Ourselves
The "Peter Principle" - people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence".
The Dunning-Kruger Effect - a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.

003: Burnout, Mental Exhaustion, and Productivity

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

Carol's Triumph: Her college freshman son, majoring in computer science, called mom to ask for comp-sci help!
Ben's Fail: R&D effort exposed that he doesn't remember how to start a new project any more.
Tim's Triumph: He turned in the paperwork to get his team their raises on time.
Adam's Triumph: Testing on a new platform for his giant application has reached 100%, and a looming deadline may actually be met.

Notes & Links

We are not medical professionals! If you need help, talk to your primary care physician.
Sisyphus
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Adam's waterproof Bluetooth shower speaker recommendation. This one isn't particularly special. There are dozens of different cheap Chinese speakers that look just like it. He's had three over the years, but they're all plenty decent.
The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino
TED Talk: Your elusive creative genius by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will - through work - bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

Black Lives Matter

002: Working from home

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

Ben's Triumph and Failure: He finally backs up his computer! Only 5 years in the work.
Tim's Triumph: He was invited to speak at a virtual conference this week as a community expert. It was really amazing.
Carol's Triumph and Failure: She was locked out of a database only to realize she configured the connection wrong from the first day. Total face/palm time.
Adam's Failure: He committed to main... tsk tsk. Who commits to main?? Oh yeah, Adam does...

Notes & Links

We want discuss how we handle remote working. Adam and Ben are pros at it but Tim and Carol are new. We go over communication styles and how they differ between face to face and virtual. How we balance home life and work life when we work in our home. We might not get it right, but we keep trying. Grab a drink and laugh with us as we figure it all out.
Freakonomics Podcast
Rich Hickey: Hammock Driven Development
Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

Black Lives Matter

001: Adam's Secret Shame

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter & Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

Triumphs & Fails

Adam's Triumph: His team realized that they could write a tool that would log, per controller method, how many times it had been run, whether or not it threw exceptions, and some performance stats, which is reducing the pain of transitioning app server platforms without a comprehensive test suite. They're currently at 90% tested!
Carol's Fail: Having just started a new job, she thought she would make a good first impression by bringing down the production site!
Tim's Triumph+Fail: A product he's been working on developing in secret for FOUR years is finally going to see the light of the day... just not through his years of persistence trying to push it past the finish line.
Ben's Triumph+Fail: A R&D project failed to get any traction, but on the plus side he got to delete thousands of lines of code!

Notes & Links

The VS Code plugin that Adam couldn't think of is Git Lens
Cargo Cult Programming
CFML ("ColdFusion Markup Language") a.k.a. ColdFusion is a web-dev language and app server that the four of us have some shared history with. Lucee is its open source alternative engine.
Spoiler alert: You can write awful code in every language!
"Life with chapters" is a concept stolen from the No Dumb Questions podcast, which is fantastic, and a huge inspiration for Working Code. If you don't already listen, give them a shot!
There are a variety of different ways people prefer to learn, but teaching a concept is the best way to help yourself find your weak spots.
Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle!
The Martian is a fantastic movie and a better book; and yes, the audiobook was narrated by Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek fame.
GraphQL is an interesting new(ish) idea in the world of web API's.
"The right tool for the job"? NOPE. The right tool for the job, for the team, at that particular point in time. You heard it here second!

Black Lives Matter

000: Hello, World!

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 18:30:00 +0000

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

Get subscribed, share with your friends and coworkers, and follow the show! We're on Twitter & Instagram.

New episodes publish weekly on Wednesday morning! (US/Eastern)