The pandemic is - not to anyone's surprise - still not over. As more countries go into lockdowns, at least there's now a game for the Nintendo Switch that seems to have captured everyone's hearts. It offers the perfect storm of Kawaii cuteness and escapism into an alternative reality in which you live with lovely animals on an island building civilisation from scratch. Which - hmm - sounds a bit awkward.

We're obviously talking about Animal Crossing New Horizons. Depending on one's count and if one included spin-off titles like Pocket Camp on Android and iOS in the count, it's the 5th or 8th instance of the successful Nintendo game franchise. And it seems to have taken off unlike any other game in our bubble and group of friends. On most afternoons or nights pretty much every single one of our Nintendo Switch friends who are online play Animal Crossing these days.

All three of us got the game on launch day. Actually we all pre-purchased and downloaded it before launch day and the game just unlocked in the middle of the night. When we did this recording, we were just about 1 week into the game and already see different strategies and interests. While Miguel went wild on creating custom designs, Lara turned out to be a collector and fish/bug hoarder while Kai is trying to make big bucks...eh bells, with fruit selling. 

We talk about our experiences with the game, how more and more of our close friends got sucked into the game and what you can do to get more out of the game.

And if you're wondering about our reference to the fruit and resource stealing by a friend of us, this incident was obviously documented on Twitter...

In case you want to play with us, below are our Nintendo Switch friend codes:

External sources being mentioned:

Using ACNH for parties and virtual catchup

Miguel made an ACNH pattern with his and Lara's dog Lily

Animal Crossing Patterns community

Animal Crossing etiquette guide

After last week's episode about how things change in the tech industry in these pandemic times, we thought it'd be interesting to get some other people's views on remote work and business continuity planning. Let's face it: Lara, Miguel and I have very clear views on why we prefer remote work and at the same time have less experience from working in *really large* organisations. Also - our respective business setups are rather small, family-sized operations and we don't face challenges that come with being responsible for employees.

This is episode 6B, the second interview we did in the wake of episode 6. We wanted to get some outside view points on how different types of organisations deal with changes in the tech industry. In this episode Kai talks to Nick, who's been working in various IT management roles in large public and private sector organisations in New Zealand and the UK for the last 20+ years.

During the discussion with Nick it becomes obvious quite quickly how different large organisation (have to) look at remote work. It can be much harder to send 1000 people home instead of dealing with the situation of a 5 person dev team. That starts with the simple things as hardware VPN authentication tokens, access to laptops and ends with networking infrastructure. Also - as a public sector organisation, state secrets might actually be at risk.

However, regardless of all the struggles, does Nick think that overall we're properly setup to deal with the pandemic or other emergencies from an ICT point of view in New Zealand? You'll have to listen to find out!

Have fun and wash your hands!!! 

Ok, we've done that weird thing again and went off the main line of the podcast to sneakily injected an interview.

After last week's episode about how things change in the tech industry in these pandemic times, we thought it'd be interesting to get some other people's views on remote work and business continuity planning. Let's face it: Lara, Miguel and I have very clear views on why we prefer remote work and at the same time have less experience from working in *really large* organisations. Also - our respective business setups are rather small, family-sized operations and we don't face challenges that come with being responsible for employees.

In episode 6A we're having a chat with John-Daniel (JD) Trask, one of the co-founders and CEO of Raygun. They have about 50 staff in Wellington, New Zealand as well as Seattle in the US and some remote contributors in various places in the world.

After the novel coronavirus and Covid-19 took off globally (and then in NZ), JD has made a very early decision to switch from an office-based setup with occasional remote work to a make everyone work remote. Some people perceived that to be *so* early, that he even had to face some criticism for undertaking this step.

We got together (obviously physically distancing) to talk about their situation, what JD's reasoning was for acting early and how it's been working out so far. 

This week's topic is a deviation from our normal plan. Due to the rapid developments around the novel coronavirus and the Covid-19 illness we decided to talk about some implications for the tech industry in regards to work setups and events or conferences.

Please note: Neither of us are doctors or epidemiologists. Lara has a background in biology and we’ve been very closely following the statistical and mathematical modelling around the epidemic clusters, but we are no experts when it comes to the pandemic. We have added some useful and trustworthy links to the show notes though.

So, this episode is not about the virus or the illness itself. Promise. The last thing we want to do is to contribute to anxiety, uncertainty and fear. But there is a need to talk about some of the implications for our industry. How will work look like in the next few months or years? What happens to physical conferences? Will we go back to what work and events used to be when this pandemic will eventually be curbed by medication and/or vaccines?

External sources being mentioned:

Are Tech Conferences Dead?

One Team Gov Global Online Workshop

General pandemic information and trustworthy/factual people to follow on Twitter:

NY Times (non pay-walled)

The Spinnoff - Flatten the curve

Actually, read all of what Siouxsie Wiles is writing on The Spinnoff

Eric Feigl-Ding (Twitter)

Kai Kupferschmidt (Twitter)

Helen Branswell (Twitter)

Amy Coopes (Twitter)

Caitlin Rivers (Twitter)

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

We're back in the main line of Code Cafeteria this week and spend some time to talk about our pets and other animals and how they influence us in our home and work lives.

While Lara works from an office most days of the week, Miguel and Kai both work remotely from home and have their respective animals around. But Lara's company allows dogs at work and we talk about what the pros and cons of that can be. Particularly in a shared, open plan office, bringing your animals to work can be great, but can also cause all sorts of issues.

Join us for some entertaining anecdotes from our animals or from friends who have been visited by rather unusual office companions...

External sources being mentioned:

Lily (living with Lara & Miguel) and Kylo (living with Kai) on Twitter

Dogs at Flick Electric in Wellington

Benefits of Office Dogs

Didga and Boomer on YouTube

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

Episode 3AAAWHAT???

Yes, dear listeners - we went back to episode 3 about operating systems for developers. And then we branched off from master into a special feature episode 3A to talk about BSD.

For this special feature episode, we reached out to Lenz Gschwendtner, who's been using BSD for server and infrastructure hosting as well as his main daily driver on his laptop for years.

Miguel and Kai spent about 30 minutes to talk with Lenz about his background and how he ended up in the BSD ecosystem and what makes it interesting and worthwhile to use it. We also cover topics like available software, hardware compatibility and many more. Hope you enjoy this out-of-schedule recording. 

We're back to our usual schedule next week...

External sources being mentioned:

FreeBSD

Laptops on FreeBSD

Byhve

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

The Nintendo Switch and video gaming in general are important parts of our lives. In this episode we talk about how we got into the current Nintendo platform, how it's relevant to how we met and cover games we love and look forward to being released in 2020.

External sources being mentioned:

Nintendo Pulse Podcast (@dasme and @stephenthemunn)

Der Nintendo Podcast (from German Nintendo Magazine)

The SwitchCast

Reddit: NintendoSwitch subreddit

Compare Nintendo Switch eshop prices globally

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

 "Developers, Developers, Developers!!!" - anyone remembering a slightly weird behaving Steve Ballmer running up and down the stage at a Windows 2000 developer conference, chanting these words? At the time he wanted to make clear how Microsoft would focus on developers now and that developers were such an important audience of Microsoft.

Let's see how that holds up in 2020. In this episode we’re getting a bit more technical and talk about operating systems for developers. The discussion about what the best OS for a developer is has been going on for years. But is there a best operating system, an actual winner? Or does it maybe come down to personal preferences or even individual projects? And sometimes, operating system choices can be driven by hardware choices or vice versa as well.

How big is the difference in day-to-day usage between operating systems these days anyway? We spend so much time in our IDEs and shells - does it even matter if it’s Windows, MacOS or Linux? We’re going to talk about our respective experiences with various operating systems over the years and try to see in what direction this fundamental part of our ecosystem is headed. Listen to us to learn more about Windows, MacOS, Linux and some other operating systems and why we might prefer one or the other for our use cases.

Codecafeteria Twitter poll results

Jennifer Doherty: Command-line scripting options for mixed-OS teams

• System 76 (US)

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

This is Episode 2, and today we talk about our past job experiences. Miguel talks about what he learned about the gaming industry when he worked there, Kai shares his experience working in Germany and New Zealand before becoming a freelancer, and Lara talks about my time as QA before becoming a developer.

Music by Chillhop: https://chillhop.com/listen

In this episode we're talking about developer communities.

We're starting off by trying to define what different types and categories of communities there are. It's quite interesting how many different angles there are to look at communities from: online vs. offline, people- or technology-centric, vendor-driven and many others.

All three of us have been part of different communities over time and we talk a bit about how each of us got involved with developer communities in the wider sense and what we currently do.

In a lot of ways, developer communities reflect life outside the tech industry and it's important to be aware of that. While you might meet like-minded people and make friends you will also have to deal with different opinions and people who you don't get along with: that's ok. We discuss some different ideas on how communities can manage this through moderation, code of conducts and in some instances being invitation-only.

To close the episode we provide some guidelines for interested listeners to find and join existing communities.