In this episode we cover "Where Does Complexity Go?" by Al Tenhundfeld. This article starts with the premise of Tesler's Law - all applications have a certain amount of complexity that can't be removed or hidden. We try to answer the question of where that complexity should go, to the customer or to the developer?

This is the third installment in our string of episodes about complexity in software engineering - make sure to check out the other two!

- The One About Complexity

- It's Not That Complicated

In this episode, we go deep on "How Platform Engineering Works" with a real life platform engineer - Joe! If you have ever wondered what platform engineering is, or more likely, if you've ever wondered what the hell platform engineers do all day - this episode is for you. We cover what platform engineering is, how to adopt the right mindset, what great platform engineering teams do well, and more.

Even if you aren't interested in platform engineering, this is a great listen for improving your everyday approach to building software at scale.

In this very special episode, we bring you a battle-royale between Evan, powered by ChatGPT, and Joe, powered by Lavazza Espresso.

We both set out to build a chrome extension to highlight text on websites. Joe had to write it by hand. Evan used ONLY ChatGPT via copy/paste with no code written by hand.

It's now up to you. Check out each of our repos and comment what you think on the episode.

Repo links:

Joe's highlighter repo

Evan's highlighter repo

Interesting links:

GenAI gets better when you're scared

One of the chat logs between Evan and ChatGPT

In this episode your two favorite frontenders cover "How to Ask Good Technical Questions" from the excellent FreeCodeCamp blog. Make no mistake - asking good questions is a critical skill to develop in your engineering career. We delve into strategies and personal experiences around how to best frame technical questions to maximize your chance at a productive answer (and also not annoy everyone you ask).

In this episode, we talk all about "Why I Won't Use Next.js" by Kent Dodds. Yes, the title is clickbait, but the content delivers. We cover NextJS stability issues, deployment difficulties, "too much magic" and many more reasons why we might just be souring on this famous framework.

As always, visit is on RuntimeRundown to leave a suggestion, comment on an episode, and search through our back catalogue.

In this episode, we talk all about visual regression testing!

Today's article, Upgrading frontend dependencies with confidence, is a case-study in using visual regression testing to catch UI issues in your build and deploy processes. We deep dive tooling, implementation, and try to answer the question "is it worth it"?

Note to our audiophile listeners - Evan's mic switches to a poor quality one mid-episode. You will not enjoy this.

Some Related articles:

In this episode, we dive into The Myth of the Myth of Learning Styles by Ned Batchelder. This is a short but thought provoking article on how to find the right way to learn for you. We go through a series of questions you can ask yourself to find out how to best learn.

We're still shaking off the rust after a few months away but we know you listen for the flubs as much as the content.

Head over to runtimerundown.com and let us know what you thought of the show!

Music by ⁠Hina⁠ and ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠

We're back everybody! After a multi-month hiatus, we've finally returned with a whole episode on Joe's (successful) job search. This is end-to-end coverage on the current job market for Frontend. We cover Joe's preparation, some his interview experiences, and lots of tips for getting the best possible job for you.

We'll be back every week, so keep looking out for new episodes Monday / Tuesday.

Be sure to check out RuntimeRundown.com and drop us a suggestion or ask questions on a particular episode. We love hearing from you all!

In this episode we cover "How to fight super-helper syndrome" by Laetitia Vitaud. This article is a spring-board for discussing healthy practices in mentorship, general boundaries, and keeping ourselves sane in the workplace. If you've ever felt burned out from giving too much of yourself to others at work, give this a listen.

Joe is learning some crazy cool rust voodoo, Evan is submitting to our AI overlords, and Joe has some of the best good news yet.

Also, we're going on a break! We will see you all in a few weeks/month. Enjoy the rest of your summers and we will catch you all in the next episode. Thank you for listening!

In this episode we cover the newest core web vital, "Interaction to Next Paint". This is a full introduction to web vitals in general, what Interaction to Next Paint is, what it's replacing, how it's measured and more. This is a big shakeup to performance measurement so listen up!

Joe's learning is somehow related to GeoGuesser again, Evan says "Falcon" way too many times and also randomly complains about React Hooks.