Your tests pass, your coverage is high, and your code still breaks in production. That’s what happens when you only test the happy path. In this episode, Matt and Robert take on one of Robert’s biggest pet peeves: unit tests that never cover the negative, or sad, path.

They break down what the sad path actually is, why developers naturally skip it (code is written for the success case, negative tests feel like extra work, and coverage tools don’t tell the whole story), and where the gaps show up in production, from partial failures in multi-service architectures to untested catch blocks, else branches, early returns, retries, and fallbacks. They close on a practical note: with today’s tooling, including AI assistance, writing tests for both the positive and negative cases is easier than it has ever been. There’s no good excuse left.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpQwkBuPxy8

Matt and Robert walk through four roles that get mixed together on job boards and resumes: programmer, software developer, software engineer, and computer scientist. They look at what each job actually covers, where “engineer” is a regulated title and where it is just a pay-band label, how ACM/IEEE CC2020 draws the line between computer science and software engineering, and how much of the “requirements” work now sits with product managers.

They also pull Bureau of Labor Statistics outlooks for programmers, software developers, and computer and information research scientists, and talk about what BLS is saying about AI and IT employment through 2034. The practical question underneath the titles: what do you actually own on a team, and what should you put on a resume when the words keep sliding.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf9na-uU-qU

Matt and Robert unpack the Forward Deployed Engineer: a Palantir-coined, customer-facing role that parks an engineer at a customer site for a set stretch of time. They trace the name to military “forward basing,” ask whether an FDE is just a consultant with better branding (or a one-person Pivotal-style embed), and look at why vendors bake these unicorns into the price of the software — so the product actually gets used instead of sitting on the shelf until next year’s renewal.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxIBrEyJO-k

Matt and Robert launch Software Madhouse with the AI open-source firehose: drive-by slop PRs flooding projects like Helm, extra maintainer load, and how communities are fighting back with policies, GitHub caps, kernel Assisted-by: trailers, and tools like Vouch and Good Egg.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGkEQvsIGo