The Rabbit Hole: The Definitive Developer's Podcast

They’re not quite as exciting as pastries, but flaky tests are an important part of the programming process. Flaky tests are those frustrating tests that both pass and fail periodically without any changes to code, and finding the crux of the problem can be time-consuming, confusing, and sometimes costly. In this episode, we talk with our producer and extraordinaire William Jeffries about all things flaky, diving into a range of different tests and the unique testing methods behind different languages like Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Python, and more.

In today’s episode, we’re going to dive straight into some prototyping tips and tricks, what you should do and should not do, and best practices to keep in mind. Of course, we couldn’t have a prototyping episode without our very own, Stephen Meriwether, programmer, and director at product development agency, Sprout Labs.

While 2020 has been a messy year for all, today we get into the Thanksgiving spirit by celebrating the top things in tech that we’re most grateful for. Show producer William Jeffries opens the conversation by highlighting his love for test-driven development (TDD) — he also talks about how he implements TDD into his coding workflow. A godsend to many, we then discuss GitHub’s squash and merge button and how it takes the frustration out of many projects. Reflecting on how work-from-home has become the new normal, we express our gratitude for remote pair programming software like Tuple. After touching on the joys of listening to music while pair programming, host Michael Nunez discusses his enjoyment of teaching interns his old tips and tricks, and how this forces him to re-examine how he codes.

Can you imagine a world where you can fast-track your idea, turn it into a feature-filled app, and perfect its development with speed and technical finesse? For Stephen Meriwether, that future is now. As today’s guest, Stephen talks to us about single-page apps, prototyping, and how he uses his skills and experience to help small businesses and entrepreneurs build products.

It’s the middle of the night and you are lying in bed when you get a lightning-strike idea. You reach for your phone and type your idea into Google only to discover that someone has beat you to it. Today we speak about this common scenario and answer the question — should you start something new when all the good ideas have been taken? As we discuss early on, the existence of Ask Jeeves didn’t stop Larry Page and Sergey Brin from creating Google. After exploring this example, we talk about how discouraging it can be to see that someone else has built a company using your idea.

BaaS, FaaS, and ASS. The tech world is inundated with acronyms that often make communication more frustrating. There’s even an acronym for ‘Things Without an Interesting Name,’ or TWAIN. Today we talk about the convenience and cost of acronyms, an important topic considering that software developers spend a lot of energy naming things. We open our conversation by touching on the awkwardness of the ever-present ‘As a Service’ acronyms before focusing on niche companies that create acronyms to differentiate themselves.

There’s a perception that web development using Ruby on Rails has already peaked, with more damning critics shouting that “Rails is a dying language.” Conversely, Python, and Django by extension, seem to be ever-increasing in popularity. Today we’ve set up a grudge match — it’s Django versus Rails, with the winner declared the better language. We open our conversation by exploring perceptions of Rails and Django, along with why Python’s many libraries give it a leading edge.

Is code formatting a blessing or is it killing the art of writing beautiful code? Today we weigh in on the arguments for and against formatting and how this might affect your coding process. An early point against formatters, we talk about how they limit nuance and some of your ability to communicate through your code. Following this, we chat about how projects can be held up because of someone’s “opinion on how code should look.” A problem that’s solved by formatters.

As remote work gains more traction, we have to find the best ways to communicate from a distance, so today on the show we discuss our favorite screen sharing and remote collaboration apps. From pair programming and code sharing software to video chat applications boasting drawing functionality and cool screen widgets, you’ll hear our take on the landscape of tools that allow you to connect with your friends and co-workers from the comfort of your home. We talk about how our beloved Screenhero got butchered by Slack and whether its predecessor, Screen.so is doing a good job of carrying the baton. Zoom, Slack and Google Meet all support video conferencing and a limited degree of extra features, but there is some bias as to what people prefer. We move on to discuss more programmer-centric apps that allow remote control and code sharing and which work best for your preferred IDE.

Kubernetes versus serverless – the battle of the decade! Both deserve their status as exciting and powerful platforms that offer organizations tremendous boosts in agility, scalability, and computing performance, but it is easy to forget that Kubernetes offers advantages that serverless alternatives don’t — and vice versa. In this episode, Michael Nunez, Dave Anderson, and William Jeffries discuss the pros and cons of each platform, what it is like working with Kubernetes versus serverless on a project, and compare the complexity, load, function call and time cost, as well as comparing different cloud hosting services. Tune in today for all this and so much more!