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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.

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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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.

Sponsors

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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.

Sponsors

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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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.

Sponsors

• Audible - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at https://workingcode.dev/audible

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.