Working Code

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Testing code is like taking out insurance: until you need it, it can be hard to understand why it's so important; it can be hard to understand what everyone is raving about. And so, you continue writing your code without tests. And, everything is fine, until one day it isn't. And in that moment, you finally see for yourself what value automated testing could have brought to the table.

On today's show, the crew talks to Scott Stroz about his experience with Test Driven Development (TDD); and, about how he has come to understand that testing makes possible what would have otherwise been impossible. With solid testing practices in place, Scott was able to refactor an exceedingly convoluted intake form that rendered 25 buttons, 6 unique workflows, and took the user through up to 28 steps. Crunch those numbers and try telling me that the chance of making a mistake isn't absolute. And yet, thanks to a rigorous test-first coding methodology, Scott was able to completely refactor this workflow - from the ground-up - and delivery it on-time and without error!

• Sandi Metz: RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things
• Sandi Metz: No Private Methods

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

Gone is the era of the life-long employee. It's hard to even imagine rising up through the ranks, grinding out the decades, and then retiring - with a pension - all at a single company. Companies don't see their people that way anymore - a perspective that is, no doubt, shared in both directions. But, if you're not going to plant your flag and hunker down for the long-haul, how long should you stay at your job?

This week on the show, the crew talks about the pros-and-cons of various employment tenures. Sure, you might get paid more by moving to a new job. But, is money everything? What about the relationships you build and the opportunity you have to really go deep on a given set of technologies?

Of course, staying in one place too long may lead to stagnation in your skills and your ambition. If you say at one place for a decade, is that a decade of growth? Or, is that the same menial tasks executed year after year ad nauseam?

There's no correct path. And, there's no reason that your personal journey has to be uniform. Sometimes, as Adam points out, it can be quite beneficial to have a few shorter jobs before settling in for a longer stint. Just about the only thing we all agree on is that you shouldn't hop from job to job to job. At some point, you have to demonstrate some grit.

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

Van Wilder reminds us to enjoy the moment, warning us "Don't take life too seriously, you'll never make it out alive." And while this is a jocular take on our own mortality, the truth is such that the total cost of death isn't levied against the dead, it's wrought upon the living - the ones left behind. To ease their transition in the wake of loss, we can prepare for own departure; and, provide a plan for our own digital landscape and social networks.

This week, inspired in part by a post-mortem checklist created by Chrissy LeMaire, the crew shares their thoughts and experiences with death. And what steps they've taken—or not yet taken—to ease the terrible, yet inevitable, burden on our loved ones.

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 peers into the deep, dark recesses of Ben's mind and tries to understand what exactly makes him tick. Composed of equal parts rant and dialogue, the topics range from throwing errors on delete operations, handling bulk operations idempotently, feeling guilty about using backup cameras, keeping large task backlogs, reprioritizing tasks on-the-fly, transpiling JavaScript to ES5 for legacy browsers, the benefits and drawbacks of a robust QA (Quality Assurance) phase, and the cargo culting of let and const in the greater JavaScript community.

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

Many companies are seeded from the same basic concept: customers have a problem to be solved and the people on the Product team know how to solve it. This customer-centric approach is what gives a product much-needed early traction, helps build a loyal community, and lets customer-and-company alike feel as though they're moving in the same direction.

As a company matures, however, the distance between the Customers and the Product team can begin to grow: it's no longer engineers jumping on Zoom calls with customers, it's a Support Team translating issues into a ticketing system which the engineers will then consume weeks later in an adjacent vacuum. This gap - this layer of abstraction - can create a breakdown in customer empathy and can quickly lead Product teams astray.

This week on the show, the crew talks about their own experience dealing with customers. And, how hard it can be to manage expectations in either direction, whether it be the little customer with the "high urgency" tickets; or, the lone engineer who's super excited to build a custom feature even if it's not on the roadmap. None of it is easy; and, the less communication we have with our customers, the harder it seems to become.

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

Every software application has "technical debt". Some of that debt is acquired through meaningful consideration: short-term value gained in lieu of longer-term ease-of-maintenance. And, some of that debt is obtained incidentally through a lack of experience and a dearth of business knowledge. This week, the crew discusses technical debt in their web applications. And goes so far as to say that taking on technical debt is a necessary negotiation within every successful product development life-cycle.

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

It's easy to be flippant about how often our industry seemingly "discovers" the programming practices and paradigms that experienced engineers have been talking about for decades. But, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. The landscape of the web is evolving at a breakneck speed; processing power and storage capacity are going up while costs are coming down; and, the needs of different applications are beginning to diverge massively.

As an industry, we're not "rediscovering", we're "Yes, and'ing". We're constantly learning up on timeless techniques and then trying to apply them to the new constraints and pressures of the modern web. Some of these experiments are going to seem familiar; but, each step in this journey is an attempt to answer a new question or speak to a new problem. Everything old is new again because the context is always changing and is in need of new consideration.

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

Sometimes, people on the internet are wrong. And this week, that person is Tim, who said something inaccurate about the .net (dotnet) framework. Thankfully, our de facto .net ambassador, Nathan Strutz, sent us a recording that shed light on the current state of .net, its open source architecture, its ability to run on many platforms, and its sweet, sweet modern features. Thank you so much Nathan for keeping us honest! And, keep those recordings coming!

For our main topic, we discuss the concept of the "10x Developer". This notion has its roots in bona fide research; however, much of the nuance has been lost in translation. When many people talk about the 10x Developer, what they imply is that there are great developers that are 10-times more productive than the average developer. This is where the reality parts way from the research. What the research found is that, in software engineering, the best engineers are 10-times more productive than the worst engineers. Which is, perhaps, a much more palatable and relatable comparison.

Of course, few developers work in a vacuum. And, when you're part of a team that is part of a company that is driven by a given culture, there's so much more to being productive than one's ability to jam out code. If you're not working in an environment that actively caters to and encourages agile practices, no amount of coding velocity can escape the gravity of inaction.

Also, is TJ Holowaychuk even a real person? Or, is he an artificial persona concocted by a consortium of elite programmers who were keen to show the world what a 10x Developer might look like? We may never know!

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.

New Year's Resolutions may be considered a bit cliche by some; and even a bit silly by others; but, there's always value in any opportunity to pause and take stock of your own situation. On this week's show, we share both our tech and our non-tech goals for the new year. As it happens, we all want to be in better shape - shocking, I know. But, when it comes to technology - and tech-adjacent interests - we all have different areas in which we wish to increase our proficiency: build systems, continuous integration, photo editing, TypeScript, mentoring, and product management, just to name a few.

Unfortunately, Tim couldn't be with us on this episode because he and his whole family came down with the Flu! But - spoiler alert - by the time this episode is published, he'll already be back to his wonderful, normal self. And, we sure can't wait to get the band back together!

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.

With a year of Working Code episodes behind us, our podcast has come a long way. But, we're still trying to figure things out: we are continuing to play with the show format, we are each growing into our own voice, and hopefully we're putting together some content that adds a little something, something to the boarder web-development conversation.

If, in our ramblings, we ever sound like we know what we're talking about, it's due in large part to the skillful audio editing and engineering provided by Matt Cavender and ZCross Media. Each week, Matt manages to magically cut and splice our pontifications into meaningful, coherent thought. Working with Matt has been a true pleasure - one that we can only afford because of our very generous Patreons!

As a year-end wrap-up, Matt offered to gather up some of his favorite clips from the show and put together a retrospective on the last 30 episodes. Thank you Matt! And, thank you to all of our listeners! Let's make 2022 a fantastic year!

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. Or, record an audio message on your phone or computer and email it to [email protected].

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.