Working Code

Blogging is a win-win activity. Not only does the act of writing help burn knowledge into your long-term memory, it also acts as an easily searchable repository of your own thoughts. Furthermore, it helps other people solve similar problems when they stumble upon your blog in the future.

The value-add of blogging is obvious; the way start blogging is less clear. This week, Adam, Ben, and Tim talk to Carol about her desire to start blogging. The discussion touches on tooling, platforms, hosting, content, and strategy which Adam sums up nicely as:

• Blogger
• Medium
• GitHub Pages
• WordPress
• Trello
• Digital Gardening
• Awesome Socks Club
• Adam's first blog post
• Ben's first blog post
• Tim's blog

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). 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.

Software is never "done". And, as it continues to evolve over time, it often gathers a lot of accidental and essential complexity. This makes it harder to on-board new engineers into a legacy application (and a legacy organization). Enter swamp guides: the aged and battle-hardened staff who know where all the bodies are buried. These guides can hand-hold new team-members as they walk fresh-eyes through the fog of war, helping them to understand where everything lives and how everything works. And, hopefully, leave the swamp a little cleaner than they found it.

• Stack Overflow for Teams
• Big Ball of Mud
• Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). 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.

This week, Adam talks about his "obnoxious optimism": his general tendency to believe that all problems can be solved and that everything will just sort of work itself out. This optimism allows him to take action and make decisions quickly. However, it also means that he may not be fully considering the future cost of his choices.

This is not uncommon in the programming world. Engineers are often criticized for choosing technologies based solely on their merits and almost never on their drawbacks. Of course, we don't want to be so cautious that all productivity grinds to a halt. The best possible scenario is to have a team with diverse personalities that can all temper each other. Every team needs an Adam; but, every team also needs a few curmudgeons.

• Just command runner
• CockroachDB

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). 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.

Do you write "new and original" code that is "useful" and has a "non-obvious function"? If so, your code may qualify for a patent. A patent can help prevent other people from using or selling your software. That said, which engineer among us isn't write new and original code every day? Software patents are weird and fuzzy and open for way too much interpretation. And, in the software industry, they seem to give "patent trolls" a lot of unpleasant leverage.

This week, the crew - which has absolutely no legal training whatsoever - talk about patents, copyrights, research & development tax credits, building software, job hopping, and best practices. And, if you don't care at all about software patents, level-up your view of the world with this quote from Adam:

• Software Patent or Copyright: Everything You Need to Know
• Legal Notes: What’s the Deal with ReactJS’s Licensing Scheme?
• How to Qualify for R&D Tax Credits: The Four-Part Test

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

The world of web development is still a nascent industry. According to Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, the number of programmers roughly doubles every 5-years. Which means that most of the developers that you interact with are relatively new and relatively young. It's not often that you look around and see developers in their 40s, 50s, and beyond; because, frankly, the web - as we know it - isn't even that old.

Because of the ongoing evolution of our field, it can be unclear as to what a web developer's professional journey can or should look like. A lot of engineers seem to end up in management; but, for those of us that want to continue coding, what comes after Senior Developer? And, is climbing that technical ladder even something that you want to do?

This week, the crew talks about the career path of web developers; how some positions allow you to be a "force multiplier" and have a bigger impact; and, how dopamine affects your sense of work satisfaction.

• Sarah Drasner: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
• David J. Schwartz Ph.D.: The Magic of Thinking Big

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

There is no one thing that is "The Cloud". Instead, there are a set of general characteristics that underscore cloud technologies: we can provision, deprovision, and scale resources at will; we don't need to manage those resources; and, we only pay for the resources that we use. But, even within this definition, there is a broad spectrum of technologies that more-or-less fit the bill. From Geocities, to managed hosting, to elastic clouds, to distributed edge-computing, lots of things kind of look like "The Cloud", depending on how hard you squint.

This week, the crew talks about what The Cloud is and why people are so keen to adopt it. And, of course, since nothing is truly free, we'll also take a look at the drawbacks of cloud-based architectures.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

Ten weeks ago, in Episode 20, Carol described a problem at work in which her customers were using Support Tickets as a means to look-up information in lieu of logging into the customer dashboard. This email-based workflow has been putting a large burden on the Support staff. And, Carol wanted to brainstorm on ways in which she could improve the overall situation and the efficiency of her team. Today, we circle back with Carol to see how it's going. Which is to say, to see just how hard Carol is crushing it!

It's amazing to see how much Carol has accomplished in just a few months. Topics include natural language processing, AWS SAM, AWS Lambda, AWS S3, AWS SNS, AWS EventBridge, AWS CloudWatcher, AWS Parameter Store, Sumo Logic, and much more! It's kind of mind-boggling to see it all coming together so quickly.

• AWS Lambda
• AWS S3
• AWS SNS
• AWS EventBridge
• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS Parameter Store
• AWS SAM
• Sumo Logic
• Jest
• Kent C. Dodds: Testing JavaScript
• Netlify
• JWT

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics: What would you do as an engineer if you knew you couldn't get fired? What conscious and unconscious fears might be holding you back from executing on tasks that you know are important? What does a healthy work-life balance look like after Covid-19? Are you one of the estimated 40% of employees that are considering quitting their job now that they've had the opportunity to work from home? In an increasingly remote-friendly culture, how are you taking care of your employees and making them feel wanted? How do you stays focused at work when you're feeling stuck? What strategies for success can you employ when you hit a wall and can't seem to motivate?

All that and more on this week's show!

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

Engineers love to build things. Materializing an abstract concept into the form of a working piece of software is one of the most thrilling experiences available on planet earth. As such, we engineers often favor building new software over buying existing solutions. However, doing so takes time and energy; and, incurs a potentially-large opportunity cost for the business. It can be difficult to know if such a trade-off is worthwhile for the business in the long-run. This week, the crew examines the "build vs. buy" dilemma; and, reflects on their own general tendencies.

• Kent Beck: Test Driven Development By Example - a book that teaches programmers by example, so they can painlessly and dramatically increase the quality of their work.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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

As Jerry Seinfeld joked, when it comes to funerals, most people would rather be the one in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. Because, public speaking isn't easy. And, for many, it's a source of great anxiety. A technical presentation takes that anxiety and compounds it by layering on a need to provide complicated information in an engaging way. Part deep-dive, part story telling, a compelling technical presentation has to present enough information on a topic so as to deliver meaningful take-aways while, at the same time, keeping the information light enough so as not to overwhelm the audience. This week, the crew discusses presentations that they've given. And, shares tips and tricks for making your presentation a real winner!

• Adam's Triumph - Adam was keen to get into testing as a life-style. And, by golly, he's done it! His current project has 100% passing tests with 95% test coverage! He's also been writing blog posts on the topic of testing in order to help keep this momentum going.
• Ben's Triumph - It doesn't necessarily feel like a "triumph" in the moment; but, Ben is excited to be giving his first tech presentation in maybe a decade. He has a lot of social anxiety. But, he wants to feel more connected to the larger programming community and he thinks that giving a presentation will help take him a step in that direction.
• Carol's Triumph - Carol is winning life! She was selected to run in the Peach Tree Road Race and she's super excited to crush her previous race times! Go Carol!
• Tim's Failure - Tim is struggling to bring operational readiness and predictable performance to a legacy system whose architecture and behavior seem to defy reason. He's at the point where a "big bang" rewrite feels like the most viable path forward. This is generally considered a taboo move in the tech industry; but, he's not sure how else he can stabilize the product and provide a good Service Level Agreement (SLA) to his customers.

• Patrick Winston: How to Speak - this talk, 40-years in the making, is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633‬ (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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