Working Code

This week, the crew sits down to talk about interviewing, both from the side of the interviewer and from the side of interviewee. What are we looking for? What are the red flags? What kinds of questions should we be asking? Are we putting too much faith in the sanctity of the interview process? And, why the heck does Zappos offer to pay you $2,000 not to work there?!

This discussion is particularly insightful because Carol shares her perspective as a female which includes things most men will have never considered. For example, did you know that you can ask ahead of time who will be interviewing you? And, that it's even OK to ask for a woman to be present on the interview panel? This underscores the importance of creating and hiring for a diverse team: everyone's perspective is different; and, everyone's perspective is valuable. And, when we only hire people that look and act like us, we only see the human experience through a small window.

Each week, our top Patreon supporters get a sponsored shout-out. And, today's shout-out goes to Girls Who Code, an organization who's mission it is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does.

• Adam's Triumph - In 2014, he wrote REST Assured, a no-nonsense ebook about architecting RESTful APIs. Now in 2021 - by popular demand - this digital work is finally coming to a paperback near you! And of course, we're all demanding signed copies!
• Ben's Failure - this past week just left him feeling destroyed. Between the "Spring forward" clock change, an absurd number of meetings, and the abysmal performance of his ColdFusion custom tag DSL inside a Docker container, this whole week has felt like a kick in the gut. Not every week is going to be a winner; and, he just hopes that next week is better!
• Carol's Triumph - she bought a daily-planer to help her keep track of what she's done today; and, what she needs to get done tomorrow. Part optimization, part self-care, writing everything down allows her to see a clear record of what she's accomplished; which, in turn, allows her to embrace her own success and feel good about stepping away from her desk when she needs to take a break.
• Tim's Triumph - his plan is really coming together! After months-and-months of consulting with customers, writing business plans, organizing marketing campaigns, collecting testimonials, obtaining budgets, running things by Legal, and working with Quality Assurance (QA), all the pieces are falling into place. And, for him, it's been a truly humbling experience. As engineers, we can be lulled into thinking that we are the center of the universe; but, when one see just how many people are involved in bringing a product to market, it becomes clear that we are just small cogs in a massive, harmonious machine.

• The MEGA Interview Guide - a humble guide to give developers the tools they need to nail technical interviews!
• Awesome Interview Questions - a curated list of lists of technical interview questions.
• Cracking the Coding Interview - the 6th edition of the book's crowd-sourced solutions guide.
• MOVA - a fake programming language created to help weed-out nefarious recruiters and engineers.
• How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects - a breakdown of different work personalities and how to work effectively with them.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

This week, we're trying something new: each host has brought with them a topic for the crew to discuss. Topics range from considerations about data-context; what does and does not make for a good manager; code that we're proud to have written; and, what it looks like when a team develops a strong bias for action. One particularly thought-provoking matter is the fact that 20% of Tim's clients prefer to make payments over the phone even when given a web-based option. This is a great reminder of the "bubble" that we can live in, often forgetting that what seems like an odd, archaic choice to us can actually be the "preferred choice" for others.

• Adam's Triumph - His desk is normally an obstacle course of empty Mountain Dew cans, thumb drives, pens, papers, and whatever else piles up and refuses to be thrown away over time. But, he finally cleaned up his office and even vacuumed the floor. And, heck if it doesn't feel good; well, at least for the next 6-hours.
• Ben's Triumph - He fixed some bugs! On a small team, there's always a tension between new feature development and fixing bugs. And, unfortunately, building the "newness" tends to win out. In the last few weeks, however, he's really focused on allocating time to grooming the backlog and fixing long-standing issues, each one of which represents a real user that's experiencing real frictions.
• Carol's Triumph - Her communication style can be a bit too curt. In a professional setting, she tends not to mince her words, which can ruffle feathers. Lately, however, she's been making an effort to "people" better, pushing back against inaccuracies with questions instead of just showing people where they went wrong.
• Tim's Triumph - Building a successful software product is far more than just writing the code. As Tim puts it, you have to be a "bridge builder". Which means, spending time getting everyone else on board: finance, legal, engineers, and the leadership within the corporate hierarchy. Everyone needs to understand why something is being created; and, why it's worth the time, money, and investment. Historically, Tim has not felt very effective at this consensus building. But lately, he's been really crushing it. He can't share too many details at the moment; but, when the time comes, we won't be able to shut-him-up!

• Girls Who Code - an organization focused on building the world's largest pipeline of future female engineers.
• Go Time podcast - a Changelog podcast focused on Golang.
• BFF: Backends For Frontends - an architectural pattern in which backend APIs are built for specific frontend clients.
• Tef: Write code that's easy to delete - an article espousing the virtues of code that is written to be deleted.
• Ward Bell - co-host of the Web Rush podcast.
• Dark Matter Developers - the quiet majority of engineers that do their job but don't necessarily participate in the greater web development community.
• IGROW - Issue, Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward: a model for mentoring and coaching.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

Ben has "feelings" about many aspects of web application development. And, after working with git and GitHub for the last 10-years, he's formed a lot of strong opinions - oftentimes strongly held - about how Pull Requests (PRs) should be created and managed within a team context. For example:

And:

As you can imagine, Ben's "PR Commandments" don't work for every one or every team. This week, the crew meets to discuss his approach to Pull Requests, reaching consensus on some concepts and pushing-back strongly on others. And, of course, this is totally fine - every team has its own set of constraints that have bearing on how that team operates. Your mileage my vary!

Plus, we find out that Carol can be bribed with tacos... sweet, sweet tacos!

• Adam's Triumph - He just had his 9-year work anniversary at AlumnIQ! And, as he reflects on the last 9-years, he's amazed to realize that he never wanted to quit. Every day seems to be a stream of challenges; which is exactly what makes the work so invigorating! When he thinks back to prior jobs that he has quit, they were always boring jobs building "forms over data" type products. He's looking forward to the next 9-years!
• Ben's Triumph - He gets a little nostalgic this week, recalling a thought he had 15-years ago about how amazing it would be to create a software system that worked like the human body, with cells that acted independently and communicated via hormones. At the time, he dismissed the thought as being crazy; but, fast-forward to today, it turns out that his instincts were actually spot-on. Though, instead of hormones, we have event-streams, message queues, and pub-sub mechanism; and, instead of cells, we have distributed, independently-scalable systems that are kept up-to-date through "eventually consistent" communications!
• Carol's Triumph - Her team has moved all thirteen of their pending-work branches into testing. This is the culmination of weeks of hard work. And, to top it off, she's proud of the fact that she was able to buckle-down and maintain a high standard of quality for her coding all the way to the very end! No cutting corners for this engineer!
• Tim's Triumph - He was required to participate in a coaching and mentoring workshop at his company. And, though he was initially frustrated about having to put pressing-work-matters on hold, once the workshop started, he found it be quite helpful. And, he was even able to find the solution to a problem he's been wrestling with for some time! It turns out that if you open yourself up to opportunities in front of you, you never know what you're gonna find!

• git - the most popular source-control system on planet earth.
• GitHub - a very popular source-control solution, built on git.
• BitBucket - another popular source-control solution from Atlassian.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

A friend of Ben's once said, "If you hate your job, you'll spend 5-7ths of your life waiting for the weekend." This is a dark way to think about existence. And, to address the flip-side of that coin, Mingo Hagen suggested that we talk about the phrase, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." This is a significantly more optimistic view on the human experience; but, does it hold up to scrutiny?

This week, the crew talks about the privilege of being able to choose work that we truly enjoy. Not everyone has this opportunity; and, even when we do, loving your job doesn't always make it feel any less like work. In fact, as Tim illustrates with some scripture, the challenge and hardship of work can be what makes it lovable and fulfilling:

Bringing a different sort of scripture to the conversation, Ben shares one of his favorite poems, "Our Deepest Fear":

The conversation examined the "do what you love" concept from a variety of different levels, with each host coming at it from a different angle. What becomes very clear is that the quote means different things to different people. But, the one thing we think we can all agree on: don't commit to work estimates that you don't believe in! Doing so will only make you your own worst enemy.

• Adam's Failure - he spent many person-hours trying to reduce the size of a Docker container image. And, while he eventually reduced it quite a bit (mostly by moving to Alpine Linux), he wasted far too much time on what turned out to be a simple little typo in his make file. The most frustrating part of all of this is that he just assumed that the line-in-question could not possibly be the issue; so, he kept debugging the lines around it without addressing the actual problem.
• Ben's Triumph - he and a co-worker, Jackie Ewald, were recently called-out as the embodiment of "customer empathy" at work because they built a custom feature for one of their clients. What made this so rewarding is the fact that they did not ask for permission to build this feature; and, it was a feature that they almost-certainly would not have been allowed to build had they asked for permission.
• Ben likes to keep this quote from Stephen Gates - the former Head Design Evangelist at InVision - on hand during all ideation meetings:

• Carol's Triumph - She's loving life in Lake Tahoe! Woot woot! Rock on with your bad self!
• Tim's Triumph - as a manager, he usually finds himself in a constant state of "meeting". However, he recently blocked-off 7-hours of heads-down time on his calendar so that he would not be interrupted; and, the amount of work that he was able to get done was refreshingly preposterous. He even received a compliment from one of his clients who thanked him profusely, at the end of the day, for everything he was able to complete!

• Mingo Hagen - listener who suggested the topic.
• Matthew 7:13 - Enter ye in at the strait gate...
• Marianne Williamson - author of the poem, Our Deepest Fear.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

Many programming languages have a sense of idiomatic code: the "blessed way" to solve a particular set of problems with a language's native constructs. These patterns exist to help people work more effectively together; and, to help new developers adapt to the language. But, unfortunately, the expression of idiomatic code in some communities shifts from "carrot" to "stick", getting used to separate the "right" way from the "wrong" way, thereby creating an implicit division between the "good developers" and the "bad developers".

The ColdFusion / CFML community has never had a sense of "idiomatic code". And, ColdFusion developers are never burdened by the homogeneity of solutions that bubble up to the surface (such as they do in other languages). This can lead to a kind of "beautiful chaos" in which teams find the right tool for the job and spend their time focusing on the needs of the customer rather than worrying about any particular standard.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

This week, the crew talks about idiomatic code, what they think it really means, and how it can serve to both help and hurt a programming community.

Triumphs & Failures

• Adam's Triumph - He's not on call this week! And that feels like a sweet, sweet triumph!
• Ben's Triumph - The moment he realized that he was going to miss a deployment deadline, he took a step back and figured out how to properly "descope" the work such that he could meet his deployment deadline by releasing a smaller - yet still meaningful - set of features. He saw this as a victory in the agile development mindset.
• Carol's Triumph - She's going on vacation to Lake Tahoe for some fun in the snow - something she rarely has a chance to do in hot, hot Georgia.
• Tim's Triumph - For his entire life, Tim has been parting his hair left-to-right. But, in a recent moment of brashness, he threw caution to the wind and tried parting his hair right-to-left. This seemingly small tweak ended up being a total game changer! And, just as Clark Kent transformed into Superman with a change in part, so has Tim transformed into a more stunning, beautiful version of himself!
• He also figured out why his Redis code wasn't working. Ironically, it had to do with how his tests were running (and how they were mutating the shared data).

Notes & Links

• Guido van Rossum - author of the Python programming language; and, a big proponent of idiomatic code (in Python).
• Rick Waldron: Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic JavaScript - an opinionated guide to writing JavaScript.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

Cunningham's Law states:

The crew recently experienced a bit of this law first hand in response to their episode on Testing. Adam Cameron - friend of the show and long-time friend of the hosts - posted a scathing (but loving) rebuttal of basically everything that Ben said in episode 009. This week, the crew meets to discuss Adam's post; and, to dig more deeply into how testing gets applied in real world scenarios.

Thew crew also attempt to pick apart the relationship between DevOps and engineering - a question posed by @LD2. Just don't ask us (or anyone) to define what exactly DevOps is; you ask 10 different people and you'll get 15 different answers.

Oh, and Adam totally built a website for the show! So, heck yeah! It's built on Eleventy and is generated based on Markdown files.

Triumphs & Failures

• Adam's Triumph / Failure - His application had a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability that was exploited. Which is definitely unfortunate. However, he was able to take a bad situation and turn it into an opportunity to practice transparency, clear communication, and a sense of urgency with his customers. In fact, in the end, he was commended by his customers for how well he handled the situation.
• Ben's Triumph - He attached some analytics to a user interface (UI) within his application and suddenly a part of the application which has historically been a blackbox was transformed into a rich, emotional experience in which he could "see" users actually consuming the tools that he built. This recent adoption of analytics (into his workflow) has forever changed the way that he will think about what is and is not an important part of the application that he's building. It's amazing how powerful "user empathy" can be to an engineer's motivation.
• Carol's Triumph - Her company is over-committed in terms of the work that they have on their schedule. But, instead of making the engineers freak-out over this planning problem, her managers are doing their job right and are protecting their reports from the organizational chaos. It's rare to see managers that understand how to manage both up and down within a company hierarchy! As Adam says in the episode, a good manager is worth their weight in gold.
• Tim's Triumph - His frustration over debugging an issue in Redis had grown to the point where he was walking around his house angry. But, instead of trying to "just muscling through it", he decided to step back, be kind to himself, and take a break.

Notes & Links

• OWASP: XSS - consistently on the Top 10 vulnerabilities outlined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
• Data Breach Response Plan - an organizational play that outlines how a company responds to data breaches, how quickly they have to notify users, and what immediate and longer-term steps they have to take to mitigate such breaches in the future.
• Shattered Glass - a movie in which Hank Azaria's character demonstrates excellent managerial skills.
• Segment - a popular data pipeline and aggregation platform.
• Amplitude - a popular analytics platform for digital teams.
• Eleventy - a simpler static site generator.
• Adam Cameron: Thoughts on Working Code podcast's Testing episode - the rebuttal that we discuss on the show.
• Cunningham's Law - states, "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
• Test-Driven Development - a test-first methodology for software application development.
• Singleton Pattern - a software design pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to one "single" instance.
• Cory Haines - a well known programmer in the Ruby and testing worlds.
• Ben Nadel: Singleton vs. Single Instance And A Decade Of Unnecessary Guilt - the realization that everything he thought about the "Singleton Pattern" was wrong.
• DevOps - who the heck knows what it actually is - platform things mostly? Code++? A mindset? A job title?

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

An engineer at SquareSpace once referred to his company as "an overnight success, 7-years in the making." This cheeky insight pays homage to the marathon of work that is often required when building a successful product and / or business. Which begs the question: when is it appropriate to start thinking about scale? Should you be taking it into account during early ideation and the construction of your MVP (Minimum Viable Product)? Or, should you kick the can down the road with the assumption that you can always throw money at the problem later (either by hiring smart people or by vertically scaling your existing compute resources)?

This week, the crew talks about their experience in scaling web application systems; what they have - and haven't yet - had the need to consider; and, how they calculate the return on investment (ROI) when it comes to adding complexity to a potential solution ("innovation tokens", anyone?).

If you like this episode about scaling, you may also enjoy our previous episode on Monoliths vs. Microservices.

Triumphs & Failures

• Adam's Triumph - After switching to a new platform, his ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) code stopped working for "reasons". And, instead of spending a whole week trying to figure it out, he just spent a single day replacing the problematic ORM queries with native SQL statements. This was a veritable "Master Class" in pragmatic problem solving.
• Ben's Failure / Triumph - This week has been kicking his butt! He's exhausted and stressed out - even his feet hurt. This is due, primarily, to the HTML emails that he's been crafting at work. That said, he's been able to take his "failure" and transform it into a "triumph" by channeling that frustration into an exciting new approach for building HTML emails that's powered by ColdFusion Custom Tags. It's still early, but he's hella stoked on the concept!
• Carol's Triumph - She wrote some rather complicated code that dealt with edge-cases in her application that weren't really ever going to happen. And, when her teammates discussed this with her, she did the honorable thing and removed her code, leaving in its place a much simpler solution. The real triumph here is that she was able to overcome the "sunk cost fallacy" we engineers often succumb to when having to confront the questionable value of our own solutions.
• Tim's Failure - What started out as a thrilling exploration of Redis has turned into a battle for sanity! For reasons that he has not yet been able to understand, the data that he's been writing to a Redis cache isn't always available for immediate read. This is in his local development environment and he's the only one hitting the code. It just doesn't make any sense!

Notes & Links

• Redis - a blazing-fast in-memory data structure store.
• CFRedis - a ColdFusion client for the Jedis Java driver for Redis.
• Jedis - a blazingly small and sane Java client for Redis.
• Mango Blog - an extensible blog engine released under the Apache license, built with ColdFusion.
• CockroachDB - a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store.
• Dan McKinley: Boring Technology Club - a spoken word version of Dan's essay, "Choose Boring Technology".
• Ben Nadel: "Enterprise" is not a dirty word - a blog post discussing the merits of "enterprise" software.
• FrameworkOne (FW/1) - a light-weight conventions-over-configuration framework for ColdFusion web applications.
• Blocking-Request Budget - a concept in which serving a user's request can only entail a limited number of blocking requests.
• AWS Fargate - services compute for containers.
• AWS Lambda - a "functions as a service" (FaaS) platform.
• Mailgun - an email service provider (ESP) built for developers.
• Let's Encrypt - a nonprofit Certificate Authority that has brought free TLS certificates to the masses.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

There are very few people in the programming world who will argue against the idea of testing software. But, when it comes to the mechanisms though which code is tested, the conversation starts to get interesting. There are those who feel that TDD - Test Driven Development - is "the way"; and, that any divergence from TDD is not only laziness but is, in fact, borderline malfeasance. At the other end of the spectrum are the people who perform all their testing manually; often, relying on QA (Quality Assurance) teams and smoke tests to find regressions before each deployment.

Most people sit somewhere in the middle of these extremes. This week, the crew talks about their own views and experience with testing; and, how they currently implement testing at work. Ben swings heavily towards the manual testing end of the spectrum; Adam and Carol swing heavily towards the automated end of the spectrum; and Tim, who often feels very hypocritical, sits somewhere in the middle.

• Adam's Triumph: He's been working hard to get his company's application migrated over to a new open-source software stack. And, as of this recording, he's successfully moved 9 of his 13 production servers over to the new setup; and, everything seems to be running smoothly! He's feeling very strong on hitting his goals of migrating the rest of the servers by the end of January.
• Ben's Failure: This week has been kicking his butt! He hasn't been sleeping well, he can't get comfortable in his chair, and everything seems to hurt. He's carrying a boat-load of tension in his neck and shoulders and he just can't seem to get past it. The only saving grace is that he can use his "standing desk" controls to select the perfect height for sitting.
• Carol's Failure: She's also having a tough time getting comfortable! Her body hurts from her tail-bone up to her head; and, the heating pad she's using just ain't doing it. She's currently on the hunt for a new chair that might help offer some relief. But, being the Amazonian warrior that she is makes things a bit more challenging. As she says: "I can't help it - I have six feet of legs and they have to go somewhere!" And, as the icing on the cake, she accidentally deleted the configuration settings for all seven of her home networks. She had automatic backups configured; but, she accidentally turned them off 3-months ago.
• Tim's Triumph: It's been a while since he was able to get into a groove; but, this week, he finally achieved flow state: that moment when the world disappears, time loses meaning, and all you can see is the code in front of you as it appears to pour out of your hands without effort or thought. He summed this feeling up quite nicely: "I feel less like I'm pushing a stone uphill and more like there's a river just flowing through me." I mean, come on, he even wrote a Regular Expression!

• Pure Function - a function that produced no side-effects; and, whose outputs are determined entirely by its inputs.
• CFML - ColdFusion Markup Language, a language specification for one of the most powerful web application runtimes.
• Jest - a popular JavaScript testing framework.
• Unit testing - a low-level test of an individual unit of code.
• Integration testing - a mid-level test of a group of software units running together.
• End-to-End / Functional testing - a high-level test of an entire software system, typically looking at happy paths through an application.
• Manual testing - using human to run tests on a piece of software.
• Automated testing - using computers to run tests on a piece of software.
• Static testing - evaluation of code without having to execute it (think linters and strongly typed languages).
• Testing budget - a concept in which the tests that can block a deployment have to run within a certain time window.
• Rich Hickey: YouTube - please, just go watch all of his videos.
• Software regression - a bug that appears, and often breaks, a previously-working piece of code.
• Guillermo Rauch - CEO of Vercel.
• REST Assured - a testing framework for application APIs.
• Gatling - load testing software.
• Feature flags - tooling that allows you to turn parts of an application on or off without having to redeploy it.
• Strangler pattern
• Ben Nadel: My Personal Best Practices For Using LaunchDarkly Feature Flags - a tome that Ben wrote on how he uses feature flags.
• Kent C Dodds: Testing JavaScript - a popular online course about about testing JavaScript.
• EggHead.io - a popular subscription service that provides tutorials on web application development.
• MockBox - a module within TestBox that allows the internal execution of a software module to be observed.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

All super heroes have an origin story. And, so do nerds. Many of us can remember back to that moment when we realized that there was magic in the world - magic that we could be part of; and, magic that we could help create. This week, we get personal with the crew and learn more about where they came from, what kind of stuff makes them tick, and what it is that they love about being web application developers.

This Part II of a two-part series. Part II will includes Carol and Adam. Part I was Ben and Tim.

But (drum roll please) thank you to our first patrons! You are helping us make this podcast better. For anyone who wants to know more, check out our Patreon listed at the end of the show notes.

Triumphs & Fails

• Ben's Failure - He, like many of us, just doesn't "people" well at times. He makes an effort to improve this by staring emails with the goal being a reply. But with weeks of stared emails lacking replies, the effort feels a tad null. Maybe he should accept this flaw and consider it a feature. And... if he hasn't replied to your text message yet, don't feel bad, yours is only 1 of 1248.
• Carol's Triumph - She mentioned last week that she was feeling a tad bit down at work, struggling to learn the business side as fast as she expected herself to. The self-induced kind of worries. This week during her 1-on-1, she was provided feedback which put that worries to rest. She is feeling less stress and more fresh.
• Tim's Failure & Triumph - Boy oh boy, has Tim failed. He turned the chipper marketing team at work into a slightly less chipper set of people by avoiding delivering of a marketing approach he was on the hook for. No sweat team, he will get around to it. His Triumph for the week stem from our previous episode about 2021 Hopes and Goals. He wrote his own blockchain! The man is non stop! He also revels a great idea for using his new found blockchaining power. Perhaps a podcast coin?
• Adam's Triumph - He's seesawing on if his triumph is a real triumph or not, and it is! He made it an entire day without sitting down. He is making an effort to stand more with the assistance of an electric sit/sand desk.

Notes & Links

• Tinker - Means: to work in the manner of a tinker especially : to repair, adjust, or work with something in an unskilled or experimental manner
• The Oregon Trail - A popular game for kids of the 90's to play. The game was released in 1990 and was developed by MECC.
• Tent.io - Was a suite of distributed networking protocols which had a goal to provide a consistent data layer that any app could tie into. In 2019 they closed shop due to funding.
• Our first search engines: Carol: Ask Jeeves, Tim: Altavista, Ben: HotBot, Adam: Dogpile
• Welcome to the Machine
• Terminal Velocity
• Teach yourself VB4 in 21 days - Adams entry book into learning how to write code.
• Church of Mountain Dew - Web archive to the original church of mountain dew webpage
• First stop to find the church of dew
• Another relic to the church of dew
• 12 year old Adam created his own Church of Mountian Dew in a notepad text editor.
• The token ring network - A token ring network is a local area network (LAN) in which all computers are connected in a ring or star topology and pass one or more logical tokens from host to host. Only a host that holds a token can send data, and tokens are released when receipt of the data is confirmed.
• REST Assured - If you think rest is napping, pick up Adams book to understand Rest and API Design.
• Taffy - Adams REST Web Service Framework for ColdFusion and Lucee
• Christian Ready - Christian Ready is a great friend of ours. We all love his work and listening to him present any chance we get. Check him out on YouTube.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

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

All super heroes have an origin story. And, so do nerds. Many of us can remember back to that moment when we realized that there was magic in the world - magic that we could be part of; and, magic that we could help create. This week, we get personal with the crew and learn more about where they came from, what kind of stuff makes them tick, and what it is that they love about being web application developers.

This Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 1 includes Tim and Ben. Part 2 will include Carol and Adam.

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Triumph - He moved mountains of data using "pivot tables" in Google Sheets in order to build summaries of his newly-rolled-out test coverage at work! He's a hair's breadth away from fully converting his codebase over to an open-source platform.
• Ben's Triumph - He totally built something without JavaScript! I know, it sounds crazy: in the age of Single-Page Applications (SPA) and JavaScript frameworks, reaching for JavaScript is the default. But he managed to build something useful with just HTML and CSS!
• Carol's Triumph / Failure - She just passed the 4-month mark at her new job, like a boss! But, she been a little bit down in the mouth, concerned that she's not getting enough done and that she's not learning enough. She managed to turn the week around, however, getting some productive "Design Buddy" work (think "pair programming" for the planning phase) done.
• Tim's Triumph - He checked his old Coinbase account from 2015 and the $15 he left in there is now worth $85. He's about to wine and dine himself!

Notes & Links

• :target - CSS selector that matches elements whose id matches the URL fragment.
• Coinbase - a place to buy, sell, and manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.
• Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes - New York Times article about a millionaire who has two more chances to remember his password for quarter-billion in Bitcoin.
• Google Sheets: Pivot tables - creating and using pivot tables in Google Sheets.
• Aqua Data Studio - a versatile database IDE with data management and visual analytics for relational, cloud, and NoSQL databases.
• ELIZA - an early natural language processing computer program.
• Zork - one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games.
• Kaypro - a computer manufacturer from the 1980s known for their line of rugged, "luggable" computers.
• dBase - one of the first database management systems for microcomputers.
• CP/M - an early operating system.
• Ultima Online - one of the first MMO (Massively Multi-player Online) games.
• Adobe ColdFusion - a modern web development language.
• Lucee CFML - the leading open-source CFML application server / engine - it's so good you might just freak out!
• Sierra Entertainment - game company famous for King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.
• Hackers - one of the best movies in the computer / hacker genre - Hack the planet!
• X-Files - 1990s tv drama about the FBI's paranormal phenomena research - the truth is out there!
• QBasic - an early programming language and interpreter.
• TI-82 - a programmable calculator.

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