Working Code

Oxford Dictionary included "doomscrolling" in their "word of the year" report for 2020; we're all feeling pandemic fatigue; many people still believe in wide-spread election fraud; the Georgia senate race was a nail-biter; and - oh yeah - we recorded this show the day after the storming of the United States capitol building.

It's all been more-than-a-bit surreal.

But, in the face of such physically and emotionally trying times, we look forward to a new year of possibility. Whether it's taking control of our finances, finding ways to be more active, building up our personal brand, or becoming the blacksmiths that we always knew we could be, the crew shares their personal and professional / technical goals for this burgeoning new year. As the Phoenix rose from the ashes, so too - we hope - 2021 will rise from the smoldering dumpster fire of 2020.

We'd also like to give a huge shout-out and thank you to Monte Chan for being our first Patreon supporter! You are a beautiful, beautiful person; and we hope to make you proud!

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Triumph - With 2020 just behind us, the Georgia Senate run-off keeping us on the edge of our seats, the insurrection, and plenty of "doomscrolling", he managed to kick off 2021 with a somewhat productive week. He's reminded of a quote from Cory Doctorow's latest book: "I'm not OK, but I'm going to be OK. I'm coping, but I have a lot to cope with."
• Ben's Triumph - Coming off the two-week "deployment freeze" at work, he managed to rebase, merge, and deploy the 20-something small git branches that he had amassed over the holiday. It took a few days, but everything went swimmingly!
• Carol's Triumph - She accidentally discovered her son (16yo) and his best friend listening to our podcast; and, they loved it! Woot woot! We are totes connecting with the youths!
• Tim's Triumph - In the aftermath of the insurrection and storming of the US capitol building, he managed to not curl up in a ball and rock back-and-forth in the corner. Given the context, this was a pretty momentous effort.

Notes & Links

• Cory Doctorow - science fiction author, activist and journalist.
• You Need a Budget - award-winning software that teaches you how to manage your money.
• Mark Drew - a rather amazing chap from the CFML and web programming world.
• Devil Forge - full-service metal melting and blacksmithing tools supply company.
• Max Cunningham - YouTube channel, blacksmith and forge enthusiasm.
• Forged in Fire - reality show featuring world-class bladesmiths re-creating historical edged weapons in a cutthroat competition.
• Alec Steele - blacksmith and YouTube star.
• Primitive Technology: Forge Blower - awesome YouTube video in which a guy "invents" the force blower using primitive tooling.
• AlumnIQ - world-class software for alumni and donor engagement.
• Brad Frost: Atomic Design - book about building design systems.
• Material Design - design system and general design platform by Google.
• Angular.js - modern application framework for building Single Page Applications (SPA) from Google.
• Storybook - an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, Angular, and more.
• * Helios - design system used at InVision.
• async / await - modern JavaScript technique for making asynchronous code read like synchronous code.
• Snowpack - a lightning-fast front-end build tool, designed for the modern web, allowing you to load JavaScript modules from URLs.
• Promise - a proxy for a future, asynchronous value in JavaScript.
• Redis - an awesome open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.
• BitCoin - is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money.
• DogeCoin - an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide.
• Cryptocurrency - a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange.
• Blockchain - the world's most popular way to buy, hold, and use crypto currencies.
• A.I. - intelligence demonstrated by machines.
• AWS Machine Learning - a machine learning as a service platform.
• Machine Learning - the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.
• Boston Dynamics: Do You Love Me? - absolutely mind-blowing video of robots getting their groove on!
• Dependabot - automatic dependency and security updates in your GitHub repositories.
• Kent C. Dodds: Testing JavaScript - online course for testing JavaScript applications.
• TypeScript - popular extension to JavaScript that adds types and other advanced features.
• Scala Play Framework - framework that makes it easy to build web applications with Java and Scala.
• JSON: JavaScript Object Notation - the de facto data exchange format for many networked applications.
• Let's not be monsters - adorable toddler telling us to be better!

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

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

Monoliths are bad! Microservices are good! These are the "obvious" truths that many engineers hold close to heart. So, why is it that Ben Nadel has been slowly merging some of his Microservices back into his Monolith? It turns out that a Monolith - like a Microservice - is a valid architectural choice that carries its own set of pros and cons. And, for him, his team, and their particular set of skills, the Monolith is proving to contain the right set of trade-offs.

This week, the crew talks about Ben's journey; why InVision started using Microservices in the first place; and, what made him realize that it was time to start pulling services back into the core Monolith. There are no hard truths here - only thoughtful, context-aware considerations.

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

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Triumph - He took the week off! He's usually not that good about taking time off; so, taking a whole week off between Christmas and New Year's was actually quite relaxing.
• Ben's Triumph - He managed to stay production at work during the "deployment freeze" that takes place during the holidays! This meant creating lots of small, parallel git branches tied up in a bow, ready and waiting for the 2021 deployments to begin.
• Carol's Triumph - She stayed up until 3am writing Unit Tests! She doesn't often work in an environment that does much testing; so, this was a new and thrilling experience. Who knew that one could be so happy thinking about the unhappy path!
• Tim's Triumph - He also took the week off (his company always takes Christmas week off)! But, he's not used to taking so much time off; and, he started to get bored by Thursday (such a classic engineer).

Notes & Links

• GitHub "Draft" pull-requests - it's just like a regular Pull Request (PR); but, it's intended to be a "work in progress" (WIP).
• Silento - Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) - official music video.
• Archer - a wonderfully raunchy animated series about spies (for adults). Sploosh!
• Microservices - an architectural choice, write-up by Martin Fowler
• Monolithic application - an architectural choice.
• Conway's Law - how organizational structure relates to programming structure:
• Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
• Single-Tenant architecture - configuration in which one customer shares no resources with another customer.
• Multi-Tenant - configuration in which many customers share the same set of resources (such as all existing in the same database).
• Single Page Application (SPA) - a common front-end application architecture in which the front-end dynamically re-renders the UI based on data-fetches.
• Distributed Monolith / Microlith - an architectural anti-pattern in which you combine the worst properties of both monoliths and microservices while reaping none / few of the rewards.
• ColdFusion / Lucee CFML - a modern web programming language for dynamic server-side rendering.
• Mark Richards - The Rise and Fall of Microservices - presentation from O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2019.
• Sam Newman - Building Microservices - the canonical book on Microservices.
• Sam Newman - Monolith To Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns To Transform Your Monolith - Sam's follow-up book to Building Microservices - it should be required reading.
• Simon Brown - Modular Monoliths - presentation from DevNexus 2016 that famously had the slide:
• If you can't build a well-structured monolith, what makes you think microservices is the answer?
• Amazon AWS Lambda - serverless compute services.
• Amazon AWS Fault-Injection Simulator - aka, Chaos Monkey as a Service.
• Amazon Cloudwatch - a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution.
• Kevin Conway - Principal engineer at InVision and a strong proponent for microservices.
• Chris Richardson - he was doing Microservices before there were Microservices. He's the maintainer of microservices.io.
• Hype Cycle - from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" to the "Trough of Disillusionment" and every emotion in between, this is how the technology world experiences new technology.
• Reactive Manifesto - an approach to building robust applications.
• Lagom Reactive Microservices framework - an opinionated microservices framework.

Impostor Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which people doubt their skills, talents, and accomplishments. Most of us have felt something like this in our careers, whether it's a fleeting moment or a persistent fear that we're going to be discovered as frauds. These feelings can be overwhelming, even debilitating; but, they can also drive us towards self-improvement.

This week, the crew talks about their own mistakes, feelings of fraud, insecurities, and how Impostor Syndrome manifests in their own careers.

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

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Failure - Adam accidentally destroyed a database by running a migration script on the wrong database! Thankfully it was a QA (Quality Assurance) database which could be restored - no critical client-data was lost.
• Ben's Triumph - He's deleted 200K lines of unused vendor code. That means shipping less code to production with every deployment. He also merged one of his unnecessary microservices back into the monolith.
• Carol's Triumph - She's not dying! Woot woot! She had gotten COVID-19 right on the heels of a kidney infection; but it is currently feeling much better (and is nursing her sons back to health as well).
• Tim's Triumph - He's been playing around with Redis as a means to make his applications more resilient. One thing he wants to do is centralize his Session management such that he can pushed new code to production without having to reset user-session data.

Notes & Links

• Breaking Bad - critically acclaimed TV drama.
• Adam Sandler's Click - comedy about appreciating your life.
• Redis - blazing fast in-memory database and data-structure storage.
• PM2 - a production-grade process manager for Node.js.
• Amazon ECR - Elastic Container Registry.
• Amazon Fargate - serverless compute for containers.
• GitHub Actions - automation tools for your GitHub workflows.
• The Push Train - Dan McKinley's presentation on managing the human side of continuous delivery.
• Lagom Framework - an opinionated microservices framework for moving away from the monolith.
• Little Bobby Tables - classic XKCD comic.
• Multi-Stage Builds in Docker
• Mike Cannon-Brookes: TED Talk on How you can use impostor syndrome to your benefit
• WTFs per minute - Coding Horror comic on code quality.
• 1 Corinthians 10:12 - "Therefore let him who thinks he stands be careful that he does not fall."
• GoTime podcast - one of the ChangeLog podcasts.
• Mythical Man Month - iconic essays on software engineering.
• 99 Bugs in the code - grumpy cat's take on the 99 Bottles song.
• Perfect is the enemy of the good - trap that many product companies fall into.
• Neil Gaiman's address to the University of the Arts Class of 2012 - "Make good art".
• The 10x programmer - toxic programming myth about unicorn developers.
• Ruby Rogues EP 220 with Laurent Bossavit - discusses the book, "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering", which covers among other things the myth of the 10x programmer.
• Radio Lab: Lying to Ourselves
• The "Peter Principle" - people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence".
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect - a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

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

Triumphs & Fails

• Carol's Triumph: Her college freshman son, majoring in computer science, called mom to ask for comp-sci help!
• Ben's Fail: R&D effort exposed that he doesn't remember how to start a new project any more.   
• Tim's Triumph: He turned in the paperwork to get his team their raises on time.
• Adam's Triumph: Testing on a new platform for his giant application has reached 100%, and a looming deadline may actually be met.

Notes & Links

• We are not medical professionals! If you need help, talk to your primary care physician.
• Sisyphus
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• Adam's waterproof Bluetooth shower speaker recommendation. This one isn't particularly special. There are dozens of different cheap Chinese speakers that look just like it. He's had three over the years, but they're all plenty decent.
• The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino
• TED Talk: Your elusive creative genius by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
• Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will - through work - bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

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

Triumphs & Fails

• Ben's Triumph and Failure: He finally backs up his computer! Only 5 years in the work.
• Tim's Triumph: He was invited to speak at a virtual conference this week as a community expert. It was really amazing.
• Carol's Triumph and Failure: She was locked out of a database only to realize she configured the connection wrong from the first day. Total face/palm time.
• Adam's Failure: He committed to main... tsk tsk. Who commits to main?? Oh yeah, Adam does...

Notes & Links

• We want discuss how we handle remote working. Adam and Ben are pros at it but Tim and Carol are new. We go over communication styles and how they differ between face to face and virtual. How we balance home life and work life when we work in our home. We might not get it right, but we keep trying. Grab a drink and laugh with us as we figure it all out.
• Freakonomics Podcast
• Rich Hickey: Hammock Driven Development
• Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

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

Triumphs & Fails

• Adam's Triumph: His team realized that they could write a tool that would log, per controller method, how many times it had been run, whether or not it threw exceptions, and some performance stats, which is reducing the pain of transitioning app server platforms without a comprehensive test suite. They're currently at 90% tested!
• Carol's Fail: Having just started a new job, she thought she would make a good first impression by bringing down the production site!
• Tim's Triumph+Fail: A product he's been working on developing in secret for FOUR years is finally going to see the light of the day... just not through his years of persistence trying to push it past the finish line.
• Ben's Triumph+Fail: A R&D project failed to get any traction, but on the plus side he got to delete thousands of lines of code!

Notes & Links

• The VS Code plugin that Adam couldn't think of is Git Lens
• Cargo Cult Programming
• CFML ("ColdFusion Markup Language") a.k.a. ColdFusion is a web-dev language and app server that the four of us have some shared history with. Lucee is its open source alternative engine.
• Spoiler alert: You can write awful code in every language!
• "Life with chapters" is a concept stolen from the No Dumb Questions podcast, which is fantastic, and a huge inspiration for Working Code. If you don't already listen, give them a shot!
• There are a variety of different ways people prefer to learn, but teaching a concept is the best way to help yourself find your weak spots.
• Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle!
• The Martian is a fantastic movie and a better book; and yes, the audiobook was narrated by Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek fame.
• GraphQL is an interesting new(ish) idea in the world of web API's.
• "The right tool for the job"? NOPE. The right tool for the job, for the team, at that particular point in time. You heard it here second!

Your hosts

Adam Tuttle -- Twitter, Website

Ben Nadel -- Twitter, Website

Carol Hamilton -- Twitter

Tim Cunningham -- Twitter

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New episodes publish weekly on Wednesday morning! (US/Eastern)