Working Code

In this week's episode, the crew discuss finding the right balance in implementing processes within software development teams. Processes often originate from reactive measures to past mistakes but it is crucial to emphasize the importance of periodically reassessing the necessity and efficiency of these processes. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is...

In this week's episode, Ben and Carol of the Working Code Podcast reflect on career advice they would give to their younger selves, touching on the importance of simplicity in coding, continuous learning, and maintaining work-life balance. They emphasize the significance of learning from mentors, leveraging database constraints, and avoiding premature optimization. Follow the show and be sure...

In this episode, Tim and Adam discuss career advice for their younger selves, including the importance of job changes for salary increases, focusing on programming tasks rather than managerial roles, and the hazards of tying one's identity to a specific programming language. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @Workin...

In this week's episode, Tim returns to the podcast for a discussion on code reviews, touching on the importance of providing constructive feedback, tailoring reviews based on the developer's experience level, and discussing the merits and drawbacks of tools like GitHub. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @Working...

In this week's episode, Adam and Ben talk about the feasibility of being a solo developer in 2024, considering industry pressures, tools, and personal strategies for balancing simplicity and complexity in the development process. 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 epis...

In this week's episode Ben and Carol delve into their personal and professional insecurities. The discussion includes feeling the need to justify one's value at work, struggles with validations. They also talk about the emotional impact of customer interactions and the importance of human connections. The conversation highlights broader issues regarding job promotions, industry expectation...

On this week's show, Adam and Ben explore the complexities of implementing AB testing in email campaigns. The hosts tackle the challenge of integrating AB testing into existing systems without causing disruptions and examine methods for experimenting with various elements like subject lines, calls-to-action, and email contents. They also discuss strategies for automating the selection of winni...

On today's show, Adam and Ben talk about their respective strategies for leaving comments within code. Each of them inhabits a different end of the spectrum, with Ben erring on the side of viewing comments as an inherent value-add; and, Adam believing that the urge to add a comment is more akin to a "code smell", indicating a need to refactor the underlying code structure. They disagre...

In this episode, the team discusses various aspects of starting new projects, dealing with both personal and professional challenges, and the excitement and fears around initiating new work. Carol shares her idea for a new web application to help organize event contributions, and the group explores initial steps and considerations for starting such a project. They touch on security, data managemen...

On today's show, Tim and Carol share personal updates while Adam and Ben are away. Carol discusses her challenging workday involving a difficult rebase and adjusting to a new routine after moving to Texas. 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 Wedn...

On today's show, we continue our discussion of the entries outlined on the website, the  Laws of Software . Topics include McKinley's law on boring technologies, Doerr's law on aligning team vision, and Fitt's law on target touchability. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @WorkingCodePod on Twitter  and ...

On today's show, we discuss a few of the entries outlined on the website, the  Laws of Software . Topics include Atwood's Law on JavaScript, Cunningham's Law on getting answers, Parkinson's Law on getting things done, Goodhart's Law on taking measurements, Hofstadter's Law on inevitable failure, and the Peter Principle. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on...

On today's show, Tim gears-up for a farm insurance conference out in Nashville where he's hoping to educate farmers on the pros and cons of artificial intelligence (AI). But, ahead of his talk, he'll be using AI voice technology to call the conference attendees and convince them to attend his presentation. And then, hopefully, weave statistics and sentiment analysis insights—from these...

This week on the podcast, we touch on a variety of topics. Ben has been incrementally building a data export feature for his customers; and, he's gotten to a point in which he can see a viable light at the end of the tunnel. Carol has discovered that if she doodles circles with her non-dominant hand, it occupies the ADHD portion of her brain and frees her up to focus on reading. Tim is continu...

Adam uses the new CSS color functions for HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) in order to  create a heatmap  for the number of dollars raised by his platform. Ben dives into the  Algolia search service  as a way to provide a search feature on his blog. Carol is trying to alleviate performance concerns around an N+1 SQL problem using an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) that has decided to use an N+1 sel...

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Tim was suffering from a "carding" attack (aka, a "credit card stuffing" attack) and had to build an internal CAPTCHA system in order to protect his web-based payment forms from bad actors. Adam created an open-source JavaScript library for mocking ES modules (see  Mockable ) that makes it possible to swap implementation details at...

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Ben talks about overcompensation at work; and, how we often swing way too hard in one direction as the first signs of a challenge. Carol talks about how her current task got away from her; and, how she suddenly founder herself creating a Pull Request with 84 files in it. Tim talks about the generation smoking ban going into effect in England. And...

On today's show, we talk about incidents and outages at work. Incidents are a fact of life. If you depend on a file system or a database or a third party vendor, at some point, something will break and your service will be degraded. Customers freak out (rightly so); and, it becomes a cross-team effort to try and find the problem, fix it, and effectively communicate updates back to your custome...

Adam picks Tim's brain searching for the perfect solution for payments and compliance auditing. With audio editing and engineering by  ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

In a world where many programmers instinctively reach for an existing solution in "user land", Ben poses the question: is there value in building out and maintaining your own standard library? This would be the collection of commonly-used functions and classes that  you  enjoy using; and, which are tailored to  your  use-cases and programming paradigms. Doing so would be a vibrant mixture...

Tim just completed his quarterly strategy review meeting at work. As such, he's in the perfect head space to teach Adam and Ben what strategy is; how strategy differs from tactics; and, how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be used in order to ensure that the work to be done actually rolls-up to one of the company's core strategies. In the end, Ben still has no idea what's going on...

On today's show, we talk to  Thelma Van  about integrating design into the product development workflow. This includes User Experience (UX) design, User Interface (UI) design, scope negotiation, and user validation through interviews. It turns out, even if you can only  talk to five of your customers , having this amount of feedback can have a massively out-sized impact on your overall design...

Several years ago, Stack Overflow noticed a small but surprising  trend within their 2017 Developer Survey data . Even when attempting to adjust for several factors, it seems that the programmers who indent their code with spaces (as opposed to with tabs) have a higher earning potential. As an example of programmers who love using tabs, the hosts of the show offer up theories about this strange fi...

On today's show, we talk about two major announcements relating to the technology world. First, the government released a report calling on programmers to start using memory safe languages (see:  Future Software Should Be Memory Safe ). Second, Apple announced that it will halt work on Titan, its autonomous electric vehicle project. We also talk about the pros-and-cons of a Computer Science de...

The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered. - Oscar Wilde You may never think about it or even be aware of it; but, you have a personal brand. A brand is not something you can opt into or out of. It simply exists. The only choice that you have is how you manage - or choose not to manage - your brand in relation to other people. On today's show, we...