Working Code

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics:  "Strong opinions, loosely held"  - is this a statement with noble intent? Or, does it encourage people to dismiss past evidence and the experiences that have shaped their current view of the world? When is it time to upgrade old technology choices? When the time it takes to upgrade is time  not spent  on building features, at wh...

Shawn Wang  - known as "swyx" online - is a financial investor turned software engineer and journalist. With a passion for history and a knack for "trend spotting", Shawn uses a keen analytical sense, honed through years of financial due diligence, in order to organize the world of web development into a series of epochs, each with its own theme. He's recently codified these ob...

The other day, Ben was listening to an  episode of the MongoDB podcast in which Mat Keep  shared a story about the adding of  atomic transactions  into the MongoDB product. Mat said that the engineer who spearheaded the effort used to joke about the fact that his team was spending a huge amount of time working on a feature that  90% of developers would never need . For Ben - who leans heavily on t...

For last 8-years, Ben Nadel has poured his heart and soul into  InVision , a product that drives design collaboration. During this period, his area of expertise has focused on the (now named) "legacy" platform - the ColdFusion and AngularJS monolith that has built the business into what it is today. Soon, however, the "legacy" platform will be wholly subsumed by the "modern&#34...

Recently on Facebook,  Hal Helms  —highly respected author, speaker, and computer programmer— shared some of his views on the use of "Sprints" to drive engineering work on a product team. In short, he despises the idea of asking engineers to  commit  to achieving a goal within an  estimated time frame . He likens this to asking prisons to build their own gallows.  Everyone  is terrible at...

As we alluded to in  Episode 20: Carol Needs a Consult , there are a lot of different products under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) umbrella. In fact, the number of products is somewhat mind-boggling. It can be overwhelming just figuring out where to start, let alone understanding which service is right for which job, how to configure that service, and how to get that service to integrate with all...

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...

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...

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 ar...

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,...

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...

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 bi...

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. T...

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...

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...

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...

This week, the crew talks about passwords. Web applications store a great deal of sensitive information. But, there is something  categorically different  about storing passwords. Because—if compromised—a password from one application may grant a malicious actor access to another application. As such, it is essential that we store our customers' passwords using modern, one-way hashing algorith...

There's no  one reason  that companies  move away  from or  onto  a technology stack. Sometimes a given technology is no longer actively updated; sometimes the pool of developers that uses a technology shrinks, making it hard to hire new engineers or find community support; sometimes people just like the  new hawtness ; sometimes licensing costs become prohibitively expensive; sometimes there&...

We all love the Hollywood portrayal of the "brilliant programmer" who can step in and just crush it at a moment's notice. We've probably all fantasized about  being that programmer . But, that's not how people work. And it's not how teams work. Highly effective developers don't just "crush it" - they cultivate good habits that they then apply consistently, day-i...

This week, the crew meets to finish their review of  Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship  by  Robert Martin  (aka, "Uncle Bob"). This book is filled with so much thought-provoking information that it took us two episodes to get through it! And, while some of the practices in the book didn't quite connect with the programming languages that we use or the types of appl...

This week, the crew talks about  Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship  by  Robert Martin  (aka, "Uncle Bob"). Recommended to us by friend-of-the-show  Adam Cameron , this book outlines a series of "best practices" that programmers can use in order to create applications that are easy to understand and easy to maintain. Just imagine if applications became easier to...

This week, the crew responds to questions shared by our wonderful, wonderful audience!  Nathan Strutz  - who called the Working Code Hotline - shares his exciting journey into feature flags;  Ryan Mueller  wants to compare and contrast Kanban and Scrum style project management; and, LD2 covers the gamut with questions regarding staying-up on new technology, the importance of having a GitHub profil...

At Carol's company, Support emails are sorted, labeled, and processed using a manual -  and very expensive  - workflow that won't be able to scale with the increasing demand. As such, Carol is looking to build a robust auto-reply system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using machine learning (ML). At least, that's the long-term goal. In the near-term, she'd be thrilled just to get more...

Adam Tuttle first came into contact with makefiles (pronounced "make files") back in high school when compiling code. But, at the time, he didn't really understand what they were or how they worked - he was just a consumer. And, after high school, years went by in which he never gave makefiles a second thought. That is, until, one fateful conversation with  Mark Mandel . Mark explained...

For Ben and his team, few things have  fundamentally changed  the product development life-cycle as much as  LaunchDarkly , a feature flag management platform. Feature flags allow software engineers to separate the "deployment" of code from the "releasing" of code. Which means safer deployments; instantaneous roll-backs; smaller Pull Requests (PRs); incremental feature development;...