Working Code

On today's show, we respond to a listener question from Kamil Maraz: I have started a Developer experience initiative in our company. We started with a survey, which led to many 1-on-1 meetings; and, one thing that came up a few times was onboarding. Long story short: it's not ideal. I was wondering if this topic could be an inspiration for one of the episodes. For example what is an onboa...

For the most part, software engineers like the concept of Agile methodology; and, they have a sense that agile development practices are the best way of getting work done. But, that doesn't mean we know how to put these agile practices in place (especially at scale). Today, we talk to  Brian Sadler  ( @brian_sadler ) - a seasoned software developer and Agile coach - about what Agile is, what p...

On this week's show, we explore a variety of topics. Ben wants to perform a mini retrospective on his desire to support the legacy platform at work. Carol is feeling isolated as the only engineer on her team - her dog is a good listener, but isn't very helpful when it comes to brainstorming. And, Adam wants to talk about the browser landscape; and see which browser(s) everyone is currently...

In web development, we tend to hold learning as a virtuous activity that's worthy of our spare time. In fact, there can be a lot of pressure on us to always be learning; and, to some degree, those of us who  don't  ride the wave of cutting-edge tech are "othered". But, is  dabbling  in new technology really moving the needle? Does learning a little of this and little of that really...

Ben never has enough time to accomplish everything that he wants to accomplish. On its own, this isn't necessarily a "bad thing". But, it can quickly lead to feelings of guilt: is he not good enough, is he not effective enough, is he letting everyone down? So much of this angst is emotional. And he knows this. But, he doesn't have the wherewithal that he needs to evolve his own per...

As we jump into the new year, the crew talks about their new year's goals—both for the podcast and for themselves. We strongly believe in the power of "learning in public". And, to that end, we've created a Google Form in which you can  submit suggestions  on how to improve the show: what do you like, what do you  not  like, what can we be doing better? No suggestion is off limits,...

Happy New Year! This week, we ease into 2024 with a variety of topics. Adam is building a new design system at work using Svelte and Tailwind CSS. Ben wonders if there's any way to create an "Overview Effect" in the world of programming. And Tim discusses a few philosophical fallacies in a work context: planning fallacy, overconfidence effect, automation bias, and plan continuation bia...

After a stressful year, we happily ease into another round of "No Effort December" in which the conversations flow without concern or constraint. Carol is excited to go ice skating for the first time in her life. Tim is trying to teach his kids about financial literacy. Ben shares his limited ability to fantasize. And Adam wonders why his computer gets so sticky. Follow the show and be sur...

In  episode 154 , we discussed the concept of a project premortem. That discussion inspired Carol to schedule her own premortem for a new 2-year project that her company is about to undertake. Given the fact that her team's work won't be sharable for at least 18-months, she's wants to make sure that her premortem is as effective as it can be. As such, we're going to have ourselves...

On this week's show, Adam Tuttle and friend-of-the-show,  Adam Cameron , go in depth on  Dead Man's Snitch  - a software service that triggers an alarm if your application doesn't "check in" with high enough frequency. 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...

On today's show, we cast off the social filters and lay down some hot takes! This journey of spice serves up the separation of concerns, the future of StackOverflow, the value of comments, the necessity of testing, the role of extracurricular coding, the beauty of clean code, the meh of JSON, and the challenge of building truly great products. Some of these hot takes are clearly wrong; but,  I...

Coming out of the Thanksgiving holiday (and still recovering from our food comas), we wanted to have some fun today and talk about all of the software that we're thankful to have in our lives. These aren't sponsors of the show (yet); but, we love them so much that we wanted to share them with the rest of the world. Topics include  Dead Man's Snitch ,  Overcast podcast player ,  git  so...

On today's show, we continue reflecting on the  4-part series on "Failure"  produced by the  Freakanomics radio podcast . This time, we talk about Premortems; and, about how important it is for a company to create a safe space in which people can talk about failure and about the reasons failure might occur. We also dig into Logging strategies, structured logging, and role of different...

Inspired by a  4-part series on "Failure"  produced by the  Freakanomics radio podcast , we went around the table and talked about our own failures. This helps to remove the social stigma associated with failure; and, helps other people process internal conflicts of emotion. Tim talks about failing to sell websites in the early dot-com boom; Adam talks about failing to create a ColdFusion...

This week on the show, the hosts talk about what they have going on. Adam is trying to better understand the cadence with which his scheduled tasks are executing; and, has built a visualization tool using Svelte and D3. Tim has signed up for  CS50 at Harvard  - an online course introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Python. And, Ben has a working draft for the first half of his Feature Flag...

When you build a system that is wholly contained within a single process, life is quite clean and predictable. But, the moment you reach outside of your process in order to get work done, you realize how messy the world is. Communication between systems can breakdown for any number of reasons. Often times, we try to create resiliency within the chaos by apply technology. But, sometimes, it makes m...

This week we go around the table and see what the hosts have going on. Carol got a promotion in her first week back at work, despite the fact that she's had to emotionally suppress everything she once knew about dotnet. Adam is now - finally - at 100% SOC compliance (and is awaiting a 3-month review period). Tim has been wrestling with APIs and bending them to his will (to receive JSON payload...

In this episode, Adam and Tim talk about margin for error in various aspects of software development, business and our personal lives. With audio editing and engineering by  ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

In this episode, the crew speculate on what would happen if every coder just stopped coding. With audio editing and engineering by  ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

This week, we go around the table and talk about a variety of topics. Ben talks about Transactive Memory Systems Theory and how it might be applied in an engineering context. Carol—having moved into a new home and a new job—talks about the joys of starting something new in her life. Tim talks about the short-comings of a ticketing system; and, Goodhart's Law (which states that  "when a mea...

The products that we build can become quite complex and involve many interconnected parts. Due to this complexity, and to the properties of the natural world, these products  will  begin to fail in new and exciting ways. There's really no way to stop a system from failing; but, we can build systems that are  more resilient  to failure. That said, this is oftentimes much more challenging than w...

Adam, our early-adopter in residence, talks to Carol about  Bun ,  Skeleton , and  Svelte . With a focus on introducing new tools to an existing team, the two mainly talk about Bun, a hot new all-in-one JavaScript toolkit that is simultaneously a  runtime , a  server , a  package manager , and a  test runner . Come find out why its feature-set and speed leave Adam singing,  My application don'...

In a perfect world, we always do our best. But, our capacity for "best" changes on a day-to-day basis. On some days, doing our best means jumping out of bed and absolutely  crushing the day ! On other days, doing our best means that we rallied  just  to get out of bed. And, that's OK. When we're in the slog - when our "best" is degraded - it can be helpful to identify a sin...

While change is inevitable, managing and adapting to change is always a challenge. Change represents the end of something we knew and - at least for some period - loved; and, ushers in the start of something completely unknown. On today's show, we explore the difficulties in "moving on" using several different contexts: Jobs, tech stacks, video games, API implementations, front-end fra...

When Carol's not here to keep us in line, the show quickly flys off the rails. So much so, in fact, that we never made it to the intended topic - it's just tangents upon tangents upon tangents. We touch upon "vendoring" of our external libraries, installing dependencies with  apt-get , dictation app differences between macOS and iOS, the regret of not building features sooner, buil...