Working Code

Inspired by an article from  Dimitri Glazkov: Build a thing to build the thing , we talk about the importance of consuming of our own products. Often referred to as "Dog Fooding", this means that we must try and build something in the same way that  our customers  would be expected to build something. And, in doing so, better identify the feature gaps and the points-of-friction. In order t...

If a property is exposed on the internet, people will try to take advantage of it. This might be in the form of sending spam through a communications portal, scamming cellular providers via SMS tolling, or using payment forms to validate stolen credit cards. And that's just to name a few possible attack vectors! It appears there's no hurdle too high nor process too tedious for the fraudste...

Early on in his career, Ben's default behavior was to add  new database columns  to any  existing table  that felt "similar enough" in nature. After years of evolving an application, however, this has lead to relatively wide tables with only a loose sense of cohesion. More recently in his career, Ben has started to err on the side of creating  new tables  in order to house  new columns...

As Ben builds-out  Dig Deep Fitness , he wants to include an "Activity Streak" indicator as a way for people to feel good about the consistent effort that they've been putting into their workouts. "Streaks", however, are bucketed by "day"; and, said "day" is specific to the user's current timezone experience. Historically, Ben has stored all of his applicati...

This week on the show, we have Tim—our only host with screen acting experience—read from  The Grug Brained Developer , "A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained". This guide uses fun, caveman'esque language to point out the challenges and missteps that we often take in software development. And, how keeping things simple - for easy  smol brain  consumption - wi...

Words aren't  just  the tools that we use to describe the world around us - they are rich layers of abstraction that carry our cultural histories, our education, and our social norms on their shoulders. When we have a shared understanding of a what a word or turn-of-phrase means, our ability to communicate with each other is robust and unparalleled. But, when our differences our great, we end...

On today's episode, we invite you into another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Ben's mind. Ben's sick, twisted cavern of decay and depravity wherein we gain insight into what actually makes this man tick. Topics include the slippery slope of the "Shift Left" mentality; over-complicating life with JWTs (JSON Web Tokens); dangerous public-on-publi...

After a multi-year global pandemic, preceded by a dearth of ColdFusion conferences in the U.S., Ben finally made it out to Munich, Germany for  CFCamp 2023  - Europe's premier CFML-oriented conference. At 130 attendees, it was the perfect place to re-enter society and talk tech with like-minded engineers. Going into it, Ben was anxious. But, by the end of the 3-day event, he ended up having a...

Starting a new project is always exciting: there's so much potential, so many visions of grandeur.  Completing a project , on the other hand, is always a challenge. In the engineering world, we often joke that the  last 90%  of a project takes just as much time as the  first 90%  of a project. Inspired by the  GitHub Guide: Finish Your Projects , we wanted to talk about why finishing a project...

After watching the release event for Apple's new  Vision Pro  headset, Tim wants to talk to us about both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR); and, get our general take on where this all fits into the future of computing. We each have a different level of exposure to this kind of technology. But, certainly none of us is using any type of headset in an ongoing way. Follow the show a...

After years of wanting to build a fitness tracking application, Ben has finally started to write code for  Dig Deep Fitness . But, starting a new project from scratch isn't something that we engineers do very often; and, all of the features that we take for granted - session manage, error logging, rate limiting, email delivery - those foundational aspects all need to be created when we start s...

On today's show, we have our first book club discussion about  The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win  by authors Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. We review chapters 3-6 and talk about how Adam's recent compliance work has given him a fresh perspective on the 190-page spreadsheet of vulnerabilities portrayed in the book. It's interesting...

When Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) come together to create the first version of a given piece of software, it feels like everyone is on the same page and has the same priorities. But, once that initial implementation ships to users, the Product and Design departments tend to move on, leaving engineers to maintain the software. This creates an uncomfortable tension between the existing use...

This week on the show, we discuss a variety of web and web-adjacent topics. Adam is feeling dubious about recommending a career in web development to his children (is it still worth it)? Ben legitimately wants to understand why we - the web development community - don't approach Testing with a YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) mindset. And, Tim wants to consider different ways to handle erro...

On today's show, we talk to  Sean Corfield  about his take on the "Tech Interview" process. With over 40 years of experience at companies like Macromedia, Adobe, and World Singles, Sean has been on both sides of the interview table; and, has been personally responsible for hiring countless engineers. His perspective that most tech interviews are "broken" might be taken with som...

This week on the show, we talk about documentation. And not just the "how" of software, but the "why" - the decisions that we've reached, as a team, regarding the technologies that we use and the architectures that glues everything together. Of course, writing the documentation is only part of the challenge; keeping the documentation up-to-date is a whole other source of fricti...

On today's show, the crew discusses a variety of topics. By which, I mean, Ben waxes philosophical on the subjective nature of  everything ; and, how he wants to live in a world where those who choose to indent code with 2-spaces may peacefully coexist alongside those who choose to indent code with tabs. Also, Adam body-slams his younger brother into a concrete floor. And then, gets in trouble...

On today's show, we reflect on the YouTube video,  15 Years of Dev in a Nutshell . A few years ago, people were complaining about "JavaScript Fatigue" - this sense that there was a new JavaScript library or framework coming out every day; and, that the race to stay up-to-date in the industry was simply overwhelming. Now, take that feeling, and expand it to include  everything  in a web...

In episode 58, we weighed-in on  whether or not 10x engineers actually exist . On today's episode, we go  hard  in the other direction, talking about the  much less mythical   -10x engineer : those engineers that seem to actively work in opposition to the greater good, holding unnecessary meetings and flooding the team with a massive amount of documentation. This discussion was directly inspir...

This week on the show, we talk about stuff we've been working on or thinking about lately. Adam dazzles us with his use of 1Password's Secrets Automation feature to drive key rotation in his production app. Ben misses the beautiful agony of having to support IE11 (and how it make the web more predictable). And, Carol shares her frustration with React and, especially, with JSX. It turns out...

Ben was recently tasked with removing an old feature from one of his services. As he did this, he kept breaking tests that were tightly coupled to the rendering of user interface (UI). In his mind, these tests were unnecessarily "brittle" and appeared to be testing the underlying front-end framework more so than the underlying business logic. When he brought this up in the  podcast's D...

As Carol launches her Freelancing career, we thought it would be valuable to interview  Nolan Erck , Owner and Director at South of Shasta. For the past 15-years, Nolan has been a Freelance web developer, a mobile developer, and a polyglot technology trainer. He knows the ins-and-outs of attracting clients, setting up a business, and sub-contracting work in order to keep the coffers flush. If ther...

On today's show, we all bring something juicy to consider. Carol kicks things off with some trepidation about becoming an independent contractor; Tim shares an article on  Technical Debt  and digs into the subtle differences between  tech debt  and  bad code ; Ben is befuddled by the fact that "common sense" is apparently wildly subjective; and, Admin introduces us to  Bloom Filters ....

As web developers, we're all high-functioning, motivated people. And, we certainly have a good sense of what we  should  be doing with our time (both personally and professionally). But, theory rarely survives contact with reality. And, on today's show, we talk about all that sweet, sweet stuff we ought to be doing and why we can't quite motivate to get any of it done! Topics including...

On  episode 114  of the show, in effort to balance out the somber tone of Carol's unfortunate layoff, we decided to have a little fun and play  Two Truths and a Lie . On today's episode we review the listener submissions and crown the  one winner  who correctly selected all of our lies. And the prize goes to....  listen to the show ! Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on D...