Working Code

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible On last week's show, we talked about "Side Hustles" - those extracurricular activities that we do in order to earn a little extra income. On this week's show, we want to talk about the flip-side to that coin: the coding that we do on the side because we  freakin' l...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew talks about side hustles: the very American desire to be making money on the side. While many people in this world  need  side hustles in order to make ends meet, those in our industry (technology) often incur side hustles as a voluntary affliction. Of...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Like Michelangelo with a block of marble, we engineers often like to dive right into the code and let the application  reveal itself to us . And while this may work on a very small scale, this extreme bias-towards-action isn't prudent for larger teams or companies with a growing c...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew talks about documentation. Yay! As developers, there's no doubt that we all love consuming great documentation - especially for APIs. But, nary a one of us enjoys the process of creating documentation. Except maybe Adam, who's oddly passionate a...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible On today's episode, we get to pull up the floor boards and once again peer into the dark recesses of Ben's brain: all the random and, frankly, sometimes incoherent chit-cat that Ben has with himself. Listen to him call B.S. on flaky tests; shake his first at overly-specific CS...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Twenty-two years ago,  Joel Spolsky  wrote an article titled,  The Joel Test , which outlines 12-steps for evaluating the quality of a software team. At the time, Joel was working with Microsoft, building products that were delivered on CD-ROM. As such, his day-to-day workflow was som...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible The less code you write, the easier it is for people to review, the less likely it is to contain bugs, and the more likely it is to merge cleanly into your main integration branch. The converse of this tends to also be true: the more code you write - particularly within a long-lived f...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, we interview  Jason Henriksen  who works alongside Carol as a Software Architect at Clear Capital. According to Jason, every engineer does some degree of  architecture , whether they know it or not. In fact, there's a lot of overlap between what Jason does a...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible We all love writing code. Honestly, here on the show, it's hard for us to imagine doing  anything other  than building beautiful digital products for our beloved customers. But, as a thought experiment - in these post-pandemic times - the crew wanted to share some of the other pro...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew talks about  GitHub Copilot . After being in private beta for several months, this  "AI pair programmer"  is now generally available as a paid product for $10/month or $100/year. But is this something people want to pay for? Will a price put the...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew shares some of the random stuff that they've been dealing with at work. Carol is about to submit a PR (Pull Request) that accounts for 8-weeks worth of commits; and, she's already warning her engineers that it's gonna be beefy! Ben wonders i...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible In each role, there are the responsibilities that get listed on the job board; and then, there's all the random stuff that they ask you do to once you show up. On today's show, the crew discusses the latter: those strange and wondrous "extras" that sometimes get rolled...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, Adam and Ben examine a variety of random topics: Adam loves watching conference videos on YouTube; Ben is feeling terribly insecure about falling behind in the field of web development; neither of us can believe that Elon Musk is forcing his employees back into...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, Adam and Ben talk about the "unhappy paths" in software design. An unhappy path - also known as a "sad path" - is  anything that can go wrong  during the consumption of a product. Some unhappy paths are nothing more than unanticipated edge-cases...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week, on the show, we check-in with Carol to see how she's adjusting to her new role. Carol was recently promoted to a position in which she is a Manager some of the time and an individual contributor (IC) the rest of the time. This setup has a lot of advantages; but, it is n...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible If Ben crushes it in the woods, and no one is there to see it, is he truly crushing it? Such are the philosophical questions that go through Ben's brain as he continues to pour his heart and soul into a legacy product that no one else at the company cares about. That is, except fo...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Carol - who has recently stepped into a managerial role - is facing an interesting situation: her company wants to start implementing process changes across the board. However, Carol's own team is  kicking ass and taking names ; and, she can't understand how any of the propose...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew talks about what they've been working on recently. Adam is exploring the use of AWS (Amazon Web Services) message queues and S3 in order to manage nightly data processing in a way that  won't crush  his application servers. Tim has been approved...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible In the 20+ years of Ben's career, he can't remember ever seeing a person in a leadership position get fired. He's seen plenty of people leave a company to "explore other opportunities", typically accompanied by much praise and congratulations. He assumes that at le...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew discusses a topic submitted by  Mingo Hagen :  Do developers wear too many hats, do they spread themselves too thin, and does the work suffer because of it?  There are clears benefits and drawbacks to wearing a lot of hats. Knowing a little bit about a...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew discusses a potluck of tasty topics. Ben is trying to figure out what project he wants to use as his vehicle for learning Docker and container-based deployments. Adam wants to completely overhaul his data synchronization workflow, but is having a lot of...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew looks back on the first 70 episodes of Working Code and reflects on what's working, what's not working, and what we'd like to see in the future. I think we all agree that we've made it a lot farther than we thought we would. And, thanks...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week, Carol talks to us about how her Support team manages communication with their customers. And, how she'd love to find an easy way for one Support engineer to know that  another Support engineer  is currently working on a given ticket. She's been exploring the use of...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, Carol leads a discussion about communication styles, recruiting, and the power of seeing female role models at all levels of an organization. From the onset of her career, Carol has both been  witness to  and been  taxed by  a general lack of female leadership i...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Under the right circumstances, application and error logs can be magical. They can shed light on how a system is behaving - or misbehaving; and, they can provide a path forward in an emergency situation. But, logs do come at a cost. Not only is there an actual dollars-and-cents cost t...