Working Code

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible For many of us, meetings feel like a necessary evil. We love to complain that we have too many meetings; and, that most of them are useless. However, forgoing meetings and attempting to solve problems and reach consensus asynchronously can feel like  even more  of a drain on our time...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Testing code is like taking out insurance: until you  need  it, it can be hard to understand why it's so important; it can be hard to understand what everyone is  raving  about. And so, you continue writing your code without tests. And, everything is fine, until one day it isn&#39...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Gone is the era of the life-long employee. It's hard to even imagine rising up through the ranks, grinding out the decades, and then retiring -  with a pension  - all at a single company. Companies don't see their people that way anymore - a perspective that is, no doubt, shar...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Van Wilder reminds us to enjoy the moment, warning us  "Don't take life too seriously, you'll never make it out alive."  And while this is a jocular take on our own mortality, the truth is such that the total cost of death isn't levied against the dead, it's wr...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible This week on the show, the crew peers into the deep, dark recesses of Ben's mind and tries to understand what exactly makes him tick. Composed of equal parts rant and dialogue, the topics range from throwing errors on delete operations, handling bulk operations idempotently, feeli...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Many companies are seeded from the same basic concept: customers have a problem to be solved and the people on the Product team know how to solve it. This customer-centric approach is what gives a product much-needed early traction, helps build a loyal community, and lets customer-and...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Every software application has "technical debt". Some of that debt is acquired through meaningful consideration: short-term value gained in lieu of longer-term ease-of-maintenance. And, some of that debt is obtained incidentally through a lack of experience and a dearth of bus...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible It's easy to be flippant about how often our industry seemingly "discovers" the programming practices and paradigms that experienced engineers have been talking about for  decades . But, the truth is more complicated and nuanced. The landscape of the web is evolving at a b...

Sponsors Audible  - get a free audiobook from Audible with no strings attached at  https://workingcode.dev/audible Sometimes, people on the internet are wrong. And this week, that person is Tim, who said something inaccurate about the .net (dotnet) framework. Thankfully, our de facto .net ambassador,  Nathan Strutz , sent us a recording that shed light on the current state of .net, its open source...

New Year's Resolutions may be considered a bit cliche by some; and even a bit silly by others; but, there's always value in any opportunity to pause and take stock of your own situation. On this week's show, we share both our  tech  and our  non-tech  goals for the new year. As it happens, we all want to be in better shape -  shocking , I know. But, when it comes to technology - and te...

With a year of Working Code episodes behind us, our podcast has come a long way. But, we're still trying to figure things out: we are continuing to play with the show format, we are each growing into our own voice, and hopefully we're putting together some content that adds a little something, something to the boarder web-development conversation. If, in our ramblings, we ever sound like w...

When you consider the hourly-rate of everyone in the room, meetings can be shockingly expensive. And, if it's a sales meeting, both  actual  and  opportunity  costs are on the line. Which is why we practice our sales pitches and offer up a sacrifice to the Demo Gods. But sometimes, that's not enough. On today's show, Tim and Adam share their sad tales of  sales fails ; and illustrate w...

At 3:30 AM the day before Thanksgiving, Ben received an emergency page about a failing API end-point. Rushing to his desk, groggy-eyed and in various states of undress, he jumped into the  #incident  channel on Slack to see what was happening. What unfolded over the next 30-hours was the manifestation of Ben's worst nightmare. The moment he had been dreading for the last 4-years had finally co...

On this week's show, Tim interviews  Adam Lehman , the Director of Product for Marketplace Core at  Spotify . Of course, many friends-of-the-show will know Adam more intimately as the former Director of Product and Engineering at Adobe where he helped drive the Adobe ColdFusion product and community forward. Or, as Tim puts it, where Adam  "lead by throwing grenades" . Like most Produc...

On this week's show, Adam interviews his long-time friend and boss  Steve Rittler , founder and CEO of  AlumnIQ . Once a software engineer himself, Steve discusses his journey from individual contributor (IC) to business leader; and, how he sees his role as the boss from both a practical and a philosophical standpoint. For Steve, it's always been about changing the world using whichever to...

Engineers like to believe that they are non-fungible. That is, that they are not replaceable - that they are special and bring a unique set of skills and perspectives to the table. And, for some engineers at early-stage companies, this may be true. However, as companies grow and evolve and become more sophisticated, the cold truth sets in: we are all replaceable. Even Apple - at this point in its...

This week on the show, the crew talks about where they each see themselves in 5 years. This is not an easy thought-experiment, especially in a technology landscape that changes so rapidly. Are we getting better at the things we do today? Or, are we changing our focus, our role, and maybe even our job? Do our personality traits of introversion and extroversion influence our career trajectory? Or, c...

One of our fans on Patreon is about to embark on a large "replatforming" endeavor. His team has decided to move away from their "traditionally coded" application (think hard to maintain, big ball of mud); and, will soon rebuild the server-side aspect of their application using a new language. The team isn't yet sure what language they'll use (this is how the topic came up i...

Surgeons and pilots have known for years that checklists  literally save lives . And, while programming is rarely a life-and-death stakes situation, the humble ToDo list continues to serve as a powerful tool in the developer toolbox. This week on the show, the crew talks about how they manage their ToDo lists using comments, software applications, and physical notebooks. And, while we each have ou...

With an increasing amount of work being performed within a distributed or hybrid team model, there's a push to move more and more communication into an asynchronous workflow. Whether through email or collaborative document editing, there's a growing perception that collaboration becomes more efficient when each person can participate in their own time. But, is this really true? Or, are we...

When two systems have to communicate with each other, the security of transmitted messages is typically enforced through the use of shared secrets. Whether with encryption or one-way hashing, the receiving system can use a shared secret to verify that a producer's message has not been tampered with or spoofed. Rotating these shared secrets can be complicated; and, may even have to take place o...

Because this week's episode was short, and because we've wanted to give the public feed a taste of what's in the aftershow, here's a bonus episode. This is the aftershow from episode 43.

This week's episode is all about the podcast's Discord server going public. We're now inviting all listeners to join us and participate in the community chat. Why would we want to do that, and what's in it for you? Answers to these questions and more now available as sound waves for your ear holes. Join our Discord here:  https://workingcode.dev/discord/ Follow the show! Our websit...

Between Frances Haugen's testimony, a meta outage of Facebook properties including  Facebook.com , Instagram, and What's App, and a $7 billion drop in Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth in a matter of hours, it's safe to say that Facebook has been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time of it. There have even been rumors that Facebook's "work from home" polic...

You might think that "programming" is a relatively straightforward concept: take abstract ideas and codify them into lines-of-code (LOC). But, within this broad abstraction, there are a multitude of implementation details. Some engineers love to hunker down and write code inside a metaphorical bubble;  mob programmers  love to dog-pile on the same machine, blitzing the problem until it&#39...