On today's show, we talk about incidents and outages at work. Incidents are a fact of life. If you depend on a file system or a database or a third party vendor, at some point, something will break and your service will be degraded. Customers freak out (rightly so); and, it becomes a cross-team effort to try and find the problem, fix it, and effect…

Adam picks Tim's brain searching for the perfect solution for payments and compliance auditing. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here.By Adam Tuttle, Ben Nadel, Carol Hamilton, Tim Cunningham

In a world where many programmers instinctively reach for an existing solution in "user land", Ben poses the question: is there value in building out and maintaining your own standard library? This would be the collection of commonly-used functions and classes that you enjoy using; and, which are tailored to your use-cases and programming paradigms…

Tim just completed his quarterly strategy review meeting at work. As such, he's in the perfect head space to teach Adam and Ben what strategy is; how strategy differs from tactics; and, how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be used in order to ensure that the work to be done actually rolls-up to one of the company's core strategies. In the end,…

On today's show, we talk to Thelma Van about integrating design into the product development workflow. This includes User Experience (UX) design, User Interface (UI) design, scope negotiation, and user validation through interviews. It turns out, even if you can only talk to five of your customers, having this amount of feedback can have a massivel…

Several years ago, Stack Overflow noticed a small but surprising trend within their 2017 Developer Survey data. Even when attempting to adjust for several factors, it seems that the programmers who indent their code with spaces (as opposed to with tabs) have a higher earning potential. As an example of programmers who love using tabs, the hosts of …

On today's show, we talk about two major announcements relating to the technology world. First, the government released a report calling on programmers to start using memory safe languages (see: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe). Second, Apple announced that it will halt work on Titan, its autonomous electric vehicle project. We also talk abou…

The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered. - Oscar Wilde You may never think about it or even be aware of it; but, you have a personal brand. A brand is not something you can opt into or out of. It simply exists. The only choice that you have is how you manage - or choose not to manage - your brand in…

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 …

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…

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 …

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 …

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 t…

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…

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, auto…

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 …

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…

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 …

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…

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,…

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, structur…

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…

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 work…

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 cha…

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 ben…

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.By Adam Tuttle, Ben Nadel, Carol Hamilton, Tim Cunningham

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.By Adam Tuttle, Ben Nadel, Carol Hamilton, Tim Cunningham

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, Good…

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 …

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 Ad…

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 hel…

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 gam…

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 no…

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 …

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 hig…

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 table…

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 a…

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 ea…

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. …

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 Toke…

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 e…

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…

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 …

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 as…

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 port…

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…

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…

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 "bro…

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 …

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…