Working Code

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074: What's On Your Workbench? May 11, 2022

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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 to use the national "Do Not Call" list and is now working to integrate this list into his communications workflow. Ben is dealing with post-deployment depression, which is often what happens when he's at the end of his R.O.P.E. And, Carol is de-scoping a massive project down into an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that can be shipped within a single sprint in order to demonstrate the value-add of the concept!

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

073: Our Golden Parachute May 04, 2022

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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 least some of these people were actually fired; but, were allowed to depart under friendly terms. He poses this question to the crew: assuming that his assumption is valid, is suppressing this information healthy for the company (perhaps an effort to keep morale high)? Or, is it a form of gaslighting that creates confusion and dissent within the organization?

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

072: Too Many Hats Apr 27, 2022

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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 lot of things can cut down on communication overhead and enable teams to move faster. But, without specialization, solutions will almost certainly be sub-optimal; and, "best practices" may not even be known to the engineer. Ideally, a team should consistent of both generalists and subject-matter experts. This kind of balance creates a "healthy tension" that tempers perfectionism with pragmatism and keeps everyone moving forward at the right pace.

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

071: Potluck #4 Apr 20, 2022

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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 trouble getting excited about the work (despite all of the exciting ingredients). Carol is being worn-down by the analysis phase of a project and just wants to start doing the work and accruing some wins for her team! And, Tim just can't wrap his head around Functional Programming (FP) - I mean, how the heck can you possibly program anything without IF-statements?!

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

070: Self Reflections Apr 13, 2022

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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 to Matt at Z-Cross Media, we always end up sounding totes profesh' on tape even when we sounded like bunch of monkeys in the recording studio. We've also been super thrilled to see our Discord community become such a lively and diverse forum, even if half of it is just people mocking Ben for not having any tests. We're all excited to see how the show evolves; and, we hope you come on this adventure with us!

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

069: Now I'm Catching Events Apr 06, 2022

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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 WebSockets and "presence channels" as a means to provide feedback within the Support platform. And, more generally, she's been looking into the concept of Publish and Subscribe (often referred to as Pub/Sub) as a means to push information from one service to another. We talk a lot about Pusher - a fully-managed WebSocket SaaS offering; and, consider other techniques that might be helpful.

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

068: Hire Women, Inspire Women Mar 30, 2022

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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 in the engineering world. From the college advisor who steered Carol away from computer science to the boss that sent her pictures of his genitalia, the last 12-years have made it abundantly clear to Carol just how important it is to hire women and cultivate a diversity of thought, perspectives, and backgrounds. And, this isn't only for the sake of women - it's also a way to drive more successful outcomes for companies and the products that they build.

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

067: We Have Feelings On Logging Mar 23, 2022

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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 to aggregating and storing logs, having too many logs can end-up reducing the signal-to-noise ratio which can make it harder to debug a running application.

This week on the show, the crew talks about different categories of logging, why some logging is required for regulatory purposes, how you can replace certain logs with telemetry and metrics, and why you should absolutely never ever email yourself errors... except for when you should; because it's easy; and because we never learn from our mistakes.

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

066: Make Meetings Suck Less Mar 16, 2022

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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 and effort. We all have some degree of meeting PTSD. But, none of us is really sure what to do about it.

This week on the show, the crew talks about their love-hate relationship with meetings. And, demonstrates that we're all a little different when it comes to right-sizing our meeting agendas. Carol, with her team of 20, burns through her standup in under 30-minutes. Ben, with his team of 3, spends the first 20-minutes of each stand-up just talking about movies. And, both of them are happy with their stand-up experience.

That's part of the problem - there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to good meetings. That said, we do all agree on a few things: silence can be golden; it's OK (but hard) to leave irrelevant meeting; and, no meeting attendee should ever have to prepare for a meeting a head of time - don't be giving people homework!

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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

065: TDD In the Trenches with Scott Stroz Mar 09, 2022

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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't. And in that moment, you finally see for yourself what value automated testing could have brought to the table.

On today's show, the crew talks to Scott Stroz about his experience with Test Driven Development (TDD); and, about how he has come to understand that testing makes possible what would have otherwise been impossible. With solid testing practices in place, Scott was able to refactor an exceedingly convoluted intake form that rendered 25 buttons, 6 unique workflows, and took the user through up to 28 steps. Crunch those numbers and try telling me that the chance of making a mistake isn't absolute. And yet, thanks to a rigorous test-first coding methodology, Scott was able to completely refactor this workflow - from the ground-up - and delivery it on-time and without error!

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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 episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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