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 is oftentimes much more challenging than we expect. On today's show, we talk about the complex systems that we've built personally; and, how we attempt to keep them online in the face of uncertainty.

As a funny aside on the topic of complexity, checkout Tom Scott's video: The Problem with Time & Timezones.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

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 Adam singing, My application don't want none unless you got Bun, hun!

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.

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Full show notes and transcript here.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 helpful to identify a single, small challenge for the day; a challenge that can be accomplish and celebrated. This technique is what Carol calls the "Power of One".

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.

Full show notes and transcript here.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 games, API implementations, front-end frameworks, and more.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

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 not building features sooner, building the perfect demo for clients, and the "trap" of having to innovate. And that's not even everything! Carol - we need you! You're our only hope!

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.

Full show notes and transcript here.

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 to best meet our customers where they are, we have to - in a sense - become our customers.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript.

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 fraudsters to circumvent. On today's show, we share our own war stories about detecting, preventing, and dealing with the aftermath of fraud on our own web-facing applications.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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. While this approach adds complexity in some ways, it also reduces complexity in other ways and creates a more clearly defined data model. Or, so he hopes.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 application dates in UTC time; but, he senses that this won't be appropriate for "Activity Streak" tracking. As such, he turns to his brilliant Working Code co-hosts for their sagely advice.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 - will often lead to better software outcomes.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 up talking past each other and going around in circles. Words aren't just effective, they're magical. Take, for example, a simple analogy: "It's the movie JAWS, but with cats!" — this will immediately conjure up entire worlds within the mind of the listener. So, do words matter? You bet your donkey they do!

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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-public method invocation; and, the inherent cost of everything.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 great time and was privileged to hang out with some truly wonderful people!

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 is always such a slog; and, how we can keep the momentum moving forward in order to get our projects over the finish-line.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 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.

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 something new. On today's show, Ben walks us through the pragmatic choices that he's made in order to try and keep progress moving forward even if it comes at the cost of elegance.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 how a security team can have a deeply collaborative relationship with a company that feels, at least for some, to be purely adversarial.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 user experience (UX) and the underlying technical details. On today's show, we talk about that EPD tension and how we might work to mitigate it.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 errors in a RESTful API.

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.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

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 some apprehension if it weren't for the fact that, in 30-years of hiring, Sean has never once had to fire an engineer for lack of ability. So, he's clearly figured out how to hire the right people using a proven and repeatable process.

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.