Episodes

Got a topic or a question for discussion? You can email us or send us a message on Twitter or Instagram.

198: Battling Build Complexity

2 October, 2024

In this episode, the hosts discuss the complexities and frustrations of deployment automation and DevOps, particularly focusing on the challenges faced with makefiles, continuous integration (CI) processes, and build systems.

197: AI, The Innovation Dilemma, Promotions and More

25 September, 2024

In this week's episode, the hosts discuss a variety of topics including AI, leading in tough times, human connection, and more.

196: Building Better, Developer Experience

18 September, 2024

In this week's episode, Adam, Carol and Tim discuss Developer Experience (DX) and its importance in creating a comfortable and efficient workflow for developers.

195: When the Juice Isn't Worth the Squeeze

11 September, 2024

In this week's episode, the hosts discuss situations where the effort put in is not worth the results.

194: Manifesting a New App

4 September, 2024

In this week's episode, Adam consults with Carol and Tim about various aspects and challenges involved in the development of an app intended to streamline and digitize the process of organizing skydiving jumps.

193: Bonds Built in the Foxholes

28 August, 2024

In this episode, the hosts delve into the idea of whether bonds formed in moments of workplace trauma and high-stress situations are uniquely irreplaceable.

192: The Best of Code and The Worst of Code

21 August, 2024

In this episode, the hosts discuss their experiences with different codebases, from the best they've worked on to the worst.

191: Processing Processes

14 August, 2024

In this week's episode, the crew discuss finding the right balance in implementing processes within software development teams.

190: Career Advice For Our Younger Selves - Ben & Carol Edition

7 August, 2024

In this week's episode, Ben and Carol of the Working Code Podcast reflect on career advice they would give to their younger selves.

189: Career Advice For Our Younger Selves

31 July, 2024

In this episode, Tim and Adam discuss career advice for their younger selves, including the importance of job changes for salary increases, focusing on programming tasks rather than managerial roles, and the hazards of tying one's identity to a specific programming language.

188: Yeeting Changes to Production - Code Reviews

24 July, 2024

In this week's episode, Tim returns to the podcast for a discussion on code reviews.

187: Is it Possible to be a Solo Developer in 2024?

17 July, 2024

In this week's episode, Adam and Ben talk about the feasibility of being a solo developer in 2024.

186: Warm Blankies For Your Work Insecurities

10 July, 2024

In this week's episode Ben and Carol delve into their personal and professional insecurities.

185: Adam's A/B Testing MVP

3 July, 2024

On this week's show, Adam and Ben explore the complexities of implementing AB testing in email campaigns.

184: Solving World Peace with Code Comments

26 June, 2024

On today's show, Adam and Ben talk about their respective strategies for leaving comments within code.

183: Who's Got the Beans? Carol's New Project

19 June, 2024

In this episode, the team discusses various aspects of starting new projects, dealing with both personal and professional challenges, and the excitement and fears around initiating new work.

182: Coffee Talk and Catching Up

12 June, 2024

On today's show, Tim and Carol share personal updates while Adam and Ben are away. Carol discusses her challenging workday involving a difficult rebase and adjusting to a new routine after moving to Texas.

181: More Laws of Software

5 June, 2024

On today's show, we continue our discussion of the entries outlined on the website, the Laws of Software. Topics include McKinley's law on boring technologies, Doerr's law on aligning team vision, and Fitt's law on target touchability.

180: The Laws of Software

29 May, 2024

On today's show, we discuss a few of the entries outlined on the website, the Laws of Software. Topics include Atwood's Law on JavaScript, Cunningham's Law on getting answers, Parkinson's Law on getting things done, Goodhart's Law on taking measurements, Hofstadter's Law on inevitable failure, and the Peter Principle.

179: AI Sells You on AI

22 May, 2024

On today's show, Tim gears-up for a farm insurance conference out in Nashville where he's hoping to educate farmers on the pros and cons of artificial intelligence (AI).

178: Upgrading From Node 0.10

15 May, 2024

This week on the podcast, Ben has been incrementally building a data export feature for his customers. Carol has discovered that if she doodles circles with her non-dominant hand, it frees her up to focus on reading. Tim is continuing to improve his AI voice-agent. And, Adam is battling some pretty steamy code rot.

177: Infinite Invisibility Timeout

8 May, 2024

Adam uses the new CSS color functions for HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness). Ben dives into the Algolia search service. Carol is trying to alleviate performance concerns around an N+1 SQL problem. Tim is getting some great feedback regarding his AI-powered call system.

176: Triumph and Fail Safe Space

1 May, 2024

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Tim had to build an internal CAPTCHA system in order to protect his web-based payment forms. Adam created an open-source JavaScript library for mocking ES modules. And Ben falls back in love with ColdFusion.

175: Build Times, Overcompensating, Mentoring and More

24 April, 2024

On today's show, we cover a variety of topics. Ben talks about overcompensation at work. Carol talks about how her current task got away from her. Tim talks about the generation smoking ban going into effect in England. And Adam talks about the challenges of mentoring junior developers.

174: When Your Software Has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

17 April, 2024

On today's show, we talk about incidents and outages at work.

173: Shopping for Solutions - Payments and Compliance Auditing

10 April, 2024

Adam picks Tim's brain searching for the perfect solution for payments and compliance auditing.

172: Building Your Own Standard Library

3 April, 2024

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?

171: From Tactics to Strategy

27 March, 2024

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 and more.

170: Thinking in UX with Thelma Van

20 March, 2024

On today's show, we talk to Thelma Van about integrating design into the product development workflow.

169: Buffer Overflow, Tabs vs Spaces

13 March, 2024

In this weeks episode, the crew follow up on last weeks topic of memory management and weigh-in on tabs vs spaces.

168: Memory Safety Mandate

6 March, 2024

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. Second, Apple announced that it will halt work on Titan, its autonomous electric vehicle project.

167: Everyone Likes Their Own Brand

28 February, 2024

On today's show, we talk about our own personal brands; how they can help us; how they sometimes hurt us; and, how the goals of brand-building can change over time.

166: What's 'Onboarded' to You?

21 February, 2024

On today's show, we respond to a listener question from Kamil Maráz regarding onboarding.

165: Agile Methodology with Brian Sadler

7 February, 2024

Today, we talk to Brian Sadler; a seasoned software developer and Agile coach - about what Agile is, what parts of it work the best, and where teams often go wrong in their interpretation of best practices.

164: Solo Programming, Chrome Monoculture and More - Potluck

31 January, 2024

On this week's show, we explore a variety of topics. Solo programming, Chrome monoculture, family tech support and more.

163: Exposing Yourself, to New Tech

24 January, 2024

Is dabbling in new technology really moving the needle? Does learning a little of this and little of that really make for a more robust engineer? Or, is there more value to be gained from depth of understanding?

162: A Question of Time

17 January, 2024

Ben never has enough time to accomplish everything that he wants to accomplish. The crew tries to help him out.

161: 2024 Goals

10 January, 2024

The week the crew go over their goals for 2024.

160: Design Systems and Coding Philosophy

3 January, 2024

Happy New Year! This week, we ease into 2024 with a variety of topics.

159: No Effort December Returns

27 December, 2023

After a stressful year, we happily ease into another round of 'No Effort December' in which the conversations flow without concern or constraint.

158: The Premortem Premortem

20 December, 2023

What's better than premortems? Premortems for your premortems. This week Carol and Ben talk about potential problems and solutions for Carol's upcoming pre-mortem session.

157: Dead Man's Snitch Deep Dive with Adam Cameron

13 December, 2023

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.

156: JSON, StackOverflow, Testing - Hot Takes

6 December, 2023

On today's show, we cast off the social filters and lay down some hot takes!

155: Software We're Thankful For

29 November, 2023

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.

154: What Could Go Wrong? Pre-Mortems and Log Levels

22 November, 2023

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, structured logging, and role of different log levels.

153: Our Biggest Failures

15 November, 2023

On today's show, we talk about our biggest failures and being open with failure.

152: Cron Heatmaps, Harvard AI, and Ben's Book - What's On Your Workbench

8 November, 2023

On today's show, we talk about visualizing your cron heatmap, Harvard's AI course, and we get an update on Ben's book.

151: Async Human Solutions

1 November, 2023

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.

150: What's on Your Workbench #3

25 October, 2023

This week we go around the table and see what the hosts have going on.

149: Margin For Error

18 October, 2023

In this episode, Adam and Tim talk about margin for error in various aspects of software development, business and our personal lives.

148: The Day The Code Stood Still

11 October, 2023

In this episode, the crew speculate on what would happen if every coder just stopped coding.

147: Potluck #9

4 October, 2023

This week, we go around the table and talk about a variety of topics. Transactive Memory Systems Theory, fresh starts, ticketing systems and force-multipliers.

146: Resiliency is Hard

27 September, 2023

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.

145: Shiny New Things - Bun, Svelte, Skeleton

20 September, 2023

Adam, our early-adopter in residence, talks to Carol about Bun, Skeleton, and Svelte.

144: The Power of One

13 September, 2023

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'.

143: Moving On, Rewriting, Replatforming

6 September, 2023

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.

142: Tangents All the Way Down

30 August, 2023

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.

141: Building Stuff So You Can Build Stuff

23 August, 2023

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.

140: Fraud, What is it Good For?

16 August, 2023

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.

139: New Tables vs New Columns

9 August, 2023

This week on the show, the crew discusses the benefits and complexities of adding new tables vs new columns to a database.

138: Ben Goes Streaking

2 August, 2023

As Ben builds-out Dig Deep Fitness, he wants to include an 'Activity Streak' indicator. As such, he turns to his brilliant Working Code co-hosts for their sagely advice.

137: The Grug Brained Developer

26 July, 2023

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'.

136: Words, Do They Matter?

19 July, 2023

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. So, do words matter?

135: Note To Self v0.3.0

12 July, 2023

On today's episode, 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.

134: Ben Goes to a Conference

5 July, 2023

On this week's episode, the crew talks to Ben about his recent trip to CFCamp in Germany, and about conferences more broadly.

133: The Final Stretch

28 June, 2023

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.

132: Virtual Reality

21 June, 2023

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

131: Starting From Scratch

14 June, 2023

Ben has finally started to write code for Dig Deep Fitness. 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.

130: Book Club - The Phoenix Project

7 June, 2023

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.

129: New Features vs Maintenance

31 May, 2023

On today's show, we talk about the tension between Engineering, Product, and Design and how we might work to mitigate it.

128: Potluck #8

24 May, 2023

This week on the show, we discuss a variety of web and web-adjacent topics.

127: How Tech Interviewing is Broken with Sean Corfield

17 May, 2023

On today's show, we talk to Sean Corfield about his take on the 'Tech Interview' process.

126: Documenting Decisions

10 May, 2023

This week on the show, we talk about documentation. And not just the 'how' of software, but the 'why'.

125: What's on Your Workbench? #2

3 May, 2023

On today's show, the crew discusses a variety of topics around what they've been working on.

124: We Are Juniors For Life

26 April, 2023

On today's show, we reflect on the YouTube video, 15 Years of Dev in a Nutshell.

123: Negative 10x Developers

19 April, 2023

On today's episode, we go hard in the other direction, talking about the much less mythical -10x engineer.

122: Coding Hot Takes

12 April, 2023

This week on the show, we talk about stuff we've been working on or thinking about lately.

121: Ben's Testing Tribulations

5 April, 2023

We decided to dig into the topic of 'what to test' more closely.

120: Freelancing with Nolan Erck

29 March, 2023

As Carol launches her Freelancing career, we thought it would be valuable to interview Nolan Erck, Owner and Director at South of Shasta.

119: Potluck #7

22 March, 2023

On today's show, we all bring something juicy to consider for Potluck #7.

118: Things We Should Be Doing But, You Know... Reasons

15 March, 2023

On today's show, we talk about all that sweet, sweet stuff we ought to be doing and why we can't quite motivate to get any of it done!

117: Champions of Truth

8 March, 2023

On today's episode we review the listener submissions and crown the one winner who correctly selected all of our lies.

116: The State of Developer Conferences with Brian Rinaldi

1 March, 2023

Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly and long time friend of the show, recently wrote a blog post titled 'The State of Developer Conferences' which shares a theory as to why both online and IRL (In Real Life) conferences are struggling to reach pre-pandemic attendance.

115: Self-Care For Developers

22 February, 2023

We thought it would be nice to reflect on how we've all changed during the pandemic; and, share the little things that we do in order to keep our wits about us.

114: Carol Got Laid-Off

15 February, 2023

On today's show, Carol graciously and courageously joins us to talk about her experience, the ensuing emotional roller coaster, and some of the fascinating steps that she's taken to help improve her outcome.

113: Surviving A Layoff

8 February, 2023

On today's show, we talk about the state of the industry, share tips on becoming more resilient in uncertain time, and talk about what do if and when the pink slip commeth.

112: Listener Questions

1 February, 2023

This week, we reach into our bag of listener questions.

111: How To Learn Stuff Good

25 January, 2023

On today's show, we share our respective approaches to learning from the ground up, including reading the manual, building applications from scratch, and everything in between.

110: Measuring Impact At Work

18 January, 2023

On today's show, we look at what goes into making those good days 'good' and those bad days 'bad'.

109: Best of 2022

11 January, 2023

On today's show, out editor is gonna share a selection of his favorite clips from the past year (2022)

108: 2022 Year In Review

4 January, 2023

On this episode, the crew reflects on the past year in terms of fitness, technology, personal growth, and reading goals; and, celebrates some wins and laments some losses.

107: Through The Wormhole

28 December, 2022

Ben talks about the crippling attachment he has to his own fingers (and why he won't work with wood); Adam talks about how excited he is for the v1.0 release of Svelte Kit; and, Tim reflects on the blinding speed with which people seem to be to making science and technology breakthroughs.