036: Blogs and Digital Gardens

Blogging is a win-win activity. Not only does the act of writing help burn knowledge into your long-term memory, it also acts as an easily searchable repository of your own thoughts. Furthermore, it helps other people solve similar problems when they stumble upon your blog in the future.

The value-add of blogging is obvious; the way start blogging is less clear. This week, Adam, Ben, and Tim talk to Carol about her desire to start blogging. The discussion touches on tooling, platforms, hosting, content, and strategy which Adam sums up nicely as:

Do whatever it takes to get started soon. Just get into the habit of writing.

Notes & Links

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Ben: yeah. Yeah, because like, it's it, if I have to go back and edit it to me, and this is just me, if it starts to feel like homework, whereas before that, it feels very much like passion.

[00:00:13] Adam: surprised that you don't turn this into another day's post, right? Like, so then you've the, it's seven weeks later or whatever, but you write a new post to said, Hey, I got

[00:00:20] Adam: a comment on this

[00:00:21] Ben: So that's what I will

[00:00:23] Carol: You do. that,

[00:00:23] Ben: I'll like, I'm like, I'm like a, a rolling forward. Not rolling back. Like I'm not going to change the old post, but I will write a new one talking about what I learned.

[00:00:32] Adam: And hopefully you go back to the old one. You leave a link at the top. Actually, there's an update to this. Go read this too. Most of the time.

[00:00:40] Carol: So does

[00:00:41] Intro

[00:00:41] Carol: dose Okay, here we go. It is show number 36 and on today's show, we're going to be discussing blogging and maybe the concept of digital gardening but as usual, we're going to start with traps and fails and Carol it's her turn to go first.

[00:01:13] Carol's Triumph

[00:01:13] Carol: Yeah, I'm going with two big wins. I got a new tattoo

[00:01:16] Adam: Yeah,

[00:01:18] Carol: super excited about that. It's

[00:01:20] Tim: where, what is it? Yeah.

[00:01:21] Carol: it's on my ribs and it is a side piece of the mountains with the trees and similar birds flying around. So by the end of the year, I want to have a full like sidepiece done.

[00:01:33] Carol: So it's just the top part. I've already got the middle one. So I'm going to put a big compass down on my

[00:01:37] Tim: You said ribs, right? Okay.

[00:01:40] Carol: Up

[00:01:40] Tim: Okay.

[00:01:42] Carol: I'll send you guys a picture. You can see it. It's

[00:01:44] Ben: it

[00:01:44] Tim: Is it three little birds

[00:01:46] Carol: And there are three little birds actually. Three little birds. Yeah. All right. And then do you guys have things you hate doing at work?

[00:01:56] Carol: Like there's something you just despise doing for whatever reason it is? Yeah. Yeah. Mine's opening Jared task. I hate it. I would rather work out of a notebook checklist and go spend time opening Jared

[00:02:09] Ben: Interesting.

[00:02:10] Carol: So today after a call, I opened three JIRA

[00:02:14] Adam: Hmm.

[00:02:15] Carol: Didn't whine about it and complain, just put them in and moved

[00:02:19] Ben: is the, what's the source of friction when it comes to opening? Jared, just purely emotional.

[00:02:24] Carol: I avoid it. Yeah. I just completely avoid it. Unlike, Hey, product owner, you go open these tasks. Like I'm going to keep coding someone else, open this and put it in there and everyone will see

[00:02:35] Adam: it sounds like you think it's not a useful, valuable use of your time?

[00:02:39] Carol: I don't know. Cause when I go back to them, I'm really happy they're there and I'm happy to documentations on it, but.

[00:02:44] Ben: Okay.

[00:02:45] Carol: I just hate it. I hate opening Jared's task. I don't know why

[00:02:49] Tim: Now you remember when you used to work with us, did that our Argyris system it's so there's so many fields I don't care about. I don't even know what half of them are. Not even half 75%. I fill out the title and the description. And like, I don't know where the rest of this crap is. I don't know. w you know, other people need it,

[00:03:06] Tim: for their, you know, people love run reports.

[00:03:08] Tim: So is yours that too? You got too many fields or is it simpler than ours?

[00:03:12] Carol: Not, no, it's all though assigned. Like, it's just, it knows the project I'm on. So I went to it opened it. It's good to go. It's ready. It's literally putting in a title and then I screenshotted the slack message of

[00:03:23] Adam: you didn't even copy and

[00:03:25] Carol: being open. I didn't even copy and paste. I took a screenshot of the slack message and said CFO

[00:03:31] Tim: even text search that come on, Carol.

[00:03:33] Carol: no, it'll get better. I'm sure when someone works at, but I opened three and didn't complain.

[00:03:41] Ben: Okay.

[00:03:41] Adam: now. You're complaining now.

[00:03:42] Ben: I will say though, that I find, I enjoy tasks a lot more when I create them as opposed to when a project manager creates them. Cause I find that the granularity of the tasks is really off, not off base, but like it's much larger per ticket than what I would do if I were creating tickets myself.

[00:04:02] Ben: So then I find I have to take their ticket and break it up into a bunch of other tickets. Although I only recently learned from you all that you could make sub tasks, which I didn't realize. So maybe I, in retrospect could have taken those and just added sub tasks. But I didn't know that existed.

[00:04:18] Adam: see, I'm the overcommunicator I love like creating tickets and making to-do lists and all that stuff.

[00:04:24] Ben: Yo, I can't remember anything. If I have to do something it's in a ticket and if it's not an a ticket, I will not remember to do it.

[00:04:33] Adam: Yeah,

[00:04:35] Carol: I have a notebook. I'm good. Does nobody else knows about the items didn't work in

[00:04:39] Carol: my

[00:04:39] Adam: but I can't, I can type a whole heck of a lot faster than I can have. I have never found a good system for keeping track of like two dues for me locally or like on my computer. that allows me like good separation between work and personal. And so like personal, I use a little notebook that I carry around in my pocket just because then I'll have it with me, even if I'm not at the computer, but for work stuff, everything is a ticket.

[00:05:06] Ben: Yeah,

[00:05:07] Carol: Well, good for you. I don't do that.

[00:05:14] Ben: but I'm the same way. And then I get not frustrated, but sometimes a manager will be like, so what have you been up to? Or, like, what do you got on your plate? I want to be like, it's all written down. Literally everything I do is

[00:05:26] Adam: You can query that.

[00:05:26] Ben: Yeah.

[00:05:28] Carol: you can find it. All right. What about you?

[00:05:32] Adam's Failure

[00:05:32] Adam: well, I had a little bit of hold an interpersonal scuffle earlier today. Totally outside of my job. but it's just got me in a little bit of fog. It wasn't even really a fight. It was just, I did not come away from a conversation that I had with this person

[00:05:46] Tim: Software related. Right.

[00:05:47] Adam: Yeah. Software-related it just, it rubbed me the wrong way.

[00:05:50] Adam: I was in a funk at the end of the conversation and that lasted like another two hours. And I, like we, when we sat down for dinner tonight, I recognized that I just don't have the patience to be around my children right now. Cause they were like way, way, way wound up. And I knew I was gonna like lose my cool with them.

[00:06:07] Adam: And so I was like, I checked with my wife and I said, okay, I'm just going to go like sit in a dark room with the door, shut by myself and eat my dinner. And that was nice because she came up later and she was like, you made the right choice because. A handful tonight. but now, I'm happy cause I get to see you guys and have a nice conversation.

[00:06:25] Adam: So that's gonna definitely boost my mood.

[00:06:28] Ben: Yeah,

[00:06:29] Tim: see,

[00:06:30] Carol: we could

[00:06:30] Adam: We'll see about that.

[00:06:32] Carol: help

[00:06:32] Adam: I mean, Carol's already pooping on me, so

[00:06:34] Tim: I need to hate her on my own show.

[00:06:38] Adam: that can be arranged.

[00:06:41] Ben: there's a book that I really love. I haven't read it in a while, but there's one called the four agreements by this guy, Don Miguel Ruiz. And it's basically just four agreements that you make with yourself to live a better life. And one of the agreements I think is just, don't take it personally. And I'm always like, whoa, I get to that one.

[00:06:59] Ben: Like the other ones are sort of not fluffy, but they're like way easier. And then you get to, don't take it personally. I'm like, excuse me, sir. I'm not like a third degree black belt in self-control here. Not taking it personally. That's like, that's not a light app.

[00:07:14] Adam: Let's assume, I assume that's about not taking anything personally, right?

[00:07:17] Ben: it's a lot about like, the things that people say are about them. Not about you, that kind of stuff.

[00:07:23] Carol: Totally projecting.

[00:07:25] Tim: Yeah, it's interesting. We took, our company since it's all these like trainings and we took a negotiation one. You remember, I talked to in earlier podcasts, how I hate negotiation. I'm not good at it, but one of the things they brought up was the lizard brain. I forget which the technical term of that part of your brain.

[00:07:41] Tim: But whenever that when you get emotional, right? When someone triggers that you go into that fight or flight response and all rationality goes out the window. And so there was a whole section on trying to identify the triggers or the F recognizing that feeling. When you get into that sort of lizard brain, part of your head to like step back and go wait a minute.

[00:08:04] Tim: Okay. I'm not rational here. I need to be aware that I'm not rational and adjusted to it, which it sounds like you did Adam. I mean, you pull, retreated from your family and the kids and I mean that's, and I think you also

[00:08:14] Adam: Maybe not soon enough,

[00:08:16] Tim: Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

[00:08:17] Adam: I might've said some things that weren't the nicest either, so,

[00:08:22] Tim: Well,

[00:08:22] Carol: Stop being reptilian,

[00:08:24] Tim: it's learning, it's learning.

[00:08:25] Adam: That's me. How about you, Ben?

[00:08:27] Ben's Failure

[00:08:27] Ben: I, I actually have one that is a little bit along the lines of yours, but not personal. I sort of let myself get sucked into. Not a dark place, but a very frustrated place. I was listening to a podcast last weekend and, there was a very well-known community. someone who's very well known in the JavaScript community.

[00:08:47] Ben: and once again, not this person, but this is something I've heard a bunch of times. People will say, when you switch from angular to react, you learn more about JavaScript. And that just like grinds my gears. Cause I, I it's all just JavaScript. Like literally everything you write is JavaScript. The difference in angular is that you're using some HTML templating and in react you're using JSX, but like all the data that you collect, all the data that you aggregate, all of the Ajax requests that you deal with, like all of the filtering and the building objects.

[00:09:24] Ben: Just deconstructing objects. Like it's all JavaScript having to understand how variables work and how functions work and how scopes work and how hoisting works. Like that's all the same. And it's just like, I still want it. I get so frustrated. And I, and then I get frustrated because obviously I love angular.

[00:09:42] Ben: So it feels to me like now there's this, there's a growing sentiment of these people. there's a subset of people. Like there's a subset of Postgres people who are like, why aren't you using PostgreSQL? this a

[00:09:55] Tim: Hey.

[00:09:57] Ben: there's a subset of react. People don't look at react as like react is a great framework.

[00:10:02] Ben: And we use it to build our stuff. There's a subset of people who are like the world has chosen react, react is the future. The people have spoken

[00:10:11] Tim: React is so new though. It's still

[00:10:13] Ben: no, I know, but I'm just like,and I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush, right? But like my failure here is that I like clearly went off the deep end

[00:10:23] Adam: you took it

[00:10:23] Ben: I heard this.

[00:10:24] Ben: Yeah. I took it very

[00:10:25] Carol: took it personally,

[00:10:26] Ben: and it's, I have, a lot of scarring from working in ColdFusion for the last two decades. And having everyone say, yo cool fusions, dad, why would you use ColdFusion? I can't believe anyone still uses that anymore. And thankfully I still get the laugh all the way to the bank.

[00:10:39] Ben: but I don't know. So I try not to take those things personally, but sometimes it feels like an attack from someone who was not even trying to attack. So it's,

[00:10:49] Adam: We'll have to talk about it some other time, because it's not today's topic, but I kind of agree with whoever said that

[00:10:54] Adam: in some

[00:10:55] Ben: That's because you're part of the problem.

[00:10:57] Adam: it's, it's just JavaScript. Angular is just not, but I think that there are, you're a lot closer to the metal right. Of Jay, if JavaScript was the metal than writing reactor, you're a lot, you're using those mechanisms a lot more in the fundamental space than an abstraction on top of them.

[00:11:15] Adam: For example,

[00:11:16] Adam: you're looping over and looping over an array and spitting out some components that represent each item in that array in react. You use a map in angry angular use what NG loop from number

[00:11:27] Ben: there's an NG repeat or an NG

[00:11:29] Adam: And you repeat. That's what I was thinking of. Yeah. and so there's minor differences, but I think that, yeah, anyway, we don't have to get

[00:11:34] Ben: but I will just say that the data that you had to build in order to iterate over, like

[00:11:40] Ben: you built that with all the maps and the

[00:11:42] Ben: four

[00:11:43] Adam: eaches and the filter is writing more JavaScript and less like framework specific code

[00:11:48] Ben: Right. and that's fair. And I think, part of choosing any particular framework is being able to lean on the things that the framework gives you. So I'm not, I don't fret on that. It's more like. it's like still it's all the same. And it's, we talked about, I think Tim mentioned maybe it was on the last one, the,curse of knowledge.

[00:12:06] Ben: I think he talked about where it's like, you can't unknow the things you've already learned in order to have a better perspective. And, I was thinking about this and I, someone had commented on, on my rant about it a little bit, and I realized like I've been doing Jeff's confer a hell of a long time.

[00:12:21] Ben: and I was doing JavaScript before there was angular and wherever it is, like you had no JavaScript back then, because it was the wild west and things were crazy. And even in jQuery, jQuery was kind of crazy and how it treated and say, like this references and everyone ran into things where like you get memory leaks and IE, when you were holding onto dominoed references, or like if you had to bind an event handler in a loop.

[00:12:45] Ben: And inside the handler, you referenced the loop index, like I, in a for-loop and like they all end up referencing the same value because the eye gets hoisted. And then like you, you had to learn a lot about JavaScript to get your stuff to work. And I realized like I'm coming into angular and react and to wherever I am with like this wealth of knowledge of how JavaScript works to begin with.

[00:13:06] Ben: So it's like, I can't, I can no longer see effectively the, what does it mean to learn JavaScript in the context of one of these frameworks? So it's anyway.

[00:13:19] Adam: We'll fight about it some other

[00:13:20] Ben: Yeah.

[00:13:23] Ben: So that's me, Tim, what do you got going on?

[00:13:26] Tim's Triumph

[00:13:26] Tim: So I have a triumph. I'll call it a triumph. I think I understand myself a little bit better this week than I did last week. And I didn't bring it up last week cause I was in the midst of it. But I think I sort of have, I don't know if you call it seasonal depression or not, but I realize a pattern of my life that every year, like when may rolls around, I get extremely happy and excited, energetic because it's summer vacation.

[00:13:54] Tim: Right. You're getting out of school and you're looking at you look forward to that all year and you get there and it's awesome. And then when August starts to get close, I get really in a bad funk. I mean a bad funk because school's starting and I, so last week I just, this was beyond Mo burnt. It was, I wasn't burned out.

[00:14:15] Tim: I just. I didn't want to do anything at all. I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want to wash, shave D I didn't want to do it. And I had to, but I just, I honestly, I hope no one from work is listening to this. I honestly did the absolute minimum I needed to get through that week. And it finally dawned on me like around, I think Friday, I think, after talking to you guys.

[00:14:41] Tim: Cause I wasn't, normally I think about what am I putting off? What am I avoiding? And I was avoiding everything. I mean, absolutely everything. And the reason I realized is because the kids were going back to school and my body was telling me it's time to go back to school. And growing up, I was a shortest kid in school.

[00:15:00] Tim: Until like ninth grade. I mean, I got picked on relentlessly. I mean, I was bullied badly and I just stuffed it down, just, just stuffed it down. And that's sort of how my sense of humor. I became sort of like the cutdown king. I couldn't beat you up, but man, I could tell you all about your mama and make people cry with verbal attacks.

[00:15:21] Tim: and, it's been, you know what, I'm 50 years old now. I'm just finally realizing I, when it's time to go back to school, it doesn't matter. I'm not going back to school, but my body goes into fight mode and fear mode because I'm just so scared. And as soon as my kids went back to school, we checked them in.

[00:15:36] Tim: They got their classes this week. I've been great. I mean, cause I started Monday, so it's like it just like a light switch. So I know myself better. So I think next year I just need to prepare myself, man.

[00:15:49] Carol: I mean, it almost sounds like, like for real, like PTSD from it, like you have this trigger things that it really happens.

[00:15:56] Tim: Yeah. So, I mean, I talked to our general manager and I explained to her, I told her what I, once I figured out, like, look, she's like, I haven't heard much from you this week. And I just told her exact kind of, exactly what I told you guys. And I'm like, I'm just not in a good place right now. So there were supportive and I appreciate that, but Yeah.

[00:16:11] Carol: Well, that's good. That's

[00:16:12] Adam: So we've,mentioned, I think previously that I basically watched no broadcast television and stick mostly to YouTube. And so, I follow a lot of people on YouTube and I listened to a bunch of podcasts of my favorite creators on YouTube. And it's kind of fun to see a little bit behind the curtain of their industry.

[00:16:30] Adam: And one of the things that I think keeps coming up is that you'll see them say like, sometimes you just have to post something, they're talking about posting videos on their channel or whatever, but they have to post something that is not necessarily their best work. they're not super proud of it, but they are on a schedule.

[00:16:45] Adam: they, maybe they have a sponsor to, get their video off or whatever. And ultimately I think where they land is like, sometimes you just have to fund it in like, not everything you do is going to be your best work. Not every week is going to be your best week of the year. And you have to give yourself that leeway to, okay.

[00:17:01] Adam: That was a down week. And I'm going to do that again.

[00:17:04] Tim: yeah.

[00:17:04] Tim: I was just tempted just to take some time off, but it's like, I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm just going to stay in bed and feel sorry for myself. But as far as the bullying goes, that stopped when I finally shot up and I took weight training, like every day in school and got a bunch more muscular and went up to five 11, that immediately stopped all the pulley.

[00:17:26] Ben: you and you were talking in one of the previous episodes about, didn't the janitor step in. And it was like really important.

[00:17:33] Adam: Yeah. I think that might've been in your origin story.

[00:17:35] Tim: Yeah, he, yeah, he saved my butt in the middle school.

[00:17:39] Adam: Yeah.

[00:17:40] Ben: I definitely feel better in the summer with the light, so I don't know if I would get seasonal affect disorder. It's harder for me in the winter months. ironically though, I really enjoy when I wake up and it's still dark out. Cause it makes the world feel a lot smaller and cozier. I find if I wake up and it's already laid out, I feel like I've lost part of the day, even though

[00:18:03] Carol: I've already missed

[00:18:04] Ben: like, I'm losing time here.

[00:18:06] Carol: completely get it. I grew up on the farm.

[00:18:08] Ben: You get it.

[00:18:10] Adam: All right. did we already mention, Ben your, your feature flags presentation and how the video of it is now on your blog and

[00:18:17] Ben: I don't remember. We may have mentioned it very

[00:18:19] Adam: if we haven't, then we are now and you can find it in the show notes, we'll link it. but yeah, if feature flags are great and, Ben did a great presentation.

[00:18:28] Adam: I watched it today. That was, probably the highlight of my day until I had that little scuffle. uh,

[00:18:32] Ben: I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Cause I give him like one presentation a decade. So, so it

[00:18:38] Ben: sounds like it

[00:18:39] Adam: two now.

[00:18:40] Ben: it sounds like it was time.

[00:18:43] Adam: Yeah.

[00:18:44] Ben: Fantastic.

[00:18:45] Tim: blog.

[00:18:46] Ben: Yeah, it

[00:18:48] Tim: what? We're talking about blogging today. How's that for a segue?

[00:18:52] Adam: There you go

[00:18:53] Ben: nailed

[00:18:54] Adam: like we know what we're doing here. So, yeah. Blogging. Carol, this was sort of your idea for a topic. Do you want to get us started?

[00:19:02] Getting Started in Blogging

[00:19:02] Carol: Yeah, sure. So I had mentioned last week and I'm not for sure if we cut it out or not. Cause it was just kind of an aside talk. So I'd have to go back and listen, but I have them wanting to start a blog and it's all because I feel like I have information that people care about. I really want to stop, solving my problems over and over again.

[00:19:21] Carol: And I feel like if I would just take the time to write it down, put it out there, it might help someone, nobody may ever look at it. But when I need that in a year, I can just go pull it and be like, oh yeah, that's where it was. But I have no idea where to start. Like I don't, I couldn't even begin to. Dark because I was looking online and I'm like, there's just so much information out there.

[00:19:44] Carol: Like where do you begin? Where do you go? What do you do? Like, is there hosting, you should look at, do you just go buy a domain, host it yourself? where do you store this? Like all of those things, like as a software engineer, I should know all of this pretty, pretty solid, but I don't, I just don't know where to begin.

[00:20:00] Carol: And I think that's, what's holding me back is not knowing where what's my first step. Other than saying I'm going to blog.

[00:20:07] Adam: Well, I think you just don't have that stereotypical, story arc for your career. Right. You kind of came into software engineering through the side door in the college

[00:20:15] Carol: Yeah,

[00:20:16] Adam: where a lot of people kind of were the nerdy kid, their whole lives. and that was just sort of the natural progression.

[00:20:21] Carol: Right. And so, I guess I missed out some, you guys spill, man.

[00:20:25] Tim: No, you had a real life for a while, so.

[00:20:28] Carol: I did that too.

[00:20:30] Ben: before we get into anything technical, I just want to underscore that you do have information and people will find it valuable. I think we had discussed in the, clean coders uncle Bob episode. I think I had mentioned that uncle Bob does some sort of back of the napkin math that says. The number of developers doubles every five years.

[00:20:49] Ben: So if you consider how long you've been doing web development, and you consider that most of the people that you interact with probably have only been doing it for maybe like two or three years. like you have a lot of information, a wealth of experience that definitely people want to know about. And to your earlier point, like you don't want to be solving the same problems over and over again.

[00:21:09] Ben: that information is great for you as well. But I think that's one of the biggest, just emotional hurdles that people have is anyone going to find this interesting? And the answer is yes. Yeah.

[00:21:19] Adam: Yeah.

[00:21:21] Carol: And so typically I'm pretty good with being vulnerable too. So I'm okay with being vulnerable and putting it out there and saying, this is how I solved it. Now, go tear it apart and tell me how I did it wrong, because that gives me the opportunity to learn and see what I've done wrong and grow from it.

[00:21:36] Carol: And right now I just kind of don't have that. I just do it how I want looks pretty good. Let's

[00:21:41] Tim: Cunningham's law in

[00:21:42] Carol: So yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:45] Tim: Put an answer out there. You'll get the, you'll get the right answer.

[00:21:48] Carol: And I'm okay with that.

[00:21:49] Adam: so I mean, to give you a little bit of a direct answer, I think that the best advice you could probably receive at this moment is to do whatever it takes to get started sooner. And so I think that probably the shortest path to publishing something is going to be to go to like wordpress.com or blogger, and one of these hosted free blogging sites and just sign up for an account and start blogging, and you'll have to pick you won't get like, Carol hamilton.com or something, but you'll get, whatever you choose.blogger.com or something, or.wordpress.com and just get in the habit of writing and then everything else can come after.

[00:22:26] Carol: Gotcha.

[00:22:26] Tim: with that because I've fallen into that trap before where I'm like the first thing I start doing as a software developer is to say, all right, what's my stack going to be. Right. Right. So I start looking at static site generation because that sounds cool. let's do some static site generation, and that way I can host it really cheap and S3.

[00:22:47] Tim: So I'll have static, I'll generate these static pages and I'll push it up to S and then I wind up spending all this time and energy on the, on the infrastructure and I don't have any content. And then I'm like, you know what? I've spent way too much time on this. And I give up, I've done that so many times.

[00:23:01] Adam: That's that I'm thinking that has a name, but I can't recall what it is, but I will just say there's a, that's a phenomenon. Right? And it's a well-known phenomenon. And part of what that is going through the process of like, allowing yourself to ideate and go nuts on the stack and all the little bits and bobs that are not the actual thing that you're trying to do.

[00:23:19] Adam: You're getting the endorphins and the adrenaline of like working on the thing without actually working on the thing. Right. You're doing the thing you already know. you're playing with the stock stack, you're playing with the technology. So you're in your comfort

[00:23:31] Adam: zone, but you're not actually taking on the thing that you said you wanted to take on,

[00:23:36] Tim: Yeah.

[00:23:38] Carol: And then I'm going to burn myself out and not getting it right. And then never start

[00:23:41] Tim: Yeah. Cause I wanted to do a cooking blog and I Just I went those motions, like, you know what, stop. And I just went on blogger and just use blogger and just start creating content and putting recipes down. So yeah, I would definitely recommend don't spend too much time worrying about what to put it on.

[00:23:59] Tim: Just start writing some content because you can always move that later.

[00:24:02] Adam: don't go with medium.

[00:24:04] Tim: Yeah, for sure.

[00:24:05] Ben: Could, even, publish using GitHub pages. I see some people do that where they'll use the,I think it can run on Jekyll or does, I think will run on a bunch of sort of static site things for free, right. Cause it's on the GitHub domain. but that's really easy because it's just a repository, which you know how to work with already.

[00:24:22] Ben: Right. I've already got that one down.

[00:24:23] Ben: marked down files.

[00:24:25] Ben: I

[00:24:26] Adam: Yeah. I mean, it's Jekyll is a Ruby thing, so if you want to customize it at all, you have to do it in Ruby and

[00:24:33] Carol: I'm sure someone's blog

[00:24:34] Adam: there's tons of material out there on how to do it. I use Jekyll for awhile. And I'm a tweaker, right? Like I gotta change my blog layout, every couple of years at least.

[00:24:44] Adam: And,

[00:24:44] Carol: Then you end up with a database. You don't have anyone who can export for your

[00:24:48] Adam: Hey, I worked around that. I just, I still haven't got all my old posts up, but I got it. I got a situation. I got access to it. I just gotta do the work.

[00:24:57] Ben: This is a weird piece of advice that I, and I hope this doesn't sound snooty, but as web developers, we're typically in a good place in our lives financially. and developers are also historically incredibly cheap. and sometimes you can get a lot of mileage by just throwing a little bit of money at the problem.

[00:25:20] Carol: And if there's like some sort of managed product that costs you a little bit of money, but gets you like way farther than you would probably have time to on your own. Like, don't be afraid of that. Like his blogger is that one, is it, is there a cost behind that

[00:25:35] Adam: I don't I

[00:25:36] Adam: don't think so. There might be like some premium ad-ons or something, but

[00:25:39] Tim: I mean the ones that advertise like, like, like

[00:25:42] Adam: ghost.

[00:25:44] Tim: and

[00:25:44] Adam: yeah.

[00:25:45] Tim: all these other ones.

[00:25:47] Adam: We usually stopped giving them free advertising

[00:25:49] Tim: Right.

[00:25:50] Carol: dang. It y'all be quiet,

[00:25:51] Tim: yeah.

[00:25:52] Tim: But if they advertise,

[00:25:52] Tim: typically it's going to be money. Right.

[00:25:54] Adam: yeah,

[00:25:55] Carol: yeah, I see those as more as like I'm an e-commerce site

[00:25:58] Carol: pages and

[00:25:58] Adam: yeah. I mean, it's totally possible to throw a blog on there.

[00:26:02] Ben: And I'm just saying, all I'm saying is like, don't necessarily take that off the table at Stebbins.

[00:26:08] Adam: But I would say start with something. and get in the habit of writing. And then once you can like, feel confident that you're going to continue the habit, then it's worth spending a few dollars on, like, it doesn't matter that it is not on your custom domain on day one. It doesn't matter that,

[00:26:23] Carol: so it's not like people are going to look at it and go, well, she must not be done that great. Cause she's on WordPress,

[00:26:28] Adam: no, I don't think so. I mean, I think that, further down the line, when, like, if you get to the point where you are a blogger, right? Like people read your material regularly, that is subscribed to your stuff and all that. Like when you get to that point, that's when you want to have your own domain, that's when you want to be in a little bit more control, because you're essentially building like a personal brand at that point.

[00:26:49] Adam: And that's when you don't want to be on wordpress.com, right? Like,

[00:26:52] Tim: well, but I mean, with WordPress, you can't upgrade right. To a custom

[00:26:55] Adam: oh yeah. You can buy a custom domain and do all that sort of thing.

[00:26:58] Carol: I've done that for friends.

[00:26:59] Tim: So, it might be worth starting with something that you had gives you a growth plan because I know a blogger. I don't, I'm not sure I'm not, I'd have to double check, but I don't see a way to change. No, wait, I take that back.

[00:27:11] Tim: It is my Timothy cunningham.com is on blogger and it's my domain

[00:27:15] Adam: Yeah. I know people that are on blogger that are in a custom domain as well. Although

[00:27:20] Tim: it doesn't cost anything.

[00:27:21] Adam: I think that they feel a little bit handcuffed by the platform though. I don't think there may not be a great way to get the content out if you wanted to take it somewhere else.

[00:27:28] Tim: well, it scares me with anything. Google is they could just shut it down. Like they're shutting down bookmarks right now. Like, they just shut down things. They're like, no, we're not doing anymore. And I could totally see them doing that with blogger because I don't see how they make money off of it.

[00:27:41] Adam: Yep.

[00:27:42] Ben: Yeah.

[00:27:42] Tim: but I want to ask, so the most seasoned person in this room right now, when it comes to blogging has obviously been I'm in bins, notoriously known for having a

[00:27:50] Ben: I do some things.

[00:27:51] Tim: very well-known blog. I think all of us know. So what is your routine like when it comes to blogging?

[00:27:59] Ben: I try to, I try to set aside a little time every morning to write whether or not that results in anything or whether or not I have anything to write about that. there's some variety there, but I try to make it part of the daily schedule so that I know it's coming. Like, it's not like I have to motivate to do it.

[00:28:18] Ben: It's here's the block of time where I've already set aside to do this every day. And I either have something to write or I don't, and things can supersede it. If there's something else that I need to be doing, but yeah. For me, I'm just a person who thrives in schedule. I have no self control, and I had don't have good motivation.

[00:28:38] Ben: So like I have to have clear boundaries to live in. Otherwise I don't function well, so I need the schedule. And, I was listening to, I think it's the shop talk show with Chris and, Dave Rupert and on it, Dave Rupert said something that I think is so key to at least how I think about blogging is he said he treats his blog as his drafts folder that he's not wringing his hands and trying to make sure everything is perfect before he publishes it.

[00:29:09] Ben: He just gets the draft version and then that's the thing he publishes. And I very much try to take that. Like, don't overthink it too much, get the information on the page. Run spellcheck and like, don't think too deeply about it. and I find that helps a lot for motivation because like, sometimes you'll hear people talk about their blogging and they'll mention something like, oh yeah, I've been working on this one post for the last three months.

[00:29:33] Ben: And I feel like I've got it to a point where I want to publish it. And you're like, I'm like, don't spend three months writing a blog post that's. That's a terrible return on investment in my opinion.

[00:29:41] Carol: That's a very long time to be dealing with a problem. Like for me, I want it in and

[00:29:46] Adam: I think it depends on what you're aiming for. Right. So there's different styles and that's kind of what I was alluding to with the digital gardening thing and the title here. So, if you are telling a story about a problem that you solved or about, the way something came to be, like history of, some relevant information, whatever, then I agree.

[00:30:05] Adam: You don't want that to take. No, wait a minute. Did that come out backwards? I don't know. It might take you a little while to, to put that together to make sure that the story makes sense that's not a little scatterbrained or whatever, I'm thinking three months is maybe a little bit excessive, but still like, three days, even three weeks, I think in the, in a large story format, would not be unreasonable now.

[00:30:27] Ben: I'm not saying three weeks of like eight hours a day, but, right. Well writing and editing for me when I write a blog post, it takes me an hour and then I'll edit it for like the next four hours. you do always catch my spelling mistakes.

[00:30:38] Adam: yeah, what can I say? It's my personality. But the other side of that coin is the quote unquote digital garden. And now I'm not an expert at this. I have been aware of the concept for a long time and it intrigues me and it's

[00:30:50] Tim: I never heard of it.

[00:30:50] The Digital Garden

[00:30:50] Adam: I want to get into basically think of it this way. when you're gardening in dirt, outside, you're planting seeds, you're weeding.

[00:30:59] Adam: Things are growing over time. You're tending to them, you're changing them, helping them grow the way you want them to grow. So a digital garden is you've got stuff that you write down ideas that you're developing and it's not fully formed necessarily. It could be maybe, maybe you get this idea and you just sit down for an hour and you bang the whole thing out.

[00:31:17] Adam: And maybe it's not perfectly written, but you get the whole thing done. And it's, it would make sense to somebody who read it versus, you, maybe you just have an idea for a thing, like, okay, conceptually, you might have a list of ideas of things you wanna write. And if you keep that private, that is not digital gardening, but you could publish that list on your blog, on your digital garden.

[00:31:40] Adam: And then, that could be a thing, right? the list grows over time. Maybe you'll pull things out of that. And maybe you'll just like write one little snippet there. and that's all that you need to write to get that out of your head. But sometimes that little snippet becomes a whole post of its own.

[00:31:52] Adam: It's a separate thing. And so it's more about getting things out of your brain and into something searchable like you were talking about not having to solve the same problem twice, or just that sorts of that sense of like, it's, you help it grow, but it helps you grow.

[00:32:08] Tim: So I guess an analogy. Kind of making another analogy for your digital garden, rather than trying to present to the wide world, the finished, completed, proof-read edited version of a novel. You just, you're putting an idea out there and you tend it and grow it in real time in public to winds up becoming that novel at the end of it.

[00:32:33] Adam: Yeah, absolutely. It could be. We've talked in the past about how, the Martian is such a great book. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but I, after reading the book learned, he wrote the first chapter and published it on his blog and people loved it so much that he just kept going.

[00:32:47] Adam: He wrote another chapter in public John's blog and, the whole thing was available for free. and he would go back and like have to change stuff because he learned new science things in chapter 11 or whatever that it would like totally affect the way chapter two goes. So he has to go back and rewrite the thing and,it's still worth going to see in the theater and it's still worth buying the book to have, because the finished product by itself is amazing, And you don't wanna have to go dig through all the blog post to get it, but

[00:33:11] Tim: it's intriguing. John Scalzi do the exact same thing. with, one, he has a series of books, but one of the particular books he's did that. He released a chapter at a time and there was periods of time in between. And he got feedback from everyone, right. People gave him critiques on the, some spelling and, and where they thought the stories should go.

[00:33:29] Adam: well actually,

[00:33:32] Tim: And then he, when the work was done, he released the whole thing. So that was pretty cool.

[00:33:37] Adam: do you have any idea what book that was.

[00:33:38] Tim: I'll tell you later, I don't know. Off the top of my head, he had a bunch of books in the series. It was. the old man's war.

[00:33:44] Adam: Oh, I love that series.

[00:33:45] Tim: Yeah, but it was part of that series. There's one book in that series.

[00:33:49] Tim: He did that. The old man's war is a fantastic siphon.

[00:33:52] Adam: Yeah, I think you might've recommended it to me.

[00:33:55] Tim: Yeah.

[00:33:56] Ben: I have very little motion motivation to go back and edit things. I know, I don't know if the idea of digital gardening would dovetail well with my personality. I feel like I get a lot of dopamine from that initial publication. and sometimes if there turns out to be something in it, that's blatantly wrong.

[00:34:16] Ben: Like I had some fundamental misunderstanding of how something worked and then someone in the comments was like, actually like that's totally off base. Sometimes I won't even edit it. I'll just go up and add a little thing at the top that says like caution, everything I said in this post was wrong.

[00:34:30] Ben: Please disregard.

[00:34:32] Adam: But everything below this line is

[00:34:34] Ben: yeah. Yeah, because like, it's it, if I have to go back and edit it to me, and this is just me, if it starts to feel like homework, whereas before that, it feels very much like passion.

[00:34:47] Adam: surprised that you don't turn this into another day's post, right? Like, so then you've the, it's seven weeks later or whatever, but you write a new post to said, Hey, I got

[00:34:54] Adam: a comment on this

[00:34:55] Ben: So that's what I will

[00:34:56] Carol: You do. that,

[00:34:57] Ben: I'll like, I'm like, I'm like a, a rolling forward. Not rolling back. Like I'm not going to change the old post, but I will write a new one talking about what I learned.

[00:35:06] Adam: And hopefully you go back to the old one. You leave a link at the top. Actually, there's an update to this. Go read this too. Most of the time.

[00:35:14] Carol: So does dose see, I like on stack overflow when someone will post an answer and then they update it below, like, oh, after looking at comment, I've actually put part of theirs into what I'm doing and here's the updated little snippet of what it could do.

[00:35:30] Ben: I am blown away at how dedicated people are to answering questions on stack overflow.

[00:35:35] Carol: I know I love it.

[00:35:37] Ben: a wealth of information and I could not motivate to do it at all.

[00:35:40] Tim: I used to.

[00:35:42] Adam: you know, when I used to spend a whole lot of time on stack overflow, it was when I was working at a huge company and I had lots of free time during the day.

[00:35:49] Carol: Yeah.

[00:35:51] Adam: And

[00:35:52] Carol: I'm just grateful people have answered.

[00:35:54] Tim: Well, what I love is when I look on stack overflow for an answer, and my answer is the solution to the problem. Like, oh man, I forgot that.

[00:36:03] Carol: How about when the answer is clearly wrong,

[00:36:06] Tim: Yeah.

[00:36:07] Carol: that happens to you. So don't just copy and paste out of there.

[00:36:10] Generating And Managing Ideas

[00:36:10] Ben: Yeah, sometimes. And this is just kind of going back to the idea of, do you have information that's worth sharing? sometimes the posts that I enjoy the most add almost no new information into the world, but it'll just be something I discovered in an existing API. Like, I'll be looking through Mozilla's developer network and I'm looking at the note API for like, for elements within a document.

[00:36:34] Ben: And I see a method I'm like, oh, I did not know that existed on the

[00:36:37] Carol: Ooh. Where'd that come from?

[00:36:39] Ben: go and I write a post I'm like, oh, I totally stumbled upon the fact that node has this method. And you can do this with this method. And like, that's the same exact thing that anyone who's searching through Mozilla would find.

[00:36:49] Ben: But like, this is my, I don't even want to call it, take on it, but it's just like my celebration of the fact that this exists. And now by writing it down, you sort of burn it into your own mental model of how the world works.

[00:36:59] Adam: And yeah. And you're surrounding it with the concepts that you would be thinking of while you're trying to come up with. There was that feature. What did you know? What's the thing and you search it, you're searching for those keywords that come to your mind on Google, and then you're gonna find your own blog posts.

[00:37:13] Ben: totally.

[00:37:13] Carol: I want this in my life. I must do this.

[00:37:16] Ben: And you can go into your Google Chrome configuration and you can add your own blog as a search engine so that you could do, like, if you type K roll and then a keyword it'll do like the site colon kind of a stuff and it automatically search just your site so you can like,

[00:37:33] Ben: yeah. You, so you

[00:37:34] Adam: have a blog post on how to do that? Ben? Cause we can link it in the show notes.

[00:37:37] Ben: ah, all right.

[00:37:38] Ben: One.

[00:37:40] Carol: Yeah.

[00:37:41] Adam: you got two weeks.

[00:37:43] Tim: I was going to say care. And one thing that helps, I found just my limited experience in the short period of time, I was actually actively writing my blog, was putting, if you have an error message, putting the error message in the text of the post, because a lot of times that's what people are Googling. Yep.

[00:38:02] Carol: Yeah. So don't take screenshots of the code and

[00:38:05] Tim: you can, but somewhere you need that, that in there,

[00:38:08] Tim: So it's searchable,

[00:38:10] Adam: screenshots can be useful

[00:38:11] Carol: Can you believe the person that doesn't want to open a Jerrod ticket that doesn't want to put words in there once to actually write about problems being solved.

[00:38:18] Adam: you can copy and paste out of the error messages.

[00:38:21] Carol: Yeah.

[00:38:22] Carol: Like, did you want to look for this.

[00:38:24] Ben: one thing that I do, that's been very helpful for me is I keep all of my random thoughts in a Trello. So I have Trello on my phone and I'll just be out and about, and somebody will say something or I'll be listening to an audio book or podcast, and I'll have like a little flash of insight or something that peaks my curiosity.

[00:38:43] Ben: And I can just open on my phone, create a card in my JIRA board. And then that's where I keep all my random thoughts. And like 90% of it is just garbage that I'll never address again. but you know, you've moved this stuff that, that, that feels good to the top. And then you have stuff to write about and it, again, it's like, it doesn't matter how big it is.

[00:39:02] Ben: Sometimes you just start with a lot of small things and you build a rhythm and then you can start to write bigger and bigger if you want.

[00:39:09] Adam: that reminded me of something. So again, another YouTube creator that I pay a lot of attention to shared sort of, his process for doing creative things. I mean, he's been creating YouTube videos for better than 10 years now. and he has a similar like notebook full of just little random things like socks or neat, Like whatever, just random thoughts. And then, and like maybe another one of them is, I want to support a small indie artists. Right. And then he'll when he wants to do something, when he feels like he needs to put something into the world, he will just go through this notebook and like pick a few of those items at random.

[00:39:47] Adam: And he's like, okay, I'm going to make and sell socks with indeed independent artists art on the socks. And you can, it's like a subscription service and, you sign up and you get to the, you get socks mailed to you and they're all neat. And the profits I'll go to charity. And that's the thing you can go to.

[00:40:04] Adam: Awesome

[00:40:05] Carol: That is so cool.

[00:40:05] Adam: and, I don't think they're currently open, but, I'm pulling it up. Awesome socks.club. It looks like you can currently sign up. Oh, Nope. Has currently closed to new members if you want to be notified when we open back up click here. But, yeah, I mean, so like just writing interesting things down, like things that interests you, can be useful later.

[00:40:24] Adam: If you find interesting ways to combine.

[00:40:27] Carol's First Blog Post

[00:40:27] Ben: Totally. Well, Carol what's like what's one challenge you had to deal with this week. That might be interesting.

[00:40:32]

[00:40:33] Carol: military flights.

[00:40:35] Ben: All right.

[00:40:36] Carol: So we've yeah. Yeah. And it's nothing tech-related but my friends trying to get to Japan, I flew here on

[00:40:45] Ben: Here's Atlanta.

[00:40:46] Carol: I left, Seattle and flew into Reno and lake Tahoe. Cause I'm still staying out here and on the west coast to see some other people and see work and stuff.

[00:40:54] Carol: So I stayed out, and did some other stuff because she was supposed to be in Japan. She still in Seattle, hasn't got an honor imply like hasn't gotten on the plane yet. Yeah. The plane's been delayed. There was a typhoon COVID test. There were all of these things. That's not documented anywhere. Talking about the restrictions with COVID tests, just how the military plane works itself.

[00:41:16] Carol: It's things completely outside of any commercial flight. But if you go to their website, there's no information. And all of these moms standing there with kids and dogs are just like in tears because you can't get on the plane, go to a Walgreens and get a test done, but you can't use the Walgreens tasks go somewhere else.

[00:41:34] Carol: So it's like, go get an Uber with 19 bags and the dog crate, like it's like those things like that would be the, probably the thing I'd write

[00:41:42] Ben: That sounds terrible.

[00:41:44] Adam: interesting. Now I'd read

[00:41:45] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds terrible for your friend.

[00:41:47] Carol: Prepare. Here's how to prepare. Yeah,

[00:41:50] Tim: So, are you thinking that your site, because I was thinking about doing that with my Timothy cunningham.com right now. I don't have any coding stuff on there. see if mumbo jumbo, I haven't updated. That's my coding side. I haven't updated it since 2014, but, are you thinking this was Carol Hamilton, blog will just sort of be your life and you'll section it off into like, different topics code and other stuff, miscellaneous.

[00:42:14] Carol: Yeah. And don't see it being a hundred percent tech because I'm not a hundred percent tech, like I'm raising teenage boys. I have a kid in college getting his engineering degree. I have one about to graduate high school. Like we have to deal with automobile insurance for teenage drivers. A lot of people have no idea how to deal with those things.

[00:42:32] Carol: So just kind of putting down some of the challenges that we went through and how the, to face it. I think it would be. But the more searchable ones would definitely be the, the tech side. The, I don't want to redo this.

[00:42:43] Tim: Okay. That's cool.

[00:42:45] Ben: It's great that you don't already feel like you have to be pigeonholed into one type of thing. I think there's a lot of people who feel pressure to have their tech stuff on a tech blog, and then they'll create like an entirely separate blog for their photography, passion or something. Or Adam does that

[00:43:04] Ben: and

[00:43:04] Adam: his hand. Yes.

[00:43:07] Ben: for that, for the listeners. Uh,but I think it's nice that you like this is the complete Carroll and the complete Carroll goes in this digital representation.

[00:43:17] Tim: how I imagined doing that is so that the www or just the Timothy cunningham.com is everything. But if like, say cooking, like recipes, cooking wood, cooking dot Timothy gunny, Omnicom would sort of automatically apply a filter that only shows you the cooking stuff, but it's the same website, same domain.

[00:43:37] Tim: And then same thing for, me dot Timothy Cunningham and creating the S the what do you call that first part of the domain? That's not the subject is sub debate. the sub domain. is can sort of search as act as a filter. So that's how I envisioned doing it. I haven't done that, but that's in my head.

[00:43:53] Carol: Yeah. I was wondering if I could use like a label system or something too.

[00:43:57] Tim: Yeah, definitely use tags, but I just kind of liked the idea that you could, if you met someone and all you really wanted them to see was your coding stuff. You say, Hey, here, go to code dot Timothy cunningham.com. Or if you're like, Hey, here's some recipes go to recipes dot Timothy cunningham.com.

[00:44:12] Tim: Or if you don't, Hey, see everything about me. Here's www that Timothy cunningham.com.

[00:44:17] Carol: What was that? Say it one more time

[00:44:18] Tim: remember.

[00:44:21] Adam's First Blog Post

[00:44:21] Adam: So, when we started talking about doing this topic, I went back and I dug up my very first tech blog post on the blog that I ended up writing for like the better part of 10 years, I think.

[00:44:32] Adam: So we'll link it in the show. Notes is only currently available on archive.org. I'm probably gonna, I mean, it's real short. I it'd be easy for me to copy and paste it to my current blog. it'll be the only thing on my blog from 2007. So that'll be how you can find it. my blog is Timothy Cunningham dot and then, um,

[00:44:48] Carol: Adam.

[00:44:50] Tim: Yeah.

[00:44:51] Adam: uh, Adam title.codes. That's me. That's T U T T L E. anyway, yeah, I just wanted to like throw this out there as an example of, I mean, you said you're not intimidated. You're not scared of, being vulnerable, which is wonderful. I started this blog, when I got my first like professional web development job.

[00:45:10] Adam: Right. So I w in my origin story, if you remember, I used to work at Purdue and I was just doing kind of web stuff on the side. And then I moved up to Pennsylvania and got a full-time web dev consulting job. And my manager there, who's one of our patrons, Chuck encouraged me to go to conferences, encouraged me to start blogging this and that.

[00:45:27] Adam: And I couldn't find any ColdFusion blogs. Now I quickly learned after I started my blog, that I was just bad at Google.

[00:45:36] Tim: No Google.

[00:45:37] Adam: cause I started my blog in part, because I couldn't find any ColdFusion content on the internet, which was just terrible. I mean, this was in the time of like cold six or seven.

[00:45:46] Adam: so was there a ColdFusion seven? Yeah, there was. Okay.

[00:45:51] Carol: I don't remember

[00:45:51] Carol: seven.

[00:45:52] Adam: a kind of a throwaway release anyway. so the title of the post was optimizing your application dot CFM, not even dot CFC. That's how old this is. And it's, I mean, I haven't counted, but it's gotta be like less than 200 words here, including the code snippets.

[00:46:05] Adam: it's real short and it's just like, Hey, do this, not that because that'll be more efficient and yeah.

[00:46:12] Carol: I love it. It's like, this is bad. This is good. Thank you. Come read my blog.

[00:46:18] Adam: And I mean, I look back at this now and I kind of cringe, but at the same

[00:46:22] Carol: No, but I really love it. Yeah,

[00:46:25] Adam: it was a start. You gotta start somewhere.

[00:46:27] Carol: you had to start.

[00:46:28] Ben's First Blog Post

[00:46:28] Adam: So I,I'm going to go look, I'm curious. What was Ben's first blog?

[00:46:32] Ben: Oh,

[00:46:32] Carol: Ooh.

[00:46:34] Adam: Do you have like a.

[00:46:35] Carol: Probably something very detailed

[00:46:37] Ben: No, I think it was like, I posted this.

[00:46:41] Carol: Oh,

[00:46:41] Adam: yeah. Yeah. Everybody's first Facebook post I'm posting on Facebook or your first tweet. Do you have a list of all your posts somewhere? Oh, here we go.

[00:46:49] Ben: At the very

[00:46:49] Adam: of blog entries. Here we go. All right. Scroll to the bottom. You got so many. I got to do command down. Did I mention how cool this is with two question marks now that this is up and running, I have to figure out how to parse out code examples.

[00:47:05] Adam: Next project,

[00:47:09] Ben: Let's see.

[00:47:10] Carol: Oh, I love

[00:47:10] Adam: beat me by a year. See, I told you I was bad at searching, right? This is April 2nd, 2006. I didn't start till 2007. Actually. I think mine was also April.

[00:47:19] Ben: man. That's hilarious.

[00:47:21] Tim: One thing I do love about your blog bed is the whole, this is that's me, your photos of people at which I'm knowing you now. I'm like, he only did that. So he can actually remember who people are,

[00:47:34] Adam: Okay.

[00:47:35] Tim: but I'm like, it's such an, it's such a cool idea. And I love it that you keep it

[00:47:39] Adam: Yeah,

[00:47:41] Adam: totally agree. And I have to know, so you go to a conference and you end up taking, it's gotta be 30 to a hundred pictures of people, right. At the end up as possible headers of your blog. How do you keep straight? Like, so you and I take a picture of a thing if you've never met me before, you don't know who the heck I am.

[00:47:55] Adam: And I'm just like, Hey Ben, can I get a picture? And you're like, yeah, dude. And when you take thumbs up picture together, whatever, how do you always have their name and your like link to their website or their Twitter or something.

[00:48:03] Ben: well, the looking at the people's links, that's manual labor, and it's sh I'm shocked at how many people, like don't have a presence online at all sometimes. but after I take a photo, I will then take a picture of their badge. And then it's the order of the photos. I know, like the badge comes right after the photo.

[00:48:21] Adam: Gotcha. So you just gotta be like, ah, so by the way, I'm terrible with names. Can I get a picture of your

[00:48:24] Ben: Yeah, it's a hundred percent what I do. I, and then some people don't ever have their backs on them and I'm like, oh, you're supposed to wear your badge at this

[00:48:31] Ben: conference.

[00:48:32] Adam: up my order here. All right. I need you to write down your name

[00:48:37] Ben: Yeah.

[00:48:37] Adam: and your Twitter on a piece of paper so I can take a picture of that. So my

[00:48:40] Adam: pictures are

[00:48:41] Adam: in the right order.

[00:48:42] Ben: There's people. I, I had to, like, I think one time there was some person I couldn't remember at all who they were.

[00:48:47] Ben: And I think I had to ask one of the conference organizers, like for a list of names from the conference. I'm like, one of them is just going to spark a memory and I'll be able to figure it out. but, yeah, I have to take a picture of the badge or I have to write it down and in my notes and then hope that the order of the names and the notes matches the order of the photos and the camera roll. But, yeah.

[00:49:08] Tim: W what's funny is I can't tell you how many times I've had people say, oh dude, I was like looking something up on the internet and I found this guy's web website and your picture came up, Cause I think we've taken like four pictures together over the years that we run into each other and I'm like, yeah, that's totally random.

[00:49:24] Tim: I mean, it's not, if you refresh the page, it's not going to be the same picture.

[00:49:28] Carol: Yeah. They'll send me a link to

[00:49:30] Tim: They'll send me a

[00:49:30] Carol: I'm like, yeah. Yeah. I was probably there then

[00:49:33] Adam: Do you guys want to know what the first code snippet that Ben posted on his blog was?

[00:49:37] Tim: Woot.

[00:49:38] Adam: Yeah. Oh,

[00:49:38] Adam: you found it.

[00:49:39] Tim: I found it is what it is. It's a, his post was, Hey, I got this thing working cool. Now I just got to figure out how to put stuff on the left-hand side.

[00:49:49] Adam: Thanks for being a good sport, Ben. Cause you're just so prolific now and like, your blogs come up in like all kinds of like angular discussions

[00:49:55] Carol: All over the

[00:49:56] Adam: your your blog is pretty well known. So, it's fun to look back and see

[00:49:59] Ben: great. Fun.

[00:50:01] Tim: But I think this is very, this kind of proves the point we were talking about with Carol earlier is that, his first two posts were,

[00:50:08] Ben: Garbage.

[00:50:09] Tim: it trash,

[00:50:10] Carol: Whoop.

[00:50:11] Tim: so don't worry.

[00:50:12] Tim: Don't worry

[00:50:13] Tim: about,

[00:50:13] Adam: comments from Ben.

[00:50:15] Tim: yeah. So don't worry about it. Just, you're working in a vacuum at that

[00:50:18] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent just have fun with it. Like it's for you. You just have to remember it's for

[00:50:25] Carol: Yeah.

[00:50:25] Carol: That's kind of how I'm going about it.

[00:50:27] Ben's Tech Stack

[00:50:27] Tim: So if you don't mind sharing, what do you run on? I know we told her not to worry about the tech stack, but I'm

[00:50:34] Ben: Oh, I run

[00:50:35] Carol: but I'm going to worry about it at some point. Tell me your

[00:50:37] Ben: on a ColdFusion.

[00:50:39] Tim: You wrote it yourself?

[00:50:40] Ben: no, so I, well, I have managed hosting, so I'm on host tech and I, pay them some amount of dollars every month just to make sure that the server doesn't crash. and you know, they'd run the backups on the database and the backup on the file system, allegedly.

[00:50:54] Ben: I mean, I've never had to do disaster recovery.

[00:50:57] Tim: Never,never audited them.

[00:50:58] Adam: Speaking from experience, you might want to try your, try, just a mock disaster recovery thing here.

[00:51:03] Ben: I do. Couple of months I'll pull the database down just to, so I feel like I have something. but you know, I hope that it works. And, yeah. So then when I want to do it locally, so I, I have an admin that I built, but I write all of my posts in a markdown file just in sublime text. And then I just copy and paste that mark down into a, just a vanilla text area to save it inside my admin.

[00:51:28] Ben: So I like, I don't even have any fancy editing or anything. No. Like a wizzy wig. I've been burned too many times by having been written something online and then go to save. And like, my session is over. Or like there's a server area. And then I hit the back button and my form is empty. So like I just write everything locally in text files and, and then just save it once it's, once it's good to go.

[00:51:51] Tim: Makes sense and built your own little blog engine, I

[00:51:57] Ben: Yeah.

[00:51:58] Tim: you just, it just, it sucks in the markdown files

[00:52:00] Ben: it's like the oldest and ghetto list type of, it's like one step beyond having the query itself run at the top of the page and then outputting the query in the CFML like, it's one step cleaner than that because it's, it's wicked old and, I don't get paid to do it.

[00:52:19] Adam: Honestly, I think that takes incredible discipline and restraint. I can't tell you how many times I rewrote my blog from scratch. Like as when I wrote my own blogging engine.

[00:52:30] Ben: Know, and it's crazy too, is my style. Like my actual programming style has changed so much over the years, just with the modernization of the language itself and my, different conference with different syntaxes and which things I want to be capitalized in which things I want to be lowercase so on and so forth.

[00:52:46] Ben: and I go to edit files sometimes and I'll see something I wrote. I'm just like you son of a What were you thinking? This is disgusting. This is terrible. How did you ever think this was readable? I'll tell you Carol, when you were talking about all of your Google app stuff and. Dealing with Amazon. I'm very intimidated by how fast you got that done. I mean, anything in there I think would be fascinating to write about and to read about because it just, you had deal with so many novel

[00:53:16] Carol: auth in there. Yeah. And that was the thing. A lot of the problems I faced there, wasn't a lot of help. Like ultimately the solution was a bunch of things put together to get it to work and. I don't know that most people would come up with this on their own. Even like our reseller was like, oh, damn, that does work.

[00:53:35] Carol: And yeah, that's about the only way it's going to

[00:53:38] Carol: work. And maybe it's because we were solving a problem. We shouldn't have been solving, but either way it got solved, then it

[00:53:45] Adam: Whole bunch of weird stuff held together with bubblegum and Christmas ornaments also known as web

[00:53:51] Carol: much. Yes. So yeah, I would love to post about some of that stuff

[00:53:56] Tim: All right, Kara, let's hold you accountable. Let's get, give you, give yourself a deadline. Give yourself a deadline when you're going to

[00:54:01] Tim: have your first post

[00:54:02] Adam: this episode, comes out in two weeks. Do you think he can do it by then?

[00:54:06] Carol: no, because I don't get home for another week and a

[00:54:09] Adam: Why do you have to be

[00:54:10] Carol: I'm out here till, well, I mean, cause I'm busy the whole

[00:54:12] Carol: time I'm here. Are you kidding me? we've planned every hour. I got

[00:54:16] Adam: It's nice of you to take some time out, to talk to us.

[00:54:19] Tim: Yeah.

[00:54:19] Carol: Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. this is the second one out here. The third I am going to skip you guys.

[00:54:24] Adam: That's okay. We're going to replace you so

[00:54:27] Carol: Hm, someone sexy

[00:54:30] Adam: You have to tune in next week to find out is it next week?

[00:54:34] Carol: is X weeks.

[00:54:36] Tim: but give yourself a deadline.

[00:54:37] Carol: Date as a date. Let's see. let me get a date here. Let's look,

[00:54:41] Carol: I gotta open

[00:54:41] Ben: We just need the hello world of,

[00:54:43] Tim: Yep.

[00:54:44] Carol: Okay.

[00:54:45] Adam: You can, right. I posted this,

[00:54:48] Carol: I got it by September. The

[00:54:52] Tim: Okay, Wednesday, September. The first we will check in on you on Discord and see how that's going.

[00:54:59] Ben: Noyce.

[00:55:00] Carol: I will have a post-op

[00:55:02] Adam: I'm putting it on my calendar.

[00:55:04] Tim: I'm doing that. I'm doing that mentoring thing. Yeah,

[00:55:07] Carol: do it. Do it.

[00:55:10] Adam: All right. My wife is going to see this on my calendar and be like, what the heck is Carol's blog launch. Cool. well I guess, unless you guys have anything else we're done here.

[00:55:20] Tim: I think so. We got a commitment from her.

[00:55:22] Carol: Thanks for your help. Yeah.

[00:55:24] Tim: thanks for the call. Thanks.

[00:55:25] Carol: someone else too.

[00:55:26] Tim: the conversation. I, it might motivate me to actually not do it.

[00:55:33] Ben: Sometimes you gotta just take that leap.

[00:55:35] Tim: Yeah.

[00:55:36] Carol: Yeah. Do it. Do it

[00:55:37] Patreon

[00:55:37] Adam: This episode of Working Code is brought to you by Timothy cunningham.com and listen, and listeners like you. If you like what we're doing here, you might want to consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/WorkingCodePod to say, thanks for your support. We offer some perks to our patrons.

[00:55:53] Adam: They all get an invite to our Discord server, where we hang out and chat about the podcast and work stuff and life stuff. And our first ever blog post. And we have other perks available, like early access to our new episodes as they are prepared and our after show, which is just, we keep the microphones on after we're done talking here and we're just gonna keep on keeping on for another 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever.

[00:56:15] Adam: every week we think our top patrons and since this week is part of every week, we're going to send out a huge thank you to Peter and to Monte.

[00:56:21] Thanks For Listening!

[00:56:21] Adam: Thank you guys for sticking around. if paying for podcasts, isn't your thing. No worries. we appreciate your taking the time to listen and you can help us out without spending any money by sharing the show with your friends and your coworkers, or you can leave us a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Please send us your questions and Joe topics on Twitter or Instagram @WorkingCodePod. Or leave us a message at 512-253-2633 that's 512-253-CODE.

[00:56:45] Adam: We'll catch you next week.

[00:56:47] Tim: Remember your heart matters.

[00:56:51]

[00:57:10]

[00:57:10] Bloopers

[00:57:10] Adam: Everybody ready?

[00:57:12] Tim: Yeah.

[00:57:12] Carol: good, good. Let's go

[00:57:14] Adam: Working. No, I never started like that. Why would I start it like that?

[00:57:18] Ben: Okay.

[00:57:19] Adam: This episode of Working Code is brought to you by Ben's first blog, post, and listeners like you, if you like what you were doing here, then you might want to, what the heck was that?

[00:57:27] Adam: Yeah. Big old bang. Something sounded like you guys didn't like that, that thing.

[00:57:31] Adam: So I'm gonna do something. Yeah.

[00:57:32] Carol: No, no, no. I liked it. I had by Timothy cunningham.com.

[00:57:35] Adam: I like that. That's what we're doing.

[00:57:38] Adam: No, I'm very pro tattoo, but I don't have any tattoos. And it's mostly because I can't find anything that I like enough to put it on my body forever. And also. They're kind of expensive and I have other expensive hobbies already. I don't need another pit to throw money into

[00:57:57] Carol: Well, tell about the finding one. That's going to be on you forever. You don't know what forever is.

[00:58:04] Ben: That sounds is that like you could die any day.

[00:58:08] Carol: no, no, no. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, if you're going to think about this for five years, you're like, oh man, I don't know if I'm going to love this in five years. Those stress you might not be here in five years.

[00:58:16] Carol: So just get what you want. Just get

[00:58:18] Adam: Let me get a whale

[00:58:18] Carol: get whatever you want.

[00:58:20] Adam: uh, tramp stamp. Yeah.

[00:58:22] Ben: I do. I do like the, the angriest, like

[00:58:25] Ben: the furious unicorn that GitHub has when they have an

[00:58:28] Ben: incident.

[00:58:30] Carol: yeah, that was good.

next episode: 037: Brian Klaas Talks Cloud

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