056: Best Of 2021

With a year of Working Code episodes behind us, our podcast has come a long way. But, we're still trying to figure things out: we are continuing to play with the show format, we are each growing into our own voice, and hopefully we're putting together some content that adds a little something, something to the boarder web-development conversation.

If, in our ramblings, we ever sound like we know what we're talking about, it's due in large part to the skillful audio editing and engineering provided by Matt Cavender and ZCross Media. Each week, Matt manages to magically cut and splice our pontifications into meaningful, coherent thought. Working with Matt has been a true pleasure - one that we can only afford because of our very generous Patreons!

As a year-end wrap-up, Matt offered to gather up some of his favorite clips from the show and put together a retrospective on the last 30 episodes. Thank you Matt! And, thank you to all of our listeners! Let's make 2022 a fantastic year!

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. Or, record an audio message on your phone or computer and email it to workingcodepod@gmail.com.

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

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.


Transcript

Spot an error? Send a pull request on GitHub.

[00:00:00] Carol: all right. So here we go with show number 56, January the fifth. It's the first episode of the year. I can't believe it's 20, 22 already.

[00:00:31] Ben: Looks

[00:00:31] Adam: Seriously, it it feels like a birthday. I know we kind of celebrated on episode 52 because that was our full year of episodes, but we kind of started at the beginning of the year, so

[00:00:41] Carol: yeah, Yeah, we got serious. We got real Mike's then. And you know, got real good at this. Well, I say good. We got okay. We're doing okay. You guys we're okay. We're okay. less bad.

[00:00:52] Carol: It's always a winner, but Yeah.

[00:00:53] Carol: we have, a great editor named Matt. Gave us the suggestion to do a best of 2021. So we're going to roll with that for this episode.

[00:01:04] Carol: And we think you guys are going to have a lot of fun listening to it. There's some good moments on there. Like. Adam spear poop or, you know, some parenting advice from me. And there's lots of other things, you know, Tim gets a nice breakthrough and Ben gets quacked a few times and one of bin never gets quack.

[00:01:23] Carol: Ben started the cursor. So hopefully you will enjoy some of these moments we've had.

[00:01:27] Adam: Yeah, and it was nice to take the week of Christmas off and not have to record. I love talking to you guys, but it was nice to take a week.

[00:01:34] Carol: Oh Yeah, Had some great family time for that.

[00:01:37] Ben: Also, I think just a general shout out to Matt is editing has been just phenomenal. He's edited. What? Like the last 30 episodes, something like that. 35 episodes.

[00:01:46] Carol: He is really good.

[00:01:48] Ben: Yeah.

[00:01:48] Adam: I wish I knew off the top of my head, but yeah, I'm so thankful to have.

[00:01:51] Carol: Yes. Yes, yes. Yes. Great job, Matt. Keep

[00:01:53] Carol: up the hard

[00:01:54] Ben: definitely. I think not all of our episodes are equally awesome. And like coming out of some of the recordings, I'm like, all right, that was an okay show. And like, I don't necessarily feel like I had anything great to say or whatnot. And then Matt works his magic. And when I listened to it for the show notes, I'm always like, oh, we sounded so much better than I thought we were going to say.

[00:02:15] Carol: Right. He's really good. He's really good. I'm glad we found them.

[00:02:19] Adam: While we're, praising Matt and, and celebrating the fact that we get to have them. We have to praise and celebrate our patrons that make that

[00:02:25] Adam: possible.

[00:02:26] Carol: Absolutely.

[00:02:27] Carol: Yeah. Without you guys, we wouldn't have that. Cause that is where your money goes.

[00:02:31] Adam: So thank you.

[00:02:32] Ben: We love you guys.

[00:02:34] Carol: you guys.

[00:02:34] Carol: agree?

[00:02:35] Adam: All right. So I guess

[00:02:35] Adam: with that on, with the best of

[00:02:38] Ep. 27 Fear Poop

[00:02:38] Ben: I'm going to go with a triumph this week, although it doesn't necessarily feel like a triumphant emotionally, but I have agreed to do a presentation at the. Adobe developer week. Oh yeah. I don't give a lot of presentations. Mostly. I just sit in my office all day, every day.

[00:02:55] Ben: and, uh, but, I'll tell you being on this podcast and talking to you and, I've been feeling more connected to my.

[00:03:02] Ben: Yeah, which has also like, conversely made me feel less connected to a lot of other people. And, and I feel like stepping out of my comfort zone and giving a presentation, will help me get back into that a feeling of connectedness with, with the broader community. But,I think you guys have actually really inspired me and made me want to put myself out there.

[00:03:27] Adam: I'm stressed as heck

[00:03:29] Ben: and, uh, overwhelmed. but I think it will be okay.

[00:03:33] Adam: Well, that's your body preparing? You'd like that adrenaline, that fear, that's your body, helping you be prepared to do a good job, right? That, that adrenaline, that's what I tell myself before I go on stage. Right. And this is kind of getting into our topic for the day is like, giving presentations.

[00:03:49] Adam: I think a lot of people feel that that fear of public speaking and that they get that adrenaline rush, especially right before they go on stage me personally, I have two, two a. Presentation routines. One is I go get my fear poop out of the way. Oh man. Wow. And, and two is I remind myself that the adrenaline that I'm feeling is there so that if I see a lion coming, I can run faster than the other people in the room.

[00:04:18] Adam: Right. And I mean, that's both literal and metaphorical because that's, that's where that evolutionary thing comes from, right. Is like when your senses are heightened, you're able to perform better. And that's what that adrenaline is all about. Right? It's, it's heightening your senses and making you more aware of how often you say, um, and, um, saying, um, and, uh, and just seeing, you know, at and T sort of time slows down for you.

[00:04:44] Adam: So you feel like you're taking a long time speaking, that sort of thing. Yeah. No.

[00:04:49] Tim: Ben, you you've spoken before, right? I that, sure. Yeah. So I'm pretty sure I saw you. I think it was a C if United, I think they've all been at CFE United. Yeah. Yeah. And I was super impressed. I mean, I was seriously super impressed and I never would have imagined a million years that you have.

[00:05:10] Tim: the anxiety. Oh,

[00:05:12] Ben: so anxious

[00:05:14] Carol: was this the like, love story when y'all talk about all

[00:05:18] Adam: the time, that was a lightning talk. And that was a, I think that was a dev objective

[00:05:23] Tim: objective. Yeah. But he did, he did a technical presentation, I think. 2010, something like

[00:05:29] Ben: that. Um, custom tags and custom tags. Yeah.

[00:05:33] Tim: Yeah. And I was like, dude, this guy's awesome. I cause, and I read your blog. You were at that point in my life, you were like my hero because everything, everything I Google was like, yeah, I've been at Albin. Everything I've found has been to Dell and T and you got up there and like gave an awesome presentation.

[00:05:50] Tim: And then I got to know you. I didn't really meet you that year later I got to hang out with you. And I was like, wow. Really kind of

[00:05:58] Adam: insecure. He's a human like me.

[00:06:01] Ben:

[00:06:03] Ep. 30 Ben's Presentation

[00:06:03] Ben: I did a thing congratulation. I have, uh, I gave a presentation yesterday at the Adobe ColdFusion developer conference and I was stressed out for basically the last month preparing for it. I give a presentation about once every seven years. So like, the cicadas, it was my time. And, I think it went well.

[00:06:26] Ben: I was, I was pretty pleased. My, my huge fear was that I was going to be done in like 15 minutes and then have another 45 minutes of asking people if they have questions. but I ended up going longer than I thought I would, and then had to sort of skim across a few slides at the end, but, overall I didn't stumble too much and I don't think I forgot a lot of things that I wanted to say.

[00:06:46] Ben: So, um, I was pretty pleased. I'm uh, I'm going hard triumph. They were cool. They recorded it, right? Yeah. I think we'll all be available. I dunno, when after the conference, I couldn't even, you couldn't access even the ones that had been recorded already yet, but, I think soon, so I will send links around if anybody ever wants to watch it, but, yeah, just spreading the love of facial

[00:07:07] Carol: flags.

[00:07:07] Carol: Great job.

[00:07:09] Tim:

[00:07:09] Ep. 31 Sorry 'Bout The 24 Hours Of Downtime

[00:07:09] Tim: Or Patreon said, how did he say I get lost in the naming of the, all these services? Yep. But even before that, I just don't know why anyone would even start to think about using it a bit mostly because our stuff just runs fine. Our traditional stuff is not like a really need a billion services to run an web app.

[00:07:25] Tim: Maybe explaining why, when and why you'd moved to the services would be. Yeah, I think we covered that. Yeah. Sounds right. Yeah. I mean,

[00:07:31] Adam: if, if you're outgrowing your server, then it's time to do something else. If you need more. Dependability was that, or durability was the word that Ben used for the, probably the same price that you're paying for a physical server in a data center somewhere, you can have a virtual server or a couple of virtual servers in a couple of different availability zones, running your application and load balance between the two or even just like a fail over scenario so that if one of them were to go offline, then the other one kicks.

[00:08:01] Tim: Um, I will say this. So he, he talked about, you know, why would you move it there? One of the pains that, that, cause we do have a lot of on-prem on premise hosting that we do ourselves. And some of it, we can't really ever move that the pricing on a PCI environment in the cloud is just, it's too far out of reach.

[00:08:21] Tim: Yeah. It's pretty out. Yeah. So, but it's like, so you, you buy equipment and the assumption is it's going to have a five-year lifespan. To appreciate out that cost of all that for over five years for your books. But it's like whenever you reach that point where you decide you need to upgrade your routers and your firewalls and your servers, there's a period of pain there that you go through going through, changing out that hardware, none of the.

[00:08:49] Tim: Applies when you're dealing with the cloud, all that is done magically behind the scenes, they are upgrading their hardware constantly. and you don't, it's completely transparent to you

[00:09:00] Adam: still occasionally happen. There'll be like, you're still on the old hardware and we just need you to reset your box.

[00:09:06] Adam: And when it comes back up, it'll be on the new stuff. That's pretty

[00:09:09] Tim: painless though. I mean, yeah. So I need to go offline and replace the entire switch and my data center. Spend my Saturday doing it. I configure the firewall wrong and the net wasn't hidden ICP correctly. So sorry about the 24 hours of downtime while I smoked the pony tail.

[00:09:36] Tim: Wow.

next episode: 057: Goals for 2022

prev episode: 055: Sales Fails