096: Why Do You Write?

12 October, 2022

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Ben: Well, that's the thing is that they talk about like, Oh, you know, in order to have a following, you have to post consistently like six to eight times a day and you should look to see what times of day your posts get the most engagement for the type of topics.

[00:00:12] Ben: You're, your comment, you're posting. I'm like,

[00:00:14] Ben: Oh, bro. I'm like, I'm gonna post before I go to work and like, that's it for the day. Like, that's all I

[00:00:20] Adam: I don't even check my work email that many times in a day.

[00:00:22] Ben: Yeah.

[00:00:25] Intro

[00:00:25] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 96 coming in quick on, uh, a hundred there. on today's

[00:00:51] Ben: It's crazy.

[00:00:52] Adam: Ben and I are gonna talk about writing. it's as, listener requests, so we're happy to take 'em. And, and, since it could only be myself and Ben tonight, Carol and Tim are both still, or both Mia this week.

[00:01:04] Adam: Tim's still loitering in London. Carol's got some stuff she's gotta take care of. So But as usual, we're gonna start with the Tramon fails.

[00:01:10] Adam's Fail

[00:01:10] Adam: I guess I'll go first and I'm gonna go with a fail. I could not stick with Microsoft Edge. no shade, you know, I'm sure that all the people that work on it, work really hard and, and do good work, but it just, I couldn't make it work for me.

[00:01:24] Adam: I was having memory management issues and it just like, it just, it it became too much to bear. you know, the, the lag, especially like when you're trying to fill out a form field and, and there's a 10, 15 second lag trying to focus a form field. That was just too much for me. So,

[00:01:41] Ben: What,

[00:01:42] Adam: And this is

[00:01:43] Ben: you

[00:01:43] Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:01:44] Adam: Exactly. This is a top spec. This is not a, a maxed out M one max or anything, but it's a, it's an M one, MacBook Pro 2021. So this is, Now granted, I, I do a lot, I've got three screens, right. My, the laptop screen and two external monitors and lots of apps open. But I've got a lot of memory and I don't know, it just, it wasn't working for me.

[00:02:07] Adam: Right. I don't know what it is about Edge versus other browsers, but it couldn't keep up

[00:02:13] Ben: Sorry to hear that. I know that when I've tried Safari, one of my big gripes with Safari is that I'll open it up and it's like, I feel like it's like a 10, 15 second delay from opening Safari to it actually being usable. I don't know what it's booting up and to memory, but it's just, it's weird.

[00:02:31] Adam: For me, Safari is like, I mean, a, it's just unusable. The problem with Safari is that it's safari. Um,it's like, it's the art student of browsers, right? It's just gotta be different for the sake of being different.

[00:02:45] Ben: Oh,

[00:02:46] Adam: So that's my fail. How about you, Ben?

[00:02:49] Ben's Double Triumphs

[00:02:49] Ben: I'm gonna go with Triumph. I'm gonna go with Double Triumphs. coming in, finger guns here. one

[00:02:54] Adam: single barrel or double barrel?

[00:02:56] Ben: double barrel finger guns. I, something like last Wednesday, I, I had an idea for something I wanted to build in the Legacy app, and I don't know if you've ever had this situation. I'm sure you've had this situation where you can see the thing in your mind's eye, what you wanna build, and you can basically get a sense of how it's all gonna fit together, more or less, you know, some fuzzy parts, but basically you can see the path A and it's really just a matter.

[00:03:22] Ben: Grinding out all of that code and you, the bandwidth between your brain and your keyboard is the limiting factor. And so I looked at this task and I thought, you know what? This feels like a week's worth of coding, like straight coding, doing nothing else. I can do this in a week. And, I created an epic in Jira and I put some really high level cards.

[00:03:46] Ben: Like I, I have maybe 20, 25 cards. And, I just started picking 'em off one at a time and I turned that feature on today. So I basically went from ideation last Wednesday to turning it on this morning. And, I just feel really good about my ability to estimate.

[00:04:04] Adam: which is like seven or eight days depending on how you measure it. So Good. You said you turned it on this morning, so Yeah, like seven days.

[00:04:11] Ben: Yeah. So I felt, uh, my ability to. I think seven days is like the max where I have any kind of high degree of accuracy. I think after that I just start going by weeks. Like anything over a week is two weeks and you know, anything over three weeks is like a month. so, so, so that was my first triumph.

[00:04:31] Ben: Felt really good about that. My second triumph goes back to the whole legacy platform stuff that I've brought up ad nauseum on the show. but for those who are new, welcome, I, I work on the legacy platform at work. I am the last of the legacy platform engineers. Everyone else at the company would like me very much to be not working on Legacy.

[00:04:49] Ben: And so, uh,it came up again when you gonna start working on the new platform. And I'm very emotional about the legacy platform. I love working on it. Everyone on the non-legacy platform is very emotional about the, the non-legacy platform, the modern platform. So it would've been very easy and very non-confrontational of me to say, You know what?

[00:05:10] Ben: It's time. I'm just gonna drop everything that I'm doing and I'm gonna move over to the modern platform. But I decided I didn't wanna just cave. I felt like that was not the, that was not the right move. and I also don't wanna work on the legacy platform forever. That's also not the right move. So what I decided was I was gonna pick a ARR or annual recurring revenue threshold, and I said, ARR represents customer dollars.

[00:05:37] Ben: And those customer dollars deserve support and love and attention. And I said, When the ARR drops below a certain threshold on the legacy platform, I will stop what I'm doing and I will move over to the modern platform. and I, and I think picking an ARR threshold feels like something everybody can just get on board with.

[00:06:00] Ben: And it doesn't have to be a lot. Fear, uncertainty. A doubt about how long it's gonna be or, or whether there's gonna be value add. There's people there, there's money, there should be attention, but only to a point. And now that we have a point, we don't really have to talk about it again, which is, I just think, I dunno.

[00:06:17] Ben: I was really happy about that.

[00:06:19] Adam: dude, I'm, That's amazing. Like I just wanna say like, I'm really proud of you, but, you know, it, it, that puts a lot of emotion into the, the sentiment, which, you know, I guess is there, but like, it feels a little weird too. But the, like you said, it takes all the emotion out of the decision and it just says, Okay, here's the line in the sand.

[00:06:36] Adam: When we cross it, then we cross it you know, you don't have to keep wondering and, and stressing over it. And I think that maybe something you did, maybe you anticipated it, maybe you didn't, but it incentivizes them to get more people onto the modern platform. Right.

[00:06:54] Adam: that. Um,what is the word that I'm

[00:06:56] Ben: Migrations.

[00:06:57] Adam: do?

[00:06:57] Adam: That Migration work? Yeah.

[00:06:59] Ben: Yeah, exactly. It becomes, it's like, instead of me just being some arbitrary emotional, stubborn person, there's now a, a thing that I can point to and say I wanna be on the modern platform, you know, in quotes, but I can't until we hit this goal. And so it's not like I'm not the blocker.

[00:07:17] Ben: Something else has become the blocker.

[00:07:19] Adam: Perfect. Yeah. Let me ask you this though. If you had said, sure. You know, today's the day, why not? There's like, you know, pull the, the table cloth out from under these dishes here. what does that mean? Like, right, so somebody still has to do the ops work of keeping that stuff online, and I imagine, you know, occasionally there's bugs found or whatever to do those, Would those still get attention or, what does that mean?

[00:07:44] Ben: Uh,it is very fuzzy, you know, for the most, So, so certain things are not up for debate. So, as an example, just yesterday, one of the guys from the security team, David ler, he's well known in the, Cold Vision community as well. he came and gave me some results. There was a pen test, a penetration test, which apparently we do annually now, at least on the legacy platform does annually.

[00:08:07] Ben: I think the modern platform might do it bi-annually. and there were some high, moderate and low vulnerabilities that, that we have to take care of. And so I, that's one of those things like you just have to drop what you're doing and start addressing those things cuz they're time sensitive. So something like that would have to be dealt with.

[00:08:24] Ben: But bugs, I mean, there's already, unfortunately, I hate to say this, there's already many bugs in the legacy platform that are just never gonna be addressed. So it's just more of that, I would suppose, if, if once we move over to the, to the modern platform,

[00:08:42] Adam: Man, that's

[00:08:42] Adam: such a weird concept to me. Like I get the idea of bugs that'll never be fixed because you've got the modern platform and you'd rather, you know, maybe, I don't know how it works in your business, but like, you know, there could be a component where customers might wanna stay on the legacy platform that you might need to incentivize them to do whatever their part is to, to move over there, even if it's just like giving up certain features or, or whatever.

[00:09:05] Adam: but

[00:09:06] Adam: the

[00:09:06] Ben: it's it's so weird. It's so weird. Sorry. Go.

[00:09:09] Adam: well, the, the, the thing that gets me is the idea of knowing there are bugs that, you know, I guess it's gotta depend on how severe the bugs are, right? Like, we have feature requests and, and I guess here's one bug that I can think of in our system, and this is the only bug that I can think of at the.

[00:09:28] Adam: That we know is there that we haven't fixed. And that is that we have an event set up form. You know, you specify these are the details of the event and then people can register for it and pay for it and all that. And that event set up form allows you to specify an end date that happens before the start date, That's something that we should have just caught in the validation and we didn't, but at the same time, it's easy enough for you to go, Oh, that's dumb. Like, maybe I shouldn't do that, . And like, yeah, we should, we should fix that. But at the same time, we've got so many irons in the fire, so many big fish to fry here.

[00:10:06] Adam: Like it's, that's, it has such a low impact, right? It doesn't cause any actual problems that I can think of. It's just we shouldn't do it. It's a bug, but it doesn't cause any like other data problems or anything like that. Anytime that we find something that actually causes data problems or that prevents people from getting work done, that's like a. not, not quite a four alarm fire, but that's like a, Okay, well, somebody's gonna drop what they're doing and fix that right now.

[00:10:31] Ben: Right? Yeah, absolutely. It, One of the sore points for me, as I've brought up many times is that, at some point years ago, someone decided to introduce, React alongside Angular in the Legacy platform. The, the, the modern platform is almost entirely built in React, I believe. there's still some Angular, a little bit, and there's still some view I believe as well, but the parts that are built in React on the Legacy platform are just such.

[00:11:01] Ben: Nightmare. And, and I've been complaining about it for so long and I've, and I've maintained it, but it's, it's, I don't wanna throw react under the bus entirely. I'm not, I'm not hating on React exclusively here. Really what the problem is, is that it was react build with this crazy redux platform approach, and the people who put it together didn't really know what they were doing.

[00:11:22] Ben: Like everyone was learning redux at the same time. And, and it's just, there's so much indirection in the angular world. It's like, I'm calling this method and it's changing this data in, in the react redux world of, of, you know, seven years ago on this legacy platform. It's, I'm, I'm like emitting this action creator, which is then getting consumed by some sort of action thing, which is then calling into a store, which is then being subscribed to by a React component.

[00:11:51] Ben: I mean, it's just figuring out where the heck the data is coming from is such a nightmare. And on top of that, compiling the react is really slow and frustrating. Anyway, long story short, there's, there's decisions that someone made in the React part of the program that I just, I, it's beyond me to understand how to fix it without completely scrapping it.

[00:12:13] Ben: Like I can't see the incremental path, unfortunately. just cause it's so convoluted. So there we, one of the, one of the big things that we run into, a lot of our bugs that I see getting clogged have to do with,what's the phrase? When you do something before the data is saved, optimistic, they, they'll make optimistic changes to the ui.

[00:12:32] Ben: like instead of waiting for a record to be created and then having the primary key from the database to work with, they'll just create a U U I D in JavaScript memory space and use that as the thing that they use going forward. But then the problem is, Users will then do subsequent actions on that thing.

[00:12:50] Ben: And, and it ends up sending the U U I D to the database and the database doesn't know what the heck you're talking about. So all these things are like, can't cast uu, I d to integer. And, and it's like, in order to stop that, I'd have to completely rip out all of the optimistic updates that they're making to the ui.

[00:13:07] Ben: But that's all getting routed through action creators and stores and it's just, it's just such a nightmare.

[00:13:13] Adam: Yeah, I mean the, the whole, my understanding of optimistic QI updates is not something I've done a whole lot with. I just choose to be lazy and wait for the result to come back from the server and, and use that. but my understanding is like, yeah, okay. You, you optimistically update state to assume that it's gonna go well.

[00:13:31] Adam: And then when it does come back, then you update state again to say, Okay, here's the new truth. Right? That record you created is ID number 42.

[00:13:40] Ben: Well, there were all kinds of weird edge cases where the, the server request would fail or wouldn't validate, but then they wouldn't roll back. The optimistic update or the, the server request just literally doesn't come back fast enough. you know, maybe it'll hit a node that's having trouble on the server and it'll hang for five, 10 seconds and the users doing another stuff with that data at that point. And, I dunno, but, but, but I'm with you man. I, I spent so much effort trying to do things proactively in the ui, especially in the really early days. And now I avoid that as much as possible and it just makes the, the code so much easier to, to reason about. And from a performance standpoint, I feel like it really didn't make that much of a difference

[00:14:26] Ben: and it's much easier to maintain.

[00:14:28] Adam: Yeah. I think that for somebody like Facebook who has, I don't, I'm just gonna throw a number out here that is so large. It doesn't even matter at that scale, but like, you know, I imagine they have like 50,000 software engineers on staff, right? Like

[00:14:41] Ben: Yo. Did you hear though, that they just started laying off some people?

[00:14:44] Adam: No.

[00:14:45] Ben: Yeah, I think like just as of hours ago, apparently they announced a hiring freeze and I think maybe they warned of upcoming layoffs. So they haven't, I think they haven't laid off people yet, but I think that warned that that's maybe probably gonna happen.

[00:14:59] Adam: Interesting. Well, we'll have to see how that, how that shakes out.

[00:15:04] Ben: Tune in next week,

[00:15:05] Adam: tip but you know, like at their scale, obviously they have problems that they're solving that we just don't have to deal with at our scale. with that kind of, workforce with that kind of, you know, brain power that they can throw at everything, they can just have one engineer sit there and figure out all the little particulars of one screen for a month.

[00:15:27] Adam: Like, we just can't do that. That's not, that doesn't work in our business model. And I'm sure it's the same for you.

[00:15:33] Ben: yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally

[00:15:35] Adam: but you know what though? I have. Or I should say my team has a, a similar React app that nobody wants to touch. and it uses Redux. And again, not to throw redux under the bush, under the bus or under the bush.

[00:15:47] Adam: Sure. Why not? Don't throw redux under the burning bush. I think the problem, like you said, the problem is that we were learning redux while we were writing this thing. And so we could have done, it could have been done better by somebody who already knew better, but you know, the only way you're going to learn is to make mistakes.

[00:16:05] Adam: And oh boy, there's mistakes in it. And, and it just became the thing that nobody wanted to touch because it's such a pain in the butt. And then it, you know, it rotted on the vine for so long that like, now it's basically un updateable, right? The code is there. The code works. I don't think there's any bugs in it, but, the, the dependencies and everything are just so out of date.

[00:16:26] Adam: It uses such an old version of React. I don't think it's, I honestly don't think it's possible. Like if we needed to, make a change to that, I think we would just be like, Okay, well now this is the moment that we rewrite it. It's fortunately, it's a relatively small thing, but, just, yeah, just no.

[00:16:44] Ben: it's, it's funny, and again, I'm sure a lot of this is just my lack of having immediate understanding of all things react, which, which makes it hard to understand what the path forward is. But there's little silly things. For example, we have some feature flags that have been turned on for everybody for a really long time, and some of those feature flags are being consumed in, in the React code.

[00:17:08] Ben: And so I'd like to, I'd like to take them out and make that code more maintainable, you know, not have the feature flag branches that are doing this or doing that based on the state. and I can't just rip them out because one or two of them is actually based on a, a, another environment variable. But in order to get that environment variable down to the place where the feature flag is being referenced, I'd have to pass it down through like, I don't know, end, you know, NT layer of components because I think.

[00:17:36] Ben: the version of React that we have is, is before there was even context, I think, and I, I'm saying, I'm saying things that I don't fully understand here, or, or maybe they've, maybe we've upgraded, but no, there's no prior art in our application about how to use context. And I don't know anything about context.

[00:17:53] Ben: So it could be as easy as saying, Hey, something's gonna provide this value, and then something far down and the stack can use it. But I don't, I don't know how that works. So if I wanted to pass this environment variable down, I'd have to literally, what, what, what they call prop drilling, where I'm essentially passing it from one component down to a component, down to a component ad nausea.

[00:18:11] Ben: Until I get to the right layer, I'm just like, No, I'm just gonna leave those feature flags in there forever. Like, that's the chances of me breaking something or like flipping my desk.

[00:18:23] Adam: Yep.

[00:18:24] Ben: Those features are just now there forever.

[00:18:26] Adam: Well, forever, until the legacy platform goes

[00:18:29] Ben: Yeah.

[00:18:29] Adam: that's, that's the benefit

[00:18:32] Ben: Yeah,

[00:18:32] Adam: has an end date. We just don't know what it is yet.

[00:18:34] Ben: So that's me.

[00:18:35] Adam: well, uh, yeah, those, that that was, definitely a full double barrel

[00:18:43] Ben: finger guns.

[00:18:44] Adam: yeah. cool.

[00:18:44] What Motivates You To Write?

[00:18:44] Adam: So let's talk about writing. So I guess off the top here, let's acknowledge that it was like, would we say 60 something episodes ago that we did in episode about blogging?

[00:18:54] Adam: and the benefits of blogging. And I, I think that, the way that we're gonna talk about it tonight is gonna be different, right? I don't remember the exact, premise for that episode. It was like episode 36 or something. we had a, like I said, we had a, a patron and a listener ask some questions about blogging and, and we thought, especially since you and I are the only two, of the hosts of the show, that that regularly, or semi-regularly in my case, blog, and have a history of it. Since it's just the two of us, it was a good time to, to answer those questions. So that's what we're gonna do tonight. So Ben, oh gosh, I don't even know where to start here. So what, what motivates you to, to write articles on your blog or anything else that you write? I don't know. Do, do you write anywhere besides your blog?

[00:19:38] Adam: On any regular, I guess there's, you know, I'm not counting Facebook or anything like that. I know you kind of post extreme summaries of your articles in some

[00:19:45] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My, my social media is, is strictly links to the things that I write and photos of my doc. That's basically all that I,

[00:19:55] Adam: Well, and videos, but we don't need to get into that again.

[00:19:59] Ben: Yeah. Wait till the after show . no, I don't write it anywhere else. I just write on my blog. And, and I'd say that, over, over time the, the breadth of things that I write about has contracted. early on I think I was in part motivated by what people would be interested in, so I found myself writing about things that I didn't really have any business writing about.

[00:20:25] Ben: Meaning things like movie reviews. You know, I went to a movie and let me write a review. I'm not very, I'm, I'm very articulate when it comes to technical things. I am not articulate when it comes to movies. I'm like, I like stuff cuz they had guns and things blew up. And, I'm not like, so I stopped writing about stuff like that.

[00:20:46] Ben: I've really focused almost entirely on. Technical things and sort of tech adjacent, you know, work stuff, work life balance stuff, that kind of stuff.

[00:20:58] Adam: That's cool. I guess I got my start. Oh, God, I don't know. I, I was one of those like annoying teenagers, like on Live Journal, just writing about my day. and if you are able to find that somewhere on the annals of the internet, please do not send it to me because I don't, I don't want to cringe so hard that I die, so I, I just, I think I've always enjoyed writing as a, as a catharsis sort of thing. I feel like I'm a decent communicator in terms of like being able to explain my thoughts, maybe not being super concise as as the last couple of sentences can point out, or could demonst. I, Maybe that's what it is.

[00:21:42] Adam: I like the written word because it gives me the opportunity to edit myself. where, you know, here on the podcast, I don't really get that opportunity so much. but, so I've got, I've been writing for a long, long time.

[00:21:52] Ben: I, I was just said, I have, I have also been always drawn to writing. I've, It, it was always something that I joined in school and I enjoy it out of school as well. It's writing never felt like, a chore.

[00:22:06] Adam: Mm-hmm. Well, I agree with you, but only the things that I chose to write, right? Like writing papers in school was the worst. and especially like any assigned reading or assigned writing was so difficult for me, even if it was something that I would choose today to read or to write. so just having it assigned, I think made it difficult for me for some.

[00:22:27] What Got You Started?

[00:22:27] Adam: So anyway, I, I have a long history of writing and so, at one point I, when I got my first, full-time ColdFusion job, which was, it was a couple years before my first get, so I wanna say like around 2005, 2004, let's see, my, my boss encouraged me to, to write, about stuff. And I was like, Okay, well, you know, I kind of understand blogging, so I'll, I'll give it a go.

[00:22:47] Adam: And I did some very cursory, searches for cfml blogs and I found nothing, literally nothing. So I was like, Okay, fine, I'll start a cfml blog. It doesn't look like one of those exist. and my very first article was like, you know how to, to keep your application CFM because application dot CFC didn't exist at the time.

[00:23:05] Adam: How to keep your application CFM performant. And you know what to include and what not to include. And, I very quickly learned through people like finding it, I guess, and leaving comments. And those, you know, back in those days, you know, you left a comment and your, it would include a URL as like part of your little profile, bits of your comment, and they would link to your own blog.

[00:23:26] Adam: And I like, I know yours does that right now, Ben, but, modern these days, you know, people just do like social links or whatever. But,

[00:23:33] Adam: um, so like having people leave those comments showed me that there were actually already cfml blogs out there. And that's how I found out about, like, you and Ray Camden and, all these other prolific cfml writers.

[00:23:48] Adam: And I was like, how did I, how did I miss this when I was searching for these things? How did, how did I not find that these people existed? So, apparently back then I was terrible at Googling, but So that's, that's kind of like how I started. It was just at the encouragement of my boss and I was like, Yeah, you know, I could, I could do that.

[00:24:04] Adam: And I think I must have had some early success in terms of like, getting people's attention because I, I can't think of anything else that would've made me stay consistent as, as much as I don't want it to be true. I, I guess I can just say I'm a bit of an attention horror, right? Like who, who has a podcast that isn't

[00:24:24] Adam: So you, like, you get a dopamine hit when people leave comments on your blog posts and,

[00:24:29] Ben: You know, a thousand

[00:24:30] Adam: it feels good. And so you just keep doing it.

[00:24:32] Ben: So I got started at work also. I, I don't even remember why I thought I, anyone would be interested in this. I started originally as an internal newsletter at the, at the company. I was working this company, Nylon Technology. And, I just started one day. I, I said, You know what? I'm gonna start sending out a technology newsletter in house.

[00:24:53] Ben: I called the nylon technology news or something. And it was basically just me blogging. and then I would write everything down literally in an HTML file. And then, I would do a CF loop. so I would loop over the email addresses of my fellow engineers, and I would just do a CF mail to them, and I would include this HTML file and. I, I don't even know why . I thought anyone would have any interest in what I was writing. I loved programming and I do love programming, and I have always gotten so much joy out of it that I cannot help but assume other people will feel the joy that I feel when I look at code. And, I just wanted to share that love with everybody else.

[00:25:38] Ben: and basically I got no response, which is, you know, a story of my life in many respects, uh, . And, so I, I did it as this newsletter, I don't know, probably for six months or something. And then I decided that I just wanted to reach a broader audience and that's when I started building, my personal blog.

[00:25:57] Ben: And, I actually found a copy of all the newsletters a while back. May, I'll see if I can, that, that feels like it's post worthy. I feel like that's a nice retro time machine kind of a thing. But,

[00:26:08] Adam: said like a true blogger, right? You got that content farm mentality.

[00:26:12] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, that's such a huge thing. every, it's like I'm building my own encyclopedia and I, I search it constantly for, for, I have vague recollections of something that I thought about or something that I solved, or it's just something technical that I can't remember, but I knew I remembered at once and I can look at what I wrote, you know, from five years ago.

[00:26:33] Ben: And it's just there and it, it's great.

[00:26:36] Why Do You Still Do It?

[00:26:36] Adam: So

[00:26:36] Adam: that's what got us started blogging. Why do you still do it? Like do you, if it was all about the dopamine hit from comments that that made that consistency happen. It's been many years for both of us. Now why do you still write, especially, I guess, I guess for me, the question is, do you still get the same level of comments that you did back in the day?

[00:26:57] Adam: And if not, why do you still.

[00:27:00] Ben: Oh man. It, it's, it's night and day. The, the level of, of interaction. It, it used to be, I, I, I would get so many comments. I didn't know what to do. Like I didn't know how to keep up with it. and it's not, I'm not, you know, I'm not like a famous person or anything. I'm not a very socially adapt person, so it doesn't take that much to throw me off my game.

[00:27:22] Ben: But it was, it was like I'd have a post and there'd be dozens of comments on it. And, now if I get a dozen comments in a week, like, I'm like, All right, that was a good week. You know, I have a couple of people, thankfully, that, that do seem to check in. Frequently, and they at this point sort of make up the, the bulk of the comments.

[00:27:42] Ben: So it feels much, much, much less, like it has that social feedback cycle for me. And I think a lot of that is because I still talk primarily about legacy. I mean legacy quote unquote, depending on who you're talking to. I, I talk about less popular, it's called like, that let's less popular technology choices.

[00:28:04] Ben: And I think that's just not, they don't

[00:28:06] Ben: engage as

[00:28:07] Adam: That's interesting. But at the same time, the people who do need that, that content, you know, have fewer places to get it from.

[00:28:14] Ben: Yeah, that's true. And, and I, and I do run into people who say, Hey, you know, I still find your articles all the time. And, and that's great. You know, one thing I did years ago was I, I put in code that will cut off the comment that'll stop allowing comments to be created on posts that are. I think like three or four years old.

[00:28:35] Ben: Cause you know, for someone who is often feeling overwhelmed by life and the number of responsibilities, to have someone jump into a post that's like 10 years old and be like, Hey, this XML parsing doesn't work anymore on my, you know, Windows NT server. I'm like, Yo, I don't, I don't wanna be rude and not respond

[00:28:58] Ben: So I'm just not gonna let anyone comment anymore on post that hold. so I feel, you know, maybe that was a bad decision. I don't know.

[00:29:05] Adam: No, you know what? I support that decision if for no other reason than, like spam, right? So that, that used to be a couple of years ago, not that long ago, a, a tactic that spammers would use. They'd find something really old that had open comments and they would just post garbage comments on it with links to other stuff to try and build up the, the link juice as it were, um, to whatever crappy websites they're trying to increase the search rankings.

[00:29:30] Ben: Yeah, So, so today, you know, I, I blog, I almost exclusively, it feels like at this point for me, I just blog the stuff that I find interesting. A a lot of my stuff is still, here's the thing that I solved yesterday, let me write about it today. And that has historically been a huge part of my approach and, and continues to be a huge part of my approach.

[00:29:54] Ben: and the act of writing, the, the beautiful thing about the act of writing is that it forces you to think more deeply about the thing that you're doing. and then that also drives it into your, I think, deep memory. I don't know, you know, long term memory,

[00:30:08] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. So before we get too far from this statement, I wanna, I wanna correct you on something you said you're not, I think you said you're not a famous person or anything like that. And I just wanna say like now, now there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here, right? Like I think that, You have been posting content consistently for a long time, and by, that's, by its very nature, that behavior will increase your follower account because people will just give you a, a follow because, oh, that one thing that you posted was interesting to me.

[00:30:35] Adam: but you have like 20, over 22,000 followers on Twitter. I don't know what your

[00:30:40] Ben: Do I

[00:30:41] Adam: I

[00:30:42] Adam: you

[00:30:42] Ben: don't know. I, I've, I've been bad about Twitter too.

[00:30:45] Adam: Now, granted, I, I'm not measuring us against each other or anything like that, but I, I would consider myself a much more casual user of Twitter, although, you know, I, I kind of put myself in tech circles.

[00:30:59] Adam: For the most part. The, a lot of the people that I follow are tech. A lot of the conversations that I engage in are tech related. and occasionally, you know, I, when I do get around to writing something these days, I will post it on my Twitter and I try to, you know, do what I can to participate in those circles.

[00:31:13] Adam: but my following is like just over 1600. So, I, I feel like the average person, you know, putting out a little bit of content can get that, you know, thou, thousand people.

[00:31:24] Adam: Mark, you are above average, Sir.

[00:31:28] Ben: All right. I, I'll, Hey, I'll take it. I'll take it because I, I do not, you know, I struggle socially, and I, even, even on social media, I struggle to be. Consistent in any way whatsoever. You know, I, I hear every now and then I'll subscribe to a, a podcast that's about social marketing, like social media marketing, just cause I'm like, you know, let me dip my toe in there, just see what's going on.

[00:31:52] Ben: And I, I can only make it like two or three episodes before I'm like, I just can't deal with this. This is a waste of my

[00:31:57] Adam: Yeah. There's, it's so much effort goes into it.

[00:32:00] Ben: Oh my God. Well, that's the thing is that they talk about like, Oh, you know, in order to have a following, you have to post consistently like six to eight times a day and you should look to see what times of day your posts get the most engagement for the type of topics.

[00:32:13] Ben: You're, your comment, you're posting. I'm like,

[00:32:15] Ben: Oh, bro. I'm like, I'm gonna post before I go to work and like, that's it for the day. Like, that's all I

[00:32:22] Adam: I don't even check my work email that many times in a day.

[00:32:24] Ben: Yeah.

[00:32:37] Adam: Hey, I'm proud of that one. I, I, I got a, a bend break

[00:32:40] Ben: yeah,

[00:32:43] Subscribing To Blogs

[00:32:43] Adam: So, speaking of social media, for me, and I, I don't know if this represents everybody else's experience as well, but I feel like, the creation of Twitter and the, the popularity of Twitter roughly coincides with, Google killing, Google Reader. at the time that Google killed Reader, it was a big part of my like, daily morning routine.

[00:33:07] Adam: You know, get to the office, check in on all the blogs that I follow, see what their content is. And, you know, cuz I was, I would follow a bunch of stuff that was mostly, you know, relevant to my work. So I didn't feel bad doing it at work. It was like, okay, these are people writing about things that I need to know or I should know to make me better at my job.

[00:33:25] Adam: And, you know, and I feel like that drove me toward commenting. and Twitter. I think I, I can't, I certainly can't say that Twitter caused Google to kill reader, but I feel like it took a lot of people's attention away from using reader. And maybe that's why they killed it. And I know there are other products out there like Feedly.

[00:33:49] Adam: I have a Feedly account, I'm subscribed to blogs and for whatever reason, maybe it's because I'm on Twitter, but I just, I find myself not having the attention. Or the time or the Motivate, something. I just don't use it like I used to. And even though there are blogs that I'm like, I really don't wanna miss anything, I guess it just doesn't rise to the level of, well then don't miss anything.

[00:34:13] Adam: it's so hard. I, I, I struggle so much with the same stuff. And, and I think part of it is just that there's so much content these

[00:34:22] Ben: days. It, it, it used to be, you know, if you followed maybe a couple dozen blogs, you could skim through all of the topics at a time and, and, and get a sense of which ones you wanna read and which ones aren't for you.

[00:34:36] Ben: But now, I mean, in a day, just in my email, I get like, it feels like 17 different newsletters that I've collected over the, over the last 20 years. And you open each one of those and each one of them has like 30 links in it. And I'm like, It it, it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming. The idea of. Casually collecting information.

[00:35:00] Ben: It, it, it feels like all of the information that I gather these days is because I hit a problem and I'm Googling very specifically for that problem. And that's where I find posts these days.

[00:35:11] Adam: Yeah,

[00:35:11] Ben: but I don't love that. I don't love

[00:35:13] Ben: that.

[00:35:13] Adam: I

[00:35:13] Adam: can. I, definitely relate to that.

[00:35:15] Ben: and maybe this is just a, a sense of nostalgia of the past, when the world was smaller and the communities were smaller, but like, I, I wanna be able to motivate to be more part of the, of the community.

[00:35:29] Ben: I, I feel like I'm not part of a community anymore. I mean, I, there's the ColdFusion community, which I think I'll just always be part of for historical reasons. but I don't know. I, one thing that I've been playing around with is the, is the idea of just dedicating Sunday, resisting the urge to write any code on Sunday and do just reading.

[00:35:51] Ben: Whether that's a book or whether it's going through blogs or, or something to just find information just to like give myself a bounded context in which to absorb information. But I don't know. I haven't really done that yet. I've did, I did it like last Sunday and it felt really great actually. but we'll see if I can keep that going.

[00:36:11] Adam: Hmm. I'd like to hear about.

[00:36:13] Where People Engage With Content

[00:36:13] Adam: So, I guess another thought I had too was, you know, you said the comments kind of fell off and I wonder how men, how much of that discussion moved over to Twitter cause or other places. I know you on Facebook and for some bizarre reason you seem really engaged on LinkedIn.

[00:36:29] Adam: Explain yourself,

[00:36:30] Ben: I I mean LinkedIn to me, cuz I, I don't know anything about LinkedIn. I haven't had to interview or look for a job, thankfully in, in, you know, 15 years. I mean, I've, in 15 years I've had. Two and a half jobs and you know, so I'm just, I've not been someone who had to network or maintain a network of people or call on my network of people for help, thankfully.

[00:36:53] Ben: so I treat LinkedIn today more just like a social platform, but I, I don't post pictures of my dog. so it's, it's the social

[00:37:01] Ben: me minus the

[00:37:02] Ben: dog But here's, here's the thing that drives me crazy, and I, and I don't understand what this is about. So I will at work, when I write an article at work that feels at least mildly work related and mild is pretty in quotes there, I will post it to our engineering channel in Slack and I say, Hey, I wrote this thing.

[00:37:25] Ben: I try to relate it to work. I say, you know, in the legacy platform we do this, and this is why I thought this would be potentially an interesting read. And I will have people go to the article that I wrote, read it clearly read. And then come back into Slack and post a comment about something I wrote, and I'm like, Bro, this comment will be lost forever.

[00:37:47] Ben: But if you had made this same comment, if you had taken the effort that you just put out and actually just did it over there instead of over here, like that would live forever. People will be able to find that, People will be able to respond to it. I, there's this like weird, almost aversion to having something live longer than a tweet.

[00:38:08] Ben: And I, I don't understand where that motivation is coming from.

[00:38:12] Adam: Do you think that's intentional? Like do you think if you, if they left that comment back for you in Slack and you said, Hey, would you mind like copying, pasting that over and leaving it as a comment on the blog? I feel like it's a good discussion and I want to have it with you, but I wanna have that discussion in the open so that other people can benefit from being a fly on the wall for that discussion.

[00:38:32] Adam: Do you feel like you would get pushback on that

[00:38:34] Ben: I don't know. I mean, you're so, you're, you're such a more mature person than I am. My, my strategy , my strategy is I will go and I will, I will go to my own article and I'll post my own comment. I'll say, Hey, someone at work, some, like, one of my coworkers just mentioned this and I thought maybe it'd be interesting to share here.

[00:38:52] Ben: And then I'll go into Slack and say like, Hey, great feedback. I left a comment about. On my post. So like I get almost like a little passive aggressive about it. which, you know, again, to say you were quite the, you, you were the bigger man . but it's, it's, you know, it's at work, it's, it's at Twitter, it's on Facebook.

[00:39:08] Ben: People will go, they'll read something, but then they feel compelled to respond in the social media sphere and not in the source of truth, in the, you know, in the, in the origin. And that I, I don't know if, I don't even think it's a conscious choice. I, I, it's like people are just so used to having social media as the thing that is the point of interaction.

[00:39:32] Ben: Like they can't help themselves.

[00:39:34] Stale Content And Experience

[00:39:34] Adam: one of the things that I struggle with emotionally is the stuff that you write or the stuff that I write over time becomes less relevant, which is less of an issue, but sometimes it becomes less accurate as time brings forth more evidence And I'm not one of those people who I'm not motivated enough to go back and fix things that are wrong. I, I'm already struggling to get through my day and do the things that I wanna do. I'm constantly out of time. I'm constantly out of breath. I think I've described this on previous episodes, is just feeling like I'm constantly, underwater.

[00:40:10] Ben: And I, I don't know how to solve that problem. but I know that solving that problem will not be helped by going back to an article from three years ago and fixing some factoid that I got wrong. But at the same time, I know that there are other people who might land on that article from a Google search and, and maybe be misled or they'll find information that is, inaccurate or might lead them into problems in other ways. And I feel bad about that. So there is like this emotional weight to, to, to feeling like everything you've done in the past is not perfect. and that sucks, but I guess, you know, when that happens a couple of times, you, you learn from that. And I think that ends up reinforcing your, your future efforts.

[00:40:58] Ben: Meaning, let's say that I'm, I'm about to write something technical and I'll say, Hey, this is how, this is how this works. And when you do this, the browser does this thing. you know, old me would've tried to end Firefox and been like, Okay, great. It works. We're done for the day. but me with, a long period of.

[00:41:14] Ben: Of riding under my belt. I'll go, You know what, let me just double check this in Safari to make sure that it actually does the same thing in Safari. And like, let me just double check that it, that it works this way in Chrome and you know, in 95% of cases it's the same in every browser. But there is that weird little edge case where it's totally different in Safari for, you know, because Safari and, and so having made mistakes and having to have that emotional burden of living with those mistakes, I think has helped me become a better thinker about the way that I write and about the things that I write.

[00:41:49] Ben: And I'm much less likely to just throw something out casually without testing it. And, and so I guess the mistakes in my past are helping me make my content going forward much more, dependable and solid,

[00:42:03] Adam: Sure. So yeah, I mean, I have a couple of thoughts. Regarding that. so a couple of things that immediately spring to mind. I guess this is where the concept of like a digital garden instead of a time based blog, you know, just like a, I mean, literally blog is, it comes from, I think it was binary log.

[00:42:22] Adam: and it was just like, okay, you know, dropping a note every day, in the, in the system to keep track of what you were doing and when it happened. and that, that has value. Like obviously, you know, producing content, on a daily basis has value in terms of keeping up with what's relevant in the moment.

[00:42:39] Adam: But I think if you compare that similarly to like vlogs on YouTube or whatever, I think that they suffer from some of the same problems, right? It's not as interesting to go back and look at somebody's videos. They're just daily vlogs of what, whatever's relevant or going on in the news from 10 years ago.

[00:42:58] Adam: and I think that that's why digital gardens have kind of become a little bit more popular these days where people, I think everybody kind of has a different approach to it. The way that I am kind of trying to approach mine is that I have a huge back catalog of content from previous, I guess I'll say iterations or versions of my blog that I have on, you know, in backup.

[00:43:22] Adam: But I haven't restored all of it yet. And what I'm trying to do is over time, I go through like a year's worth of that content and I go, That's not worth reposting. That's not worth reposting. Okay, I'll, I'll keep that one or I'll update it, or whatever. And it's, it really is like gardening, right? Like I'm pruning out the stuff that doesn't belong anymore, that's not relevant, that's just, it's not worth rewriting or it didn't, wouldn't have value today. And that gives me the motivation to, do what I can to keep things up to date. And, you know, it's, nobody has the time to go back and re-review everything they wrote last year to make sure that it is still relevant today. Especially someone who writes every day like you, like I put out maybe a dozen.

[00:44:06] Adam: blog posts in a year, if, if I'm lucky, right? Like a good year for me is 12 to 20 blog posts for you. I think a good month is 12 to 20 blog posts, or 20 to 30.

[00:44:18] Ben: at a good month. Yeah.

[00:44:19] Adam: Yeah. So, like ain't nobody got time for that, right? Like, we're not,

[00:44:23] Ben: what I was gonna say, and that, that's my big issue with the idea of, keeping things fresh maybe, is that it only ever gets harder. Meaning that as your back catalog grows, the, the thing that remains constant is you.

[00:44:38] Ben: you, you can't get more, you and you can't get more hours in the day for the most part, you know, unless you stop doing some other things. So the idea of going back and updating things, it's, it's like it will only ever get harder if I want to keep doing that.

[00:44:52] Adam: Yep. So that kind of ties in nicely with another one of the ideas that I had, which was like, especially considering you wrote your own blogging platform, it would be so simple for you to throw in like a little banner at the top of the blog post that says, Hey, this was written more than five years ago.

[00:45:09] Adam: So there's a real good chance that it's out of date. You know, it's still here because you might find it helpful, but it, you know, there might be a more relevant or more recent resource for you to use. And

[00:45:21] Adam: then, you know, if you do get comments

[00:45:23] Ben: Yo, actually, that's a really good idea,

[00:45:25] Adam: See, you're welcome . I'll send you a check or an invoice. and I think that you. Wherever you're drawing a line for turning off comments. Right? You said you turn off comments for old entries do the same thing for the banner, right? Like if you, if you're not gonna accept comments on something that old, then it's probably, the same cutoff would make sense

[00:45:45] Adam: for

[00:45:45] Ben: I think that that,

[00:45:47] Adam: old.

[00:45:47] Ben: that makes a lot of sense.

[00:45:48] Adam: You are welcome.

[00:45:49]

[00:45:52] What Have You Done Right? What Have You Messed Up On?

[00:45:52] Ben: I guess the next one on here that's interesting to me in the moment is, what have you, what do you feel like you've done, right? And what do you feel like you might have messed up on?

[00:45:58] Ben: Well, as far as messing up on, I think it, it was writing about stuff that I didn't really have any business writing about. I, earlier in the, the discussion here, you know, I talked about writing about, movies, and to, you know, don't get me wrong, I love movies. I really, really love movies. I just, I, I don't speak about them really well.

[00:46:17] Ben: And I was doing it because I thought other people, I thought it might get engagement, you know, to write about movies But it, it, it always felt a little bit like a chore. Here's the thing, It's like, I don't want the writing to ever feel like a chore. And, and the mistakes, the biggest mistakes that I've made has been writing stuff that didn't feel like it just flowed out of me. the, the things that I think I do well are when I'm really excited about something. I'm not saying it's always easy to get to the end of an article. Sometimes I'll be writing and I'm just like, Oh, I have to take another screenshot and, and put arrows on something. I'm like, I don't, I don't wanna, I don't feel enthused about this, but, but like the idea and the writing of the article itself, like I'm excited about, and I think that's the, that's the thing that I feel like I've done the best at is, is having a solid voice.

[00:47:06] Ben: Like I know who I am and I know what I'm excited about, and I've really started to, focus entirely on the things that I'm excited about.

[00:47:16] Adam: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I would say I've had the things that have been most successful in terms of engagement views and comments and stuff have always been things that are relatively cutting edge that excite me. And, so I, I kind of just chased my interest down a rabbit hole and I learned something interesting, so I decided to write about it, and then it turns out to be something that people end up searching for, right?

[00:47:41] Adam: It like, if it brings search traffic, then you know, you get lots of views, you get lots of comments and lots of dopamine from that.

[00:47:47] Adam: and at, you know, kind of let me tie this back into your movie thing. So, a pretty big movie trope would be the like, sort of, the guy who has no idea that a potential love interest is, sending him clues that, that she's interested.

[00:48:04] Adam: And so he just completely misses his opportunity to, pursue that romance. I feel like that has, that's a, a good representation of my writing career. I. Failed to capture the lightning that's been right there in the bottle in front of me so many times. or, or failed to realize that the lightning was in the bottle, right?

[00:48:27] Adam: Like, Bootstrap two era, so long time ago I wrote this post about, customizing a bootstrap type ahead. Are you familiar with that type ahead? It's

[00:48:38] Ben: You're talking, so like when you're, It's giving you suggestions, that thing.

[00:48:42] Adam: yeah, yeah. So you type in an input box, just like a regular single line text input, and as you type it filters and shows you the items in a list that, that match, that filter.

[00:48:53] Adam: Well, as it turned out, even back as early as bootstrap too, that was very customizable. Like you could give it some functions and it, you know, you, you could have a function that does the matching, right? So like, it. Make an Ajax request and get the data to do the matching there or whatever. And then, so like, and separate from that, you had a function that could do formatting of the results that you're about to display because these are the things that matched, right.

[00:49:19] Adam: And so I wrote this awesome blog post that, kind of dove deep into what was possible with a bootstrap type ahead. It as even as going as far as like, you know, you search for president names or whatever, and it shows you their name. And underneath that, like a sec, a secondary line of text, it would show like their, the, the years that they were president and it showed their picture, like their official president photograph in the, in the dropdown.

[00:49:44] Adam: you know, it was like just nicely formatted, like this is how a, a good type ahead would look. And that got so many search hits and so many views and a decent number of comments and it was just, Like years later I was like, I really should have seen what was going on there and like gone deep on so many other aspects of Bootstrap that would've, I think that would've altered the trajectory of my writing career.

[00:50:13] Adam: Had I done that,

[00:50:14] Adam: but I completely was clueless at the time. I was like, Oh look, all these clicks, this is awesome And that was

[00:50:21] Adam: that.

[00:50:22] Ben: tell you something that makes me think about too is that, because I have focused on the same topics for such a long time, ColdFusion and JavaScript and you know, more narrowly angular and The topics tend to get more advanced over time because those are the types of problems I'm solving.

[00:50:39] Ben: It's, you know, day one, I'm, how do I make a query to the database? And, you know, day 4,000, I'm like, let me look at how you organize index structure to have a covering index to make joins more efficient. And, what I forget is that not everyone in the world is going on that journey with me. In fact, most people are not going on that journey with me, which, which is like my audience almost by, it's by the nature of my journey, becomes smaller over time, which is very frustrating because I'll, for example, write a post on here's, here's what I've learned over the last 15 years about database index structure.

[00:51:24] Ben: I pour my heart into it and it's, you know, it's a, it's an opus on, on, on how beautiful indexing can be and how fast and all these problems that it solves, and it gets very little traction. And then I'm like, Oh, did you know that, you know, you can find the closest parent do element by calling this one method that's on the Dom api.

[00:51:47] Ben: And people are like, Oh, that's amazing. You get like 70 comments. You're like, What? Really? Like that's the thing you guys are excited about. And, and I, I only say it from my perspective because that feels like the stuff I would've written about 10 years ago. But the reality is, and I always forget this, is that most people are where I was 10 years ago.

[00:52:10] Ben: And I don't mean that in a, in like a, I was so far ahead of the game. I mean, like there are just so many new programmers all the time and they don't have. The experience because they've literally only been programming for two years, or three years, or five years. So, you know, to your, to your point almost about the bootstrap stuff, I, I take a lot of opportunity off the table by forgetting that beginner, intermediate, simple kinds of topics are actually very attractive to people.

[00:52:41] Adam: Yeah.

[00:52:42] Ben: But I don't be, because so much of my writing is based on, here's the thing I solved yesterday, I don't know how to get into that mode.

[00:52:50] Ben: Hmm.

[00:52:51] Adam: Yeah. I dunno what to tell you.

[00:52:53] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. if, if I were creating content for the sake of creating content, meaning if I was writing articles, As a means to get traction, as a means to get, interaction from users. I think it'd be a lot easier to, to come up with those, those kind of earlier on in your career topics. but because I'm not creating content specifically for the sake of creating content, I just find it much more, you know, I'm, I'm follow, I'm following my own journey and I'm writing about that journey, and I guess I just have to lean into the fact that, that fewer and fewer people are coming with me.

[00:53:32] Adam: So here's maybe, here's something that will be interesting and, helpful to you and interesting to see how it's gonna play out at some point whenever you cross that ARR number. You're gonna be, you're gonna find yourself on the, the modern platform

[00:53:46] Ben: my God,

[00:53:47] Adam: And you're,

[00:53:48] Adam: and at that point you are going to be a senior developer, senior level developer, with, you know, a decade or more of experience in a totally new world, right?

[00:54:04] Adam: Maybe not entirely new, but you're gonna be

[00:54:07] Adam: pretty low down, very, very early on the, the path of learning the, the new tech stack. And I think that that's gonna present you a unique opportunity to present learning content from the perspective of somebody who has seen the end of one of these roads, right?

[00:54:26] Adam: You, you've seen, you know, the design patterns, you know, a lot of lessons learned the hard way. that might be interesting to carry with you through that journey and see how it affects how you think about learning the new stuff.

[00:54:41] Ben: I'm so terrified, honestly, of that transition because I think it's gonna be such a hit emotionally. I just, I just watched, it's so scary. I just watched, the, the latest Thor movie just came out in Disney Plus, Thor Love and

[00:54:54] Adam: love and

[00:54:55] Ben: was called. Yeah.

[00:54:57] Ben: Yeah. so I'm not, I'm not a big comic book person, so the, the back stories don't mean anything to me really. And they don't stick in my memory. But I guess Thor, he had his hammer and then he lost his hammer broke. So he has a new hammer. , I apologize to all the Marvel people who are yelling at me right now.

[00:55:14] Ben: and in love and thunder, he, he, he has feelings, you know, he's, he's catching, feelings about his old hammer , and he keeps putting his hand out, to try and get the hammer to, to come to him. And it just won't, cause it's not his hammer anymore. And I, and I feel like that's what going to the new platform is gonna be like, I used to just be able to put my hand out into the air and, and magic would happen.

[00:55:36] Ben: And now I'm gonna still wanna do that, but nothing's gonna happen. The, the, the, the history of understanding and the history of the technology, it's, it's just not at my fingertips anymore. So it's gonna, it's very challenging.

[00:55:50] Adam: Yeah, I think, you know what, Let's just wrap it there. I think that that's a, a good spot.

[00:55:54] Patreon

[00:55:54] Adam: Okay, so, this episode of Working Code was brought to you by Google Reader, the hip new RSS reader. you should check it out reader google.com. And listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.

[00:56:10] Adam: patrons help us cover the cost of recording and editing. We couldn't do this every week without them. So special thanks to them and huge thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Sean. You guys rock. if you wanna help us out, you can go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod all of our patrons at every level get, early access to new episodes, before they go public.

[00:56:29] Adam: tonight on the after show, I have a thing. I don't know. Ben, is there anything that you wanna talk about on the after show?

[00:56:35] Ben: no. Maybe some ranting.

[00:56:36] Adam: Okay, that's fine. I gotta, I got a thing that I wanna kind of dig into, but I don't think it's gonna be a full show. So I think after shows where it's gonna go, I'm gonna talk about, supporting emoji in MySQL. Why is that, an emotional thing? What does it take to make it work? why hasn't it just been possible from the beginning?

[00:56:53] Adam: And, what are the limitations of that that you incur by turning on the config to make it work? So, we'll get into that a little bit.

[00:57:00] Thanks For Listening!

[00:57:00] Adam: we of course have, a discord. That's where we kind of try to gather our community from the podcast. If you enjoy talking to us and or other listeners of the show, you can, join our Discord by going to workingcode.dev/discord.

[00:57:12] Adam: It's like Slack only more community oriented, less work oriented. It's a cool place to. You can send us your topics or questions at work in Good pod on Twitter or Instagram. when this comes out, you should still have a little bit of time if you're listening to this as soon as it's released. You should still have a little bit of time to submit your questions for our upcoming 100th episode.

[00:57:34] Adam: spectacular. We'll be doing an ama while we punish ourselves with, food that no, no person

[00:57:40] Ben: It's gonna be way too spicy

[00:57:43] Adam: yeah, I, I, who was it? Somebody We were talking about, spicy Food in Discord recently, and somebody said something about, like it was something spicy, but like dipped in battery acid. I forget what it was.

[00:57:54] Adam: And that was, you know, one of the sauces that we're gonna have on our, uh, on our plate here soon. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Discord, you can, email us at WorkingCodePod@gmail.com or send a voice memo there. We'll get it on the show. I think, that's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you next week and until then,

[00:58:10] Ben: Remember folks, your heart matters, especially Carol, who is part of our family, but couldn't be here tonight.

next episode: 097: Expectations Of Professional Software Engineers

prev episode: 095: Potluck #6 - Unpopular Opinions Edition