Episodes

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074: What's On Your Workbench?

11 May, 2022

This week on the show, the crew talks about what they've been working on recently.

073: Our Golden Parachute

4 May, 2022

Is voluntary resignation for leadership (as opposed to firing) healthy for the company? Or, is it a form of gaslighting that creates confusion and dissent within the organization?

072: Too Many Hats

27 April, 2022

The crew discusses a topic submitted by Mingo Hagen: Do developers wear too many hats, do they spread themselves too thin, and does the work suffer because of it?

071: Potluck #4

20 April, 2022

This week on the show, the crew discusses a potluck of tasty topics.

070: Self Reflections

13 April, 2022

The crew looks back on the first 70 episodes of Working Code and reflects on what's working, what's not working, and what we'd like to see in the future.

069: Now I'm Catching Events

6 April, 2022

Carol talks to us about how her Support team manages communication with their customers.

068: Hire Women, Inspire Women

30 March, 2022

Carol leads a discussion about communication styles, recruiting, and the power of seeing female role models at all levels of an organization.

067: We Have Feelings On Logging

23 March, 2022

The crew talks about different categories of logging, why some logging is required for regulatory purposes, how you can replace certain logs with telemetry and metrics, and why you should absolutely never ever email yourself errors...

066: Make Meetings Suck Less

16 March, 2022

The crew talks about their love-hate relationship with meetings. And, demonstrates that we're all a little different when it comes to right-sizing our meeting agendas

065: TDD In the Trenches with Scott Stroz

9 March, 2022

The crew talks to Scott Stroz about his experience with Test Driven Development (TDD); and, about how he has come to understand that testing makes possible what would have otherwise been impossible.

064: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

2 March, 2022

The crew talks about the pros-and-cons of various employment tenures.

063: Nobody Makes It Out Alive!

23 February, 2022

This week, inspired in part by a post-mortem checklist created by Chrissy LeMaire, the crew shares their thoughts and experiences with death.

062: Note To Self

16 February, 2022

This week on the show, the crew peers into the deep, dark recesses of Ben's mind and tries to understand what exactly makes him tick.

061: Software Is For People

9 February, 2022

The crew talks about their own experience dealing with customers. And, how hard it can be to manage expectations in either direction.

060: Technical Debt

2 February, 2022

This week, the crew discusses technical debt and goes so far as to say that taking on technical debt is a necessary negotiation within every successful product development life-cycle.

059: Everything Old Is New Again

26 January, 2022

As an industry, we're not 'rediscovering', we're 'Yes, and'ing'. Everything old is new again because the context is always changing and is in need of new consideration.

058: Do 10x Developers Exist?

19 January, 2022

We discuss the concept of the '10x Developer'. This notion has its roots in bona fide research; however, much of the nuance has been lost in translation.

057: Goals for 2022

12 January, 2022

On this week's show, we share both our tech and our non-tech goals for the new year.

056: Best Of 2021

5 January, 2022

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.

055: Sales Fails

29 December, 2021

On today's show, Tim and Adam share their sad tales of _sales fails_; and illustrate why it's so important to go into any meeting with a rock-solid plan-of-attack.

054: We're So Quacked!

22 December, 2021

At 3:30 AM the day before Thanksgiving, Ben received an emergency page about a failing API end-point. Rushing to his desk, groggy-eyed and in various states of undress, he jumped into the #incident channel on Slack to see what was happening. What unfolded over the next 30-hours was the manifestation of Ben's worst nightmare.

053: Product Management with Adam Lehman

15 December, 2021

On this week's show, Tim interviews Adam Lehman, the Director of Product for Marketplace Core at Spotify.

052: Starting Your Own Business, with Steve Rittler

8 December, 2021

On this week's show, Adam interviews his long-time friend and boss Steve Rittler, founder and CEO of AlumnIQ.

051: You Are Replaceable

1 December, 2021

This week on the show, the crew talks about their own relationship to the notion of being replaced. On one hand, it can be very humbling. But, on the other hand...

050: Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?

24 November, 2021

This week on the show, the crew talks about where they each see themselves in 5 years. This is not an easy thought-experiment, especially in a technology landscape that changes so rapidly.

049: Revisiting Replatforming

17 November, 2021

On today's show, we talk about the choices that we'd personally make if we had to rebuild our application using a new language.

048: // TODO: Microwave ToDo List

10 November, 2021

This week on the show, the crew talks about how they manage their ToDo lists using comments, software applications, and physical notebooks.

047: Email Ruins Everything

3 November, 2021

This week on the show, the crew talks about different communication styles, Inbox zero, email as a delivery mechanism, and the not-so-surprising surprising way that Zoom calls can supercharge our ability to get stuff done!

046: Secrets Management vs. Premature Optimization

27 October, 2021

A classic battle between doing things "the right way" and getting things done quickly and cost-effectively.

045: Join Our Discord

20 October, 2021

We're inviting you to get more involved in the community by joining our community chat server.

044: Facebook's No Good Very Bad Week

13 October, 2021

043: Relay Race Programming

6 October, 2021

You might think that "programming" is a relatively straightforward concept: take abstract ideas and codify them into lines-of-code (LOC). But, within this broad abstraction, there are a multitude of implementation details. Some engineers love to hunker down and write code inside a metaphorical bubble; mob programmers love to dog-pile on the same machine, blitzing the problem until it's obliterated; and, pair programmers methodically alternate responsibilities between a "driver" and a "navigator" in cooperative pairing sessions.

042: Potluck #3

29 September, 2021

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics: "Strong opinions, loosely held"; When to upgrade your aging technolgies; The ethics of GitHub Copilot; and Why don't we see more employee-owned software companies?

041: The Third Age of JavaScript, with Shawn @swyx Wang

22 September, 2021

Shawn Wang - known as @swyx online - is a financial investor turned software engineer and journalist. With a passion for history and a knack for 'trend spotting', Shawn uses a keen analytical sense, honed through years of financial due diligence, in order to organize the world of web development into a series of epochs, each with its own theme. He's recently codified these observations in a blog post titled, The Third Age of JavaScript. Today, we're thrilled to have Shawn as a guest on our podcast to discuss the past, present, and future state of JavaScript as well as the world of developer ergonomics and the magical possibilities of effortless platform management.

040: Automaticity Is a Weird Word

15 September, 2021

On today's episode, the crew talks about how they use databases; the role of atomic transactions in the reduction of application complexity; and, whether or not they've ever felt "held back" by the limitations of a relational database management system. Full disclosure, all of the hosts have far more experience with traditional databases when compared to NoSQL databases.

039: Ben's Future at InVision

8 September, 2021

For last 8-years, Ben Nadel has poured his heart and soul into InVision, a product that drives design collaboration. During this period, his area of expertise has focused on the (now named) "legacy" platform - the ColdFusion and AngularJS monolith that has built the business into what it is today. Soon, however, the "legacy" platform will be wholly subsumed by the "modern" platform - a distributed, microservices architecture built on Go, Node.js, and React.

038: Holding Developers Accountable

1 September, 2021

Recently on Facebook, Hal Helms —highly respected author, speaker, and computer programmer— shared some of his views on the use of "Sprints" to drive engineering work on a product team. In short, he despises the idea of asking engineers to commit to achieving a goal within an estimated time frame. He likens this to asking prisons to build their own gallows. Everyone is terrible at estimating everything. So when companies start to use each "estimate" as a "contract" with which to punish engineers for under-delivering after over-promising, all it does is set the entire team up for a toxic cycle of disappointment.

037: Brian Klaas Talks Cloud

25 August, 2021

Brian Klaas (@Brian_Klaas) is a Senior Technology Officer and instructor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; he runs a team that builds a Learning Management System (LMS) running on a hybrid cloud; he's been using and extolling the value of Amazon Web Services since 2009; and, he's a well known and respected speaker and leader within the ColdFusion community. According to him, the overarching value that AWS provides is the outsourcing of "undifferentiated heavy lifting": AWS builds the infrastructure that you don't want to, allowing your team to focus on your own business-critical product-lines.

036: Blogs and Digital Gardens

18 August, 2021

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.

035: Being a Swamp Guide

11 August, 2021

Software is never "done". And, as it continues to evolve over time, it often gathers a lot of accidental and essential complexity. This makes it harder to on-board new engineers into a legacy application (and a legacy organization). Enter swamp guides: the aged and battle-hardened staff who know where all the bodies are buried.

034: Some of My Best Friends Are React Developers!

4 August, 2021

This week, Adam talks about his "obnoxious optimism": his general tendency to believe that all problems can be solved and that everything will just sort of work itself out.

033: Software Patents

28 July, 2021

This week, the crew - which has absolutely no legal training whatsoever - talk about patents, copyrights, research & development tax credits, building software, job hopping, and best practices.

032: What Comes After Senior Developer?

21 July, 2021

This week, the crew talks about the career path of web developers; how some positions allow you to be a "force multiplier" and have a bigger impact; and, how dopamine affects your sense of work satisfaction.

031: To the Cloud! But Why?

14 July, 2021

What is "The Cloud"? Why and when would you choose to use it? And what are the drawbacks and trade-offs?

030: Carol's Consult Catch-Up Conversation

7 July, 2021

Ten weeks ago, in episode 20, Carol described a problem at work in which her customers were using Support Tickets as a means to look-up information in lieu of logging into the customer dashboard. This email-based workflow has been putting a large burden on the Support staff. And, Carol wanted to brainstorm on ways in which she could improve the overall situation and the efficiency of her team. Today, we circle back with Carol to see how it's going. Which is to say, to see just how hard Carol is crushing it!

029: Potluck #2

30 June, 2021

This week on the podcast, the crew discusses various topics, with no advance notice of what they will be!

028: Buy vs. DIY

23 June, 2021

Engineers love to build things. Materializing an abstract concept into the form of a working piece of software is one of the most thrilling experiences available on planet earth. As such, we engineers often favor building new software over buying existing solutions. However, doing so takes time and energy; and, incurs a potentially-large opportunity cost for the business. It can be difficult to know if such a trade-off is worthwhile for the business in the long-run. This week, the crew examines the "build vs. buy" dilemma; and, reflects on their own general tendencies.

027: Giving Technical Presentations

16 June, 2021

Part deep-dive, part story telling, a compelling technical presentation has to present enough information on a topic so as to deliver meaningful take-aways while, at the same time, keeping the information light enough so as not to overwhelm the audience. This week, the crew discusses presentations that they've given. And, shares tips and tricks for making your presentation a real winner!

026: Passwords

9 June, 2021

Web applications store a great deal of sensitive information. But, there is something categorically different about storing passwords.

025: Breaking Up With Your Stack

2 June, 2021

024: The Archetype of an Effective Developer

26 May, 2021

This week, the crew discusses which habits make - or break - the most effective developers.

023: Book Club #1: Clean Code by "Uncle Bob" Martin (pt2)

19 May, 2021

This week, the crew meets to finish their review of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). This book is filled with so much thought-provoking information that it took us two episodes to get through it! And, while some of the practices in the book didn't quite connect with the programming languages that we use or the types of applications that we build, our general consensus is that most of the suggestions in this book are spot-on.

022: Book Club #1: Clean Code by "Uncle Bob" Martin (pt1)

12 May, 2021

This week, the crew talks about Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin aka "Uncle Bob". Recommended to us by friend-of-the-show Adam Cameron, this book outlines a series of best practices that programmers can use in order to create applications that are easy to understand and easy to maintain.

021: Listener Questions #2

5 May, 2021

This week, the crew responds to questions shared by our wonderful, wonderful audience! We continued the discussion on feature flags, compared Kanban and Scrum, discussed staying up to date with new tech while working on old tech, the importance of having a GitHub profile, and whether we'd rather be a jack of all trades or a master of one.

020: Carol Needs a Consult

28 April, 2021

This week, the crew meets to commiserate with Carol on the complexity of email management; and, to help her brainstorm on ways that she might use AWS - and other service providers - to increase Support efficiency while also providing more customer value.

019: Makefiles

21 April, 2021

Today, the crew listens to Adam wax poetically about what makes makefiles so great.

018: Feature Flags (Finally!)

14 April, 2021

Feature flags allow software engineers to separate the "deployment" of code from the "releasing" of code. Which means safer deployments; instantaneous roll-backs; smaller Pull Requests (PRs); incremental feature development; load-testing with real-world traffic; and - generally speaking - a big bowl of awesome sauce that you didn't even know you needed!

017: Premature Optimization

7 April, 2021

This week, the crew talks about "premature optimization". As Ben explained it to his wife, this is when you "solve problems that you don't have yet". But, what kind of problems are we talking about? Missing features? Missing methodologies? Missing performance characteristics?

016: Interviewing

31 March, 2021

This week, the crew sits down to talk about interviewing, both from the side of the interviewer and from the side of interviewee. What are we looking for? What are the red flags? What kinds of questions should we be asking?

015: Potluck #1

24 March, 2021

This week, we're trying something new: each host has brought with them a topic for the crew to discuss.

014: Zen and the Art of Pull Requests

17 March, 2021

This week, the crew meets to discuss Ben's approach to Pull Requests, reaching consensus on some concepts and pushing-back strongly on others.

013: Do What You Love and You'll Never Work a Day In Your Life

10 March, 2021

This week, the crew talks about the privilege of being able to choose work that we truly enjoy. Not everyone has this opportunity; and, even when we do, loving your job doesn't always make it feel any less like work.

012: Idiomatic Code

3 March, 2021

This week, the crew talks about idiomatic code, what they think it really means, and how it can serve to both help and hurt a programming community.

011: Listener Questions #1

24 February, 2021

The crew responds to listener questions and a particularly scathing blog post in response to episode 9.

010: Scaling

17 February, 2021

This week, the crew talks about their experience in scaling web application systems; what they have - and _haven't yet_ - had the need to consider; and, how they calculate the return on investment (ROI) when it comes to adding complexity to a potential solution ("innovation tokens", anyone?).

009: Testing

10 February, 2021

This week, the crew talks about their own views and experience with testing; and, how they currently implement testing at work.

008: Origin Stories Pt.2

3 February, 2021

This week, we get personal with the other two hosts and learn more about where they came from, what kind of stuff makes them tick, and what it is that they love about being web application developers.

007: Origin Stories Pt.1

27 January, 2021

This week, we get personal with two of the crew and learn more about where they came from, what kind of stuff makes them tick, and what it is that they love about being web application developers.

006: Hopes for 2021

20 January, 2021

Whether it's taking control of our finances, finding ways to be more active, building up our personal brand, or becoming the blacksmiths that we always knew we could be, the crew shares their personal and professional / technical goals for this burgeoning new year.