105: No Effort December

Welcome to the start of No Effort December! That's the time of the year in which we gather 'round the mics and talk about whatever the heck comes to mind. We just passed two years on the Working Code podcast, it's the holidays, we've been peopling super hard with our families, and we all need a little jolly relaxation. On today's show, Carol wonders if she can use Hackathons as a means to "improve community outreach" - one of her team's new OKR (Objectives and Key Results). And, Ben discusses the difference between deploying on Friday vs. deploying during the holiday (and why these are not the same thing).

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. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.


Transcript

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[00:00:00] Ben: I went to a Tech Crunch Disrupt Hackathon one time. That was a lot of fun. I think that's what it was called. This was like 12 years ago or something. This was a really long time

[00:00:07] Adam: Either that or you fell asleep while you were watching Silicon Valley and you just created this memory.

[00:00:13] Ben: Yo, actually, now that you say that, am I getting confused? , between

[00:00:37] Intro

[00:00:37] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 1 0 5. I'm back. Thanks for waiting for me everybody. I know you were patiently waiting, just, you know, tolerating these other three folks, uh,

[00:00:47] Carol: They had to listen to me a lot.

[00:00:49] Adam: No, I listened to you guys the show that you guys recorded. It was great. Really enjoyed it. Great discussion. so yeah, let's see Today, we are recording this on December 5th, which means that, it is between, clearly between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve and we've decided we're gonna start a new tradition where we're gonna take it easy on ourselves and have no set topic coming into the show.

[00:01:11] Adam: and just make it a little easier for us to get the group together and, and have a, just, have a conversation should be a little easier. if you're a, if you're familiar with YouTube, there's a lot of people that do no effort. November, uh,

[00:01:21] Carol: Oh, I like that.

[00:01:22] Adam: our no effort, Thanksgiving to New Year's.

[00:01:24] Tim: that's not the November I heard about

[00:01:26] Carol: Oh,

[00:01:27] Adam: right. Hey, hey, Keep it pgs or,

[00:01:31] Tim: No, it November.

[00:01:32] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, of

[00:01:33] Tim: What were you thinking about?

[00:01:34] Adam: Uhhuh. And so as usual, we're gonna start with our triumphs and fails. Um,

[00:01:40] Adam's Triumph

[00:01:40] Adam: I guess, it looks like it's my turn to go first, so I will do that. I'm gonna take a triumph here that I am upright and any day above

[00:01:48] Ben: Nicely done.

[00:01:49] Adam: choose to accept that as a triumph, by default if I don't have anything else good enough.

[00:01:54] Ben: are you still skydiving in, in the winter weather or do you skydive all year round or is there a time off?

[00:02:00] Adam: some people take time off. I choose not to. I, I went Scott, Evan yesterday actually,

[00:02:06] Ben: Oh,

[00:02:07] Adam: and, got three jumps. It's, it's tougher in the winter because the weather, fluctuates more. you know, a it's colder, right? And, and there's a lot of people that just kind of like, eh, it's too cold for me.

[00:02:17] Adam: It does get particularly cold. you know, you have to have, extra gear, like gloves and stuff that, and stuff to cover your neck better, whatever. I, I choose to brave the cold. but then even then, you know, days are shorter. it rains more often. Snow can be a problem, right? You have to have a clear runway.

[00:02:31] Adam: So if the runway's covered in snow, you're not jumping. That sort of thing. but yeah, you know, I, I choose, I try to go all year round, get as many jumps in as I can every year.

[00:02:40] Ben: Nice, nice.

[00:02:41] Carol: So, I heard something today that just made me think of you and what you said. Right? There are two days of the year you can't control yesterday and tomorrow, so, so enjoy today.

[00:02:53] Adam: I'm totally gonna steal.

[00:02:55] Carol: Yeah.

[00:02:55] Tim: Enjoy today because that's why they call it the present

[00:02:58] Carol: It's a present. I wasn't gonna go that sappy, but Yeah.

[00:03:05] Tim: knit that on.

[00:03:07] Adam: Seriously. I need an ugly Christmas sweater that says that. Okay. that's gonna be my triumph. How about you?

[00:03:13] Ben's Failure

[00:03:13] Ben: I'm gonna go with a failure, which is that in the beginning of 2022, I set my big, hairy, audacious goal for the year to be, to build a containerized thing. I didn't necessarily know what that thing was gonna be and then deploy it to something that would manage and deploy containers for me. I did approximately 0% of that in any way whatsoever.

[00:03:36] Ben: And, for a moment I had briefly considered building something that tracks tips, like, like tips you might give to the postman or something. Although I don't think, I don't think you're

[00:03:45] Carol: I hope, do you do tips to post? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe your hairdresser or

[00:03:49] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. That's a better example.

[00:03:50] Ben: That's a better example. and then I did absolutely nothing with that. and then I started to realize that even just deploying a container is like not no monies. because, so I have a VPs that I've had for my blog forever, and it's, it's not inexpensive. And the idea of doing anything else for not money, like for no profit just feels really weird.

[00:04:14] Ben: Like, I don't think I can justify it in my head. So, I mean, ideally I'd want to create some sort of a loosey cfml service because as we all know, ColdFusion is amazing. It's the future. And, and, but you know, you think of generically, I think of something like Digital Ocean as, oh, I can just spin up a $5 droplet.

[00:04:32] Ben: No, a $5 sticks out in my mind for the last 15 years or however long digital ocean's been around. But then if you look at digital ocean, And you look at the cost of things and you're like, well, I want like at least four gigabytes of ram and you know, I wanna have MySQL and I want to have a persistent data store.

[00:04:49] Ben: And like, it's,

[00:04:51] Carol: They're all add-ons. Yeah.

[00:04:54] Ben: like, oh, $5 droplet is not what I thought it was.

[00:04:57] Carol: Yeah.

[00:04:57] Ben: so I think what I want do, so I wanna continue on in 2023 and I'm sure we'll have a 2023 New Year's resolutions episode, but, but I do want build something and I'm, I want to balance it out in that I think the local development will all be containerized, but I think ultimately I'll just end up to my site, you know, to my VPs as per use.

[00:05:22] Ben: But, so failure in that, I made zero progress on that goal whatsoever. But, but I, I, it took me a year to sort, sort of formulate what I want do, and now I think I have a sense of where I want go. So silver lining.

[00:05:35] Carol: Are you still gonna do a tip type system?

[00:05:37] Ben: No, I wanna, I think I had mentioned one time that I dabble in poetry from time to time and, and I wanna build my little poetry app.

[00:05:46] Carol: No,

[00:05:46] Tim: And now I can just, er, I can just generate with ai.

[00:05:49] Carol: I was gonna ask, are you gonna use open AI for it?

[00:05:52] Ben: That would be something, actually a kind of cool feature, I think. So I don't ever expect to make money on a poetry website, but I do think about like, what, what could be theoretically the, the paid upgrades, you know, in a freemium model, what would someone be willing to pay for?

[00:06:07] Ben: Maybe they'd be willing to pay for something like that. It's very interesting.

[00:06:10] Adam: Hmm. Or they could just go on beta.open ai.com and

[00:06:15] Ben: Yeah. So I, I don't understand. So I don't understand like, what people pay for, what they don't in terms of the AI stuff. Cause I, cause I do know, like when I went to try it, there were, there was, uh, like a waiting list and it would show you like how many people are ahead of you in the queue for, for getting things processed.

[00:06:30] Ben: I guess in varies depending on who's hosting that stuff. But,

[00:06:32] Carol: Hmm. Interesting.

[00:06:34] Tim: I dunno, I didn't, I didn't run.

[00:06:35] Carol: I, I didn't see a waiting list.

[00:06:37] Tim: You're talking about for the image generation. Right.

[00:06:39] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:06:40] Tim: Okay. I'll send you a link.

[00:06:43] Ben: yeah. And I tried to even, I couldn't even find the, the, the sandbox that you were talking about in open ai. Maybe I have to sign up. Maybe I was trying to find something where I wasn't signed up. Anyway, that's me. Tim, what do you got going on?

[00:06:54] Tim's Triumph

[00:06:54] Tim: Well, I'll take a triumph. I have StereoVision again. That's great. I the pink eye is, is mostly gone, so I can see. That's fantastic. It wasn't that long ago, we recorded, so I mean, not a whole lot has happened. Georgia Bulldogs won the s e championship. Yay. Awesome. Go Dogs. but you know, since the playoff, c CFPs come around, it's like, it's just like, okay, big deal.

[00:07:15] Tim: They won next game. So, no, but I don't really, don't really have a whole other, triumphs other, it's just feels really good to not have, painters tape and, toilet paper on my eye.

[00:07:25] Carol: It's a win. Call The win.

[00:07:27] Tim: I'll take it. How about you, Carol?

[00:07:31] Carol's Triumph

[00:07:31] Carol: I am going to go with the Triumph. my boss is taking a vacation in another country for two weeks and is not taking his laptop for the first time ever. And it's because he trusts us. So isn't that kind of crazy? yeah. The. Conversation or like the last conversation we had was ultimately that worst case scenario.

[00:07:54] Carol: One of you can be my, like fingers on a keyboard if it's that critical, but we're like, yeah, we hope that it's not that. So I took over some of his projects and, and wrapping up a couple things that we need to get done by the end of the year, but it was just nice to have shown him that he can step away finally, because he's been doing this job on his back for a very long time and now he finally has people that can carry the burden with him.

[00:08:19] Carol: So it's just, it's good. Yeah.

[00:08:21] Ben: Very cool.

[00:08:23] Adam: I think he's pretty brave for going two weeks in another country. Like start with a, a weekend, you know,

[00:08:30] Carol: I was like, could you have taken a couple days off, like last month or something and let's just test the water.

[00:08:36] Ben: it, it's interesting with, an incident where something's on fire. You have a bunch of people involved in some sort of incident remediation. Typically it's low level engineers, individual contributors, and then usually maybe like an engineering manager or, or maybe a CTO steps in at some point, depending on the criticality.

[00:08:56] Ben: And there's, I've been in a bunch of incidents over the years and at one point, you know, an incident, it'll get raised at like 5:00 PM and it's really hard to figure out. And then it's 6:00 PM 7:00 PM and then it's 9:00 PM and people just banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out what's going on.

[00:09:13] Carol: Those are the

[00:09:14] Ben: Oh, it's the worst. And I always feel like the engineers can never step up and be like, should we just let this burn all night? And then like,

[00:09:22] Carol: I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. They don't know when to call

[00:09:26] Ben: yeah. And, and a manager of some sort really needs to step in and say like, let's just call it for the night. We're not gonna get anywhere.

[00:09:33] Ben: You know, the 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM slot is certainly not gonna solve that problem. but I, I feel like managers are very hesitant to do that cuz they'll probably get yelled at if the incident's not solved either. So

[00:09:44] Carol: and see, I will say here, we're quick to jump in and go, Hey, let's take a breather, right? Let's figure out what this is. Let's figure out if it's solvable, how we're going about it. But I have been at jobs where the response was, do you need me to bring you coffee? And I'm like, no, no. I don't know what to do.

[00:10:02] Carol: Could you bring me another engineer?

[00:10:05] Ben: Yo, that's the worst feeling.

[00:10:07] Carol: Yeah.

[00:10:07] Tim: And this also depends on your company's SLAs for, for that project.

[00:10:11] Carol: Yep. Absolutely.

[00:10:13] Ben: Well, that's actually one of the really interesting things that we're dealing with right now because as I mentioned in previous episode, we had a huge reduction in force to say it nicely back in July. And, we have, some of our services are, let's, let's just say not adequately staffed. And we're trying to figure out how to do on-call rotations.

[00:10:34] Ben: And it, it it, to Tim's point about SLAs, like we're trying to figure out are there services where we feel comfortable just saying, yeah, if the service is down for 12 hours because there's literally no engineer around that knows what to do with that service. Like, is that okay? And like, which services is that okay for?

[00:10:50] Ben: Cause it's clearly not okay for all of them, but we're, we're going through that exercise

[00:10:54] Tim: Cool.

[00:10:56] Carol: Cool. Cool.

[00:10:59] Merch And Elon Episode Updates

[00:10:59] Adam: Okay. Well then, I guess before we move on, got a couple of things I gotta throw in the middle here. merch update. So I mentioned, last time I was on the podcast two weeks ago that, we got suspended on Red Bubble for some reason that they have just chosen not to, to tell us why. Um, officially, yeah, it sucks.

[00:11:16] Adam: It's dumb. Officially it's been two weeks since they suspended us. but it's only been, today would be two weeks since they suspended us, but tomorrow will be two weeks since I submitted my appeal. So technically they have another day to get back to us now. Do I expect them to? No. So we're on the hunt for a new home, for our merch.

[00:11:34] Adam: We'll look into that and hopefully have another report back for you soon. But again, this is, you know, no effort. December, so we'll see.

[00:11:40] Carol: I mean, I got a couple stickers I can sell for, you know,

[00:11:44] Adam: they're,

[00:11:44] Carol: right offer.

[00:11:45] Adam: they are,

[00:11:46] Tim: edition.

[00:11:47] Adam: that's right. so yeah, there, that's in the air. Still waiting to figure that out. Like I said, I don't expect a response from them. The other thing is, apparently Tim and I don't know that much about Elon Musk, apparently we put our foot, directly into our mouths a couple of times.

[00:12:05] Carol: how bad

[00:12:06] Adam: got some corrections from, from listeners. you know, I don't wanna look. It would be probably a whole episode discussion to get, go through and just re-litigate everything that we got wrong and, and get it right. So let's just say this, don't take what we said about Elon Musk, as, as a reliable source of truth, for anything, we were kind of shooting from the hip and, aiming to, to provide good information.

[00:12:31] Adam: But really it was just a discussion between a couple of friends who were apparently not that well informed.

[00:12:39] Carol: that goes back to what this show is, right? Like I'm okay. I'm not saying we're totally wrong all the time, but I will say that when we started this, we're like, Hey, let's just make it, if we sat down at a bar and started having a conversation, there's no guarantee we are experts in the subject that we're talking about.

[00:12:55] Carol: And actually, we usually aren't experts. We're learning about it as we're figuring it out. So our conversations are meant to be just conversations about it and challenge us to go learn more.

[00:13:06] Tim: Hey, I, I take this as a win, right? If, if you want to get a response from an episode and get like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 paragraphs of, of feedback, it's Cunningham's law. Just say something wrong. We were right. We would be like, nobody's listening. No one, no one's, no one's listening. They just must download it and not listen to it.

[00:13:26] Tim: Like this guy was listening, man.

[00:13:28] Carol: Yeah. And it makes me feel like he's involved in our conversation, so it makes me feel like it's more of a friend coming to you to be like, Hey buddy, you could do better. So I really enjoy those conversations.

[00:13:40] Tim: I just jumped outta the paragraph where it says, in this case, I have to agree with Tim. I'm like, okay, cool.

[00:13:44] Ben: This guy knows what he is talking about clearly.

[00:13:46] Tim: This guy

[00:13:49] Ben: Well, so what did, uh, I mean, I know Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, or, or was, I don't know if he still is

[00:13:54] Carol: fact check please.

[00:13:55] Adam: shot his car at Mars.

[00:13:57] Ben: So I, I assume that his billions, his many billions is not from selling a particular company or anything. Like what is, what is the bulk of his money? Did it all come from one

[00:14:08] Ben: thing?

[00:14:08] Adam: Yeah. I mean, most of it is, is value currently? Yeah. Yeah. Currently, now, again, I'm just shooting from the hip here. I, I'm no

[00:14:17] Ben: You heard it here, folks.

[00:14:18] Adam: but I have to believe that most of it is value created in his companies. And so like in order to do the Twitter deal, he had to sell a bunch of, I believe it was Tesla stock.

[00:14:27] Tim: Yep. He, he did sell some, not, not a huge amount, honestly. and then had people.

[00:14:31] Ben: cuz he took, he took funding from like European countries, I think.

[00:14:35] Tim: Different banks and things. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's the thing. It's like people are like, you know, why don't these billionaires take, take that money and, and spend it to like, save this problem? Well, when all your money is actually just on paper, like that's, that's literally impossible.

[00:14:49] Tim: That's literally impossible. That they'll do the math and say, you know, have this many billion dollars, you could feed this many starving people in the world. And math. Yeah. But in, in practice, if you start selling a whole bunch of stock, your stock is gonna tank. Particularly if you're like the founder, the billionaire guy, people are like, oh, something must be wrong with the company.

[00:15:06] Tim: And all of a

[00:15:07] Tim: sudden, all of a sudden that value of that stock is, is garbage. And like now you have no money to help poor people. I'm not saying they, they shouldn't do more, but I'm just saying sometimes that argument is a bit trite.

[00:15:17] Ben: Yeah. It's not a, Scrooge McDuck vault full of

[00:15:20] Tim: Right. Exactly.

[00:15:21] Carol: And diving into your coins. Yeah.

[00:15:24] Adam: As much as we would all like to do that.

[00:15:26] Ben: Yeah.

[00:15:28] Tim: Now Apple, on the other hand, they actually do have a huge amount of cash, so

[00:15:33] Carol: Yeah. I hate Apple right now. I'm very mad at them. Yeah.

[00:15:36] Adam: Why

[00:15:36] Ben: they, have they done any layoffs?

[00:15:38] Carol: Actually, I don't know about.

[00:15:40] Ben: I don't think

[00:15:40] Ben: I've

[00:15:40] Ben: heard of any.

[00:15:41] Carol: But I don't like 'em right now because someone sent me money on like text or like Apple Cash, right? So I just left it in my account. Well then I bought something for the dog and that company went out of business and never shipped anything. And typically, like if it was on my American Express, I would just be like, Hey, they never shipped it.

[00:16:00] Carol: They would just refund me the money. I put in a report and then called the day. They're like, we're sorry, this isn't a fraudulent charge. You agreed to it, so you're just out the money. I was like, I'm not putting any more Apple Cash on there and like it's all getting transferred to my checking account and then I'll put it on a credit card and pay it off.

[00:16:17] Carol: Like there's no way I'm gonna go through this again.

[00:16:19] Adam: Yeah, that's, that's some

[00:16:20] Carol: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:22] Ben: Was it an adorable Christmas hat for your dog?

[00:16:25] Carol: No, it was these cutest little, dog beat dog, gosh, dog feeders. And it has like a puzzle in it. So they sniff around to like keep eating longer so that they don't just scarf down their food and she's a slow eater. But we just thought it would be adorable to watch her play in her food. So we bought it

[00:16:42] Carol: Well now we don't get to watch it and we're miserable.

[00:16:44] Adam: No, I'm sorry. We have, we have puzzles like that, that we bought because, Lucy was, you know, on basically bedrest. So we were like, okay, well we need to keep her mentally stimulated if we can't take her out and wear her out on runs or whatever. and so we have a bunch of dog food based puzzles and they're, they're a lot of fun, and she goes, not so firm.

[00:17:02] Carol: It's fun to watch 'em learn the puzzles cuz we have several puzzles that Ruby solves and it's neat to, cuz we have to stop over like no chewing. Like no chewing. So we have to force her, like use her nose and then use her pause to open things. So once you teach her to stop chewing, she just slides the whole puzzle like across the living room trying to get it to open on stuff.

[00:17:21] Carol: Up Yeah.

[00:17:23] Adam: Okay. well, shall we move on to the, the couple of things that we had written down as possible topics for today?

[00:17:28] Carol: Yeah.

[00:17:29] Hackathons

[00:17:29] Adam: Carol, the first one in there is yours. You wanna do

[00:17:31] Carol: Yeah, I can kick us off. so I am part of management at our company. if you didn't know that, and part of what we do is we figure out how to set the goals for the following year. So those are called your OKRs. And that's usually set at the top level of the company, like our executives set that, right?

[00:17:48] Carol: And then each department has their, their OKRs to achieve the corporate or like the company level OKRs. and then from there we have key results or key objectives, key results, the things that we are gonna do to try to meet those goals. So, well, like none of ours are out yet, but one of them's easy to talk about, and I'm not gonna get in trouble

[00:18:09] Carol: It's to, it's to, uh, improve community involvement. Just as you know, building better teams, building more involved people. it's just more community outreach. So my brain. Didn't immediately go to, let's go pet puppies and feed homeless people. It was, can we have a hackathon? Because that's engineering involvement, right?

[00:18:30] Carol: That's building the community of engineers where I feel like the other part of the company could totally go pet puppies and feed homeless people. And you know, it's still giving back to community in different ways. But I just wanted to know if you guys thought that a hackathon would be community outreach and have you ever done one?

[00:18:47] Carol: Cuz I've never actually done one. I've been at conferences where they were done, but I'd never had the opportunity to sit through that long of a time because we have other stuff going on.

[00:18:57] Tim: So when you say community outreach, can you define that a little bit more for me?

[00:19:02] Carol: Uh, yeah, improve community outreach and all the communities where you live.

[00:19:07] Tim: Oh, so this isn't like developers communities. This

[00:19:10] Carol: It doesn't have to be. And that's where I was gonna challenge and say, well what about if we do community outreach? An engineering level, a developer level. So it is still a community outreach project, just not in what you think of maybe when you first hear community

[00:19:26] Adam: Yeah, I could see it going two different ways. Right? You could do. A hackathon where people from the company can participate and it benefits their local community somehow. Right.

[00:19:36] Carol: Oh yeah.

[00:19:37] Adam: one of the, one of the things that I've seen for hackathons is, you know, everybody joins up and you, each team or whatever, gets paired up with a, like a non-profit organization and helps 'em build the thing for their website or

[00:19:51] Carol: Oh, that's cool.

[00:19:52] Adam: Okay. And then the other thing that came to mind was like, do a more directed hackathon. Like, you know, you can buy like robotics kits or whatever, and bring in like high school kids or something from your community and like just have it as an a way for them to be introduced to software engineering.

[00:20:11] Carol: Yeah, and see that we have, the University of Nevada like or something. There's a big school, there's a a school in Reno, so we do partner with them on something. So I had thought about bringing in college students too, as part of the hackathon. So it definitely wasn't meant to be just only for people inside our company to work on, but more as a bigger, broader engineering outreach because we're also like, I feel like it's our job to mentor people trying to get into this field, and it's our job to open doors and build the path forward.

[00:20:43] Carol: And sometimes things like hackathons are easy ways to do that.

[00:20:47] Ben: I went to a Tech Crunch Disrupt Hackathon one time. That was a lot of fun. It wasn't any kind of tech crunch as a website. And,

[00:20:56] Carol: but what was the second thing?

[00:20:57] Ben: disrupt, I think was,

[00:20:59] Ben: I think, I think that's what it was called. This was like 12 years ago or something. This was a really long time

[00:21:04] Adam: Either that or you fell asleep while you were watching Silicon Valley and you just created this memory.

[00:21:09] Ben: Yo, actually, now that you say that, am I getting confused? , between, I know, I, so I've definitely been to a hackathon and participated in Hackathon, but I'm, I'm, I'm almost certain it was Tech Crunch, disrupt, but, it was a lot of fun. it was 24 hours, I think it was, or maybe it was 36 hours. It was like a day and a half.

[00:21:28] Ben: It was, for someone who goes to bed at 9:00 PM you

[00:21:32] Carol: That was a long day.

[00:21:33] Ben: that was hell. A long day. It was a, it was a caffeine fueled fever dream. And, I did at times feel actually physically unsafe because of the amount of

[00:21:43] Carol: Oh no.

[00:21:44] Ben: but, it was a lot of fun.

[00:21:46] Carol: So did you go with a team or did you get paired up when you got there? Do you remember?

[00:21:51] Ben: I went, with, Aaron Foss from the ColdFusion community. And, he, he went in, we went in, he had an idea for a, a demo he wanted to build. So I was sort of hired Muscle

[00:22:03] Carol: that's cool.

[00:22:04] Tim: Both literally and physically. Yeah. So there is, if you wanna learn more about hackathons, I subscribe to, you don't have to subscribe to, you can go to the website, devpost.com and it sort of aggregates a bunch of, hackathons that are out there right now. Like, yeah, so like right now, let's see. They have like beginner friendly hackathons.

[00:22:28] Tim: Total prize is a hundred thousand dollars. and so one

[00:22:32] Carol: I'm a beginner. I'm definitely a beginner. I'll get in on

[00:22:35] Tim: Microsoft Azure Innovation challenge $10,000 in prizes. And so it basically aggregates 'em, so you can see which ones are out there, you can sign up for none of them ever. I've never seen anyone cost money to join. They're all free to join.

[00:22:51] Tim: Typically, they want you to use some sort of, API or some sort of, technology that they're featuring, and then display it. And that's the whole point of this. You know, you're getting a chance to win prizes, get to learn some new stuff, and they get to be able to go, you know, show these, you know, these guys were, you know, they had two months and they came up with this really cool thing and here it is, and give you a big check, and everybody claps.

[00:23:13] Tim: And just to encourage people to, to use their technology.

[00:23:18] Carol: That's really cool. So there's one right here that's called Hack Hers 2023, and it's all about filling the gender gap in exploring technology. So yeah, those are,

[00:23:29] Adam: the potato chip company.

[00:23:30] Tim: right,

[00:23:32] Carol: I don't get it.

[00:23:34] Adam: There's a potato chip company called hers. It's got two R's though.

[00:23:37] Carol: Oh, yeah, I, I didn't know that.

[00:23:38] Adam: dude. Okay, so this is,what's the word? let's just go with geospatially. Relevant. I live in Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and. The hers like headquarters, home base plant is within easy driving distance of me.

[00:23:51] Adam: And every year they put up an amazing, Christmas light show,

[00:23:56] Carol: Oh, cool.

[00:23:57] Adam: and, and you just go and you just drive through. There's, you turn in as if you were an employee. Like you just go onto their little campus and they have a predefined route, little signs up and everything, but you can just follow all the other cars cuz there's, you cannot go in there at night and there's not cars going through it.

[00:24:15] Carol: Cool. That's awesome.

[00:24:17] Adam: through Christmas life show. It's always a lot of fun.

[00:24:19] Carol: Do you have to turn your radio to a certain like AM station to hear the music that goes along with the sounds?

[00:24:24] Adam: That would be really fun. But

[00:24:25] Carol: That's what they do here.

[00:24:27] Tim: Am I the only one who hasn't heard of hers chips?

[00:24:29] Carol: I've never heard of hers chips. I thought at first he was like poking fun at Hershey's. Cuz Is it in Pennsylvania too?

[00:24:35] Carol: Yeah.

[00:24:37] Tim: I've Never it must be a regional

[00:24:38] Carol: I think so.

[00:24:39] Adam: Yeah.

[00:24:40] Carol: Yeah.

[00:24:41] Ben: I mean, I'm like, one stayed over from him and I've never heard of it.

[00:24:44] Tim: That's true.

[00:24:47] Ben: Hers like h e s,

[00:24:49] Adam: H E R R

[00:24:50] Carol: two R's

[00:24:51] Tim: So getting back to the hackathon thing, so

[00:24:54] Carol: Random talks. You guys.

[00:24:56] Tim: yeah. Randall talks, this is what you're gonna get. So you can host a hackathon with dev post, I've never done it myself. You can do a private one. for, with like within your organization, you can do a public one as well, if you want. Uh, so there might, there might be some tools there if you, if you wanna.

[00:25:11] Tim: You could, you know, I guess you could do this multiple ways. You could either host a hackathon, yourself, but then you have to come up with all the objectives and everything. Or you could just pick one that you think looks interesting and, you know, reach out to the community and say, Hey, we'll we'll work with your, you know, bring, put college students or, you know, high school students on the team.

[00:25:29] Tim: And we'll, we develop season developers. We'll work with you and if you win, you guys, you know, get the money.

[00:25:35] Carol: Yeah. That's actually really good. I like this. I'll be taking credit for yours and Adam's ideas here. Thank you guys.

[00:25:43] Tim: that's what we're here

[00:25:44] Carol: Free a consulting night,

[00:25:46] Tim: You steal from me. You stole twice.

[00:25:50] Adam: It's not relevant to this discussion at all, but I just stole something from Tim not too long ago, man. I'm sorry for bringing it up cuz I can't go into a whole lot of details for personal and legal reasons, but, my, something you said Tim, a long time ago at a conference that I really obviously made a mark on me because I still remember it, is that, you know, like white male privilege is like playing a game on easy mode and, and people that are in minorities and, and that sort of thing, are playing on hard mode.

[00:26:20] Adam: And you know, based on all the stuff that we've been struggling with lately as a family, I told my wife that it's like somebody went into the game settings of our lives and switched us over to hard mode and she was like, actually that's like perfectly describing how we're

[00:26:34] Adam: feeling. So,

[00:26:36] Tim: And you can't change it back.

[00:26:37] Adam: Yeah.

[00:26:38] Tim: Yeah, I, I remember that. I remember that. I think it was a breakfast. We were our lunch at the conference. You and I were sitting a round table and, I don't know how the conversation got started and some people are, start kind of poo-pooing the whole privileged thing.

[00:26:51] Tim: And I was like, no, , we are very privileged people. You, we, we have no, we have no, we're so deep in it. We don't know how, how much we've benefited from it. So

[00:27:02] Adam: which is exactly what privilege it is.

[00:27:04] Tim: Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, that, and you stole that from me. Well, I stole it from John. It's Johns scaly, you know, you and him, you, I, he did a blog article.

[00:27:13] Tim: He can Google it. Johns scaly White P Privilege, and it'll be like one of the first, scaly S C A L I Z I. it'll be the top hit. And it's a really good article.

[00:27:23] Adam: no, I, between the L and Z S E A

[00:27:25] Tim: Ah, thank you. Yeah. Trying to.

[00:27:28] Adam: Hey, hey, Working Code Podcast, your number one source for misinformation, not disinformation, misinformation,

[00:27:37] Tim: I'm trying to think what other hackathon things could you do? Or, or maybe just even not a hackathon, what are their community outreach things?

[00:27:44] Carol: Yeah, I mean, and we went, like in my head as I'm making these bullet points, I went through the obvious ones. You know, like there's several opportunities for food involvement. So, you know, bring in foods, do food drives, you know, we can host our own food drive, and give back to communities where we live because our offices are in multiple cities.

[00:28:01] Carol: So it's not just in one place. And then challenge people remotely to do the same. and then there's opportunities with like the, oh, I had the letters. A, s p,

[00:28:10] Ben: A S pca.

[00:28:11] Carol: A, that's the one. , dyslexia. Hear you guys. yeah, I'm like, there's opportunities to volunteer across the board just for actual people, community involvement.

[00:28:23] Carol: I just was trying to think of something that would actually stimulate an engineer to go do.

[00:28:28] Carol: Because we don't motivate too easy outside of a technology field or outside of video gaming, and it's just how it is. So

[00:28:38] Tim: Hey, a video game tournament.

[00:28:41] Carol: would not be a bad idea.

[00:28:43] Carol: Proceeds go to some charity.

[00:28:45] Tim: Yeah. Got a winner. But the, you know, so winner gets a little bit, but the proceeds that go to,

[00:28:50] Carol: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:51] Tim: you know, charity

[00:28:53] Carol: Yeah.

[00:28:53] Adam: Okay.

[00:28:54] Adam: is there anything more to talk about for that? Hackathons.

[00:28:56] Carol: Now I have some ideas. I'll present them. I'll let you guys know what happens with it.

[00:29:00] Adam: So who was this one?

[00:29:02] Tim: I imagine some of our, listeners might have some ideas too.

[00:29:04] Carol: Yeah, yeah. Hit me up with them.

[00:29:07] Adam: Where can they do that? Carol,

[00:29:08] Carol: Oh, you can do that on Discord. You can head on over to workingcode.dev/discord and join, and you know I'm at K or just search for Carol. You'll find me.

[00:29:23] Adam: she's the one that's got a really long, ridiculous, uh, alias for her name

[00:29:27] Carol: I need to change it. That was a joke one day and I never took it off.

[00:29:32] Ben: Uh, the next one was me.

[00:29:34] Adam: Okay. Go for it.

[00:29:35] Holiday Code Freezes

[00:29:35] Ben: Code freezes during the holidays. Uh, so this is something we do at work. We have a halt on all deployments. I think it's between like December 23rd and January 3rd, something like that. a little wiggle room on either side. And it's, it's interesting to me because there's a, there's this notion oftentimes in the programming world that the people who are afraid to deploy on Fridays with people who don't test.

[00:30:02] Ben: So they're always unsure that, you know, I might just deploy something and it explodes and I'm already on the train home kind of a thing. And I think, it's interesting to think about Friday deployments versus holiday deployments, because it's not the same thing to me. the, the, the reality of deploying is, is that always something can go wrong, having nothing to do with your code.

[00:30:27] Ben: It could be like a network failure or if you know you're a container based deployment, you know, maybe new containers just don't spin up for some reason. Or you're on Amazon and there's literally they don't have any instances that they can give you at that moment and you just can't, like, your deployment just breaks or, you know, for whatever.

[00:30:44] Ben: There's like a thousand reasons, as I have discovered

[00:30:47] Carol: Yeah.

[00:30:48] Ben: don't work. I actually, literally, right now as we speak, I've been trying to deploy codes since about 4:00 PM and it, it has to go to a, a number of clusters. And it's gone to 84% of the clusters. And for whatever reason, it keeps timing out at 84% of the clusters and just doesn't want to go forward.

[00:31:08] Ben: And I don't know why I've, I've retried it about seven times and, I filed a ticket with our platform team, but it's like, it's not my code. Something of the platform level is just breaking at some sort of weird low level Kubernetes, Amazon reserved ins versus spot instance. Probably some sort of vertical autoscaler.

[00:31:26] Ben: Like, who knows? It's so, it's such a mysterious black box. So anyway, I don't mean to rant, but, as far as not deploying during holidays, because something can always go wrong, it's just like you're not a jerk. Like don't be a jerk to your team because if something's not working and then it becomes an all hands on deck, like suddenly you ruin someone's holiday.

[00:31:46] Ben: And, it, it's not about trusting your code, it's about not taking chances. And, and those are, those are different things, but, and they're different enough that, I think it makes sense to have code freeze during holiday.

[00:31:58] Carol: Yeah. We are doing a code freeze. I think it starts the 22nd through the, third, and it's for the same reason. It's not that we don't trust our code, it's that, like you said, if it doesn't deploy, I can't fix that. I have to go call someone in and say, Hey, this isn't working. Or if I need to make a database change, I can't do that.

[00:32:18] Carol: A DBA has to do it, so it's not fair to be like, Hey, we just wanna keep pushing things out the door. So it's one thing if there's a problem, like I'm all for, if there's something wrong, we'll fix it. That's different. But if it's just to get more product out the door, no. Why? Why risk it? We all work to have nice families.

[00:32:37] Carol: We don't work to just keep working.

[00:32:41] Ben: Absolutely. Do you guys, Tim, Adam, do you guys do code freezes?

[00:32:44] Adam: The way that I'd like to do my code freeze for the holidays is I just, try to make a tradition of taking the week between Christmas and New Year's

[00:32:51] Adam: off.

[00:32:51] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. We're at a.

[00:32:53] Adam: And so like, I'm not there, I'm not deploying anything. And I, you know, I, I make it a, a point not to check in on work chat or email or anything like that.

[00:33:03] Adam: Like I'm just not around. I'm not available. So if you have a problem, good luck,

[00:33:10] Tim: Yeah, we're, we're off the entire week of Christmas,

[00:33:12] Ben: Your whole company's closed.

[00:33:14] Tim: Yeah,

[00:33:14] Ben: Oh dude, that's

[00:33:16] Tim: we get the whole week. Yeah. So, yeah, so if you wanna, if you wanna deploy like, early, you know, like the, you know, into that, it's like, go ahead, that's fine. You're, you're gonna fix it, you know, on one of those days of the week.

[00:33:30] Tim: But yeah. But, but usually by time, you know, people get around to, you know, whatever, the second day in, they're not, they haven't deployed anything and nothing's broken, so usually it's okay, but, but unofficially, yeah, we, we all just kind of talk, just go and go, you know what, this, this can wait because we have an approval system.

[00:33:47] Tim: And if, if it's like you're approving it, it's like, no, I'm not approving that till we get back.

[00:33:52] Ben: I, I love the fact that your company is closed officially for the holiday. I, I really, I've never been at a company where it was like that and it's always half the company takes the time off and then the other half of the company is there doing basically nothing. because one, you can't deploy code.

[00:34:10] Ben: And two, it's just not fun to work when only half of the people are actually online, especially with pool requests that need to be approved and everything. But it just like, it's like you're keeping the company over open for the sake of keeping it open. Like you're not keeping it open cuz something productive is happening and always just.

[00:34:27] Ben: Disappoints

[00:34:28] Tim: you, yeah. I mean, once, once your customers get trained to it, it gets better, but we don't deploy a whole lot of code anyway. At, on the, on the, on the payment side of the house. We deploy maybe once every couple months.

[00:34:42] Adam: Really.

[00:34:44] Tim: Yeah. So, no, there's not a whole lot of changes. So why, why break it

[00:34:51] Carol: That's crazy. Yeah. So for us, it makes sense to stay open, Ben, because we have a lot of customer support stuff, right? So we have people working through these holidays. We have people still buying houses, still trying to close on stuff by the end of the year. Like there's a lot that's still trying to, to process.

[00:35:07] Carol: And if some of those orders start failing, we need engineers there to start figuring out what's happening with the network, what's happening, you know, with the code layer to do all of it So,

[00:35:18] Ben: Yeah, that's

[00:35:19] Carol: well that was distracting Tim.

[00:35:22] Tim: sorry,

[00:35:23] Adam: Tim took off his shirt and wow.

[00:35:26] Carol: So, yeah, but Mo, most of engineering does take off and this year it worked out good because we have the two days off, so it's like, I think we're closed Friday, Monday. So then people are taking off Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then they're off Friday, Monday again for New Year's. So people are only taking three days off, but getting like 10 days off or something.

[00:35:46] Carol: I don't know. The math, I'm working the whole time, so I don't care what you guys do. Go enjoy your holiday

[00:35:52] Adam: So, Tim, how did you get so tan in the winter?

[00:35:54] Tim: you don't really talk about how I grew breast at the same time.

[00:35:57] Adam: Hey, I didn't wanna pry that's, it's none of my business.

[00:36:02] Carol: okay. You guys fill everyone in who may not have listened to last week's episode.

[00:36:07] Tim: Yeah. So Ben, afterward. Ben, why don't you tell us, so you, you, you were inspired, I guess, when we talked about the AI and the image generation and, and you were trying to generate something.

[00:36:17] Ben: So I think weeks or months ago, whenever the, the whole stable diffusion stuff, when that was really getting a lot of press on, on all the podcasts. I, I googled for some sort of online sandbox where I could try the image stuff just cause I was so curious. And I typed in, I mentioned this on the previous episode, I typed in something to the effect of huge muscular women dripping and sweat and glistening and flexing their huge biceps.

[00:36:45] Ben: And it generated what was like a photorealistic picture. It was like a, it was like four different pictures and they were all kind of stunning in that it actually created these out of nothing.

[00:36:58] Carol: Like, they look like bodybuilders, right?

[00:37:00] Ben: yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:37:01] Tim: Well, his looked

[00:37:02] Ben: well,

[00:37:03] Carol: Well, no, no, no. The first one. The first one was good

[00:37:05] Ben: So, yeah. Yeah. So the first one from months ago was, was amazing. It was like what Tim just posted now.

[00:37:10] Ben: and then after we did the episode last week and I was writing up the show notes, I'm like, oh, wouldn't it be fun if I included as part of the show notes, my prompt and a couple of images, but I, I couldn't find the original thing that I tried. I found some other thing. And, the prompts led to like nightmarish looking pictures, , like things that would, you'd see in a nightmare that would come kill you.

[00:37:33] Ben: Like it was that kind of a thing.

[00:37:35] Carol: have you ever seen the image of like the first taxidermy wolf or something? Yeah.

[00:37:42] Carol: that.

[00:37:43] Carol: is what that face looks

[00:37:44] Ben: yo. Oh my god. Totally. Totally.

[00:37:47] Carol: where the guy's like, I don't know what this animal's supposed to look like, but maybe this

[00:37:53] Ben: so Tim, Tim took the, the type of prompt that I used and put it into something, and it came out with this amazing photo.

[00:38:01] Carol: Like what you would expect to have, have been able to deliver to our listeners last week.

[00:38:07] Tim: yeah, yeah. It's not a picture of me. Trust me, I, I, you get older, you lose all your body mass, muscle mass.

[00:38:17] Adam: Yeah, that's why you don't have it,

[00:38:18] Tim: Exactly, and I and I, and I sit all day, but I'm blaming it on the testosterone. Wow. Sorry to derail there.

[00:38:29] Ben: No worries.

[00:38:31] Update On Ben And The Legacy Platform

[00:38:31] Adam: I have a question. leading out of, last week's show. you guys talked, I guess, at the beginning and the trans fails about how Ben, you're, you've decided you're on your last project on the legacy platform,

[00:38:40] Carol: He's letting go.

[00:38:44] Carol: That was good. you.

[00:38:46] Adam: the, so I was curious, you know, where are you on that, that roadmap, that zoomed in roadmap of

[00:38:52] Adam: this project onto the next.

[00:38:54] Ben: So this project is still in the ideation phase. I, I literally spent all of Thursday and Friday of last week just thinking about how I wanna approach this problem. I mean, not just in my head, but like writing down notes and kind of playing around with what some database tables might look like, but all just in, a Jira ticket.

[00:39:16] Ben: You know, it's just like now it's this massive Jira ticket where I'm, it's an epic. So I'm, this is the description in the epic that I'm trying to figure out how I wanna do this. And it's not quite clicking yet. I, I'm not quite sure what I want the data to look like, and I'm reviewing the code to see what it already does.

[00:39:30] Ben: And, and I don't know. so as far as the end of this project and then the, the, parlaying into the, the new platform, that's still just in high level discussions. I'm, I talked about it with my, the director of platform who, the person I report to right now and, She seemed open to it. I, I think she needs to look at her roster and see where people are allocated and where there's huge gaps in the, the coverage, like I was talking about at the top of the show.

[00:39:59] Ben: We have services that like no one's assigned to, and there's really serious issues if there's downtime. So there's gonna be what I want to do, and then there's gonna be what the company needs me to do. And hopefully there's some overlap. But I'll tell you one thing that I had just touched on her. I have a, a weekly meeting with the, with her on Mondays, which is when we're recording today.

[00:40:23] Ben: she had mentioned in a previous call, I'm a principal engineer. That means something different in every company, I'm sure, but it means something at this company. And she, she said something to the effect of, well, on the new platform, we'd like to bring your, your efforts more into alignment with what a principal engineer does, which I didn't.

[00:40:42] Ben: Didn't exactly know what that meant, but it sounded much like I'm not doing my job. Which, you know, is, is not out of the realm of possibility. I was, I was just made a principal engineer by a cto. He like blessed me and he said, you're, you know, you're no longer just an engineer. You're a principal engineer today, and you report to me.

[00:41:02] Ben: And that was, that was like six years ago. And no one's really questioned it since. so I said to her, I said, you know, if we need to have a discussion about me not being a principal engineer anymore, like maybe my skill set on the legacy platform fell under principal engineer responsibilities. And maybe on the new platform, it's not the same thing.

[00:41:20] Ben: Like maybe my skills just don't translate into a, into a modern platform in the context of principal engineer. And so, so that's another conversation that we might have as well. But,

[00:41:32] Tim: It's like, yeah, you're programmer. One take, take a 75% pay

[00:41:35] Ben: I, I, I know. So, so that's the big thing. That's the big thing. I'm like, I, I definitely don't want to not make the money I'm making right now. Like, I don't wanna make less money. That would be un

[00:41:47] Tim: that will, that won't be in the cards.

[00:41:49] Ben: I feel like that would be a morale buster.

[00:41:51] Carol: Oh yeah, that'd be bad. I'm gonna give you my prediction. I think this conversation's gonna go along the lines of, a principal engineer needs to be able to manage people and needs to be able to manage resources and needs to be able to manage like budgetary constraints a little bit. And maybe you weren't having to do that on the legacy side, so she may be being like, look, you're gonna have to like manage a team of people

[00:42:17] Ben: uh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I have successfully been managing a hundred percent of the people on the legacy platform,

[00:42:25] Carol: Yeah. You're gonna need like a few more. So I don't, I don't think it was meant like in my head, like, I can't imagine someone like coming to one of our engineers and being like, you're going to this project, but you're no longer, like, no longer a principal engineer because your technology doesn't match what we need over here for this technology.

[00:42:47] Carol: You're not suited for it. It would be more of, well, you need to broaden your, your career a little bit with with responsibilities to match what other principal engineers are having to.

[00:42:58] Ben: Yeah. And yeah, go ahead, Tim.

[00:43:00] Tim: Yeah. I mean it could be, I mean, that, that's what that means. It could also mean, you know, some people think that a principal software engineer, they, you know, they develop the test of software, achieve the goals, and, and, they, they oversee the technical aspects of the computer software projects. So it may not necessarily be a, like a people management job necessarily, cuz I, I do see a lot of, definitions of that and they tend to be different across different companies.

[00:43:29] Carol: Maybe not people management, but what about people leading? Does that make more

[00:43:33] Ben: so she mentioned, like more mentoring stuff and helping to up level more junior engineers.

[00:43:40] Carol: There you go.

[00:43:41] Ben: Not, not that we have a lot of junior engineers at the company. It, it, our company has always been plagued with the, we would love to have more junior engineers, but not now.

[00:43:52] Ben: And like, but it's been like that for like 10 years.

[00:43:55] Tim: Yeah, I mean, my gut feel bit is, I think that if you really like, just commit yourself to it and be like, all right, we're, you know, whatever the new thing is that you're having to learn, I'm gonna reading your blog post about this new thing and you're gonna be knee deep in it and going, this is so cool. Do you know can do this?

[00:44:13] Tim: Cause I mean, that seems to be how you learn is by you kinda learn out in the open and, and, and, you know, and learn by teaching. So I mean that you'll, you'll be spinning that up and you'll be writing blog articles. The next thing you know, people in your company would be like, oh man, I googled this problem that we had, and Bins Ben's blog came up.

[00:44:32] Tim: You know, it's like

[00:44:33] Tim: for, for our, for our, for this. Yeah.

[00:44:36] Ben: and I

[00:44:36] Ben: hope it's not, I hope it's not, Peter principle where, you know, I'm, I'm fi like, they've finally put me in a place where I'm just no longer effective, but

[00:44:45] Carol: No, they're not putting you out. The Pastor

[00:44:48] Tim: No. Well, and you're not really doing anything. It's just your different, it's gonna be different stack. Right. It's not, it's not like they're saying, Hey, we want you to lead finance or do sales and marketing. And you're like, yeah, I'm, I'm a really good coder so I can do that too. That's the Peter principle.

[00:45:02] Ben: Well, she, she keeps bringing up a lot of cross team communication, like, oh yeah, we want, we want you to be in, in touch with more teams. And I'm like, oh, that sounds like people,

[00:45:12] Adam: What was the, there was an episode that you guys did mostly without me, while I was camping. I think it was Carol as your coworker, uh, Oza Solutions Architect. Is that what it was?

[00:45:22] Carol: Oh,

[00:45:22] Carol: yeah. With Jason.

[00:45:24] Adam: Yeah, it sounds, it sounds kind of like she's kind of moving in that direction, right? She wants you to like, help people get unstuck or, you know, mentor them so that they become better at their own jobs.

[00:45:35] Carol: Yeah, if, if we had principal engineers, he would be at that level. But we have architects.

[00:45:41] Carol: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[00:45:43] Ben: probably right. I think you're probably right. I, I just hope that it jives with, with whatever sparks joy for me.

[00:45:49] Adam: Yeah.

[00:45:49] Adam: just, just, I think since nobody else at the company's gonna be doing cfml, you're gonna have to learn to, to not get hung up on the syntax, right? It's about

[00:45:58] Ben: Uh,

[00:45:59] Adam: and the

[00:46:00] Carol: Oh, you made him cry now, Adam. God.

[00:46:04] Ben: I, I, I just want a quickly tangent here and ask Carol, what in the heck she's.

[00:46:08] Carol: I fidget all the time, as you may have noticed over the past, you know, 105 episodes of this. and I have these magnetic little hexagons. I think they're hexagons. They could be pentagons how 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5 sides is a Pentagon.

[00:46:25] Carol: Right.

[00:46:26] Adam: be a Pentagon.

[00:46:27] Carol: And they all click together and make a ball, or you can just smash them and they all come apart.

[00:46:32] Ben: okay.

[00:46:33] Carol: So I just, I play with 'em and restack them and just play with a couple and make a cube or whatever and

[00:46:39] Adam: It looked like a nicer version of the ones that we got from my kids when they were little, like the, they were real cheap, you know, little things, but yours looked real nice.

[00:46:45] Carol: Well, they're not super nice. I got 'em on Amazon for like, you know, five bucks. So

[00:46:51] Ben: I love

[00:46:52] Carol: haven't fallen apart yet, and the dog hasn't eaten it, so I'm gonna keep playing with it. So one of those things happens.

[00:46:58] Adam: We've had our first, Christmas decoration casualty.

[00:47:01] Adam: Uh, we had a,

[00:47:02] Carol: Do tell,

[00:47:03] Adam: themed Teddy bear. Murdered by

[00:47:05] Ben: Yeah,

[00:47:05] Carol: oh.

[00:47:08] Adam: Duffed.

[00:47:10] Carol: Yeah, we have a, we have a grumpy cat that's been around since the boys were little. They got it for me one year for Christmas. So every year I just pull it out and it's got the little t-shirt on and it says like, I had fun once. It was terrible, you know, so it goes under the Christmas tree every year and it just sits there.

[00:47:25] Carol: While today we were in the kitchen and Ruby comes walking in there with that cat in her mouth and looks at Peyton and Peyton's like, no

[00:47:36] Tim: Not grumpy cat. Why?

[00:47:39] Carol: Yeah.

[00:47:40] Adam: R I p Grumpy Cat.

[00:47:41] Carol: So I'm waiting for the same thing, Adam, for, for it to be destroyed soon.

[00:47:46] Adam: Okay. Anything else you guys wanna talk about before we shut it down? Move on to after show.

[00:47:50] Carol: I think we're.

[00:47:52] Tim: Yeah.

[00:47:53] Adam: Okay, well, as I mentioned, we're gonna go do the after show, tease a couple of topics here for you. So I know in the past on show, like as we're heading into Thanksgiving, I mentioned that I was having a fence installed around my backyard. I don't think that I've mentioned that I don't have a fence around my backyard yet.

[00:48:08] Adam: so I guess I'll get into that a little and another thing I wanted to throw out there was, Tim, it must have been an after show or,

[00:48:15] Adam: something like that. You, you had mentioned a book called Jumper. I think we were talking about movies and, and you mentioned the book that one of those movies was jump, based on, jumped on.

[00:48:23] Adam: Um,and so I, I, yeah, I started reading it. I'm about 75%, maybe 80% through on. And yeah, it's, we're gonna talk about it a little bit,

[00:48:32] Tim: Yeah. Cool. I'll get like to hear you see your reaction. I hope you hate it.

[00:48:37] Adam: and I guess, Ben inspired a song in his last episode.

[00:48:42] Tim: Mm-hmm.Yeah. We'll, we'll, uh,

[00:48:44] Adam: Are you

[00:48:45] Tim: little, yeah. I'll be singing again.

[00:48:47] Tim: Yeah, yeah,

[00:48:47] Ben: exciting.

[00:48:48] Tim: yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:50] Patreon

[00:48:50] Adam: so this episode of Working Code was brought to you by No Effort December. 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. Our patrons cover our recording and editing costs.

[00:49:06] Adam: so we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. if you wanna help us out, you can go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod can support us for as little as $4 a month and we really appreciate every single person who does and we're thankful for you.

[00:49:23] Thanks For Listening!

[00:49:23] Adam: your homework this week, go to workingcode.dev/review. That's probably the best way to give us a, a little boost. And, leave us a review. Five stars only, please. Gotta keep the street going. Last time I looked we were still all five stars, so really appreciate all that. that's gonna do it for us this week.

[00:49:39] Adam: We'll catch you next week. And until then,

[00:49:41] Tim: Remember, your heart matters and it takes no effort for us to appreciate your heart.

[00:49:46] Adam: Nice.

[00:50:07] Carol: Yeah.

[00:50:08] Adam: Facebook for people who volunteer at your local soup kitchen.

[00:50:11] Carol: Yeah.

[00:50:12] Adam: It's a joke.

[00:50:14] Carol: Oh wait, Facebook, you said Facebook for people that volunteer at your local soup kitchen.

[00:50:19] Adam: Yes,

[00:50:20] Tim: I

[00:50:20] Tim: was trying to figure out what he meant.

[00:50:22] Adam: there's,

[00:50:22] Carol: just assumed it was a group

[00:50:23] Adam: no, it's, there's like a meme, right? Like Facebook for penguins or whatever. It's like if you don't know what to do for your startup, it's just Facebook for something.

[00:50:30] Tim: Um,

[00:50:30] Adam: Yeah. All that needs to go

[00:50:32] Carol: Yeah, cuz I didn't get it. I was like, okay.

[00:50:35] Adam: It's cuz it wasn't funny. Apparently.

[00:50:37] Tim: not even dad humor, just bad

[00:50:39] Adam: Uh, I, I, you know what? I don't care. Use it as a, as a blooper. That's fine.

next episode: 106: A Cascading Cataclysmic Christmas

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