108: 2022 Year In Review

4 January, 2023

Happy New Year! We did it! We survived 2022! This has been a rather hard year in many ways and a decent year in some ways. On this episode, the crew reflects on the past year in terms of fitness, technology, personal growth, and reading goals; and, celebrates some wins and laments some losses.

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Adam: so actually my one reading goal for 2022, was to, finish test driven development by example, the, the T d D Bible as it were.

[00:00:10] Adam: Because I had started it in 2021. and, I kind of stalled when I got to the point where like, I, I kind of got the, the basic gist of it. and in 2022, I believe I read a grand total. Let me do the math here. Carry the one. Yeah, I read zero pages.

[00:00:47] Intro

[00:00:47] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 1 0 8, and on today's show we're gonna do a year in review. still technically no effort, December, but we're putting in a little effort December,

[00:00:56] Ben: little bit. Tiny

[00:00:57] Tim: Minimum. Minimum.

[00:00:58] Adam: when this comes out, it'll be January, so, you know, you, you get the transition effect,

[00:01:03] Ben: right.

[00:01:05] Adam: But, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails.

[00:01:07] Adam: Unfortunately, Carol's out sick this week. so I'm gonna, I guess I'll kick it off. I'm gonna

[00:01:11] Tim: Well soon. Carol

[00:01:13] Adam: yeah.

[00:01:14] Adam's Triumph

[00:01:14] Adam: I'm gonna kick it off with a triumph. one more working day this year,

[00:01:18] Ben: Heck

[00:01:18] Adam: for me. and then I've got the, the rest of the year off for vacation. And man, it is so tempting to just let senioritis take over and, you know, Punch the clock and watch YouTube all day sort of thing.

[00:01:33] Adam: But at the same time, like there are aspects about the, the project that I'm working on that are really interesting and exciting and, and like providing me with just enough of a challenge. Like it's not difficult, but it's something I haven't done in a while, and it's React not C F M L. So it's like, you know, it's, it's, poking me in the right places.

[00:01:54] Adam: And,

[00:01:54] Tim: What place is that

[00:01:56] Adam: the brain you know, the place that C F M L doesn't ever reach. so it's, it's, it's, it's weird because I've been, strangely productive given I have this like, constant voice in the back of my head that's just like, don't actually do any work.

[00:02:12] Tim: That's a 2023 problem.

[00:02:14] Adam: and yet I'm still able to, have fun and get work done and contribute and, make dinner work. So, counting that as a triumph,

[00:02:23] Tim: Yeah, for.

[00:02:24] Ben: Awesome. How many, uh,jumps out of a plane did you get done this year? Did you keep track?

[00:02:28] Adam: I usually do keep track. I don't, I don't have my digital logbook up to date with my, physical logbook. But give me a minute and I'll look it up. pull that spreadsheet up. 2022. Not many. In fact, one of my worst years in like the last. and my, well, so my digital logbook is going up to where, September 4th.

[00:02:53] Adam: So, okay. So I guess if I had to guess at the total, I'm probably in the 70 range for the year. my best year ever was 88. my first full year that you could count was 40. but since that first year and that first year, I started in May. and then since then, my worst year was, looks like 62. So

[00:03:16] Ben: you know, it's a million times more than I've done. I actually thought about you the other day. I was watching this Tom Cruise behind the scenes look at, the next Mission Impossible movie, and he has this stunt where he has to motorbike off this. Off the side of this cliff in Norway, and then he goes directly into a base jump with a parachute.

[00:03:37] Ben: And, and Tom Cruise famously does all of his own stunts, which I don't even understand how movies like that get insured, but whatever. he spent two years. Yeah, yeah. He spent two years training for it. And they, and they said at the height of the air stuff, he was doing upwards of 30 jumps a day, which is just mind boggling.

[00:03:57] Adam: when you've got Tom Cruise money, you

[00:03:59] Ben: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:00] Adam: you're, you're not, you're not on anybody else's schedule. You're not. You're not spending your own time packing your parachute, you know, you, you're just paying for somebody to pack your parachute. You fly your own plane up, you're like, all right, pilot, let's go.

[00:04:11] Adam: We're going now, you're taking me. And, and so when you've got, you know, a really nice airplane that's big and, and you know, has twin, turbo prop or, or, not, yeah, I guess that would probably be what you would call it. I was gonna say jet, but they don't, they don't use jets. But, you know, you can get from the ground to 15,000 feet in like six minutes with it.

[00:04:29] Adam: If it's just like you and, and a pilot and a couple of other people on a plane, you know, with a fully loaded plane. Heck, I mean, with a fully loaded plane, you can get to 14,000 feet in, you know, like 10 minutes, no problem. So,

[00:04:41] Ben: That's pretty good. That's a lot of up and down though.

[00:04:45] Adam: Yeah. And yeah, I mean, if he was training for that motorcycle base jump thing, that's different.

[00:04:54] Adam: I. There's a whole lot that would go into that, that would be a whole other discussion. Let's not,

[00:04:58] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't mean to sidetrack. I, I didn't. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's do it.

[00:05:03] Adam: Cool. so that was me. how about we go to you, Ben?

[00:05:05] Ben's Failure

[00:05:05] Ben: I'm, I'm gonna go with a soft failure, which is that when Covid started, I quarantined like everyone else did. And I don't have children, so I didn't have to deal with their, with them or like the people that they know, or institutions that they attend. so I have managed to not get sick. Like, not, not even just covid, like I haven't had a cold in like three years and it's been amazing.

[00:05:31] Ben: And I woke up at 2:00 AM this morning and my throat was sore.

[00:05:35] Adam: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:36] Ben: And, and I think I'm in the throes of getting, I, what I hope is just a head cold, cuz I don't, I actually don't feel very bad at all. but I was just like, ah, I just, you know, I, I went to dinner, I went out to dinner on Tuesday. We had a little date night on Tuesday.

[00:05:51] Ben: And, normally the places that we go, we, we don't go indoors all that often, but we went to this place on Tuesday and, it was us and, and then we were surrounded by tables of families and all the families had like three and four year olds. And I, and I

[00:06:07] Tim: germ

[00:06:08] Ben: oh. I sat down and I looked around the room and I was like, this is it.

[00:06:11] Ben: This is, this is when I get sick, . And, but I'm hoping that it doesn't become too much. I'm taking my, my zinc and I'm drinking everything I can put in my mouth.

[00:06:22] Adam: if it's any consolation, there's a lot of stuff going around, so it might not be covid, it could be R S V, or Strep Throat, or , which is not all that much better.

[00:06:32] Tim: Flu strain. I, I was reading that like England is, has this resurgence of scarlet fever. I mean, that's, I mean, Scarlet Fever, this sounds so Victorian. I mean, I didn't know

[00:06:42] Ben: Is that even a thing?

[00:06:43] Tim: Yeah, Scarlet Fever's like taken off there and they're afraid it's gonna come to the States. I'm like, I mean, if you ever read the Velveteen Rabbit, that's like

[00:06:49] Adam: Mm.

[00:06:51] Tim: they had to burn all the stuff cuz The Scarlet Fever.

[00:06:53] Tim: Oh my God. That

[00:06:54] Ben: Oh man. Yeah, that's not so that, that's like, when you hear about the plague and you're like, wait a minute, the plague is still a thing. And you're like, yeah, it's coming back.

[00:07:04] Tim: Yeah. Don't, don't pet par Prairie Dogs. They, they carry a bubonic plague.

[00:07:08] Ben: for real. Um, but I'm, I, I'm fully vaccinated. I got my flu shot like two months ago or something. So I'm hoping that whatever's in me is, is at least being counteracted to some degree.

[00:07:20] Tim: yeah. I was, I was reading some good news. So the Mr. Because of Mr. M rna. like the, what they used to like, do the Covid vaccine. They're working on a universal vaccine for the cold, cold and flu, which they think has actually a pretty good chance of pretty good success. So what they're be able to do, huge.

[00:07:42] Tim: Yeah.

[00:07:43] Adam: That would be awesome.

[00:07:44] Ben: Yo, I might never have to wash my hands again.

[00:07:47] Tim: right. I never do anyway.

[00:07:50] Adam: Just go straight from the urinal back to the dinner table.

[00:07:53] Tim: That's right. I don't touch it. I just let it hang out.

[00:07:58] Adam: Oh, I knew you were old Tim, but damn. Like those guys that just put their hands on their

[00:08:03] Tim: just, yeah, just kinda like, you know,

[00:08:06] Adam: up in the

[00:08:06] Tim: hands in the air. Just gotta swing in. Make sure you hit right. That's the most sanitary way to go.

[00:08:12] Adam: See what happens when we don't have Carol here

[00:08:14] Tim: I know. I,

[00:08:15] Adam: us on our best behavior.

[00:08:16] Ben: The ship. Yeah. So hopefully it sucks going into the holidays, maybe not feeling great, but you know, obviously Carol's not feeling great, so I'm in good company and hopefully it doesn't get much worse, but that's me.

[00:08:30] Tim: Okay.

[00:08:31] Ben: What about you, Tim?

[00:08:32] Tim's Triumph

[00:08:32] Tim: So I, I'll go with the triumph. So I, I realize, so I, I, we have a customer prospect that we're working on trying to get their, their, their business. And, you know, a lot of times the hardest thing for a customer, like we're doing payment processing and things like that, is for them to visualize how it will work, right?

[00:08:52] Tim: You can like say, oh, here's the, these APIs and some screens and they really can't visualize. So I've been working on, since end of last week, all the way through this week, a prototype of just kind of what their biggest business issues. And building tool, you know, screens and everything kind. Help them visualize.

[00:09:11] Tim: Ultimately they won't use what I'm building, but it's just sort of a, a wire frame prototype that act, it does actually work, right? I have a login. I built, you know, two-factor authentication that's important to them and some other things, but I just realized how much fun that is. I just love that just being able to slap something together.

[00:09:31] Tim: I, I'm not, you know, I'm not too worried about it. Sometimes I kind of go off on a, in a tangent, like I realize I'm optimizing too soon. I don't, this doesn't need to be perfect. This just has to get through the demo to show them what is possible. Cuz ultimately our engineers and their engineers work together and build the thing in the end, but they need to be able to kind of see it.

[00:09:50] Tim: Cuz you're dealing with non-technical people and if you try to describe in their mind what you say is not necessarily what they see in their head, but if you actually show them, okay, here's how the flow works, here's the screens, here's where the money is gonna move here and do that. And it's solving their problem.

[00:10:07] Tim: Which is very unique to them. I mean, that, that is how you get the deal. And so I've just had so much fun working on this cuz it's like, it's just kind of gr greenfield and, and I don't have to worry about, you know, so many concerns about security and, you know, all, all the different things that if you're really building it, that's gonna be someone else's problem.

[00:10:29] Tim: But if I get the deal, I told my team, like, all right, here's what I'm building, here's what it does. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna hand this to you guys and you gotta build it for real and make sure it's secure and PCI compliant and, and all those other things. But man, that's so much fun for me though, , just to build stuff that's kind of proof of concept.

[00:10:49] Tim: It just, it, it really scratches that, that itch for me.

[00:10:53] Ben: Absolutely. And then sometimes you get halfway through a prototype and you realize there were some huge blind spots that you hadn't considered before. And it just, it, it's that aha moment where you're like, ah, sometimes just building something right away is not the answer. And, it, it forces you to think it's really great.

[00:11:13] Tim: Yeah.

[00:11:14] Ben: And you get to practice your css.

[00:11:16] Tim: Yeah. I, so, I, I, I'm, do you know, I've did some basic CSS and trying to make it look good. I talked to our designer today and I'm like, Hey, I, we got a demo next week. I know we're out, but I want you to kind of take a look at this and if you just, I can't figure out how there's like a login screen. I can't figure out how to make it center.

[00:11:32] Tim: All I wanna do is make the things center. I can't figure it out. I mean, I'm not gonna worry about that. I'll let Bonnie, Bonnie will, Bonnie will handle it for me. She'll, she'll take a look at it in like 10 seconds, figure out how to center it. Cuz I, I work for like 20 minutes. I'm like, no, I don't have time for this.

[00:11:44] Tim: I gotta make this thing actually work. So,

[00:11:46] Ben: Very cool.

[00:11:47] Adam: That's like question number one on the front end. Developer interview, Sheet

[00:11:53] Adam: Center, this thing three different ways.

[00:11:56] Tim: The, the center tag didn't work. I don't know what happened.

[00:12:00] Ben: did you try the marquee tag?

[00:12:03] Adam: at least it's centered part of the time.

[00:12:05] Tim: Yeah. For 10 seconds. Well, it's funny. So I was trying to figure out how to, so I have like, I have a dropdown that has like these store credit card or ach, you know, bank methods. And I wanted like the image, like the logo, visa, MasterCard or whatever to show up in the dropdown. So I'm like, you know, I've heard so much about ChatGPT and you know, the open AI stuff, how smart it is.

[00:12:29] Tim: So I put it in and said, you know, explained the problem to it. You know, show me an HTML and j J query how to do this. It gave me a completely useless answer. It, it, I like really because it looked really easy. I'm like, I can just put an image tag in the dropdown and that's gonna work. And I tried it and it absolutely did not work.

[00:12:47] Tim: Absolutely did not work. So,

[00:12:50] Adam: Did you like reply back? Like, that answer was terrible and you should feel bad, or something

[00:12:54] Tim: I did, and it told me, you know, that, you know, it would kill

[00:12:58] Adam: as a large, you know, machine learning training model. Oh my God. The response that you get back when you ask it to do something that it can't do is so annoying. Cuz it's like, the, the thing that kills me about ChatGPT is that it like, types out the response instead of just like dropping the entire paragraph on the page.

[00:13:16] Adam: You have to like, watch it type out each character, which is relatively fast, but it's still like, you, you, you get this response back if you ask it to like, you know, what does an eagle sound like? It's like, oh, I don't have, instead of saying, I don't have ears, I can't hear you, I can't tell you that. It's like as a, you know, you get this whole paragraph and it's the exact same thing

[00:13:35] Adam: every

[00:13:35] Tim: It's boiler plate.

[00:13:36] Ben: Hmm.

[00:13:37] Tim: And you have to watch it scroll through as it it says, and you know exactly what it's gonna say. I'm like, fine. You don't know. Just say, don't know.

[00:13:44] Adam: Right.

[00:13:44] Ben: It was, it's so interesting cause I feel like the podcast that I was listening to two weeks ago, everyone was raving about chat GT G gtp, what is

[00:13:55] Adam: J P T.

[00:13:56] Ben: G P t and they're like, oh, it's right in code. And I tell to like, just write me this thing. And ColdFusion, it just makes it work. It's amazing. And now I feel like all the podcasts I listened to this week, everyone was like, so ChatGPT will tell you the wrong answer.

[00:14:09] Ben: Super confidently,

[00:14:11] Adam: Yeah,

[00:14:14] Tim: Yeah.

[00:14:15] Adam: I, I've actually gotten a couple of, you know, whatever, kickbacks in my code reviews lately where something that co-pilot wrote that turned out to be wrong. I just kind of blindly accepted, right? Like, so, like, I wrote something and it was like, what I should have written was like, you know, format currency or whatever the, the,C F M L function is.

[00:14:36] Adam: And, and it gave me something completely different. Like it was the JavaScript version or something, and I, it was just like, okay, yeah, that looks good. And I just assumed it understood what the function should be and it did not so,

[00:14:49] Tim: It's only, as good as the base code it was, trained on, and I can't imagine the base code that it was trained on, was that good for cf.

[00:14:58] Adam: Probably not.

[00:14:58] Ben: Well, that's a, someone I was listening to the React Show. it's another podcast, and they were talking about Dan Abramoff, who's a, who's a contributor to the React Framework. And he was talking to chat, g p t and chat. G p t was basically using the documentation that he wrote for React Back to him.

[00:15:16] Ben: It's kind of funny that he recognized it.

[00:15:18] 2022 Year In Review

[00:15:18] Ben: So year in review.

[00:15:20] Adam: Yeah. Let's, let's talk about, 2022. That was a great year, wasn't it guys? I saw a, a TikTok the other day that was like, all right, we need to have a talk. I don't need this to be like an amazing year. I don't need this to be a breakout. I just want 2023 to, to come in. Sit down, shut up, and don't touch anything. I, I need a year off. Just like, just chill.

[00:15:43] Tim: Yeah, I don't think that's gonna happen, man.

[00:15:45] Tim: We got a recession coming war in Ukraine.

[00:15:49] Adam: Oh, yeah.

[00:15:50] Tim: AI taken over jab.

[00:15:53] Adam: the Ukraine stuff has been going on for almost an entire year now. It's been like over 300 days.

[00:15:57] Tim: Yeah. I think what February will be will be a full year

[00:16:01] Ben: I can't believe that so many people are without electricity. I, I can't imagine It's, yeah, it's freezing where I am and I assume it's freezing where they are and to not have heat. Ugh. I, I don't even understand how that's,

[00:16:16] Ben: That takes a lot of fortitude.

[00:16:18] Tim: you know, we're, I mean, so Georgia never gets terribly cold, particularly where I am in the south of Georgia, but it, like tomorrow is gonna drop down to like 19 degrees and then the day after that 12 degrees is never that cold here. So

[00:16:32] Adam: is that the actual or the feels like?

[00:16:34] Tim: that's the actual, the feels like is lower, like the, feels like, it's like zero.

[00:16:38] Tim: So today I went and bought like a whole pickup truckload of, firewood for, for our fireplace, just in case. Cuz I mean, cuz we might lose power, right? So I don't wanna freeze the death. So yeah, just it's, it's just nuts.

[00:16:52] Ben: We'll check in on you periodically,

[00:16:54] Tim: if I don't have power, I don't know, maybe.

[00:16:58] Adam: Charge up all those battery banks you got laying around from conference swag

[00:17:01] Tim: yeah. Swag bags. Yeah. So yeah. 2022. Yeah. It's,

[00:17:07] Adam: so about, you know, imagine this, it's a year in review, approximately 51 weeks ago we did this episode, episode 57, where we discussed our goals for 2022. Unfortunately, Tim, you were out sick with the flu that week, so,

[00:17:20] Tim: Mm-hmm. I

[00:17:21] Tim: was

[00:17:21] Adam: how the turntables have turned, um,

[00:17:25] Tim: Oh, Carol's got it.

[00:17:27] Adam: Yeah. but, yeah, I thought, you know of, from what we can remember of that, I thought maybe we could kind of go through and, talk about how we did on those goals and, and other things that we accomplished this year and, you know, just review. The year as, strange as that sounds.

[00:17:41] Health and Fitness Goals

[00:17:41] Adam: So, I guess the first category of things that we talked about in that episode was fitness goals.

[00:17:45] Adam: so, as our resident fitness nut, Ben, why don't you go first?

[00:17:48] Ben: yeah, I think so this year, fitness-wise, I think that I've sort of hit my stride a little bit. I felt really off physically for the last couple of years. I would go work out and I just wouldn't have any oomph. I just felt, I felt old and I felt tired all the time. And, I still feel old and tired a lot of the time, but I, I feel like I've decreased the volume of the work that I do, and I've added more variety.

[00:18:19] Ben: And I started listening to more music. I used to listen to podcasts while I was working out, and it just, it just doesn't motivate, you know, it doesn't get the blood pumping. so I listen, I, I use Pandora as my streaming service and. They have a, a, a specifically a rap workout station. And I know nothing about rap, but, I have grown to love the lyricism of, of this channel.

[00:18:43] Ben: And, uh, so I, I'm going that, my, my physical fitness goals for 2022, I think we're met. I've had knee pain for a really long time and I went to physical therapy this year and I've been to physical therapy several times and it never does anything. And this year was not different and that physical therapy did nothing.

[00:19:03] Ben: But, about a month ago I was just surfing YouTube and I came across this, physical therapy program by this like E three rehab and they had specifically, a rehab program for knee pain. So I figured I would try it mostly cuz I just wanted to try something different. So I've been doing that for about a month and, it's pretty intense.

[00:19:22] Ben: I do two rehab sessions a week and they're like a full hour long each time. And. And, yeah, and I feel like maybe my knee is starting to feel a little bit better. but I, I, I'm just, I dunno, I, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty pleased with, I've, in terms of like highs and lows, I feel like I'm finally coming out of a low and, I'm, I'm trending upwards again, so I'm pretty excited about that.

[00:19:47] Tim: I, I'm surprised you don't know a whole lot about rap. I mean, you are from the street. I mean, I mean, I mean, not the hood,

[00:19:54] Adam: Sesame Street.

[00:19:55] Tim: Sesame Street. Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:59] Ben: I, I'll tell you, as a kid, I, I did, it's not even that I didn't know about rap. I didn't like it, I didn't understand it, it didn't make sense to me. It was very angry sounding like that's as much as I knew. It's not like this was based on a lot of extensive listening, but I am, I'm kind of blown away just at the cleverness and the, and the rhyming and.

[00:20:22] Ben: It's, it really is a, an an art form. I mean, I'm, I'm, I have to say I'm not embarrassed that I didn't know more about it before, but I feel like I could have leaned into it a lot earlier and, and enjoyed it a lot.

[00:20:35] Adam: Yeah. There are some really, really smart, talented people who are, you know, like putting layers upon layers of meaning into just like four bars, right? Like,

[00:20:46] Ben: Yeah. It's, it's, it, it, yeah, exactly. It's so dense and, I, like, I don't ever listen to it casually like I listen to other music, but I, I listen to it now when I'm working out and it's great.

[00:20:57] Tim: Definitely get your, get

[00:20:58] Adam: So, yeah, I, I don't remember everything. I did go back and re-listen to that episode where we talked about our goals for the year. I don't remember everything, but one of the things that does stick out in my mind is, I think I remember you saying you were joining Planet Fitness.

[00:21:10] Ben: Yes, I, I have been in Planet Fitness. It's, it's like literally $10 a month,

[00:21:18] Adam: You've just gone for the free pizza or

[00:21:21] Ben: So I was going for a while. I was going basically Saturdays and Sundays or like, I'd go Friday, Saturday, Sunday, cuz it was too far away to get to during the week. but since I've started this rehab program for my knee, I haven't, I haven't been, so I haven't been in like a month or so, but,

[00:21:36] Adam: and, and since you moved, is there, does that make it easier or harder? Different location.

[00:21:40] Ben: it's about the same, it it's still like 20 minutes away, which is why I only do it on the weekends. But now that I'm farther up north, I am farther away from the metropolitan area, so when I go to the Planet Fitness, it is twice the size of the one I used to go to.

[00:21:56] Ben: And there's like 15 people there,

[00:21:58] Adam: Yeah.

[00:21:59] Ben: which is great.

[00:22:00] Adam: Little less, little less, dense. Little

[00:22:02] Ben: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[00:22:04] Adam: Cool. Well, for me, fitness wise, my goal for the year was to just like establish a routine of like showing up and, and doing a workout. and for me what that meant was going into my basement and using the equipment that I had bought for myself.

[00:22:19] Adam: I

[00:22:19] Adam: think around this time last year as when I, had discovered that my gym closed during Covid, the one that was, you know, maybe a 10 minute drive from my house. and so I bought, Squat rack and barbell and some plates and stuff, and was trying to commit really hard to, to doing that. And I will say that I have gotten into a little bit of an exercise routine, but it's not the one that I wanted.

[00:22:44] Ben: So I'm giving myself partial credit. you go. Baby steps.

[00:22:47] Adam: well, so the routine that I've gotten into is I've become very, depend dependable, I don't know, whatever. I, I don't seem to miss any of my dog walks. you know, we get up and we walk the dogs as, as soon as we can in the morning. You know, we have to kind of get up and get the kids ready for school.

[00:23:04] Adam: And then once the first school bus comes, then we can go off and do that. and then, you know, after dinner we take 'em on another walk. So, you know, we're doing that regularly, not missing them. unless the weather is just like, awful, awful, you know, you're not gonna go do a dog walk in a downpour sort of thing.

[00:23:18] Adam: But,

[00:23:18] Adam: um, And so that's not the exercise routine that I wanted, but I've been consistent. So I, I'm taking partial credit there and that, that was actually something that I read that I really liked this year was that like, it's way more important that you go because if you're there for, you know, if you just tell yourself, I only have to be here for two minutes while you're there, it's like you're gonna develop a habit of picking up a little bit more cuz I'm here.

[00:23:43] Adam: Right. I might as well, you know, do five more, five minutes of squats or whatever it's gonna be. so

[00:23:49] Ben: you work at. So your basement, is obviously readily available. Do you work out during the day? Do you wait till after work? What's your deal?

[00:23:57] Adam: the way that my schedule works and the way that my brain works, it would work best for me if I could get it done first thing in the morning. I feel like I don't like to work out on a full stomach. and so, you know, it's like from the time that I eat dinner until. At the time I go to bed, I really kind of only wanna relax, right?

[00:24:14] Adam: Eat dinner, hang out with the family, maybe record a podcast, watch some TV with the wife, and then go to bed. so I'm not a, I'm not a nighttime workout person and I don't like interrupting my work day, for anything really, if I don't have to. And if I don't have to, then I'm not going to, right. I'm not gonna be like, okay, well I guess I'm just gonna go take an hour to go work out because that's, you know, the healthiest time or whatever for me to go.

[00:24:36] Adam: and so what that leaves me with is like, generally I have about an hour or two that I could do something, right? If it's, you know, clean up around the house or, or whatever. I, I could choose on certain days to go work out and, or I could, you know, do part of that time on a workout and part of it doing other chores stuff.

[00:24:56] Adam: But, yeah, morning is when it ends up being. And so like for me, it would probably end up being like seven 30. That's like after we got the kids on the school bus

[00:25:04] Adam: and we did a dog walk. Yeah. that would be like, you know, come back from the dog walk, and then go straight down and do a workout. And that's, there are times that I've done it this year, but I just, I can't. So for me, another big thing, and I, I don't know if we talked about this in the episode, was, I was trying for a while to really give up the soda habit. You know, at one point I got down to like one a day and there were a couple of weeks where I was like doing nothing. And at the moment I'm back up to like somewhere between six and eight a day.

[00:25:33] Adam: And I'm not proud of it, but it's true. and you know, the way I'm looking at things like that, like the soda and the, you know, failing to work out as much as I would like, is like, you know, I could have habits that are a lot worse for me, right? Like, I could be smoking and drinking a six pack of beer every day, but I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm drinking six or eight Mountain Dews and I'm just skipping my workout.

[00:25:55] Adam: Like, you know, everybody has to have some vices or, or you have to. Be lazy somewhere. And if that's where I'm gonna be lazy, I'm, I'm not too pissed about that.

[00:26:06] Ben: I, I'll tell you, I work out at, at like two in the afternoon and, it's a pretty nice time to do it cuz it's, I, I do take a break from work obviously to do it. but I, it clears my head and two o'clock like that, that early afternoon is always, I think my foggiest time mentally andso it feels like it's a nice break.

[00:26:28] Ben: I, years ago I used to try to work out super early and it just destroyed me. I couldn't do it. I tried it for like two weeks and I've never done it again.

[00:26:37] Adam: I mean, it's too bad. Carol's not here. She gets up and like, works out at like 4:00 AM or something. It's ridiculous. In a good way. We love

[00:26:45] Ben: Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course.

[00:26:47] Tim: you also?

[00:26:47] Adam: So, so Tim, I know you were sick last year, but, uh, did you have any fitness goals you were aiming for this?

[00:26:53] Tim: not really. I mean, I was on, so, you know, I, I, I was doing my fasting regimen where I didn't eat for, you know, I was just water only for three and a half days. And that for, I, I had done that for over four years and it was working. My goal was not necessarily for losing weight, it was for keeping control of my cholesterol, which I have a genetic propensity toward high cholesterol.

[00:27:18] Tim: and then this year I realized it stopped my latest checkup. I, it stopped working. So I, I stopped fast. I'm like, what's the point of fasting? So I'm, I had been doing at the, and I mentioned this I think on the after show, just doing sort of like, intermittent fasting where I just don't eat until dinner time or supper time, depending on where you live.

[00:27:36] Tim: but what I've noticed, I've been doing that for almost a month and a half, two months. My pants are not fitting

[00:27:44] Adam: like you're

[00:27:45] Adam: losing weight or,

[00:27:46] Tim: no, I'm, no, I'm gaining weight. I can't, it's like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm gaining weight and I do not like that at all. So, so what my goals for my, my decision now is, I think I might go back to doing the fasting again, but what, what I've added, I think the thing that, and my doctor had mentioned this, she said, you know, 30 minutes of exercise a day would really help, right?

[00:28:13] Tim: And so it's like as I get older and my propensity toward high cholesterol, I'm not gonna be able to battle this just with diet anymore. So, you know, we have a, a treadmill, just outside my, my office here, we have a big playroom that's a big treadmill and it's sat there. I don't think anyone's used it in the past year.

[00:28:31] Tim: So every, every day I use a treadmill. It's not really a, a jog, it's just a really fast walk for 30 minutes, you know, get my heart rate up, sweat a bit. So every day while I'm working. So after our standup, we have a standup at 11, but I schedule like an hour for it. So the normally only takes 10 minutes, so I schedule an hour for it so people don't book me on calls.

[00:28:55] Tim: And then, so after my standup, I get on the treadmill. Get sweaty, you know, do it for 30 minutes, a 30 minute walk or brisk walk, slight jog, get a shower, and then, you know, and then I don't eat lunch. but I think I'm actually gonna go back to the three and a half that plus the, the three and a half days of fasting and see what it does.

[00:29:15] Tim: Cuz Yeah, I don't, I don't wanna buy new clothes.

[00:29:18] Adam: Yeah.

[00:29:19] Tim: I don't wanna buy new clothes.

[00:29:20] Ben: Yo, I have literally been in sweatpants for the last like two years. It's.

[00:29:27] Tim: I, I went, I went to like a formal dinner and I had a suit that, that used to be kind of big on me, and I put the pants on and it was like, Ooh. I, I had to like, kind of like loosen and it was

[00:29:40] Adam: Guess I'm not sitting down

[00:29:42] Tim: Yeah, for sure. And then my, my, my, you know, I had a tie on and with the, with the collar and I had to like unbutton the collar.

[00:29:50] Tim: Because it was just really, I'm like, okay, this, yeah, I'm, this ain't gonna happen. I'm too, I'm too vain to let this happen. I can't have a, a, a big old gut, so, yeah.

[00:30:02] Adam: Well, you were talking about, you know, you kind of bounced bef between calling it jogging and brisk walking. And the thing that always killed me when I was trying to be a runner was like I would go for a run around, I live, I live on a circle, so I would like run three laps around the circle or something. My, my time for running three laps around a circle was almost not even any faster than walking. Right? Like I'm, I'm doing the running motion where you're like throwing your body up into air, but I'm not actually making myself any faster than a brisk walk.

[00:30:34] Adam: It's like, is it, is it really worth it to, to do that?

[00:30:37] Adam: If I can just walk, if I can basically power walk and make the same time.

[00:30:43] Tim: I think the important thing is you get heart rate up and you, you breathe faster. So I mean, breathing is, you know, I, I saw this Ted talk about where when you burn calories, where does it go? Right? And it, it base it a hundred percent. It goes to breathing, right? You're, you're, you're creating, you're taking oxygen and converting it to carbon dioxide.

[00:31:04] Tim: That chemical reaction, that's where all that's going. So if you're breathing more, you're burning more calories.

[00:31:10] Ben: Interesting.

[00:31:11] Tim: So getting, getting your heart rate up and all that, and you're, some of it is liquid, but most of it is just creating co2. So the more you're, the more you're creating the, the more chemical reaction that's burning calories.

[00:31:23] Tim: But I, I think really it's the getting the heart rate up, particularly for cholesterol is that helps clear out all that stuff. So,

[00:31:29] Adam: Yeah.

[00:31:30] Ben: to, to piggyback on some of Tim's stuff cuz he talked about dietary changes and I have also made a small dietary change lately, which is that I have cut out snacking. I've, I now eat my meals and I have a, a post-it note on my cupboard that says, don't snack.

[00:31:46] Adam: No, don't lie. Ben, we, we saw a picture of this on your Facebook. What does it say? What does the note say?

[00:31:52] Ben: two Ben, stop snacking. Something like that.

[00:31:56] Adam: It says, note to self,

[00:31:57] Ben: Oh yeah. No,

[00:31:57] Tim: to self just like on the show

[00:32:02] Tim: Note to self

[00:32:04] Ben: and I've been good about it. I walk into the kitchen now thinking I'm gonna get something and I see the note and then I. Turn around and I, and I head back to the office and, I've been doing it for two weeks and I feel better. I don't think I've lost any weight yet, but, but, I just physically feel better not eating all day long.

[00:32:22] Adam: Well, I'm, I'm not a doctor. I don't know how true this is. And, and, you know, I can't give it as advice because it, I, it didn't work for me. I don't, I wasn't able to stick with it. But, I don't know how well you are or how do, how well you do at staying hydrated,

[00:32:34] Adam: but,

[00:32:35] Ben: continuously.

[00:32:36] Adam: but do you drink water or do you drink like bubbly?

[00:32:39] Ben: I drink bubbly stuff. I drink a lot of tea. I drink. Yeah,

[00:32:44] Adam: the, the thing that I had heard, yeah. The thing that I had heard was that like when you're feeling hung hungry, a lot of the time you're actually just thirsty and you're misinterpreting that signal. So it's like, drink first and then give it a minute, and if you still feel hungry, then eat something, but,

[00:32:56] Ben: I, I definitely think a lot of my eating is, is boredom. Not, not boredom. Like I just want to get up from my desk and go do something and putting stuff in my face feels like a natural thing to do.

[00:33:06] Adam: oh

[00:33:06] Ben: and and my thing is, I don't eat terribly unhealthy, like the types of food, you know, I'm not eating like hohos and ding-dongs and stuff. Uh, but I just have no portion control. It's like it's in front of me and I'll just keep eating it until it's gone. So like I'll eat, I like, I love mixed nuts, for example. And if you ever talk to, if you ever hear a doctor talk about eating nuts, they'll be like, oh yeah. You know, you could definitely feel free to have like six almonds a day.

[00:33:34] Ben: So, good for you. And I'm looking down and I have like, I have like a handful of 30 almonds

[00:33:38] Tim: they are so, they nuts are so calorie dense. It's incredible how calorie dense they are.

[00:33:44] Adam: Yeah.

[00:33:45] Ben: Yeah. So I have no control. So my, I have to just stop it at the source, which is reaching into the cupboard to begin with.

[00:33:52] Adam: Oh yeah. I, I can totally relate with the, you know, just needing to get up from your desk and do something for 30 seconds for me, it's like, oh, okay. I'm, I'm running the JavaScript build and that's gonna take 20 seconds, so I'm gonna take a drink of Mountain Dew now. Right. And that's how I end up drinking a, a day.

[00:34:06] Ben: There you go.

[00:34:07] Tim: for

[00:34:07] Tim: sure. Well, let's talk about tech.

[00:34:10] Adam: Okay. This is ostensibly a tech podcast, so

[00:34:13] Tim: For sure. Yeah. Not a diet

[00:34:16] Tech Goals

[00:34:16] Adam: Anybody have any tech goals from 2022 that you wanna talk about?

[00:34:20] Ben: I failed all of mine.

[00:34:22] Adam: Well, well,

[00:34:23] Adam: Ben, you're the one you talked about the most last year was, deploying a container

[00:34:29] Containers

[00:34:29] Ben: Yes. I wanted to build something into a container, or I wanted to build something into an image and then deploy it as a container with continuous integration and continuous delivery. I don't know which ones, which, I can never remember, but I wanted, you know, to push my code somewhere and to have something automatically build and then, then to have that thing automatically deployed somewhere.

[00:34:49] Ben: And, of all of those steps, I got zero of them done. Um, . So

[00:34:55] Adam: But you did talk about them several times.

[00:34:57] Ben: I did talk about them. I did a lot of hand ringing. Uh, I did a lot of self-doubt. and, and, yeah. And so I have now, at least, I, I mentioned this in one of the previous episodes, I do have a sense of what I wanna do. it's not going to be deploying a container because it turns out that that costs money and I don't, like, it costs more than I'd like, especially in the cfml world.

[00:35:18] Ben: You know, if I was gonna, if I was gonna spin up a node service or like a Dino thing, unlike eight megabytes of Ram, you know, that would cost nothing. But that's not the world I live in yet. so I think I'll probably just containerize things locally for development and then just deploy them to my V p s, which I'm already paying for.

[00:35:39] Ben: So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. That might also be too grand a plan , but that sounds like a 2023 problem.

[00:35:47] Adam: Well, good luck. We'll, we'll, we'll keep encouraging you

[00:35:50] Ben: Thank you. I appreciate it. I'll have more to report, I'm sure. What about you?

[00:35:54] Typescript

[00:35:54] Adam: So my big tech goal for the year at least, that I talked about last year was to learn type script. and I would say for the most part, that's been a success. I was really hopeful at the time when we talked about that, that west Boss was gonna drop his type script course soon and it feels. it's been, or maybe, maybe I was just hopeful that his next course was gonna be type script.

[00:36:13] Adam: I don't know if he had, let it slip that even unofficially that he, was working on a type script course. But it

[00:36:18] Ben: Yeah, he's definitely, he's definitely working on one

[00:36:20] Adam: Oh, yeah, yeah. I, I know that by now, but I don't know if I was this sure of it a year

[00:36:25] Adam: ago.I'm still a little surprised that it's not out yet.

[00:36:27] Adam: I feel like there's been a couple of other people that have released TypeScript courses and I'm like, you're gonna, you're gonna lose your, your market to all these other people that are beating you to the market. Not all of them. I mean, you know, he's probably the best known, video training guy in tech right now, at least on an individual basis.

[00:36:43] Adam: anyway, so I, I would say for the most part, success, I know plenty to get myself in trouble and to hang myself. You know, I, I, I have plenty of rope here that I can use to hang myself with type scripting. We don't have any really large type script projects yet, but my whole team is conceptually bought into type script.

[00:37:02] Adam: I was actually kind of hoping to get into the relatively new Js js doc style, like, syntax for type script, which is basically you just write JS files and then you write what looks like JS dot comments, but with a special TypeScript syntax in them. And so TypeScript will see that and interpret it as if it were a ts file with your standard TS syntax.

[00:37:28] Ben: No,

[00:37:29] Ben: that's, that's still a proposal though, right? That hasn't actually landed in JavaScript, I don't

[00:37:34] Ben: it hasn't landed in JavaScript, but it, it is supported by the TypeScript,Really? Oh, I didn't know

[00:37:39] Adam: and and so, you know, you can, one of the benefits of that approach is that at the end of the day, you just have JavaScript. right? You don't have to do anything special with it. If you, if you're just, you know, dropping a JavaScript file into an HTML file, it's, it works right?

[00:37:56] Adam: With no pre-processing at all. and, but at the same time in your ide, whether that's VS code or JetBrains or whatever you're getting, you can, you can get full type script support and, you know, syntax highlighting, or not syntax highing, but you know, inte sense and all that fun stuff. and in theory that works great.

[00:38:15] Adam: Like I, I would've been fully on that train if the syntax wasn't so, God awful. uh,I mean, not that I a hundred percent love the, the type script syntax, especially around like generics and, and sort of nested types, but, there are, when you start to create some pretty complex looking types, it starts to look like red JX to me.

[00:38:33] Adam: Like, you know, right. Only not meant to be red, but, Basic types make total sense to me. and, it's just, I, I was so hopeful for that JS doc syntax, and I, I spent about half a day on it going, you know, like, I, I really want this to work. Can I please just get this to work? And, and you can get it to work, but the syntax is just terrible.

[00:38:53] Adam: So for me, it's just worth it to stick with the, with the compile the compilation step. The other thing too that I've figured out is like, you can just take a JS file and put a comment at the top. It's like, you know, slash slash ts dash check and, type script. If you're like, for me in VS code without any additional stuff, I think I might have the type script plugin or something.

[00:39:13] Adam: But without, with very little work and, and almost nothing in the project, you can tell TypeScript like, I want you to check this file as if it were a TypeScript file. And just do everything via inference.

[00:39:23] Ben: Hmm.

[00:39:24] Adam: and it gives you some of the, the benefit of TypeScript, which is nice.

[00:39:29] Ben: Yeah, that is cool.

[00:39:30] Adam: So I would, I would count that as a success for me.

[00:39:33] Adam: Like I, I wouldn't call myself a type script master, but I don't think anybody would go from zero to master in a single year, so

[00:39:39] Ben: It, it is very com complex and there's just a lot of edge cases and details and stuff.

[00:39:47] Adam: and, and so much that you can only truly understand once you've, like hit the point where you need something complex. Like there's so many things that are super complex that you just won't understand if you don't have a need to actually use it in your code.

[00:40:01] Ben: Yo, for real. I, I remember a while back I was writing something and I had a, a catch block, like a try-catch block. and you, I guess the error in a catch block is by default type any, because you can throw anything in JavaScript, so it has no idea what, what, what, what it'll be. And then someone was like, oh, well that's technically should be an unknown.

[00:40:23] Ben: Or like, there's some nude type script type. It's not any, it's like unknown. And they were starting to tell me why that's better. And I'm like, literally, I don't understand anything you just said.

[00:40:31] Adam: Well, so the funny thing is, it, it's not the right way to do to deal with it, but it is the Tess way to deal with that. You can, you can have like, you know, e colon any right to have your error defined as any, and then you can cast it, you could just say like, you know, e as an as unknown as some other thing, right?

[00:40:50] Adam: So you can have like a, a type that you just declare as like, you know, my standard error type or whatever. Just it has a message and a stack trace or something. and so you can say like, error as unknown as my standard error. and, and that way by going through the unknown type, it just strips out.

[00:41:07] Adam: Preconceived notion of what it actually is. And it's like, okay, well this is, could be anything, could be nothing. I don't care. And now you're telling me it's gonna be this shape, so I'll, I'll accept that. And then you can do whatever you need with it. It's a, it does feel very wrong. Like, I'm throwing, I'm throwing an error.

[00:41:26] Adam: Why can't I just have an error type? And like, when you read all the blog posts about it, it, it, I will say it makes sense, but I don't agree with it. , you know, like, should be able

[00:41:36] Ben: You're technically wrong, but morally incorrect.

[00:41:40] Adam: Right. Well it's funny, the, see, now I'm gonna catch myself. When I was listening to episode 57 recently to, to prepare for this episode, I found myself saying it's funny as my way of like starting, okay, it's my turn to speak like way too many times.

[00:41:54] Adam: And now every time I say it, I'm gonna catch myself. I apologize, but what was I gonna say?

[00:41:59] Tim: it, it, it's funny you say that.

[00:42:02] Adam: So the, the other thing is like, so we talked recently about spelt kit hitting 1.0 and, one of the, their breaking changes was that in order to do a redirect in the framework, you have to throw the redirect, which got a lot of people's knickers twisted.

[00:42:18] Adam: the,

[00:42:19] Ben: framework was this?

[00:42:20] Adam: spel kit.

[00:42:21] Ben: Spoke it.

[00:42:22] Adam: Yeah. And so in order like the, the idiomatic way to do a redirect and the in Spel Kitt 1.0 will be to throw, I don't know off the top of my head exactly what the object is, but you, in order to do a re. , you have to do a throw. And the the explanation is basically like, just like when there's an exception and you don't care about anything, would, that would happen next, right?

[00:42:43] Adam: You just wanna stop the current execution flow and deal with the error. The same thing is also true in the situation of a redirect. Like, I don't, whatever would've happened after this no longer applies, and I just want you to do the redirect instead. So there's a certain logic to it, but it, it just reminds me of the, the type script error type problem. So I'll be curious to see how that goes.

[00:43:08] Ben: It's funny that you're dealing with that because

[00:43:11] Ben: in cold

[00:43:12] Adam: you

[00:43:13] Ben: because in ColdFusion the redirects naturally abort the page and and I have always found that to be very convenient. for life. Tim,

[00:43:22] Prototyping

[00:43:22] Adam: What about you, Tim?

[00:43:23] Ben: join

[00:43:25] Tim: so I mean, so this in tech for me this past year. So my role, I, I mean, I can see where it's, the trajectory of my career is going and is moving more toward becoming a general manager of running a company, which involves a lot less hands on keyboard, programming things. And I, I'm okay with that cuz I, I do like to see a product be incubated and then grow to fruition and then, you know, start making money.

[00:43:54] Tim: but what, the things I still love, and I don't think I'll ever get away from this is, is I was talking about that earlier. My triumph was, is prototyping. I've done that multiple times this year. You have a, a prospect, a client that you're trying to, you know, to sign on the dotted line and get a contract.

[00:44:12] Tim: And, the only way to do it is really just to prototype something that doesn't exist and do it quickly. Right? A lot of times these, you know, you engage them, but you get a meeting, you do a discovery call, you figure out what their, their needs are, and, and maybe have two, three weeks at most to come up with a demo that's gonna wow them and say, yeah, we wanna sign with you, rather than the competitors.

[00:44:34] Tim:

[00:44:34] Tim: and I've done that multiple times this year and, and that it's, I mean, it's, it's kind of exhilarating. I mean, honestly, it's like, all right, it's like, putting on a play. Because some of it is, I mean, some of it is smoke and mirrors, let's be honest. Like you're not showing them the actual product. You, we have a set of tools, we have things that, you know, that do, but it's like a set of tools can be used to build what they need, but they really need to see how it works.

[00:45:03] Tim: And it's not necessarily, you know, how is the final product's gonna be, but they have to visualize it. You're selling to people who typically, I mean, you have a couple technical people, but typically the pe they're not the ones making the decision, ones making the decision with the checkbook. They're a C level people and they just want, they wanna visualize, they wanna understand, and they wanna know that you understand their problem and you've demonstrated that you know how to solve it.

[00:45:27] Tim: and so doing this kind of rapid prototyping, to win deals has kind of really sort of been my, tech growth this year. and knowing that ultimately I'm not gonna be the one who's gonna build the final thing for them. and I'm okay with that. I, I've learned that my team is much better at building a solid product that works over the long term than I am.

[00:45:49] Tim: I'm the kind of person that gets bored once it gets really complex. , once the it gets really, I'm just like, I don't care. It, it kind of works. You know, I'm 80% there. It kind of works, but yeah, my team's not that way. They're, they're very, they're like, they wanna make sure it's bulletproof and, I'm glad they're there to do that for me.

[00:46:06] Tim: So, that, that's been a lot of what I've done. Also, I, I think I talked. I dunno if this was past year or maybe the year passed, but like, I was wanting to learn Redis and I really thought Redis was gonna be harder than it was, but it turned out to be like, it took like a few weeks to figure out and it just, I put it in place and it just worked.

[00:46:22] Tim: So, yeah. Yay. It was easy. I thought it would be so much harder, but it really wasn't. yeah. And then, you know, I continue to, you know, proselytize for PostgresSQL, our Lord and Savior. it's, it's a great database. It, it, the way it deals with dates is a little weird. Every time I have to deal with dates with PostgresSQL, I get a little, little angry.

[00:46:40] Tim: But, but other than that, it's, it's a great database.

[00:46:44] Ben: whatever happened to a cockroach db? I know you were kind of keen on them for a while.

[00:46:48] Tim: I am, it's just, I think they need to get more, more tour, right? It's like, it's, it's one of those things that, I really like the prospect of it, that you can just stand up. The, the idea with that is, is if we ever want to go global right now, most of our customers in North America, but if we want to ever wanna go global and doing payment processing across the world, I really think that is to be able to stand up shards all across the globe, different hosting places, and it's gonna use the closest one to whoever the data is.

[00:47:19] Tim: And it's just one of those things I just keep an eye on. Cause I really think the promise of that is awesome, but I don't think it's mature enough yet.

[00:47:28] Ben: Yeah. The, the databases at the. At the edge, so, so, so much of what the last year or two has been about technologically seems to be evolving. The, the historical content delivery networks into being content and compute resources. So a lot of Lambda style functions at the Edge. And then things like, CockroachDB and I've, I've been hearing a lot about Planet Scale lately.

[00:47:54] Ben: Planet Scale. I think they do like a global master master replication where like, I think you're hitting the database that's closest to the user, but then eventually they're all synchronizing. I don't, I don't, I could be totally misrepresenting what they do, but I feel like that's what I've heard. But that's a whole world that I feel like I know absolutely nothing.

[00:48:14] New Tech and Rate of Progress

[00:48:14] Tim: Yeah. And, and then just, I mean, I, I find myself reading just a whole lot more general kind of tech just to get a view of, of what is coming, right? The AI stuff, and just trying to figure out how strategically can we take these things that are coming out now and, and, and utilize them. so much of what is coming out now is just very transformative.

[00:48:39] Tim: I, I, I think. ChatGPT once it gets better and better is really going, give Google a run for their money. I mean, if you can like just have a conversation on your phone or some app that just, you know, have an actual conversa, like Star Trek computer, uh, , , and then just have a conversation with a computer and it gives you answers that is so much more natural than, you know, typing into a Google search.

[00:49:04] Tim: I, I, I think so. I think these things are super transformative. So I just, just wanna be aware of these kind of things and, and technologies. I'm not necessarily the person who's gonna build them or implement them and put them into our tech stack, but I know, I want to know they're there and make sure our, my team, who they're kind of head down building stuff know, Hey, we need to kind of look into these kind of things and you know, how we can implement them and, and, and keep current.

[00:49:31] Adam: it's gonna have to get to the point where it can correctly count the number of letters in a word. First,

[00:49:35] Tim: Right.

[00:49:36] Ben: saw that one. That was silly.

[00:49:37] Adam: it's like any, any word that you ask it to, to count the number of letters it gives you. It's like off by one. It just refuses to count the last letter. It's weird.

[00:49:46] Ben: Sean Wang, who we had on the show, I don't know, maybe like two years ago. I forget how long it was a year ago. I have no idea. I guess a year ago probably. Anyway, he's been doing the rounds on a couple podcasts as of late, and, he's super bully on all of the, the, the chat and the AI stuff. I've been trying to do a little bit more reading. I, I've been feeling very disconnected from the broader tech world lately. and I've obviously talked many times about, I work on the legacy platform at work. Um,but, but further while I, what, what I've realized, and I think I've always known this, but it's become very clear in my head that so much of my learning has always been deeply rooted in what I was doing at work.

[00:50:28] Ben: So when I had new problems to solve at work, I had to learn new things, new techniques, new frameworks, whatever. I had to look into stuff. and because there was a extreme limit on what I was allowed to do at work, I feel like so much of my learning stagnated because there was, there weren't new problems at work.

[00:50:47] Ben: It was mostly you, it was mostly like customer problems, not technical problems that I was solving. And, I'm, I'm like, I don't wanna say I'm nervous now, but like I, I listen to podcasts and the stuff that people are talking feels like it is farther and farther and farther away from the things that I do.

[00:51:05] Ben: And I don't know how much of that is just terminology and it's just not that different, but I'm just not familiar with it, or, or how much of it is fundamentally different. and I'm, I'm trying to start doing more reading so I can maybe close some of that understanding gap. But I'm just, I've been, I've been angsty about it lately.

[00:51:27] Ben: I've been angsty about, The rate at which things seem to be changing. And I feel like I'm not staying current anymore,

[00:51:35] Adam: Mm-hmm. We're getting an old.

[00:51:38] Ben: yo getting old. But like sometimes I'm just not quite sure if it's, if it's just like, you know, putting a fancy new dress on an old pig or something. Cuz like I, I'm familiar with rendering in ColdFusion and serving up dynamic pages. Like that's, you know, we've been all, we've been doing that for decades.

[00:51:55] Ben: But then when I hear people talk about things like the next JS and, and the more reactive JavaScript type frameworks and all of the stuff that they're doing and they're compiling and deploying to the edge and then they're like pre-com computing some of the content, but then dynamically computing content that hasn't been cashed yet.

[00:52:16] Ben: And it sounds like really magical. But then I'm like, how different is that than just putting a CDN in front of my ColdFusion server? And doing stuff dynamically and like, so that's what I'm saying is like, I don't know how different it is or if it's just different words to more or less mean very similar things and

[00:52:35] Adam: Yeah, about, I don't know. I don't know. Roughly. I'm just gonna guess like 10, 15 years ago, I had this insight that I was like, you know, it feels like everything is cyclical, right? When, when we, when, when the industry was young, there was nothing but server side, right? The first there was just mainframe and everybody had to dumb terminal, right?

[00:52:54] Adam: And then, and everybody had like, you know, nice home PCs and so you could do stuff locally and, and share it up with your coworkers on a, a work server or whatever. And then on the internet it started sort of similar, right? You had only server side, and then it's like, oh, okay, now we can do client side.

[00:53:12] Adam: And now every, see it's like everything is kind of, everything old is new again, right? We're doing server side again. So there's static generation, but I think that it's like a more nuanced approach to it, right? So like you were talking about, it's not just static site. It's like, okay, well this page. Itself doesn't have anything dynamic on it.

[00:53:31] Adam: So this the, you know, the about us page can be static and other pages in the same app can be dynamic or, you know, little islands within the page can be dynamic and rest can be static sort of thing.

[00:53:43] Ben: Yeah, and then I think because I only hear about it second, I don't have a sense of how much of this is commonplace, or this is like the bleeding edge and, you know, people who wanna build rando website. This isn't necessarily the thing they're jumping into, but this is the possibility. And I, and I don't have a, i, I don't have an instinct for that anymore, it feels

[00:54:06] Adam: And I, I, I don't have, like, you, I don't have the recent, I feel like there's this whole new generation of front end web developers that are like, wait, server side stuff.

[00:54:17] Ben: Right.

[00:54:17] Adam: how does that work? And, and like, I, I'm, I'm certainly not here to poo poo anybody's experience. That's not what I'm saying. But like, you know, When, when remix started to, to pick up hype.

[00:54:31] Adam: And it's like, it seems like the whole, their whole thing is like, yeah, you don't have to do everything on the client. You can just do server stuff and, and like use the web platform. And I'm like, you mean? So my dragging my feet for the last five years on not like super specializing, doing everything in the browser,

[00:54:49] Adam: It's just like I waited it out and now we're back and, and you've come back for me,

[00:54:53] Adam: circle back. So,

[00:54:56] Adam: yeah.

[00:54:56] Ben: it is, yeah. It, it's like, it, it, it keeps getting incrementally better. So I think that there are things that I'm not capable of, of taking advantage of because of the technology that I'm using, but I I don't know if it's so fundamentally different yet that, that it feels like it's a forcing function for me to change.

[00:55:15] Ben: Not sure.

[00:55:16] Reading

[00:55:16] Adam: Well you were talking about reading Tim. I know you. You and I have very different interests when it comes to reading. What have you been reading lately?

[00:55:25] Tim: I don't say we have different, it's just I cuz you and I read a lot of same books, but,

[00:55:29] Adam: Well, that's true. There's an overlap.

[00:55:31] Tim: Yeah, there's the overlap. But I am a huge history buff. I, I really enjoy history. So this entire year I've really been into Carthage and Rome. And so Carthage, I, I just find because they got destroyed by Rome and, and history is written by the winners, there's not a whole lot, you know, about Carthage, but I mean, honestly, they, their culture, their history, who they were as a people, they were, a nautical people that just, you know, built empires all around the Mediterranean.

[00:56:01] Tim: very came, came very close to destroying Rome early on before Julius Caesar. just super interesting. I, I, I believe, and I do enjoy history because I think you can learn a lot from the people in history, about mistakes that you can make in your life and trying to avoid them, you know, if they say, you know, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

[00:56:22] Tim: And, and I think just, just some of the, I mean, Carthage, they eventually just kind of got beat up by Rome and they just, Rome at one point basically showed up at, showed up. because they said that they broke a treaty and told the entire city of Carthage in Northern Africa, that, you know, we will destroy you unless you guys like move your entire city.

[00:56:46] Tim: All of you have to just, we're gonna destroy your entire town and you guys gotta move like 60 miles inland.

[00:56:52] Ben: That's

[00:56:52] Tim: And they ha they, and they did it , did it. So it's, yeah. Yeah. But really, and also, not just, just history, but also like, some things relative to work about,skills that I feel I'm not really good at it.

[00:57:06] Tim: negotiation. Carol had recommended a book about negotiation. I read, I read or listen to that. trying to get better at that. And I think, you know, it paid off because, you know, earlier I talked about this customer that, who's a difficult negotiator. He's a lawyer, so obviously he's good at that.

[00:57:21] Tim: And I was trying to get a price increase across and he fought me on it, but, I got it through

[00:57:26] Tim: man Yeah. It, it was, it was a big win. It was a big win for our, our, financial goals for next year. So yeah, history and, business skills. Just trying to get better as a, as a leader in a company.

[00:57:40] Adam: I think that my, I've, I've really cultivated this skill of. When I am done with work for the day, I am really good at turning off that side of my brain. I don't check my work email, you know, I can be reached via on call and my coworkers have my phone number and stuff, but like, for the most part, I'm, I don't wanna have anything to do with my business life when I'm not on the clock.

[00:58:02] Adam: with very few exceptions. And so I think a big part of that is my interest in fiction. Like, it just helps me take time for myself. It's, it is sort of relaxing and, so I read a lot of fiction stuff. That might be why. so actually my, my one reading goal for 2022, that I had set on the podcast was to, finish test driven development by example, the, the T d D Bible as it were.

[00:58:30] Adam: Because I had started it in 2021. and, I kind of stalled when I got to the point where like, I, I kind of got the, the basic gist of it. and in 2022, I believe I read a grand total. Let me do the math here. Carry the one. Yeah, I read zero pages. but it's, I've, I've had it on my desk, like within reach.

[00:58:49] Adam: It's, it's probably four inches from my keyboard right now. And, it's been there all year as a reminder that I should get back to it and read it. And so I'm, I'm gonna commit, I'm gonna finish it in the first half of 2023. Like it or not, just need to get this one off my desk. but a aside from that, I actually did a good bit of reading this year.

[00:59:08] Adam: I think, if things go as I'm expecting them to, I'm on track to, read 24 fiction books this year. I try to read two a month.

[00:59:16] Ben: that blows my mind.

[00:59:17] Adam: Which, I mean, look, it, it's relatively easy because I, it it, like, I know people who read two or three books a week, right? Some of our friends in the ColdFusion

[00:59:27] Adam: community are, are ravenous readers.

[00:59:29] Adam: and so I feel a little bit, you know, like I could be doing more, but I, I just know I'm splitting my time with other things, right? Podcasts and whatever else. And so, yeah, just, I just try to set a goal of two books a year, and I accomplish that almost entirely because of audiobooks, right? I can read those while I'm in the shower and while I'm driving, while I'm cutting the grass and, you know, walking dogs and whatever else.

[00:59:51] Adam: but I, I'm happy with that, you know, like that's, it makes me feel good to accomplish that now. You know, other things have to suffer to do that. Right. I'm, I'm, 36 hours and change, behind on podcasts, right? So there's a bunch of podcasts that I subscribe to and they, they all get queued up as they publish.

[01:00:08] Adam: and I, I have like different settings, right? Certain podcasts that I'm like super gung ho about. They go to the top of the list when they publish and everything else is just like, you can go to the end of the line and I'll get to you when I get to you. And there are, it's crazy cuz I have at times fully caught up on that list.

[01:00:22] Adam: I'm like, well, but now what? And I can't remember the last time that that was.

[01:00:29] Tim: So what, what was your for 2022, what was your favorite book that you read slash listen to?

[01:00:34] Tim: Oh, that's a really good question. Because I'll give you mine if you gimme yours

[01:00:38] Adam: let me pull up my list of books that I read this year because I don't wanna, this is such an important question. I want to give it justice. Right.

[01:00:46] Tim: Yeah, I'm looking at my list too.

[01:00:47] Adam: I reread Project Hail Mary this year,

[01:00:50] Tim: Mm-hmm. That's a good one. I read that

[01:00:51] Adam: Very good. I also reread, Delta V, which is a Daniel Suarez book.

[01:00:55] Adam: I reread seven Eves this year because I, so the first time that I read Seven Eves, I, I was not prepared for the major shift in the third act. Like when,have you read it? Tim. Okay. So when, when it says 5,000 years later, my brain just like, shut off.

[01:01:12] Adam: Yeah.

[01:01:13] Adam: and so like, I, I went through the motions of reading it the first time, but I just, like, I, I didn't have the right headspace to follow the characters, and so it was just like name after name after name and relationships, and I just completely lost the, the thread of the book and I, yeah, whatever.

[01:01:31] Adam: So I went back and I reread it and it made a lot more sense to me. And I, I definitely enjoyed that third act more this year. in terms of books that I read for the first time this year that I really liked. I read the Cai Preservation Society, that's a John Scalzi book. That was really good. I think you recommended that.

[01:01:44] Adam: and the other one that I really liked was, upgrade by Blake Crouch. I think that was published this year. If I'm not mistaken. Blake Crouch is like a sci-fi thriller writer. He's had a couple of really good ones. And I read Jumper, that was maybe,

[01:02:00] Tim: My rec my

[01:02:01] Adam: yeah, yeah, yeah. and I don't mean this as shade, but I would say it was a little on the juvenile side.

[01:02:06] Adam: Like I think it's, it is as young adult fiction. And it's funny cuz there are, there I go saying it's funny again, there are, books that are definitely ya that I feel like still work as an adult. And then there was like this that I felt like, I don't know if it's just the, the vocabulary used or what, but it felt very

[01:02:28] Tim: The

[01:02:28] Tim: sequels. He's older, so it's less. Yeah.

[01:02:31] Adam: So I don't know. And I read, a series of books, the Aurora Cycle. So Aurora Rising, Aurora Burning Aurora's End, just, just another sci-fi space opera series. And I enjoyed that. It was pretty good.

[01:02:44] Tim: So I asked you if your favorite and you gave me

[01:02:46] Adam: Yeah.

[01:02:46] Tim: Okay.

[01:02:47] Adam: Oh God. See that's the thing is I can't, I can't,

[01:02:50] Tim: Yeah.

[01:02:50] Tim:

[01:02:50] Tim: I I tell my kids I don't have favorites. I don't have favorites. I have my top something. I never have a favorite. I so say a favorite is very black and white. It's just stupid. So I, I'll give you my, I'll give you my two. So my favorite, my top one or two for fiction is the per.

[01:03:09] Adam: The peripheral.

[01:03:11] Tim: Peripheral by William

[01:03:12] Ben: That's the one they just made a show about. Yeah.

[01:03:15] Tim: Yeah. Yeah. So I watched the show. I really enjoyed the show. So I, I, I read the book and listened to that. It was really good. So basically it's like people in the future where they'll be able to, to go back in time in like, not back in time, but they would like send info back in time to people in kind of our time period.

[01:03:34] Tim: Give them information through like their, they're using like an Oculus kind of virtual reality, and they were able to transport them their mind into the future to do stuff. It's, it's, you know, it's a mind, mind bender.

[01:03:46] Adam: So this isn't a, this isn't Biff finding the Almanac. This is

[01:03:49] Tim: No, no, no, no, no. But it was really good. I mean, William Gibson is just a, a fantastic, fantastic author.

[01:03:56] Stoicism

[01:03:56] Tim: And then, so for non-fiction is, Marcus Arres. The Roman Emperor, he had, so he was a stoic, right? He was a stoic philosopher, and he wrote a, what wasn't really a book, it was just sort of, I think it was almost his personal journal, called Meditations that got published after he died. And it's just his.

[01:04:20] Tim: So here's a man who's pretty much the most powerful man in the world. and just talking about stoicism and, and it's, it's interesting. It's like if you're not, you know, a lot of, there's, there's a lot of similarities between stoicism and Christianity. but stoicism, it doesn't believe really in any sort of, like, supernatural stuff.

[01:04:39] Tim: It's just very logical. and just sort of the, the code that he lived by was extremely refreshing to see how he, despite all the power that he had, how he controlled himself. As a stoic to and stoicism, you think about like denying yourself. He really wasn't about that. It's all about that. The only thing you can control as a human being is yourself. And so, you know, if someone's mean to you or someone attacks you, you know, that's an external force. But if you, if you have stoic control, you control your reaction. That's the only thing you can control. So if you, you know, like say someone yells at you and you get mad and you beat them up, you're gonna go to jail, right?

[01:05:21] Tim: For assault. But if you're a true stoic, you control yourself. You control your passions, control, you know, you do moral things because you are in control of yourself as a human being, as a rational being. And it was such a good book that I, I bought four copies and gave 'em to, I bought one for myself and my kids and my wife and just like, here, read this.

[01:05:41] Tim: Cuz it's just, it's just, it's a really, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting philosophy for. Rational ways to deal with, with grief and to deal with pain in life.

[01:05:55] Ben: Sounds really cool.

[01:05:56] Adam: Does it, does it read like a nonfiction, like a science book, or is it more story based?

[01:06:03] Tim: So the, the version I got, was, is basically a, a psychol, a psychologist, who is kind of, he's explaining the book meditations to you, right? So it's not the act, so it's not the actual word for word,

[01:06:18] Ben: Gotcha.

[01:06:18] Tim: story that he wrote. So it's not the actual text from Marcus Aurelius. This is a, he's a psychologist who deals with behavioral therapy, cognitive the therapy.

[01:06:27] Tim: It explains kind of how, the relationship between what he wrote and how modern psychologists use these same techniques of model. behavior, and how to control your behavior and how to deal with interpersonal conflict, works. And it's just, it was just, it was, it was transformative. I mean, to, to really to read that, particularly seeing that the guy, he was right.

[01:06:49] Tim: So, I mean, you think about people that have so much power. He was, he was an okay emperor. He was kind of one of the last really good emperors, his son Commodus. So if, if you ever watched Gladiator, it's kind of based on Marcus Aurelius was the old guy in, in Gladiator, communist was his son. And lot of that is actually very true.

[01:07:09] Tim: A lot of it's fake. But Commodus, his son was complete Heath Heathen. He once he, once he, once his daddy died. Once his daddy died, he, he went and got 365 concubines won for every day of the year and put all these games. And communist actually trained to become a gladiator. Fought in the gladiator pits and actually got very good at it.

[01:07:30] Tim: He was just a complete opposite of his dad. He was just such a controlled guy, so wasn't, wasn't a great dad , but, but he was, he was a very intelligent and just yeah. thinking man. So just

[01:07:44] Adam: It's interesting the way that you described it. I, I've had a, minor interest in stoicism over the last year. it was, I won't say it's one of the things that I was working on in therapy now. I, I haven't gone to therapy in a little while, but, I was doing therapy I think toward the beginning of this year still.

[01:07:58] Adam: and just like, you know, like you were talking about controlling my own responses to outside stimuli, and the way that I was thinking about stoicism was like, you know, the, the, the feelings that you have could be depicted by like a sine wave. Sine wave, right? You've got your peaks and your valleys and stoicism.

[01:08:18] Adam: The way that I was thinking about it was just sort of like squishing that in, right? So when the, when the highs are high, you just kind of like, let that go and, and don't let it encourage you to be outlandish or whatever. And when the lows are low, when somebody's making you upset or whatever, you, you kind of reign that in and, and just try to be steady.

[01:08:37] Adam: I don't know how accurate that is, but that was the way that I was thinking about it.

[01:08:41] Tim: Yeah, i'll, find a, I'll I'll find, I'll find a link in there. It's just, it, it's, it's just extremely good. It's just a, a very rational way to think about, I think for people who are not religious, it's, it's a good kind of life model to follow

[01:08:56] Adam: Okay.

[01:08:56] Tim: it doesn't re, doesn't really require any sort of belief in a higher power, although honestly, he did.

[01:09:02] Tim: But.

[01:09:02] Adam: Okay. Well,

[01:09:04] Adam: Let me throw a couple of things out there. these should be pretty quick for me. So this year,it's amazing when I think about it, but somehow in the, in the course of this year, we managed to adopt two cats, two parakeets and a dog. And that just seems normal.

[01:09:17] Ben: That's, that's a lot

[01:09:19] Adam: Yeah, we, we've always been a pet family and like the parakeets belong to one of my sons, the, the cats, our family. And that happened very early in the year, like January, February, maybe March, I don't remember exactly. And then, the, the dog was only a couple of months ago. But, yeah, just, just crazy. and then other things like that I did this year, I learned selt.

[01:09:37] Adam: That was totally new to me. And, and, very excited about that. I picked up Tailwind. You know, it's another one of those things like Redis, like, it seems like it's gonna be such a big deal. And then you're like, oh, okay. I guess that was it.

[01:09:49] Tim: Yeah,

[01:09:50] Adam: but it, it's so useful. Love.

[01:09:53] Tim: I mean, I think for me, I think the big thing is like kind of getting back to traveling, which I, I do enjoy. So I got to go to Barcelona for work and also got to bring my family out there for Barcelona, which is awesome. And then I got to go to London and visit some of my family that lives in London.

[01:10:07] Tim: paring wins. Yeah. My, my son, it was, I can't believe it was this year, it seems like so long ago, but, you know, my son graduated high school and was top of his class and valedictorian, and he's going in college now. And, and so just super proud of him. And my, my daughter, you know, she's doing great things too.

[01:10:23] Tim: And, and, well, I haven't talked about, just recently, I haven't, down to zero credit card debt, which is awesome.

[01:10:31] Adam: Nice.

[01:10:32] Tim: Which, yeah, was a, you know, wasn't that big a debt, just, I didn't like having it hanging around my head particularly, you know, as interest rates keep going up and everything. So I just, I just wanted to get completely outta debt.

[01:10:42] Tim: so fully outta debt, the only. Thing I have is my mortgage. And so that's, that's a nice place to be. So I'm actually, probably for the first time in a long time, I'm actually saving money, right? Taking money in, in the stock market and just investing and buying stuff. So,

[01:10:58] Adam: Congrats, man.

[01:10:59] Tim: yeah.

[01:10:59] Ben: You know, if you just like put in some code at work to take like a hundredth of a penny from every transaction.

[01:11:06] Adam: wasn't that in Superman?

[01:11:08] Tim: Thanks, Richard. Pryor,

[01:11:10] Patreon

[01:11:10] Adam: Alright. well it sounds like we're about ready to head to the after show on tonight's after show. I'm gonna fire Ben and Tim for being light mode Heatons.

[01:11:19] Tim: light mode Heathens. Uh,

[01:11:22] Adam: Mode for Life. Uh, but before we do that, of course the episode of Working Code is brought to you by deploying containers of production. That's something that Ben is definitely going to do this year.

[01:11:31] Ben: His fingers.

[01:11:32] Adam: And listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can continue putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, you should consider supporting us on Patreon, our patrons cover our recording and editing costs.

[01:11:43] Adam: And you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and set a goal here. I wanna get to, I wanna get our Patreon this year to the point where we can afford to start doing transcripts, of all of our episodes. It won't take that much more because there's like AI bots that can take our audio file and, and spit out a transcript and then we just need to pay somebody to go through it and, and clean it up.

[01:12:03] Adam: So hopefully we can get there this year, that would be really nice. but, we need a couple of more patrons to jump on to make that happen. So if you wanna help us get there, go to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod Of course. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte, Shawn and Giancarlo. your continued support is very appreciated.

[01:12:20] Tim:

[01:12:20] Tim: and you know, one, one of the great things if you, we can transcript it, we can feed it in the ChatGPT, and then we can actually just generate an entire show based off ai. We don't even have to like, we can really phone it in

[01:12:32] Adam: Yeah, we'll have chat, g p t come up with a script, and then we'll use like descript or something to, to, to generate the, the audio.

[01:12:38] Tim: there.

[01:12:40] Thanks For Listening!

[01:12:40] Adam: All right, your homework this week, join our Discord. We would really like to hang out with you by the time you hear this. game night has already come and gone. I've talked about it recently, but, our Discord is where we get together, where we organize and congregate and hang out with each other and talk about the tramps and fails of everyday life and, and of working.

[01:12:59] Adam: and you don't have to wait a whole week to get those in. So that's the place to do it. workingcode.dev/discord. That's it for us this week. We'll catch you next week. Until then,

[01:13:08] Tim: Remember, your heart matters regardless of, you know, if it's a 2023 problem

next episode: 109: Best of 2022

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