134: Ben Goes to a Conference
After a multi-year global pandemic, preceded by a dearth of ColdFusion conferences in the U.S., Ben finally made it out to Munich, Germany for CFCamp 2023 - Europe's premier CFML-oriented conference. At 130 attendees, it was the perfect place to re-enter society and talk tech with like-minded engineers. Going into it, Ben was anxious. But, by the end of the 3-day event, he ended up having a great time and was privileged to hang out with some truly wonderful people!
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Ben: and just to like top it all off, this is very exciting for me personally. So I'm at the baggage claim in Newark, New Jersey on the way home, and I'm standing there waiting for my bag, and all of a sudden freaking Christian bail Batman walks right in front of me.
[00:00:37] Intro
[00:00:37] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 134, and on today's show we have three of your four illustrious, podcast hosts. As as promised
[00:00:44] Carol: prettiest ones.
[00:00:46] Ben: Obviously the most suave and elegant.
[00:00:49] Adam: whoa. We do not wanna insult Tim like that. He is a very pretty man.
[00:00:54] Carol: he is very pretty. I agree.
[00:00:56] Adam: Anyway, we have some of the prettiest ones. everybody but Tim is on, today on the show we're going to talk about conferences.
[00:01:04] Adam: Ben just returned from, attending CF camp in, it was Germany, right?
[00:01:08] Ben: Yeah, it was, outside of Munich.
[00:01:10] Carol: So jelly. So jelly.
[00:01:12] Adam: my brother's actually getting ready to go on a vacation to Germany, so,
[00:01:16] Carol: Ooh.
[00:01:17] Adam: I got Germany on the brain. Right. We've been talking to him about it a lot lately. So, I, I'm, I'm like, interested to go, to, go visit has, I'll be very curious to hear about your experiences over there, but we'll get to that later.
[00:01:27] Adam: because as usual, we're gonna start with our triumphs and failures. It looks like it is my turn to go first, but, you know, turn time is meaningless, turns are whatever because, we are all, all sorts of chaos lately. Uh, but we're gonna try to restore a little bit of order.
[00:01:40] Adam's Failiumph
[00:01:40] Adam: I'm gonna go first and I'm gonna kick us off with AUM because Yeah.
[00:01:45] Adam: Man, life is chaos for me right now. And, and like, there's good things, there's bad things. I guess I'm gonna say like, my life has been very chaotic. My mom is staying with us for a couple of weeks. she had surgery on her neck. We live in southeastern Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. She had surgery, to like fuse some vertebrae and install some metal and, you know, whatever.
[00:02:05] Adam: she, she was in a, a, she was rear-ended, pretty severely when I was just a little, wee little one. So, you know, like 20 years ago. not, not 35 years ago, 20 years ago, cuz that's how old I am in my brain. and and ever since then she's had really bad problems with her neck. And so this is
[00:02:20] Carol: Oh man.
[00:02:21] Adam: you know, thing to try and keep her semi-mobile or whatever.
[00:02:25] Adam: Anyway, she had had surgery on her neck. It was down in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins. and so I've been running her to and fro, right? She's staying with us cuz she needs to be babysat and not allowed to drive. Wasn't allowed to like bend, lift, or twist. all,
[00:02:38] Carol: Probably on pain meds and stuff.
[00:02:39] Adam: And, and she normally lives alone at home with her dog.
[00:02:42] Adam: So, she and the dog had been staying with us and, I, you know, I drove her down to the surgery. I went down a couple days later to pick her back up and then we had a follow-up appointment today to, get the staples out. She's supposed to have another appointment next week, and it's just, it's a lot of that got my own medical
[00:02:57] Ben: how far away is Philadelphia from Baltimore?
[00:03:00] Adam: With the traffic that's on 95 right now from construction, about two hours, give or take in the middle of the, like a weekday day. So yeah, that's four hours of driving. Anytime we wanna go down there for something. Um, yeah,
[00:03:11] Carol: I bet that's not comfortable for her either sitting in the seat like that for that long.
[00:03:15] Adam: It, it's not fun. So we, we do, we found like a, a Chick-fil-A that's like halfway. So we stop and grab lunch and, and that works out okay. But it's still, it's just a lot of driving. Anyway, so that there's that going on. I've got my own medical stuff going on. We've got the kids, got stuff going on, my wife has stuff going on, everything's going on.
[00:03:32] Adam: like for example, you know, today we had, one of those appointments. So I was in the car for four hours today. I got home, we ate dinner and then my son has been waiting for me to get some, work done on his computer. Like we re reformatted and reinstalled everything cuz it was just getting outta control.
[00:03:49] Adam: He was waiting for like the last few things for me to install so that he could stream on Twitch and all this and that, whatever.
[00:03:55] Carol: Aww.
[00:03:55] Adam: And so I finally did that, and then I was, then I looked at my watch, I was like, oh no, it's like two minutes until we're supposed to record quick, send you guys a text. I'm on my way.
[00:04:04] Adam: so, yeah, that's been, that's been my life. So it, it's, it's hard to keep it all straight, like I said. Oh, and, because of all of this too, I missed, we were supposed to do book club this afternoon, which I scheduled. And I completely missed it. It just like totally
[00:04:19] Carol: Oh no. Yeah. They'll understand then they'll, they get
[00:04:24] Adam: I apologize, but, yeah, I'm, I, I'm hoping that they had it without me, cuz it's been, we've delayed it.
[00:04:30] Adam: This particular meeting, I think this would be the third week we've tried to hold this, this meeting
[00:04:35] Adam: to discuss these three chapters. So I really don't want this to stall out. I want to keep making progress. So I'm hoping
[00:04:40] Ben: What, what, what chapters are we even supposed to be on?
[00:04:43] Adam: yeah, up and through 20.
[00:04:46] Adam: Up to and
[00:04:46] Carol: Don't, don't do 21 cuz that's cheating Ben.
[00:04:50] Ben: No. No, I'm not a cheater.
[00:04:52] Carol: Okay. I accidentally started it and went, wait, wait, wait. I was like, I saw a message. Don't do 21, and then Monday fell apart, so I missed it.
[00:05:00] Adam: Yeah. So I guess if there's a silver lining to all the stuff that's going on, it is that I have not heard a single word of complaint, at work, about me missing all of this time. To handle family things. Right. I've been on p t O for a lot of this time and it's just like, yeah, take care of family.
[00:05:18] Adam: That's what you should be doing. So,
[00:05:19] Carol: Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. It's nice when you can step away and not feel like you're gonna walk back into more chaos at work, that you can step away and people kind of keep going. Even if they need you for things and need to ask questions, at least they can keep movement going while you're
[00:05:35] Adam: Yeah, for sure.
[00:05:37] Carol: Yeah. I'm sorry.
[00:05:39] Carol: It's so chaotic. I hope it, hope it calms down
[00:05:42] Adam: You don't know anything about chaos, Carol?
[00:05:44] Carol: Nothing. Right? Nothing at all. So a silly question. You said you have another dog at the house. How is that, because I always worry when people come with a pet, like, oh, this is going to be trauma for every animal here, and we're all gonna hate it. Like, how's that going?
[00:06:00] Adam: Fortunately, you know, it's my mom's dog. So they spend a little time together and then they have a lot of time apart. Then they spend a little time together and have a lot of time apart because she visits, you know, pretty regularly with the dog. so they know each other. They're familiar when, when the, like the very first time that she brought him up, there was a little scuffling between the two.
[00:06:17] Adam: We only had our one dog at the time. and you know, bender and my mom's dog Tucker would. not fight, but you know, there was a little like, you know, they were figuring it out. Yeah. How, how is this gonna work between us sort of thing. Who's gonna hump who? And, and, it turns out little, little of column, a little column B, little both goes both ways.
[00:06:39] Adam: and, yeah, they worked it out and now they're best buds and, you know, they ha they spend a lot of time together and get along great.
[00:06:45] Carol: Oh, well that's good.
[00:06:46] Adam: man, she's just the most chill dog ever.
[00:06:49] Carol: Aw.
[00:06:49] Ben: Nice. She's a lab.
[00:06:51] Adam: well, as it turns out, we had her DNA n a, tested. She's a pit mix like,
[00:06:55] Ben: Oh, that's right.
[00:06:55] Carol: interesting. Never list that on the insurance
[00:06:58] Carol: policy.
[00:06:58] Adam: But, but it is like 40% pit.
[00:07:00] Adam: It's the, the plurality of her, d n a says, supposedly according to, you know, whatever
[00:07:06] Ben: No one dog defines her.
[00:07:09] Adam: She is the most gentle soul I have ever met. So
[00:07:14] Adam: she's chill. Love her. So anyway, that's my, uh, fum and I guess that means I will kick it over to Ben.
[00:07:22] Ben's Triumph
[00:07:22] Ben: All right, I'm gonna go with a couple of triumphs here. let me, let me. Paint a backstory for a second. So at work we have enterprise customers and we have non-enterprise, or what we call self-serve customers of the enterprise customers. Some of them existed in the multi-tenant system, so they were right there alongside all the other enterprises and the other self-serve customers.
[00:07:47] Ben: And then we had a tier of enterprise customers that paid more money to get. An isolated environment, something we called a private cloud environment. And that had, say it again?
[00:07:58] Adam: card.
[00:08:00] Ben: Yes, exactly. V i p exclusive, you know, completely separate network, completely separate S3 buckets, completely separate database, all that kind of stuff.
[00:08:11] Ben: And,
[00:08:11] Carol: sound like a headache at all.
[00:08:13] Ben: It, it, it's caused a lot of headaches over the years. not the least of which was that in many cases we were actually selling them at a loss financially, which, it's just one of those things that you don't understand how poor communication and companies is sometimes until someone looks at a balance sheet and they're like, Hey.
[00:08:34] Ben: You guys are selling these, private cloud clusters for like 7,000, $10,000 a year. And this sales people are like, yeah, is that a problem? And the, infrastructure guy was like, yeah, it costs like $40,000 a year to run these. So it turned out we were selling a bunch of them at a loss anyway. Over the last two or three years, a lot of those customers have either churned out or have been migrated to the new platform, which is a multi-tenant system.
[00:09:01] Ben: There is no concept of private cloud or Or that level of isolation. Yeah. And today we just turned off the last private cloud cluster. So, and it was super exciting cuz I, I do deployments through, this chat bot and Slack, see like, it's called Rosie. So I'll say like, Rosie release CF projects and then it gives me a little popup and says, what are the tiers you want to deploy to like, testing, preview, multi-tenant and single tenant.
[00:09:28] Ben: Single tenant as the private clusters. And I went to release something at like three something today and suddenly there was no option to deploy to the single tenant environment. It was so exciting. Yeah, it, it's gonna be financially much more comfortable not having any private cloud stuff. And then it also just simplifies the code a lot because there was a lot of logic for, like, if this is a single tenant instance, there's special things that have to or not have to, you know, like a special things either have to take place or are not allowed because it's in single tenants.
[00:10:00] Ben: So,
[00:10:01] Carol: Yep.
[00:10:02] Ben: as with all things, I'm excited to go in and start just deleting any code that no longer makes sense.
[00:10:09] Carol: You're gonna spend like a few days of doing nothing but cleaning up. We will
[00:10:13] Ben: which my,
[00:10:13] Carol: this way again.
[00:10:15] Ben: to which my director was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. They're like, the databases still exists. So theoretically, if a customer said, Hey, there's an emergency, we forgot to move something, can you please turn our cluster back on? We could do that. But we've given them like, I think like a, a two week drop dead date where, Everything is turned off now, but in theory, we could turn something back on.
[00:10:39] Ben: They have two weeks and then like literally S3 buckets are gonna be deleted. Databases are gonna be deleted. There's no undoing.
[00:10:47] Adam: That's not a very, I mean, I, I'm not trying to like call you out or anything, but that's not a very generous timeline. Two weeks is
[00:10:53] Ben: It's, it's, it, it's, it's the last of the customers. so it's not like we, we've had several hundred customers in private cloud over the years. And they have been migrating off and they had much more generous policies. Like, I think, I think we gave them like 90 days
[00:11:12] Ben: to
[00:11:13] Adam: one or two customers and
[00:11:14] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like their contracts are literally up.
[00:11:18] Ben: That's why this is finally
[00:11:19] Carol: Ah, okay. Okay.
[00:11:21] Ben: Yeah. So it's just super exciting. I'm, I'm pretty thrilled about
[00:11:25] Adam: That's pretty awesome, man.
[00:11:26] Ben: financially it makes sense. Deployments are gonna be faster, the code's gonna be simplified.
[00:11:31] Carol: like just the debugging when something happens, right? Like one place
[00:11:36] Ben: the logging, there's no more logging for those systems. There's no more metrics to be collected for those systems.
[00:11:41] Ben: Like it's just from a cost perspective, it makes so much sense across the board. So,
[00:11:45] Carol: Does
[00:11:46] Adam: Spend the code Reaper.
[00:11:48] Ben: Oh, I, I, I feel like. I, I'd look around at work and I'd just, people don't seem to be excited about deleting code in to the extent that I am. I'm like, I'm like champing at the bit to freaking delete code.
[00:12:01] Carol: I like when they have the option to clean up stuff. I get scared because I'm like, oh, what if it's used on this one little thing I don't know about? Then I'm like, oh, just do it. Just do it. It's okay.
[00:12:11] Adam: So before we move on, can I ask if, if, you know, what is the, the genesis of the name Rosie for your deploy chatbot? Do you know?
[00:12:20] Ben: I know that it's based on the Rosie from the Jetsons. The, the, the
[00:12:24] Carol: George Jetson.
[00:12:26] Adam: Yeah.
[00:12:26] Ben: I don't remember where they came up with that. The original name of the chatbot itself was like XB 500, which may also be a Jetsons reference. I don't know.
[00:12:36] Adam: Very
[00:12:37] Ben: Maybe that was the model of Rosie. I don't know. But, I enjoy using a chat bot to do the deployments.
[00:12:42] Ben: It's it's very co-located with where I am. You know, it's like I don't have to go to a separate engineering dashboard or anything to do stuff. I'm in Slack already all day. I do a little at Rosie Chat bot and I, I like it. I like it. You know when it goes well, when something doesn't go well, then it gets a little panicky.
[00:12:59] Ben: Cause I'm like, someone gimme me a dropdown so I don't have to guess at the commands. It's also like, so you can roll back the deployments with the chat bot,
[00:13:07] Carol: Oh, that's
[00:13:08] Adam: but in a year I maybe roll back once and so you, I never remember how to do it. So like I spent a few minutes just trying random commands and then trying to find help commands and then asking in the engineering channel, so, Do you know, like, I guess where my head is at is I would love to kind of dig into that as like a show topic sometime, but I do, you know, the underpinnings of how that works? Like how do you, how does a rollback work for your architecture?
[00:13:34] Ben: I know very little about
[00:13:36] Adam: Okay, so. Maybe we could get somebody from your team on to
[00:13:38] Ben: yeah, that would be awesome. I know a guy.
[00:13:41] Adam: Yeah, let's write it down.
[00:13:43] Ben: And then the o the, you know, the, that was my main triumph cause that was very exciting and very timely. The other triumph I have is just that I've talked about running the office hours
[00:13:52] Carol: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:54] Ben: that's, I'm continuing to try and do that every Friday.
[00:13:57] Ben: But what I am excited about is that I have taken the feedback from people that I've talked to and I have actually turned it into, changes to the system itself. So I've been working on some performance improvements
[00:14:08] Carol: Oh, that's awesome.
[00:14:10] Ben: have a customer that has. A prototype that has over 2300 screens in it, which is like a mind boggling amount of data.
[00:14:18] Ben: And the UI and the application just wasn't built and more importantly, wasn't ever really tested to work with a, with volume that large. So I'm. I got my, my, chrome dev tools open and I got the profiling tools open. I'm recording and I'm clicking around and going from screen to screen, and then I'm looking at the flame graphs and, it's, it's been exciting trying to one, just remember how flame graphs work, that for whatever reason it felt easier years ago.
[00:14:46] Ben: And now I think I've lost
[00:14:47] Ben: the, uh,
[00:14:48] Adam: everything's getting harder in web dev now. Just like, so, I mean, we were talking about this with Tim, earlier today, how like, you know, machines keep getting faster and faster and faster, but like, it seems like we're demanding more and more of them and, and our demands are outpacing their improvements and yeah, it's just, like I feel, I, I completely feel that for the, the, profession of web development.
[00:15:14] Ben: agreed and well, and I feel bad too because I'm on an Apple M one Mac book. And so I'm sure whatever performance I'm seeing in the site is actually much better than what the standard customer is seeing. So even when I'm evaluating am I improving performance with the changes that I'm making, I might be able to see a, a, a noticeable improvement on my end.
[00:15:38] Ben: But it might just be like, it might go from like terrible to not terrible on my end, but it might still just be terrible to terrible on their end if their, if their hardware is not great. All right. So that's me. I've had some triumphs. ironically enough, like so much of work is, is frustrating right now, but I am finding these little like limbs of hope.
[00:15:57] Ben: But, anyway, that's
[00:15:58] Adam: you're still not fired
[00:15:59] Ben: and I'm still not fired. I'm still putting food on the table.
[00:16:02] Carol: Yeah.
[00:16:03] Ben: All right, that's me. Carol. What do you got going on?
[00:16:06] Carol's Failure
[00:16:06] Carol: Oh, guys, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with Adam. I'm gonna say that I can't even call this a fell like, how do you say it? A, a.
[00:16:15] Adam: Phil.
[00:16:15] Ben: Yeah,
[00:16:16] Carol: Yeah, I'm just gonna call this stress failure, talk about chaos. Moving still sucks. mentioned before, like we had a whole issue with pods not getting our stuff over and everything.
[00:16:26] Carol: Well, you know, we went on vacation. It was supposed to show up, it then went missing. Our pod literally went missing. They couldn't find it in the system. Yeah, with our stuff in it. Not only that, while on vacation, cuz me and my husband just had our one year anniversary, so Of course. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:16:44] Carol: What do you do? You go to the happiest place on earth? We went to Disney World with the kids. So, while we were down there, we got the email that's like, you know, your pods will be delivered in four days. So I gotta log into my account. Every single page on my account says, page not found. Page not found.
[00:17:01] Carol: Page not found. So I called them. They're like, oh, we show like your account isn't working. I was like, what do you mean it's not working? They're like, we can't get it to pull up. We're gonna put in like a technical support request for this. So we get back from vacation. I'm like, okay, well now I have an account again, but all my documents are gone.
[00:17:18] Carol: My contract's gone. Everything before is gone. It started from the day the error happened. So then, they're like, we can't actually find your pod. It's nowhere. We don't know where it is. So then, it just shows up at my house one day. Like the delivery guy says, Hey, this pod isn't in the system. So I didn't even know where it was supposed to go, so I had to search through emails to find it.
[00:17:40] Carol: And if you hadn't responded by text, I wouldn't have even came out here. I was like, are you serious? So then he goes, oh, and by the way, I didn't tell you this, but there's a giant hole in your roof. There's a split. I was like, what? Sure enough, the stuff in my pod's wet or things are ruined. It's just like, yeah, lots of, lots of things are just messed up.
[00:17:59] Carol: So it's gonna be, an interesting couple weeks still dealing with that. And then, you know, 60, 60 days out we moved to Arizona, so,
[00:18:08] Adam: Oh my goodness.
[00:18:09] Carol: oh my goodness.
[00:18:09] Carol: It's so much.
[00:18:11] Adam: you planning on using pods to move to
[00:18:12] Carol: No. We'll, never, ever, ever, ever use pods again. We are hiring movers. This was just a it. We wanted a weekend thing, get it done, and then it's out of the way.
[00:18:22] Carol: It turned into a month later getting our stuff and never again. We should have just gotten a U-Haul and been done with it because it was like an hour away. We live like a little over an hour away from each other, so it wasn't a big move. It was just neither one of us wanted to drive a U-Haul truck. So I was like, oh, there you go.
[00:18:39] Ben: I feel like our listeners could play Carol Bingo. Be like, you know, who had, water coming through the ceiling in your electrical fan? Or like who had a car driving onto front lawn and taking out mailbox. Did anyone have allergic reaction while on vacation?
[00:18:58] Carol: Oh, that would be me. Yep. Done that one. Yes. I, uh, things just happen. Things happen. Yeah.
[00:19:06] Adam: So I said earlier, like, chaos is life. another, the reason I phrased it that way is another little minor tri for me the last couple weeks is, I got my mom hooked on Ted Lasso. She had never seen
[00:19:16] Ben: Oh, nice.
[00:19:17] Adam: so she, since she's been spending so much time with us and since she was gonna be like in the hospital for a couple days, I was like, here, here's the first two seasons of Ted Lasso.
[00:19:24] Adam: Fill your time in the hospital with that. And, uh, yeah, she's loving it. We
[00:19:28] Carol: I love Ted Lasso.
[00:19:29] Adam: Halfway through season three, so got a little bit to go.
[00:19:32] Carol: Yeah, he's good. I like that. But yeah, that's me. It's uh,it's a little crazy right now, but I know it'll get better. And you know what, we just push through whatever happens, you know, we're still together, we're still happy. You know, I go to bed at night and wake up the next day and start over.
[00:19:49] Carol: So we'll figure it out.
[00:19:51] Adam: Yep. And I guess we should mention that Tim couldn't be with us tonight because the, I guess a utility company or somebody, cut the fiber line to his neighborhood. And so like they're, they've been without internet for a couple of days, but hopefully he'll be back soon.
[00:20:04] Carol: Yeah.
[00:20:04] CF Camp
[00:20:04] Adam: Alright, well our topic for today is conferences, but more specifically, we wanna start, talking to Ben about CF camp.
[00:20:11] Adam: I've never been, I know it's in Germany. It's been long running conference, What do you wanna start with, Ben? How'd it go?
[00:20:17] Ben: Yeah, I had, I had a great time. And, so this is, is running just outside of Munich? It's in a town, I think it's called Freis. I dunno, I'm sorry, I'm butchering the pronunciation there. but it's been going on since I think about 2008 is what they were saying. I've never been to it. And, Gert Franz, who's one of the, you know, co-creators of Lucy C F M L, he's.
[00:20:39] Ben: He's been inviting me out there for years and, I'm just not a big traveler in pandemic and all that stuff. And, and, I have politely turned him down I think for like five or six years running and, I had lunch with him, I don't know, I think back in November or something, and he asked me again, oh, you should totally come to CF Camp.
[00:20:58] Ben: You know, we haven't had it for the pandemic. It'd be great if you came this year. And I just, I didn't have the heart to turn him down like one more time. so I said yes and and then I went to book the flights thinking like, oh, I'm like six months out. This will be totally inexpensive. Cuz the last time I flew was probably to, CF objective in, in Minnesota, which, I mean, I think that air ticket was like, I dunno, 600 bucks, 700 bucks.
[00:21:26] Ben: So that's, that's what I had my
[00:21:27] Adam: that's not even a great price, but yeah, that's,
[00:21:29] Carol: Yeah.
[00:21:29] Ben: Yo dudes. I like an embarrassing amount of money. It, it, I, my air, my round trip, air ticket ended up being like about $4,000. Yeah. And I was like, oh, as I'm looking at this, I'm like, can I, can I just tell him I won't go? This is an absurd amount of money.
[00:21:52] Carol: Can I virtually present?
[00:21:55] Ben: So I talked to my wife and I'm like, this is crazy, right? She's like, she's like, look, you have not seen humans in, in like two years. You, we don't travel. She's like, just, just treat yourself, like, we'll take it out of the budget. So yeah, treat yourself. So
[00:22:13] Carol: a good woman you got.
[00:22:15] Ben: she's very, she's very supportive. So I, last Tuesday, Went to Newark, New Jersey.
[00:22:20] Ben: Got on a flight seven hours, 50 minutes, arrived in Germany, and I just had an amazing time actually, it, it, CF CAMP is a relatively cozy conference. I think they originally thought something like one 60 people were gonna show up and I think maybe 120 ish people or 130 people showed up. And for me that's like, The perfect size because it's, it's much more social than I am on a day-to-day basis, but it's not a going to Las Vegas and walking through a crowded casino kind of social like
[00:22:54] Adam: With 3000 of your closest
[00:22:56] Ben: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:56] Ben: Yeah. So, so it was, it was really nice. There were two tracks. it was a Thursday, Friday conference and everybody was just so nice, so nice. And, and people were very excited that I was there personally, which was really nice. They kind of made me feel, yeah, they, they made me feel a little bit like a celebrity and, uh, and I just, it was so great.
[00:23:18] Ben: I don't think I realized, How much I missed being with people, how much I missed being at a conference and being able to talk to like-minded people. It was, it, yeah, it was, it was like I had forgotten my nerd brethren and, and how great they are. So
[00:23:34] Carol: You gotta go back to your roots, to those CF roots, you know? So the people who, who have the same passion for something that you love, and that's. You love cf. We all know you love cf.
[00:23:44] Ben: do love me some cf.
[00:23:46] Carol: and that's okay. And, you were with a bunch of people who love cf like you. So not only were you at a great conference, you were with people who had the same passion you do.
[00:23:54] Carol: So I think it was worth your four grand in airfare. Yeah.
[00:23:58] Ben: Oh, and that's just the Air Force.
[00:24:01] Adam: I was gonna say that's, that's gotta be like well over half of your total expense for this trip. Right.
[00:24:05] Ben: Oh, it was, I mean, yeah, it's like 80% at least of the cost. Cuz the hotel was actually fairly reasonable. I ended up getting a. Car service. My wife drove me to the airport, but then I was coming in very late on, on Saturday. So I got a car service from the airport. But that was like a two hour drive.
[00:24:22] Adam: You said this was like
[00:24:23] Carol: didn't stay long, did you?
[00:24:25] Ben: No.
[00:24:25] Adam: was like a Thursday Friday conference or,
[00:24:28] Ben: Yeah.
[00:24:29] Adam: okay, so, so you arrived with several days before the conference and you kinda spent some time there.
[00:24:34] Ben: so I, if, because it's a red eye flight. If I had left Wednesday, I would've gotten there too late on Thursday for the conference. Like the conference would've already started. So I had to leave Tuesday night. I got there Wednesday morning and I basically had Wednesday to adjust to the new time zone.
[00:24:51] Carol: Yeah.
[00:24:52] Ben: And then, so then it was Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday I took a, like a 3:30 PM flight from Germany. Back here. I got, I crawled into bed finally at like 11:00 PM my time. And that was a, that was a nine hour flight. That's the longest flight I've ever been on in my entire life.
[00:25:12] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:25:13] Ben: and it was, it was pretty used pretty long.
[00:25:15] Ben: That's all I can say. it wasn't so bad, I guess, I, I all, all in all, like, everything went smoothly, you know? There was no like flight delays or anything like that,
[00:25:24] Carol: No lost luggage. That's happened too. You can add
[00:25:26] Ben: No, no loss luggage. Oh, oh, oh. And, and, and just to like top it all off, this is very exciting for me personally. So I'm at the baggage claim in Newark, New Jersey on the way home, and I'm standing there waiting for my bag, and all of a sudden freaking Christian bail Batman walks right in front of me.
[00:25:47] Ben: long hair, like shoulder length, long hair. I assume he's getting ready for some sort of a role. And he's going over to the carousel. He's getting his bag. He's there with his wife, and I think he had like two kids. And, he had a police escort, getting him out of the, out of the terminal. But, I'm, I'm a huge Christian bail fan ever since American Psycho and Batman.
[00:26:06] Ben: He's just, he's done some, some really great stuff. So that was
[00:26:09] Adam: Yeah, I saw you posted like a, it was, it was like a selfie, but it wasn't like he. Was participating, if
[00:26:14] Ben: Yeah, so, okay, so here's the thing, like I didn't want to take a photo of him because I'm sure that's the last thing in the world he needed. So what I did is I put my phone into video mode and I started recording a video, and then I put it up to the side of my head, like I was taking a call. And so I wasn't even looking at him, I was kind of looking off to the side.
[00:26:34] Ben: With my video recording him, and then the photo, I, it is just a screen capture of the, of the video
[00:26:39] Carol: What a creative way to do it, to not be like intrusive. I appreciate that.
[00:26:44] Ben: It's, it's, and like everybody was very chill. Like nobody was looking at him. Nobody was making eye contact. But then as he left, right, and I'm, I got my bags like two minutes after he did. And, and as I'm walking by, everybody's talking about him. You know, like the, the security guards are talking about and police are talking about how like, oh, he's my height.
[00:27:03] Ben: How great is that? That's so exciting.
[00:27:06] Adam: He's a human too.
[00:27:07] Carol: He's.
[00:27:10] Ben: So,
[00:27:11] Adam: He wears shoes just like me.
[00:27:13] Adam: Sunglasses.
[00:27:14] Carol: He had to wait a baggage claim too.
[00:27:17] Adam: Yeah. Yeah, he probably could have had somebody wait for him if he wanted. so this was your first time at CF camp. did you, Carol mentioned something earlier. Did, and I didn't know this, did you present there?
[00:27:28] Ben: No, no, it, I was already gonna be so stressed out about the travel and the socialization. I, I felt like I couldn't, I couldn't present this time that would've been, a bridge too far in terms of stress
[00:27:42] Carol: okay.
[00:27:42] Ben: So I, I, I, I, I would like to go next year, preferably, find a way for the airfare and hoppy low expensive.
[00:27:50] Ben: I don't know if that just means like booking farther in advance or somehow using credit card miles or
[00:27:57] Carol: I was gonna say, get you a Delta card. Start putting everything on there. Like we pay for all of our flights with Delta points.
[00:28:03] Ben: See, because I don't travel historically. I'm not a traveler. I don't know the, the games that people play, so I gotta figure that out.
[00:28:10] Carol: Yep.
[00:28:11] Ben: But, yeah, so I didn't wanna present this time.
[00:28:13] Ben: I'm also historically just terrible at coming up with ideas for presentations. so it was, it was just, it, it wasn't the time, but I would like to do it next year. I think
[00:28:22] Carol: Yeah. I like when people gimme a topic like,
[00:28:25] Ben: that would be easier for sure.
[00:28:27] Carol: I was talking to some guys about, Cf, whatever. What just happened in Vegas? I don't even remember what it was. This, yeah, there you go. CF Summit. And they asked me to present on security and I was like, oh, let me think on it. And then it ended up being not a good time.
[00:28:43] Carol: I was like, I can not make this happen right now. So, but I was like, if you give me a topic, I can prepare for it. If you want me to come up with something, I'm like, I don't know. Like, what do people wanna know? Like that's not easy to, to just figure out. For me. I do a lot better when someone says, Hey, can you teach us this?
[00:29:00] Carol: And I'm like, well, if I don't know it, I'll learn it and then try to teach you.
[00:29:02] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. That. I don't, for whatever reason, you know what I, I, so I write a lot. So people think that, oh, you must be able to come up with topics really easily. But the reality is when I'm writing, I'm writing about two or three lines of code. You know, I produce like 17 pages on why these three lines of code work the way they work.
[00:29:21] Ben: Right. but, but you can't give a presentation like that, I don't think. It's not, it's too specific. Right. You need a lot of presentations are broader. Yeah.
[00:29:30] Adam: Nobody likes white. It's just slides of nothing but white
[00:29:33] Ben: Yeah,
[00:29:33] Carol: Yeah.
[00:29:35] Ben: it's just
[00:29:35] Carol: And um,that was
[00:29:36] Ben: the right arrow a bunch of times from slide to slide. so yeah, this was a, this was a good ease into it. I, I was just gonna say, you know, now that I am, now that that part of my brain is sort of turned on again, this idea that I want to be around people and I wanna be talking about technology.
[00:29:53] Ben: I really wanna find something regionally around me, but I just moved to the, to like the boonies. I mean, it's really, so I'm half an hour north of Poughkeepsie, and Poughkeepsie is like the closest thing that resembles a city, and I think IBM has a campus there that used to be a really big deal. I don't think it is really anymore.
[00:30:13] Ben: That's the closest thing I can think of it. I've, I've tried looking on meetup.com. All of the meetups around here are like book clubs and real estate.
[00:30:22] Adam: Yeah.
[00:30:23] Adam: I mean, it sounds like you're looking not just regional, but like local, you know, you don't wanna leave town.
[00:30:28] Ben: Well, so, so for meetups, I thought maybe there'd be something very local, but, but, as far as, you know, I wouldn't mind say going to New York City, which is two and a half hours away, I wouldn't mind doing that, you know, and staying in a hotel for two days or something to do it a little bit more regionally.
[00:30:45] Adam: I'll let you know when the next, spelt Society meetup is, and you can go to
[00:30:48] Ben: Nice. Is that in Philadelphia or That's in,
[00:30:51] Adam: They, they usually have 'em in New York. That's like, so spelt society is,sort of worldwide, right? They have like little regional events, all over the place. And sometimes they have like, sort of like a, a big, like a live stream and they'll have like watch parties all over the world or, or that sort of thing.
[00:31:05] Adam: So, but I, I believe it, if I'm not mistaken, it started in New York City, from, our buddy Swix
[00:31:13] Carol: Cool.
[00:31:15] Adam: and it just kind of grew from there. and you know, I would love to go to the one of those as well. So maybe we'll go together, we
[00:31:20] Ben: that'd be awesome because especially cause I don't know that much about spelt, so it'd be fun to be exposed to something pretty new.
[00:31:27] Adam: Cool. So
[00:31:28] Carol: a reason to learn.
[00:31:30] Adam: Your buddy Seb Duggan posted a picture with no comment, of the back of your head at a, at a talk, at CF Camp by a friend of the show, Nolan rk.
[00:31:40] Carol: Oh, no.
[00:31:41] Ben: previous guest on the show.
[00:31:43] Carol: Yeah.
[00:31:44] Testing
[00:31:44] Adam: Yeah. And, the, the title, it looks like that's the title slide, I'm guessing it's the title slide, is why testing is important and where do I start?
[00:31:51] Adam: How did you like that talk,
[00:31:52] Ben: It, it was very good. Dolan gave a very good talk. He actually gave two very good talks, I think
[00:31:57] Carol: Nola's great at presenting.
[00:31:59] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think my favorite talk at the conference was his second talk, which was just about web components. and, and that's because web components are completely new to me. I've, I'd never even looked up how they work.
[00:32:11] Ben: So just to see a little teaser and, and kind of uh, web components in action kind of a presentation was really good. But, The testing talk I, I thought was really good. I'm not, I'm not anti-testing. I, I just don't test automat. I don't have automated tested, and, and for me, a lot of it comes down to, I think I have a natural disdain for the concept of mocking things out.
[00:32:34] Ben: And ultimately everything comes down to database interactions. And it's sort of a. It's sort of a, you know, turtles all the way down
[00:32:43] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:43] Ben: because at the center of everything, there's a database. It's like every layer then has to rely on something that doesn't quite work like it does in production sort of a thing.
[00:32:52] Ben: And I, I don't know. Anyway, his talk was really good.
[00:32:55] Adam: I, I, I, I definitely see what you mean, and I agree with you. Like there, it's a very special sauce. Like it could very much be like its own profession, like being really good at testing and setting up that sort of thing. Like you could spend an entire career on that. I think.
[00:33:13] Ben: And I also at work. I, I am turned off when I see how complex some testing is. It, it feels to me like it should be easy and I, and maybe that's just naive on my part, but it feels to me like. I have a method I should call it, and it should return to value, and I should check that value. And, and when I see testing, that is so much more than that.
[00:33:37] Ben: And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of workflows are making database calls or making API calls, and they have to have data. Like you can't just make that up. it just makes everything so complicated and I'm, I'm like, Ugh, gross.
[00:33:52] Carol: But lots of times when you, when I see very complex tests, it's because it's poorly written code. That's way too complicated. It's not doing one simple thing, it's doing a lot of work inside something.
[00:34:03] Ben: I think so. And, and my gut is, and, and this gut is probably inaccurate cuz not based on anything I. Real, but my gut is a lot of testing is not well done either. It, it just feels like it. When I look at testing, it feels to me the way I would have done testing when I didn't know what I was doing, which to be the.
[00:34:24] Ben: Clear is still the case. I, I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to testing, but like, that's why I think it hits home for me. I'm like, look at this test thing, and I'm like, oh, these people don't know what they're doing. Like they're clearly just throwing everything at the wall because they feel like they have to, and, and it, and it seems absurd, but
[00:34:40] Carol: No.
[00:34:40] Ben: I dunno.
[00:34:43] Adam: On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
[00:34:47] Ben: Hey, so, so Carol, you went to the summit or did
[00:34:50] Carol: I did.
[00:34:50] Ben: end up doing
[00:34:51] Carol: no, I didn't end up not going, but I really wish I would have, because, you know, one thing that I have noticed in the CF community is that a lot of people don't attend conferences or any type of meetups. And it's a pretty quiet community overall.
[00:35:04] Seltzer and Travel
[00:35:04] Adam: Remember how I said life is chaos and chaos is life. Well, my recording just decided to out in the middle there. So, uh,if there's a weird edit here, then that's why cause stuff happened and we had to like just sort of figure it out and, and carry on.
[00:35:18] Carol: Adam, this is why people restart their computers every couple weeks.
[00:35:23] Adam: know, but I like my uptime. I like the number keeps going up. Well, all right, we'll figure it out. Did you guys have any idea how far in we were.
[00:35:32] Carol: Yeah. I was, about to just mention about CF people attending conferences, so that's one thing that.
[00:35:39] Adam: I was talking about like
[00:35:40] Carol: Oh, tied 37 minutes.
[00:35:42] Adam: Okay,
[00:35:42] Carol: Yeah. Yeah. We're at 37. I'm tracking this. It's my bedtime. Okay.
[00:35:49] Adam: She's got us on the clock over here.
[00:35:50] Ben: I know. I'm still jet lagged.
[00:35:52] Carol: Oh, that's awful. I hope you
[00:35:54] Ben: during, during the day, I feel fine. It's that by, at like 4:00 PM I start to, I start to slump.
[00:36:01] Carol: Yeah.
[00:36:02] Ben: But it's nice cause I fall asleep pretty fast when I get
[00:36:04] Carol: good. Are you staying, asleep though, like through your normal morning time or are you getting up at like 2:00 AM
[00:36:10] Ben: No, no. I've been, I, I'm, I'm on my regular schedule. It just, I can just get
[00:36:15] Ben: Get tired. Okay. Well that's good. Yeah, that's good. I was gonna say, so when Adam was restarting, Carol and I were talking about seltzer and, and this was something that was actually very exciting for me personally because I love seltzer,
[00:36:27] Adam: The beverage.
[00:36:28] Carol: Yeah.
[00:36:29] Ben: apparently seltzer is a very big thing either in Germany or Carol says in Europe in general,
[00:36:35] Carol: Yeah.
[00:36:36] Ben: and.
[00:36:37] Ben: Half of the drinks provided in the conference hall. Like, you know, you go outta your track and there's a table full of snacks and drinks. Half of those drinks were seltzer. And that's like unheard of for me, for any conference. I think. I've never been to a conference that, that had anything. yeah. So that was, I was down in that stuff like, like it was water.
[00:37:00] Ben: I mean, it
[00:37:01] Carol: I'm getting my $4,000 worth of seltzer.
[00:37:04] Ben: Yo, for real. I was drinking to win
[00:37:09] Adam: I think the airline is still gonna come out on top in that equation.
[00:37:12] Carol: Oh yeah.
[00:37:13] Ben: yo, even the, so, I, I did upgrade from the Economy to Economy Plus,
[00:37:19] Carol: Ooh,
[00:37:20] Ben: is like, basically you get your own armrest, which is actually pretty nice. and, and the seats came with a bottle of water, which that was unexpected. That bottle of water, it was seltzer. So that, that's pretty exciting. Yo. But if I can side ran for a second, and I don't know if this is Europe. I, I feel like this is just weird. Hotels in general, bathroom decisions in hotels are just really confusing. How many showers don't have doors or like have little pony walls or I, I, I don't know, just decisions that. I, I feel like the person who made that decision has never showered before and does not understand the physics of water hitting a body and splashing.
[00:38:06] Ben: I, I just, I, I, I'm befuddled by how many poorly designed showers there are in hotels.
[00:38:12] Adam: My favorite, the, I'm pretty sure it was the, speaking of conferences, it was the, the hotel that we stayed at for CF objective for many years in, at the Mall of America, if I'm
[00:38:21] Carol: And blue.
[00:38:22] Adam: Yeah. The, if I'm not mistaken, I was there for three or four years running and the. The bathroom. Like you, as you step out of the shower, freshly clean, there's like a, a makeup mirror directly across from you.
[00:38:36] Adam: a and like I, I swear they had to have done it on purpose cuz it was more than one year. That like, as you're stepping outta the shower, the makeup mirror is like pointed just directly so that you can see your own lower half, right? You're getting a closeup from eight feet away. It's like this has to be intentional, right?
[00:38:57] Carol: Oh man, I didn't even remember that.
[00:39:00] Ben: times. I hate, I hate stepping out of a shower and seeing a mirror that's like, that's never the way I wanna start my day.
[00:39:07] Carol: So after I got my, so I have a tattoo right on my chest, so it's right below my collarbone. And for probably two or three weeks after getting it, every time I'd step outta the shower and go to wrap my towel around me, I would jump thinking there was like a spider or something on me. Cause I'm like, what is that?
[00:39:25] Carol: It's not supposed to be there. So it took a little while to
[00:39:28] Adam: Is it a tattoo of a spider?
[00:39:30] Carol: No, it's, it's three hearts together.
[00:39:33] Adam: Okay. Oh yeah, that's the, the clover looking one? Yeah.
[00:39:36] Carol: Yes. A clover looking one. Yes. Three hearts. Yep.
[00:39:39] Adam: Is
[00:39:39] Carol: right. So,
[00:39:40] Adam: you and your kids?
[00:39:41] Carol: no, actually it's, no, we can keep it in the show. It's me and my two sisters. Yeah. Yep. And then we also have, this summer we got, or last Thanksgiving, we got, Celtic knots on our wrist for the same
[00:39:54] Ben: Nice.
[00:39:55] Carol: So the three little points on it.
[00:39:57] Carol: I love my sisters. Did you try again?
[00:40:00] Adam: Yeah. Siri, try again.
[00:40:02] Carol: Siri. Sorry guys.
[00:40:04] Adam: So conferences, huh?
[00:40:07] Ben: What's up with that?
[00:40:08] Carol: Yeah, about that topic.
[00:40:09] Conference Attendance
[00:40:09] Adam: Before my computer decided that, that we would, we should be done recording the podcast. You were starting to say, to the best of my memory, you were starting to say that like not enough people are attending conferences.
[00:40:18] Carol: Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's in every community. I feel like it's in the CF community though. Like I feel like a lot of CFS don't take the time to attend conferences, and I don't know if it's because there's just not a big following of it, so I just don't see it. But when I was attending, it felt like.
[00:40:34] Carol: You had to pull teeth to get someone to attend the conference or even to get companies that were using CF to sponsor people to go to like pay the admission to pay airline and and hotel. It was not something they wanted to invest money in, which is sad because there is a big. Number of people that use this and companies aren't going off of it.
[00:40:56] Carol: So I wish there were more people attending the CF conferences. Now granted four grand like been paid. Like I could not see my company being like, Hey, I'm gonna just fly you to to Germany, but sending me to Vegas, flights to Vegas are cheap. Usually you can get there. Pretty inexpensive hotels there you can find somewhere if you shop around really cheap too.
[00:41:18] Carol: So when you're talking about going to CF Summit, it's, it's worth it to go out to network with people, to find people to ask questions to when you have problems. And I know, I feel like it's worth it and. Yeah, find jobs, well, I don't wanna say find jobs if your company's sending you out there, but Yeah. But definitely, definitely you find networking people who can help you solve the problems, and that helps your company because you get to answer a lot quicker than you would've on your own trying to figure this out.
[00:41:46] Adam: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I have opinions on why we see a, what I would assume is a lower than average community participation from the CF community when it comes to conferences. They're not exactly kind opinions, you know, I try to, I try to be, I try to sugarcoat them as much as I can, but, I mean, my thing is I feel like CF. Came, maybe not out of the gate, but it really found a niche within the US government. and as a result, I think there are a lot of people that are CF developers, but that did not like come out of college raring or, or whatever the background is. Like, you know, chomping at the bit to be a web developer or a programmer of any sort.
[00:42:28] Adam: They're just like, okay, I guess I have to do this now.
[00:42:30] Carol: Yeah. It's what you landed in.
[00:42:32] Adam: Yeah. I call those people clock punchers. Not, and I don't mean that as an insult, but like they're here to do the job and then they want to go home. Right. They're not excited about getting better at the job or anything like that. They're just, I'm doing my job and, you know, I'm waiting for my government pension and whatever.
[00:42:47] Adam: And the, at the end of the day, I don't suppose there's anything
[00:42:50] Ben: doesn't Carol work for the government now?
[00:42:54] Carol: I mean, technically, but I'm not doing any cf. No CF for me.
[00:43:00] Ben: that's, there's the rub.
[00:43:01] Adam: And, and yeah, for sure. That's a very good, way to bring up that not everybody at any one location is gonna have the same approach, right? Like,
[00:43:09] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:10] Adam: I imagine just based on my, generally somewhat negative opinion of, the government in this country that, there's a lot of clock punchers there,
[00:43:20] Ben: So
[00:43:20] Adam: sure that there are a lot of passionate people there as well.
[00:43:23] Healthcare.gov
[00:43:23] Ben: h here's something that I just heard recently. I think it was on an Ezra Klein episode. Two or three weeks ago, and they were talking about the, healthcare.gov and, and why that was so horribly rolled out. And they, they said a lot of it has to do with the way that contracts are provisioned in the government.
[00:43:41] Ben: That as an, as a government agency, if you want to contract with an external vendor, it goes through an absurd approval cycle. Like if you wanna start working with a company, it's like a 16 month. Process of creating contracts, getting contracts reviewed and approved, getting the vendors reviewed and approved, and all this rigamarole.
[00:44:03] Ben: And so what this woman on the Ezra Klein podcast was saying was that, Because these are such long approval processes. Oftentimes what will happen is that if a government agency already has a contract with a vendor, they will end up giving work to that vendor, even if that vendor isn't really prepared for that work, simply because they know that they already have approval and they don't have to go through a new approval process.
[00:44:27] Ben: So they were saying with the healthcare.gov, that's a lot of what ended up happening is these companies were being tasked with building the system that they weren't really trained to build. And ended up creating, you know, obviously
[00:44:40] Carol: Trash.
[00:44:40] Ben: not rolling out very well.
[00:44:42] Carol: Yeah. Dead on day one.
[00:44:45] Adam: Well, I, I do feel, I don't wanna throw it too much under the bus there, or, or maybe we'll throw it under the bus, but we won't back the bus up over it.
[00:44:51] Carol: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:52] Adam: yes, it sucked on day one, but they did
[00:44:54] Carol: They improve. Yeah. I mean, it's good now,
[00:44:57] Adam: Yeah. And I, I do feel like they did an Admiral Jo admirable job of doing that.
[00:45:01] Adam: Right. They didn't have to rewrite from scratch, or if they did, they made it look an awful lot like the original, you know, they, they managed to bring the phoenix out of the ashes as it were.
[00:45:10] Carol: Yeah. Yeah, it definitely was not meant, and I think goes to a scale, right? Like I don't think they anticipated it being used as much as it was on opening day, right? So everybody's hitting it. Even if you weren't using it, you were like, let's go find out what this is. Cuz it's new to the gut, new to the us, right?
[00:45:29] Carol: So all these people are on it and it just wasn't built for that bandwidth.
[00:45:33] Adam: Oh yeah. I mean that just, that's a really good point. I feel like. A better strategy, a more informed or thoughtful strategy would've been like a, a staged rollout, right? Like if your last name starts with A
[00:45:44] Carol: A through. Yeah. That's what I thought immediately when everything started happening.
[00:45:49] Adam: yeah.
[00:45:49] Ben: Well it's funny too cuz how many companies are like, oh yo, I gotta build a infrastructure for a billion people. And you're like, yo, why don't you concentrate getting your first user? But definitely like healthcare.gov, it's like, Hey, how about if on day one you have 400 million customers,
[00:46:05] Carol: Oh
[00:46:06] Ben: it's just like no one.
[00:46:07] Carol: Yeah, no, no one, do you scale that, right?
[00:46:10] Ben: They have the actual problem that everyone wants.
[00:46:13] Carol: Yeah.
[00:46:14] Adam: And I mean, a lot of, maybe not a lot, but, if you want that problem, there's only a couple of industries that I can think of that you're gonna pretty much be guaranteed it. And, and that's, you know, things where there's only one source for it. If you have a monopoly like the government, you know, you, you have to go to the government, you know, for that thing.
[00:46:32] Adam: I had other ideas, but they're not polite company ideas, so I don't wanna share them.
[00:46:35] Carol: Yeah, I was like, I can't think of anything really other than that. So,
[00:46:40] Adam: we, maybe I'll bring it up on the after show.
[00:46:41] Carol: Sounds good. Good.
[00:46:43] Ben: like hugging. I, I got to hug a bunch of people. I,
[00:46:46] Carol: Aw.
[00:46:47] Adam: Did you, did you get, additional thumbs up photos for your,
[00:46:50] Ben: I got some, I, so I gotta, I gotta process them, you know, like resize 'em and stuff. I gotta, and put 'em in the database, but I forget which conference I went to. This was, maybe this was a CF objective conference, or this may have been a work conference. every, you know, you go and you get your badge and then a lot of conferences will have additional stickies that you can either trail off the bottom of the badge or, or just put it on the badge.
[00:47:13] Ben: Yeah. And, I think it work. The one, the one that we had to at work, there was a, a ribbon you could get that basically said whether or not you like hugs. And so, you know, there's never an awkward, like, do we shake hands? Do we hug? You know, I've been talking to you on Zoom for five years. I feel like now that we're meeting in person, I feel like we should hug.
[00:47:33] Ben: But, but
[00:47:34] Carol: mine would be like, I'm a hugger.
[00:47:36] Ben: yo, I'm definitely a hugger. I, I'm
[00:47:39] Adam: should be like a, yeah, you should get like a shirt.
[00:47:41] Carol: Yeah,
[00:47:42] Adam: Hugs, welcome or something.
[00:47:43] Ben: Hugs, welcome. Agreed. I, I'm, I was raised as a, as a hugging family. I, I didn't, I did not realize that there are people who don't like hugging until I was an adult. I didn't, I didn't know that that was a thing, and that's not a judgment statement.
[00:47:56] Ben: That's like, literally like everyone in my family hugged. I just didn't, I just thought that's how you did things.
[00:48:01] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:48:02] Carol: Yeah, at her old house, we had this sweet little old lady next door and every time Steve would come over, she'd give him a big hug. She goes, I just need a hug from a big, strong, handsome man. And I'm like, well, he's got lots of hugs, so feel free to take him.
[00:48:18] Carol: Well I'm glad you had a great time at the conference.
[00:48:22] Ben: yes, I, I am
[00:48:24] Carol: miss it.
[00:48:25] Adam: Yeah, for real.
[00:48:26] Carol: Yeah.
[00:48:26] Ben: I'm also glad and, and now I'm inspired to try and find something more regional, you know, in the
[00:48:32] Carol: Something social.
[00:48:34] Ben: east coast or something to that effect. So,
[00:48:38] Carol: that'd be cool. So,
[00:48:39] Adam:
[00:48:39] Patreon
[00:48:39] Adam: Okay, so I guess this is the part where I say that this episode of Working Code was brought to you by hugging.
[00:48:43] Ben: Oh yes.
[00:48:44] Adam: just hugging. That's it. No joke. A and listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.
[00:48:55] Adam: Our pat patrons cover our recording and editing costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. And you know what? At this point, I'm just gonna go off script and I'm gonna throw in a special thank you to the people that noticed that we didn't have our early access episode, published in our early access feed for patrons.
[00:49:15] Adam: it's, like I said, chaotic. It's been chaotic A couple of weeks we're, we're off schedule on recording. We're, we're like a week and change late from what we would have normally recorded, which means people have started to notice like, Hey, I'm missing my episode, I'm getting getting the, the Jones here.
[00:49:28] Carol: man. That's a good problem for us to have though. People like listening to us.
[00:49:32] Adam: And a couple people brought it up in Discord in our, in the early access section. So I just wanna say thank you, thank you for caring, thank you for listening. and, and you know what? Even if you're not a patron, thank you for listening. We really appreciate each and every one of you guys out there, and gals and, days,
[00:49:50] Carol: Thems yes. All. Everyone.
[00:49:52] Adam: each and every person
[00:49:53] Carol: Yeah.
[00:49:54] Adam: Anyway, we're gonna go record our after show, which is one of the benefits of becoming a patron. we're just gonna keep the mics on and maybe we'll talk about Disney World. Maybe we'll talk about Germany. Maybe we'll talk about who knows? Maybe we'll tell dirty jokes. You'll, you don't know. You won't know unless you become a patron.
[00:50:10] Adam: And maybe this is a good time to mention. There's now a 14 day free trial of our Patreon. You can
[00:50:15] Carol: Woo woo.
[00:50:16] Ben: Oh,
[00:50:16] Adam: coded and
[00:50:18] Ben: I mean, I totally knew that.
[00:50:20] Carol: Yeah, duh.
[00:50:22] Thanks For Listening!
[00:50:22] Adam: Okay.that's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you next week and until then,
[00:50:27] Carol: Your heart matters. Even those who don't drink Seltzer,
[00:50:33] Adam: nice
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