206: The Most Impactful Books
In this week's episode of the podcast, Adam, Ben and Tim discuss various books that have significantly influenced their careers and coding philosophies. The conversation ranges from classics like 'Clean Code' and 'The Phoenix Project' to unexpected titles such as 'Fight Club' and 'The Four Agreements'.
The discussion underscores the value of continuous learning and how different types of books can offer unique perspectives and practical wisdom.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
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[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Ben: if I can talk about a book that had a big impact on me that is not technical, but this was still just, I don't know, it resonated. and I'm sure we've talked about it on the podcast before, but it was the Four Agreements.
[00:00:14] Tim: 50 shades of gray.
[00:00:37] Intro
[00:00:37] Adam: Okay, here we go, it is show number 206, and on today's show, we are going to surprise Ben with a topic. He's the only one of the three of us here that doesn't know what we're gonna talk about, so, in order to surprise Ben, we're just gonna have to surprise you, I'm sorry. It's gonna have to do with things and stuff, okay?
[00:00:51] Ben: things. I'm a huge fan of stuff.
[00:00:54] Adam: Well, I prefer things, but, you know.
[00:00:56] Tim: I'm a things guy too.
[00:00:57] Adam: first as usual, we'll start with the triumphs and fails. And for definitely no reason in particular that would indicate that Tim would be the best person to transition us into the main shop, main topic of the show. I'm going to go first.
[00:01:10] Ben: Hmm.
[00:01:11] Tim: Wait, it's my turn.
[00:01:13] Adam's Triumph
[00:01:13] Adam: so my triumph is I bought a baby monitor.Uh, no, I'm not having a kid.
[00:01:18] Tim: Okay. All right. Congratulations.
[00:01:21] Adam: it's, uh, so I started that conversation with my coworkers about two weeks ago. It's like, you know, my office is just about as far in our house as you can get away from our back door where the dogs are going in and out all day long.
[00:01:33] Adam: and it's annoying. Like, I have an elderly dog and he wears a diaper and so he fills it up occasionally because, you know, I, he has trouble communicating that he needs to go out and so I'm late getting there and so there's the diaper thing. Anyway, we've got the dogs like bell trained and they'll bark if they're not getting enough attention to go out but, I needed something, right. I started this conversation with my coworkers like two weeks ago. And I just said, like, I'm thinking about building something, maybe like a proximity sensor or, you know, maybe a noise sensor or something that could put near the back door that will then like flash a light in my office or something.
[00:02:07] Adam: I just so I'll know, like they're there and they want to go out. Maybe I could even set it up so that it would let me know that when they want to come into, that would be nice.and I went down like a, I don't know, an hour long rabbit hole of like, okay, I can get a raspberry pie and it has these kinds of sensors.
[00:02:22] Adam: or like Arduino sort of thing, it sounded like a fun electronics project. And I think that's why I like kind of went down into that rabbit hole
[00:02:29] Tim: Premature optimization.
[00:02:30] Adam: yeah, yeah. And, and actually what I initially did, after about that hour, I was like, wait a minute, electronic doorbells are a thing. Like you just get a little door, the button and I put it low enough on the window for the, the dog to, to smack it with his paw and that's been working.
[00:02:48] Adam: Okay. but.
[00:02:50] Ben: you, you trained your dog to hit the doorbell?
[00:02:53] Adam: yeah, so we, we, for years and years, we've had, just like a small rope with some bells on the end of it hanging from the door handle. And, you know, they'll smack the bells to let us out, let us know that they want to go out.and what I did was I just, it's a, it's a little circular desk.
[00:03:07] Adam: It's maybe three inches across diameter. and it's like a sticky pad or whatever, just like stuck it to the sliding glass door, stuck it to the door, roughly at the same height as the bells that they were using and took the bells off. And it's got like a digital. It's wireless, and you just plug in the bell at the outlet.
[00:03:24] Adam: And if you press the button, then the bell makes noise. so I found that pretty quickly. I was like, okay, cool. Here's the solution. We started using it and it was, it's okay. but. There's like false positives, right? What if the cats are just standing there and like tapping it because they want to be annoying, right?
[00:03:40] Adam: Because that's a thing that our cats will
[00:03:41] Tim: Cats are jerks. They really are.
[00:03:44] Adam: Anyway, long story short, my wife had the idea of like, why don't we just get a baby monitor? Then you can have like a little screen right there in your office and it can have like, you know noise Yeah, it's
[00:03:55] Ben: I was, when you were, I was thinking just audio,
[00:03:57] Tim: yeah. I was too actually. Yeah. The old school ones.
[00:04:00] Adam: Yeah, and like it was like 35 bucks
[00:04:02] Tim: Yeah,
[00:04:03] Adam: Super cheap, and yeah, I mean, when, when we had, when our kids were young, we only had audio baby monitors, so I finally got a video baby monitor for the dogs, but yeah, so I just put the camera up in the kitchen, like facing down at the door, and I can see when they're there and scratching to come in or, or, they're asking to go out and it works great.
[00:04:22] Tim: that works. We, we have a Blink doorbell and we don't use it for going out. They do ring the bell and I can usually hear it, or there's other people home normally, so they'll, they'll hit the bell and to go out, but when they come back in the blink sensor senses them and we can open the door and let 'em back in.
[00:04:38] Adam: How does it sense them? Is it like a visual thing or is like a weight on a pad or,
[00:04:42] Tim: Blinks, it's, it's a motion sensor, right? So it, it's, well, it's like a ring doorbell, but they're a lot cheaper. They're from Amazon Blink, and so yeah, it, you, you see it. Pops up on my phone, says, you know, there's something at the door. I go Look at it. I'm like, oh, the dog's trying to come back in to let him let him back in.
[00:04:58] Adam: So yeah, that's it. easy peasy for me. I just thought I would have a little fun with that and make you guys think that I was having a baby for
[00:05:05] Ben: I did think that when I saw the, the triumph there,
[00:05:07] Tim: I mean, you were showing a little bit.
[00:05:09] Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I've been bulking. So, oh, that's it for me. What do you got going on, Ben? Like
[00:05:17] Ben's Triumph
[00:05:17] Ben: with a small triumph, which is kind of along the same lines of your, you were going down this rabbit hole and then you decide to go in a different direction. I avoided some premature optimization in my little side project, and I'm pretty excited about that. Uh, that from himms? Mm-hmm
[00:05:35] Ben: and, I tried to thought I, uh.I, typically, so if anyone's not familiar with the concept of the N plus one query problem, or it's not necessarily a query problem, just the N plus one problem, this idea that if you have to fetch a certain amount of data, sometimes you have to get one, you have to execute one request to get the set of data that you need to get, and then you need to get N requests.
[00:05:59] Ben: One request for each of the return date items to get the kind of full fleshed out data and in a production system, you basically never want to do this because it pretty much always is some degree of bottleneck, especially as the system grows and usage and in size of data. Anyway, so I'm working on this little side project and nobody's using it, right?
[00:06:18] Ben: I'm just doing it for fun and to flex my thinking skills. And I have a couple of pages where I have to basically do a. Get a list. And then for that list, get an individual, like additional records. And, I'm just leaning into the end plus one problem and I'm just going for it. And, you know, like, whatever, it takes a couple, you know, tens of milliseconds to do all this on, on a single machine.
[00:06:41] Ben: And, I'm just not freaking out about it. And I know that sounds silly.
[00:06:46] Tim: It's progress. Ben, I'm
[00:06:47] Ben: We know it's like when you spend years and years building applications in a certain way, you have a lot of. Patterns that you've laid down that are the default way to do something. So. Even in a silly little simple project, I would normally reach for a lot of those same tools because I know that eventually it'll become a problem, but I know that that's not the problem I'm actually trying to solve right now.
[00:07:10] Ben: I'm just trying to think more about some architectural stuff and some, you know, permissions and file layouts. I mean, all the stuff I've been hand wringing about in the Discord chat and the n plus one problem is not a problem that I'm trying to solve. That's like, that's a soft problem for me. That's not, you know, I don't have to think about it and I don't want to have to write additional code to worry about it.
[00:07:28] Ben: So I'm just embracing the N plus one lifestyle and I'm not worrying about it. And, I'm moving on to the more interesting problems.
[00:07:35] Tim: do you have like a, a vinyl sticker in the back of your car?
[00:07:39] Ben: There's a special flag for the N plus one
[00:07:41] Tim: And plus one lifestyle. It's like salt life.
[00:07:45] Adam: people, people who run, marathons.
[00:07:48] Tim: Yeah. I, I want a 0.0.
[00:07:50] Adam: they make those, I was just thinking, you know, N plus one.
[00:07:53] Tim: Yeah.
[00:07:54] Ben: Yeah. So I don't know. I know that's like a stupid triumph, but I feel like it's a triumph of wills and, and I'm in, I'm loving it.
[00:08:02] Adam: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to say there are times that you have no choice, but to do N plus one. There probably are. I mean, I've, I've got one that I've been working on and, and it was easy enough for me to just be like, you know what? I could spend a week trying to figure out like smarter SQL for this, or I could just accept N plus one, know that this query is going to take like four seconds instead of a half a second.
[00:08:25] Adam: And put on like an artificial boundary, like, Oh, you can only select a maximum of 31 days, right?
[00:08:32] Ben: Yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent, every, everything that's, that's kind of the beautiful thing about programming as you get more mature and you realize that it's, everything is just trade offs. It's just trade offs all the way down and there are no rights and wrongs. Yeah. Turtles and trade offs all day and, just feeling good about it.
[00:08:49] Ben: I'm having fun. That's me. Tim, what do you got going on?
[00:08:54] Tim: you notice we're skipping Carol. I'm going last Carol's internet seems to be down apparently. So. Sorry, Carol. Both things get better.
[00:09:01] Tim's Triumph
[00:09:01] Tim: so I'm going Triumph as well. So the three of us, the boys, we got the Triumphs. Um,and so I've been helping out. It's not, I'm not hiring for my company. I'm hiring for one of our sister companies.
[00:09:13] Tim: They're just kind of slammed and they don't really, I have a lot of experience doing interviews and I forgot. How much I really enjoyed doing interviews. I thought I hated it. And then I got today, I was like really looking forward to today. Really enjoyed the conference. I had seven interviews today that I did with people and really just enjoyed talking to people and learning about them and their journey and why they're looking for work and you know, all the questions I, I'm not, I'm, I don't think of myself as a hard interviewer.
[00:09:42] Tim: You maybe you'd have to ask the people I interviewed. but I, there's only one question that I really asked that. It's kind of like an open ended, no wrong answer kind of question that kind of gives me insight into who they are as a developer. And I think this question really, I'm not looking for a right answer. I'm just kind of figuring out who they are and what their, their approach to coding and just work and life is. And that question is, so when it comes to programming and technology, what book have you read in your life? That made the most impact on you. So it was pretty interesting. Do you guys want to hear what some of the, I don't have all seven because some of them were answers that were non answers and some of them I forgot. But I wrote
[00:10:32] Adam: right here.
[00:10:33] Tim: yeah, I wrote down the most interesting ones that I thought. So let me pull up my notes here from the interviews today.
[00:10:39] Tim: Hopefully they're not, I did tell some of them about the podcast. So hopefully say, Hey, if I mentioned yours and I tell you that was a terrible, um, I, I don't mean it. Um,so, all right. So one of the guys, he's like a cold fusion. So this is a cold fusion programming job that we're trying to fill.plus other skills as well, but primarily cold fusion.
[00:11:01] Tim: and so I asked one guy, he's a contractor, lots of experience. And I asked him, I'm like, you know, so that same question. And he said. I forgot what his first one was. It wasn't interesting. The second one he said, but if I'm really being honest, he's like in like, I think like in junior high or something, they'd had a class where they did some programming and he was like on an Apple IIe coding in, in, in like binary logic and basically typing, you know, just really just, and then having, but he said, what was a, he said, what struck me about that is like, I really didn't understand what I'm typing, but I did have to understand how to debug it. He said, and the process of debugging that code was, to me, the most interesting thing I've ever done because it was, you, you had no point of reference as to the context of the code, other than trying to figure out what the binary instructions were. It was like some sort of game they were doing. I remember those days where you get like pages and pages of code, you type it
[00:12:01] Adam: get a magazine. Yeah.
[00:12:03] Tim: in a magazine.
[00:12:03] Tim: Yeah, he's talking like on an Apple IIe. So he's probably about my age.
[00:12:06] Adam: I'm guessing it's more assembly than,
[00:12:09] Tim: Yeah, he said binary, but it's, it's probably more assembly because I do remember that you would, you would type things in assembly because you're trying to do things that because basic back then was really the only programming language available to most people on simple home computers, maybe Fortran, but yeah, but if you want to do anything that was more advanced than that, you had to do it in probably assembly and so that, That kind of told me something about him.
[00:12:33] Tim: One that, you know, he's been coding a long time, right? He had an early life epiphany about computers and programming instructions and that epiphany stuck with him and it's probably been driving his entire and I can relate to that. I have the same sort of thing. Early in life, you know where I was doing that to just type.
[00:12:53] Tim: I didn't understand what I was doing I was typing in code from a magazine He's right debugging it was really sort of the interesting game there And so I thought that was I thought that was pretty it told me something about him as a person and his life history In just one answer. No, I didn't tell him any of that, right?
[00:13:11] Tim: I didn't tell him that insight I gained on him but it's like it gave me a snapshot of kind of who he was as a coder where he is in his history and It, there's no good or bad there, but it's just interesting. So unless anyone has comments, I'll move on to another one.
[00:13:30] Adam: Yeah, go ahead. I'm, I'm, I'm here for the book, Rex.
[00:13:33] Tim: So another one, so his guy, he started out, he had a journalism degree, I believe, but then kind of moved into coding. He was a recommendation from someone. She's a project manager. She really liked working with him, but they were in QA together at the time. And, but he's kind of just over his. Years of, of working just kind of more and more gotten more and more involved with coding. And so I asked him that question because I was kind of interested to see, would it be more sort of a soft skills kind of thing, or what would it be? And his recommendation was one that we, have, have talked about on the show and that's the Phoenix project.
[00:14:10] Ben: Oh yeah. I literally just recommended that to someone yesterday.
[00:14:15] Tim: Really? Yeah. So, I mean, it's a good book and that, I mean, so that tells me he's. Kind of interested in number one. That's not as far as time goes. It's not an ancient book. It's not It's not from the 80s or 90s when the other guy was doing but this is a book that tells me he's trying to At least keep up and learn new things, but he's also kind of Interested about he the way he described it kind of cracked me up He says I remember before I was in corporate the world.
[00:14:44] Tim: I watched the movie office space He said I thought it was a hilarious And then I actually got into the workforce and I found out it was a documentary.
[00:14:57] Ben: It's a Greek tragedy.
[00:14:58] Tim: Yeah, exactly. What would you say you do here? I got seven bosses, Bob.and so they kind of told me that he's interested in just kind of being the person who works to like, understand, you know, we have a dysfunctional situation.
[00:15:15] Tim: How do we get out of it? So he he's. Into continuity learning and he's also interested in looking and he said I saw it as office space But rather than marinating in the pain trying to figure a way out And that was hopeful. I thought that's, that's pretty good.and then another guy, he's a, he's a CF consultant.
[00:15:34] Tim: I actually know him.once he got on the call, I saw, I went, you know, we do a little background research, I go on their LinkedIn. I looked at that, but it's like, you know, these LinkedIn profiles, people look really good. Right. And you're like, I don't really recognize this guy. And, and then we get on the call.
[00:15:49] Tim: I'm like, Oh, I remember you from CF summit back in, you know. 2017. He said, Oh yeah. Yeah. We hung out. Okay. Okay. I know you. I know you. And, I asked him the same question and it's interesting is as much experience as he had, cause he's a contractor. So he's not a hundred percent CF. He's like, helps people like take people that are written in one language.
[00:16:10] Tim: They're trying to convert to another, like trying to get off CF and move to C sharp or whatever. So very big, broad experience in different languages. And the book he recommended is it's kind of old. I never heard of it and I'm going to check it out. But the book is don't make me think
[00:16:26] Adam: Oh yeah. I've heard of that
[00:16:27] Ben: Steven
[00:16:28] Tim: that one.
[00:16:29] Tim: Yeah, Krug, yeah, it's Krug, yeah. And I think there was like a, don't make me think revisited, which is more sort of about, sort of software principle design about making your software easy to use, making it accessible, from the blurb I read. And I thought, okay, that's really cool. He, you know, he really wants to help with the user experience.
[00:16:48] Tim: That struck him that he wants to, you know, he's like, I read it now, it just made so much sense. It's like, yeah, you know, why are we designing software that's difficult to use? Let's make it easier. I'm like, okay, cool. So now I understand. He's coming from
[00:17:01] Ben: can I just say, I think don't make me think might be the first book I ever read as kind of a professional.
[00:17:09] Tim: really.
[00:17:10] Ben: I I'm remembering, you know, it's like I I'm picturing where I was in the world. I was at the place where I had my first internship out of college that then became my first full time job and I read it while working there.
[00:17:21] Ben: So I'm pretty sure that was the first, I'm now an adult and I'm reading books to better myself kind of a book.
[00:17:29] Tim: And so the last one, and I'll kind of do a general of why the other ones I don't even bother mentioning. so the last one, he's also a CF guy and. Does some, does some consulting as well and I asked him, he says, well, he, he's more of a music guy. I looked in the background, he had like 10 guitars behind him.
[00:17:50] Tim: He's like, I'm not a big reader. I'm like, okay. That means not everybody's a big reader and I'm not going to count points. He says, but you know what, the, the things that have been most impactful in my career, you know, the big guys in cold fusion, you know. Ben Nadell,
[00:18:03] Ben: What? Score.
[00:18:05] Tim: Camden,
[00:18:06] Ben: Noice.
[00:18:07] Tim: he didn't mention my name. So automatic deduction,
[00:18:10] Adam: Yes.
[00:18:12] Ben: pass.
[00:18:12] Tim: yeah.
[00:18:13] Tim: Hard pass, but, but yeah, he, he, he did say learn CF in a week. So he does get some points there. Cause you know.
[00:18:19] Adam: So did he, did he name any specific books CF in a week?
[00:18:23] Tim: He's like, he's like in my career, whenever I wanted Ben's blog, he's like, he, he's like, he can't do CF and not know Ben Nadell. And I said, listen, I'll talk to him tonight. I'll tell him you said that he'd be very pleased.
[00:18:35] Adam: Yeah, Ben and
[00:18:36] Ben: I, consider me pleased.
[00:18:38] Tim: Yeah. So, and so that kind of tells me that, okay. So his main interest, he's got other interests he's into. He's, we got talking about their hobby, his hobbies and things. I'm like, so he's a hobby guy. He likes coding for him. It's like. You know, he's, you know, he's good at what he does because he's making living consulting and stuff.
[00:18:57] Tim: but for him, it's, he's into other stuff and I get that. I'm, I'm, I really enjoy doing other stuff too. But when you really need to know something, I'm not going to sit down and. Consume an entire book about principles and say, I just give you this straight and skinny about how the CF query parameter thing works.
[00:19:14] Tim: And yeah, Ben has a blog on it. I'm going to read that and do my job. That tells me a little bit about him. The ones I don't bring up is people who just talk about like what, you know, they've been out of college 10, 15 years, some of them. And, they're like, oh yeah, it was my college. yeah, this book I, in school.
[00:19:32] Adam: Mm
[00:19:32] Tim: And you've read nothing that's made any impact. So don't get me wrong. It's like, maybe that was like your first introduction. You thought, okay, this is really, really good, but it's like. You haven't really read anything since then. I mean, I, I, I guess this is just, you know, your day job and you got other stuff you're doing, you know, taking care of kids or, you know, maybe you got a side business, whatever.
[00:19:55] Tim: That's cool. But that also tells me something that it's like, yeah, I read, I read this syllabus in, in, in college and that was good enough for me and, I don't need anything else. Really super interesting. I think it's a great question. And if they really are interesting, I kind of, I'll ask them and I forget the feeling that they'll share it.
[00:20:12] Tim: I'm like, so non work related, what's your favorite books? And got some pretty cool answers too.
[00:20:20] Adam: Yeah, I mean, as we do here on the show,
[00:20:22] Tim: Yeah. We talk about books a lot. Yeah.
[00:20:24] Adam: it's a topic of interest for us, so.
[00:20:26] Ben: you know, there's always an opportunity. I'm talking from the interviewee's perspective, part of what you can demonstrate in an interview is not. Even if you can't answer the question, how do you answer the question without answering the question? You know, you can say like, oh, I, I don't read a lot of books, but I've watched this documentary last year and it, you know, blew my mind.
[00:20:50] Ben: Or there's this guy I follow on YouTube and he's always showing the craziest survival techniques and in the woods. And it's just amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it. I'm not saying, you know, it's, it's, it's just people can find ways to keep the conversation going. And I think that speaks worlds.
[00:21:06] Adam: even like, you know, I, I don't, I can't find the time to read programming books, but I do consume every conference talk on YouTube I can find from Sandy Metz and, you know, like,
[00:21:16] Tim: Hey, if you're not, if you're not, some people are not readers. Some people are not, you know, audible book listeners. I had one person, she was. She couldn't remember. She's like, Oh, I can't remember. And I was just, there's no right or wrong answer. There's no points, you know, taken off for this. And then about after we hung up, cause a lot of times like you're in an interview and you're trying to do your best.
[00:21:38] Tim: Someone asks you a question that completely catches you out of left field. Cause a lot of them are like, Oh, that's a good question. A lot of times you can tell people are like ready for the question when they give you an immediate answer. But when they're like, they stop and they go, Oh, Yeah. That's a good question.
[00:21:56] Tim: You know, like, okay, you caught them up and now their brain is really churning. And that's, that's most what I find interesting is, is like, what do you come up with when you're digging deep? Are you the kind of person who can like come up with something like you were talking about, or you're a person who really needs, and there's just different thought patterns.
[00:22:13] Tim: So the one. She, she couldn't come up with it. She's like, Oh, this, I remember. She's like, it was awesome. It was like, it was an online book and you could like put the code in there. You didn't have to like compile everything. He just, it was Java. I said, I can't remember it. I'm like, don't worry about it. I'm like, I just friended you on LinkedIn.
[00:22:30] Tim: If you think of it, let me know. 10 minutes later, she sends me the book title, which tells me she's the kind of person who needs to be prepared. She's, you know, she's not a spontaneous kind of thinker. She's a more. You know, needs a little bit of runway to prepare and that's, that's those type of people are really good at coming up tend to be, in my opinion, people come up with sort of long term plans.
[00:22:53] Tim: They're long term planners, not a short, quick term, kind of just off the top of the cap kind of thing. And you need the balance of those kinds of people to really get a good thing. So as I told all of them, there's no wrong answer, but it does. It is a litmus test of kind of a personality test, in my opinion, it's, it was really fun doing that today.
[00:23:15] Adam: well, so I think the, the most obvious, You know, sort of next step of this, discussion we're having here is we should talk about our, our books and I think, you know, given that this is a long form podcast, not an interview that we're trying to knock out in 30 minutes. No, no limits. Right? If you got more than 1 book, please feel free to go.
[00:23:32] Adam: You know, go off,
[00:23:33] Javascript, the Good Parts
[00:23:33] Adam: I'll start I, I, when, when we were talking about this, in discord earlier today, and, I knew it was going to come up on the podcast tonight. I went ahead and pulled this off my bookshelf. So my, my first pick is, JavaScript, the good parts. And I, I mean, it's a nice short book. You can read it.
[00:23:49] Adam: If you're a fast reader, you can read it in like a day. Yes. Douglas Crockford. so yeah, if you're a fast reader, you can read it in a day. If you're, if you're like a slow methodical reader, you just don't have a whole lot of time, you know, easily to easy to finish in like a week. but for me, the reason I consider that like a transformative book for me in my career is, it took, like it hit me at the right time and it was, just such a, a wealth of knowledge and in a small package, it took me from like, Oh yeah, JavaScript is just this like little toy that you can use in the browser to like hide and show a div. To like, no, this is actually a really useful tool. And then like, I think the year after I read that or maybe a couple of years after I read that is when like no JS came out and it was like, Oh, wait a minute. Now this is a whole thing. This is like a whole ecosystem that got unlocked. And so for me, that was a real, real big, important things like, okay, these are, this is how you do JavaScript.
[00:24:39] Adam: Well,
[00:24:41] Ben: Yeah. I'm almost certain that I've read that book.
[00:24:45] Tim: Yeah, I have to, I have it.
[00:24:47] Ben: and, I also liked. That was, in that kind of same time period, there were a bunch of cookbook style books like jQuery cookbook. And I think there's probably JavaScript cookbook and a bunch of other cookbooks. I really enjoyed just the cookbook format of ways to learn because it was very problem statement, answer, problem statement, answer, problem statement, answer, and it was kind of taking the theoretical part of programming and just making it much more pragmatic. And I really appreciated that.
[00:25:19] ColdFusion MX Bible
[00:25:19] Ben: I think one of the ones that it was hugely influential for me, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but, was the cold fusion MX Bible.
[00:25:28] Tim: Yeah, I
[00:25:28] Ben: And it was this kind of orange, reddish book, and I swear it was three inches thick. I mean, it was just a beast of a book. At least that's the memory I have of it.
[00:25:40] Ben: And I used to wake up at like 5 AM. What does, what does that say? Cold fusion.
[00:25:47] Adam: cold fusion mx? It's the it's like before they're actually it's called programming cold fusion mx It's an o'reilly book
[00:25:53] Tim: before the WAC.
[00:25:54] Ben: It wasn't that book, but it was that kind of size. Like it was something you could
[00:25:58] Tim: Brooks Belson. Ah.
[00:26:00] Ben: You could beat someone to death with, with the MX Bible for sure. Like no questions asked. Literally. I think all it was, was. A printed version of the cold fusion documentation. Like, there was no nuance. I think it was just, here's, here are all the functions and what they do here, all the tags and what they do.
[00:26:16] Ben: And I just went through it methodically morning after morning until it was done. And the reason that I think it was so influential for me is because it was the first time that I can remember where I actually just sat down and. RTFM read the freaking manual and I, it was, I, it was just like a weird light bulb moment.
[00:26:40] Ben: It's like, Oh, so if you just read the documentation, then like you can learn about stuff. And, I feel like there are a lot of people in the world today that don't know that. So I feel very lucky that I discovered that pretty early on. Turns out the documentation is good.
[00:26:56] Adam: early on in my professional cold fusion career but you know, I done cold fusion for several years before I like got a full time job doing it and Early on when I after I started going full time on it. They sent me to a like a professional cold fusion training Which for me, it was kind of like an easy egg.
[00:27:14] Adam: Cause I had been doing it for a long time. And most of the people in there were like, this is their first exposure to it. but I did learn a lot in there, you know, it's like all the rounded off all the rough edges of my knowledge, you know?
[00:27:25] Ben: Absolutely.
[00:27:27] Micro Cornucopia
[00:27:27] Tim: So, I'll go with, mine isn't necessarily a book. So, the first one, there's multiple. So, I'm not going to peg myself as a person who learned something once and then didn't learn it again. So, early, early on, this is formative days, right? So, there in, back in like the early 80s, there was a magazine called Micro Cornucopia, which I subscribed to.
[00:27:52] Tim: And which was, you know, I actually paid money for this as so in 1981, it came out. So I was probably 81. I was 10 years old and I started, so I, and I think I didn't get in the initial, although I did buy the backdated copy. So I think I was probably around 12, I started subscribing to it. it was, kind of a, it was a micro computer enthusiast magazine that talked about like Capro computers, robotics, embedded systems.
[00:28:20] Tim: artificial intelligence, even back then, there was an article that I read that was, it was toward the end of, it only lasted for like nine, 10 years, the, the magazine, But toward the end of it, there was like an opinion piece about the power of hypertext. So HTTP, you know, the, the, the hypertext, the links, basically, like the internet's cut is talking about the internet and how you could basically, you know, have a write an article and then talk about a subject in brief, but then link to a longer article about that in, in bigger context.
[00:28:58] Tim: Which absolutely friggin blew my mind, like, because it was really, I mean, back then people would just tell us stuff and we, you know, like if someone would ask a question, we just, we're like, well, I think, you know, so and so said this and we're like, okay,
[00:29:11] Adam: hmm. When I get home, I can look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I think that's an
[00:29:15] Tim: right. Yeah. And if it's not in your encyclopedia and you're not bougie, like Adam's family that had an encyclopedia, you had to wait like to mom, drive you down to the library and go try to look it up with the Dewey decimal system cards. And I thought you can just click. And find out like all the information about this thing that the article only is like briefly talking about and get more information and then that could have links to drill down into other things.
[00:29:45] Tim: I'm like, I could be clicking forever little did I know, but yeah, so I mean that to me blew my mind that, that to me, like said, there is a whole world of knowledge out there and that there's so many people that have this. If we could like compile this into a worldwide web kind of thing, how smart we'll be, we'll like, we'll be like the most educated people in the world.
[00:30:10] Tim: Again, little did I know that it was not a lack of knowledge that we were dealing with in life. But anyway, that blew my mind.
[00:30:21] Ben: if I could very on point,
[00:30:24] Hypermedia Systems
[00:30:24] Ben: I took Friday and Saturday and I read, and I'm holding up for the camera here, a book called Hypermedia Systems.
[00:30:30] Tim: Yeah, I saw you post that on Facebook. What the heck is
[00:30:32] Ben: So this is by the guy who wrote a JavaScript library called HTMX. And the HTMX is kind of a, in parallel with Hotwire Turbo that I've talked about before, which used to be TurboLynx.
[00:30:45] Ben: There are other versions like Unpoly and he mentions in the book, but, Essentially it's embracing the idea that HTTP and sending HTML around is just this beautiful construct and it's so flexible and it's so resilient and the browsers know what to do with it. You don't have to maintain multiple APIs.
[00:31:04] Ben: So very on point with what you're saying, but if I can, if I can, Pat myself on the back for a second. I have not read a book in a while, and I have been a little bit afraid that I've forgotten that skill, like that I've, that I forgot how to sit down and just read and not be, you know, watching TV while also scrolling through Facebook kind of a thing.
[00:31:26] Tim: Yeah.
[00:31:27] Adam: hard to second screen a book.
[00:31:29] Tim: Yeah, it
[00:31:29] Ben: yeah, yeah, exactly. And I, I, it was not easy. I mean, I literally, I mean, in total, I probably read for about. 13 hours or something, you know, over two days and it was not easy to do, but I was pretty excited that I could actually do it. And it wasn't, it wasn't one of those things where I'm reading for 10 minutes and realizing that I wasn't paying attention.
[00:31:51] Ben: I have to go back, you know, six pages and reread. Like I was, you know, to the, to the book's credit, it was an engrossing book. And I was really interested in what the, they were saying, the arguments they were laying out. But I was just like, Oh, brain still work, can't still read. I was pretty excited about that.
[00:32:09] Ben: Well, I got like an honorable mention, but I want to throw out before I forget it. And then I have another book. so my honorable mention is going to be Ben's book, the feature flags book. Um, I'm sure that I would be picking it had I read it.honorary read.
[00:32:23] Adam: Yeah, well, so here's the deal. I feel like, it's got to be 75 percent ish of what's in that book.
[00:32:29] Ben: I've gotten from you in our conversations here on the podcast. And like, I think we've, I've read your blog posts about feature flag stuff. And so like, I feel like I've gleaned the vast majority of that out there. And I still intend to read the book. I, you know, you sent me a copy. Thank you for that. Zero pressure,
[00:32:45] Adam: but like the, just those conversations and the blog posts and, and all of that.
[00:32:50] Adam: Kind of rolled together. I'm assuming that that's it. That's for me. That's kind of standing in for the book. And that has been a big improvement on my career
[00:32:59] Ben: Yeah. Feature flags are just the bomb diggity. I don't mean to drop the B bomb, but yeah.
[00:33:06] Adam: So, the other book I wanted to mention, you mentioned the Phoenix project earlier, Tim. and I I.
[00:33:12] Tim: Well, that was in the interview. Yeah.
[00:33:14] Adam: Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:14] Tim: Yeah. Which, which was, they got points for that in my mind. Honestly, that was like, I'm like, yeah, that's cool.
[00:33:19] The Unicorn Project
[00:33:19] Adam: well, I wanted to throw out the Unicorn project. So the Phoenix project is more like management sort of oriented and the Unicorn project is sort of the same. It's the same company having the same problems, but through the lens of the developers, not so much the operations guys. and for me, what it was a good reminder of is like, you are part of this company too, and your opinion matters.
[00:33:42] Adam: And if you think that there's a better way to do something, you know, A, advocate for it and then B, sometimes you just have to like, okay, I'm going to do something on my own time to, to prove the point that there's a better way to do this. And, you know, I've done that a number of times in my career, and it's, it's just really, you know, I think it, it demonstrates that you are passionate about making this change, A, and then it also demonstrates that the, the change is a viable thing to consider.
[00:34:12] Tim: Unicorn, unicorn pressure.
[00:34:14] Adam: Yeah, it's a, it's a, I'm sure we've talked about it on the podcast before it's, it's like a companion to the Phoenix product, same author, everything, but
[00:34:23] Clean Code
[00:34:23] Tim: I mean, we did the book club on, clean code.
[00:34:26] Ben: Yeah.
[00:34:27] Tim: And so I was hoping someone would say clean code in these interviews, but, you know, I didn't want to lead the witness. But after, after I would tell them my, and, and my, what I told them, I'm like, I said, so I came to clean code late in my programming career, and I wish I had read it earlier, because it would have saved me from a lot of mistakes and false.
[00:34:48] Tim: Beliefs and anti patterns, because I, I think for me, reading clink code really helped me. Number one, like people who would tell me like, Oh, this is the way to do it. And they were not best practices, practitioners. They were just, this is the way I do it. And that's what, therefore you should do it that way
[00:35:08] Adam: that makes it the best.
[00:35:09] Tim: Right. And so, and they had more power than me. And so I did it. And then after and it felt dirty the whole time and then I read clean code i'm like, Yeah, now I understand why that felt dirty and so yeah clean clean code for me and that was Strictly because of this this podcast because I hadn't read it prior to this so being a part of this I should say this is probably it's not a book but you know It's very impactful because otherwise I wouldn't have read clean code and and realize, you know I don't apply all of it, but because not all that applies but it's like the things that Did apply to my coding technique, really improved it significantly.
[00:35:48] Adam: Yeah. I mean, if you're looking for CLE credits, send a self addressed stamp envelope to Tim Cunningham, uh, and just, you know, mentioned that you've been listening to this podcast for so long and you'll get some credits.
[00:36:00] Tim: there you go. Yeah.
[00:36:00] Ben: Well, so we, we talked about this in the last episode, how there's the bell curve of experience and you're kind of the beginner. And then the intermediate is overly complex and the expert is kind of going back to that simple lifestyle. And I feel like clean code for me was, was a way to get from that intermediary.
[00:36:19] Ben: Everything is complex. I'm, I'm applying all the design patterns that I've ever learned and clean codes are like. I hate to say it's, it's almost like vibe driven development where it's, it's like you're looking at the code and just doesn't feel right and, and it feels a little gross and it seems a little stinky and clean code gives you, I think the words to describe the vibe that you're feeling.
[00:36:42] Ben: You're like, Oh, it doesn't feel good. Oh, right. Because of the cyclomatic complexity because of the magic numbers, because of the Boolean
[00:36:49] Tim: is doing too many
[00:36:51] Ben: Yeah, exactly. It's like, it helps you articulate the vibe that the code has given you. five driven development,
[00:36:59] Tim: interestingly, no one I talked to had ever read it
[00:37:03] Adam: Yeah, I'm not surprised. It's a, it's a big book and it's a little on the old side, so I think that most people would kind of write it off for those two reasons. Now, I mean, I'll say, you know, we read it for book club for here on the podcast and I read it. And honestly what I took from it, there was some good stuff here and there.
[00:37:20] Adam: What I'd really love to get is like a clean code, the good parts.
[00:37:23] Ben: Yeah, totally.
[00:37:24] Adam: yeah,
[00:37:25] Tim: Hey, Hey, there's our, there's our book project. There we go. We can be.
[00:37:31] Adam: called it dibs.
[00:37:32] Tim: Yeah.
[00:37:32] Adam: no, but, honestly for me, you know, obviously there's going to be some good stuff in there. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. But. for me more so it was like, okay, here are the rules. And, and that is useful to know because, there are plenty of opportunities where it is legitimate to ignore the rules.
[00:37:52] Adam: Like it's okay to break the rules if you know that you're breaking a rule and you have a good reason for doing so, you know?
[00:37:59] Tim: My issue with it was, although I did love it, is there was a lot of it was highly tied to Java.
[00:38:08] Adam: Yes.
[00:38:09] Tim: A lot of, and a lot of the examples were very tied to job. And I'm like, I don't even understand the problem that you're talking about here, so I'm just gonna skim to this chapter and maybe later if it comes up in my life, I'll deal with it then.
[00:38:20] Tim: But like right now, it's like I, I don't care what you're talking about.
[00:38:25] Ben: well, not only was it tied to Java, but. Uncle Bob, uncle, you know, Robert C. Martin, who wrote the book has been in the world of software development for decades, many decades. And I think some of the outlook in that book is a product of so many of the constraints that existed in the world that just don't exist anymore.
[00:38:49] Ben: You know, when you were living in a world where you had to flash code onto a chip and send it to someone physically. And it had to be right. And if you had to be able to fix it by doing some kind of, I don't know, other kind of crazy mechanical thing that I don't understand these
[00:39:04] Adam: There was no auto update over the
[00:39:05] Ben: right. There's no, Oh, that didn't work.
[00:39:08] Ben: Just deploy a hotfix. You know, that's in a world where we're so much more
[00:39:13] Tim: in a
[00:39:14] Ben: in a world. some of the, it's not that you want to be sloppy. It's just that the meticulousness with what you think about some of the levels of separation. I think just, they don't. They don't, you don't get as much mileage out of them as you used to for the complexity.
[00:39:31] Adam: Yeah. I mean, for a lot of the code that we write, the stakes are just lower.
[00:39:37] Ben: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:39:38] Adam: I was actually, I saw something in a, in one of the newsletters that I get, daily, that like there was somebody wrote up an article of like all these rules that, NASA has for the code they write and the description of it was like, yeah, these are not really relevant for people that are not writing code for spaceships because can just, you know, deploy another release.
[00:39:58] Adam: It's not a big deal, but like, it's, it's interesting glimpse into that life.
[00:40:02] Tim: you, you can't unex explode.
[00:40:04] Adam: Yeah.
[00:40:05] Tim: dollar rocket, which is funny. So one of the guys that graduated from high school, he last year started, he is the launch manager for NASA.
[00:40:14] Adam: Oh, cool.
[00:40:15] Ben: Holy
[00:40:15] Tim: I all of a sudden he started like posting these pictures of the Kennedy Space Center. I'm like, dude, where are you? He's like, he's like, yeah, I'm in Florida.
[00:40:23] Tim: I got hired by NASA. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm like, yeah, he was like before that he was like a cyber security specialist. He's like, yeah, I've always wanted to work for NASA my entire life. Cool. He was one of those dudes that like everyone in high school was scared of. Like he was like the kid who was like, had like six, six, six on his jacket and like was always, we were in art class together.
[00:40:45] Tim: He was like, draw pictures of naked women and demons and the, and our, and our, our art teacher was pretty cool. He'd be like, yeah, you can draw this stuff. It's like, but we can't keep it. And we'd like, he put, hit it back in like the photo. We had like a photo developing area. So he kept all the, like the naughty.
[00:41:00] Adam: I'm going to take it home with me. That way nobody else gets it.
[00:41:04] Tim: You take all the naughty pictures and put them in the back room, but he's like, let him, drew him. Yeah. We all thought this dude was like, like just insane. And now he's like a notch, a launch specialist for NASA. I'm like, cool. Good for you, buddy.
[00:41:16] Ben: That's pretty cool.if I can talk about a book that had a big impact on me that is not technical, but this was still just, I don't know, it resonated. and I'm sure we've talked about it on the podcast before, but it was the Four Agreements.
[00:41:32] Tim: 50 shades of gray.
[00:41:36] The Four Agreements
[00:41:36] Ben: It was a book called the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. And it was just about how to think and think towards yourself, think towards others. And it's literally just four agreements. And each one of them is outlined. It's basically agreements you make with yourself. But, I think it was, to call it a spiritual book, I think might be a little bit of a stretch, but they talk about the Toltec wisdoms and their spiritual,
[00:42:05] Tim: Toltec, like Aztec,
[00:42:07] Ben: yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:42:08] Ben: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, but I don't know. It's just, it's just a great book. I mean,
[00:42:14] Adam: you summarize what are the four agreements?
[00:42:16] Ben: God, put me on the spot. It's like,
[00:42:18] Tim: We can pause. You can Google it.
[00:42:20] Ben: it's like, always do your best. Don't take it personally.Oh my gosh.
[00:42:26] Adam: Be impeccable with your
[00:42:27] Ben: Yes.
[00:42:28] Adam: Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions and always do your best.
[00:42:33] Ben: It's very simple. things like don't take it personally though. I mean, come on. That's like Herculean effort right there.always do your best. I really enjoy it. In the book, he talks about how always do your best is always contextual. It's really always do your best in the moment.
[00:42:49] Adam: The best you can do
[00:42:50] Ben: right, if you're running on two hours of sleep, the best you do right now is not going to be the same as the best you do after a good night of sleep, you know, things like that, but kind of like being kind to yourself and, and just trying to be a better person.
[00:43:02] Ben: But it was just, it just laid it out in a way that, that was very simple and, and, resonated.
[00:43:08] Tim: So that reminds me, I wasn't going to mention this, but so one of the guys, he's also,a contractor. And I asked him the same question, he goes, he goes, well, book might make me sound like a nihilist and it's not coding related, but it's kind of my life philosophy.and it's, Fight Club.
[00:43:28] Ben: Nice
[00:43:30] Tim: I'm like, explain. And he
[00:43:33] Adam: Is he applying for a job at a credit card company or?
[00:43:36] Tim: right.
[00:43:37] Ben: spoiler
[00:43:37] Tim: He said, Fight Club. I like, okay, so explain, he goes, you know, because I didn't, it was a book before it was a movie. I had seen the movie and I'm glad I saw the movie before I watched, you know, read the book, but I haven't read the book because I really love the reveal, you know, at the end about, you know, Tyler and the other guy who they actually were there.
[00:43:57] Ben: alert.
[00:43:58] Tim: So I didn't say I didn't anyway, he goes, it made me realize.
[00:44:06] Tim: That, you know, what we do for work, you know, it's like I'm coding systems that are just dealing with college, you know, entrances or, you know, he named different things that he does. And he's like, I'm not going to die if I get it wrong. And no, and actually no one's going to die if I get this wrong. I'm not dealing with life or death situations.
[00:44:30] Tim: And I'm like, yeah, okay. I make sense. It was like, you know, it's like we are fight or flight creatures are, are we, our bodies are designed. To like, if a, if we're walking through the Sahara, you know, or through the Savannah of Africa and some tiger comes up out of the woods, out of the, out of the, and, and chases us that we, you know, decide to fight or flight.
[00:44:55] Tim: Our lives, not a whole or not at that level of, of urgency. And yet our bodies still act that way. Because I've gotten an email from a customer that made me shake physically. Right. To like, just go into like this complete panic mode. And I've had to tell myself this, I'm not going to die. No one's going to kill me. And if this person was just mean to me, like they, they, they hurt my feelings because they said, but it's like, it's not life or death. So I'm like, okay, I can respect that. Not necessarily what I was looking for, but I respect
[00:45:33] Ben: there's actually a term that I've just heard a couple of different people coincidentally use and I, and I don't remember what it is, but it's like evolutionary mismatch. This idea that you have evolved to deal with problems that are just no longer relevant in today's world, like salty, sweet, fatty foods taste amazing evolutionary.
[00:45:54] Ben: There's a reason for that. But
[00:45:55] Tim: because yeah, there's no food. The second you find something salty fat, you eat that as much as you can because you're not going to get it again. But now it's like we're covered with it. So
[00:46:05] Tim: everything we love to eat is killing us.
[00:46:08] Ben: The idea that you go into panic mode and it's like cortisol can be coursing through your body for things that are so trivial, like you, we evolved to do that for a reason, but it's just not a reason that makes sense anymore, for the most part.
[00:46:20] Tim: Yeah, this is a very big aside and I hope I don't get canceled for this. But there are studies that talk about the. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no men, men are for Mars. Women are for Venus. So it's like, so the, the re the bodily reaction to stress. And men and women are completely, not completely different, but they, they lag.
[00:46:42] Tim: So a man, most men, I'm not going to just, but most men, it's like, if there's a stressful situation, they react extremely quickly.
[00:46:52] Adam: Hmm.
[00:46:53] Tim: The reaction can stop extremely quickly because in nature, like you're facing, you know, there's an animal coming at you and it's attacking you. You need to kill it. You kill it.
[00:47:04] Tim: It's dead. It's dead. It's dead. It's dead. Now you just turn that off because there's no need for dealing with that. With women, it's a bit longer, right? So when a woman faces a stressful situation, it takes a little longer to get there. But when it does, it lasts a lot longer. And that's typically why if, if you've been married to a woman, you realize it's like, when you're done with the argument, she probably needs probably another 30 to 40 minutes to calm down. She's still in the fight or flight mode. And you're like, why, why are you still up? So I thought we deal with this and like, she's still mad. That's why when they wake up from a dream where they like dream, you were cheating, it takes them an hour to get over that. I
[00:47:55] Ben: it is so interesting how things have, even in my lifetime, changed so much socially. And I think we, we often talk about in the show, how having the right words for something is so important. Having the right names for something is so important. And I think that's, I mean, we talked about programming where that's very relevant, but just life, socially, it just makes sense everywhere that if you have in your head, The way something works and it doesn't line up with the way it works in someone else's head.
[00:48:27] Ben: It's just, it's cause for grief. And we try to create these, we try to paint with such broad brushes. And I'm not really, I'm just going off on my own head right now, but it's like everything has become so polarized, but I think it's become so polarized in part because we're just using the wrong words and people react to the wrong words.
[00:48:48] Ben: And then we just go down these crazy spirals.
[00:48:51] Tim: don't want to talk about this now maybe the after show, but I do want to talk about kind of the in memoriam segment of the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special that came out Sunday, which was really kind of telling about exactly what you're talking about.
[00:49:05] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can do that in the after show.
[00:49:08] Adam: Was that good? I didn't watch it.
[00:49:11] Ben: It's like, yeah, it's like every SNL episode where it's like, some of it's pretty funny and some of it's like, what?
[00:49:18] Tim: Yeah. So any other book recommendations or like things that like kind of change your career? I think.
[00:49:26] Textbooks
[00:49:26] Adam: I was going to do the, I don't have it on my shelf anymore. I must have gotten rid of it the last time we moved or something. But, I actually for years and years held on to just as like a nostalgia thing. The textbook from my linear algebra class from college. Because that class, it wasn't so much the book, but that class was very formative for me in the way that I treat and think about computers, you know, previously it was like, okay, I can, I know how to write visual basic.
[00:49:53] Adam: And I can make things and I, you know, I was doing some cold fusion stuff on the side. And so I was able to make computers do things, but that class was like where we dove in and it was like, okay, or is it kind of, metaphorically like taking the cover off the computer and like tracing circuits, right?
[00:50:07] Adam: Like, this is how a computer works. This is how a computer thinks, you know, memory registers. And like, this is how a compiler works. It like looks characters and okay, this is an expression. What does this expression mean? You got to tokenize it and parse it. And, yeah, it, it was, yeah. A very like light bulb, coming on in my, my career moment or class.
[00:50:28] Adam: and so I held onto that book for a long time and I don't know what the title of it was, but that, that class linear algebra for me was amazing.
[00:50:35] SQL in 10 Minutes
[00:50:35] Tim: I would say so one in my classes that I took, it was very kind of computer IT heavy. It was more like webpages and that stuff. And then you actually have to do stuff with it. You realize, Oh, I need a database. And so when I got to my job, Binforte's SQL in 10 minutes. Was an absolute godsend because it's like, they're like, Oh yeah.
[00:51:00] Tim: So we need to talk to the SQL database. I'm like, I have no idea how to do that. But fortunately there's a fantastic CF query tag. I could just throw some SQL in there.
[00:51:09] Ben: don't even get me started about the CF
[00:51:11] Tim: I know I'm talking, I'm talking to your love language, buddy. I knew that I knew talking to your love language.
[00:51:16] Ben: Adam mentioned something that was a little triggering for me, not triggering, but like when I was younger, I had, I don't know, it's like three or four bookshelves worth of books and over the years, whether it be moving or just downsizing, you know, spring cleanings, you just start throwing stuff out. You're like, I can't keep this.
[00:51:32] Ben: So my bookshelves of books, is literally just this one little cubby now over my shoulder. So actually I just want to take a quick. Look at that and I just want to read the list of books that have made the cut that have lasted through the years. Hold on.
[00:51:45] Tim: No, this is interesting.
[00:51:47] Adam: Ben is rolling away or he's taking pictures of him so he can come read them to us.
[00:51:50] Tim: putting it as in your, your phones again. There we go.
[00:51:52] Ben: What? Oh, sorry. Were you saying something to me?
[00:51:54] Adam: were narrating what you were
[00:51:55] Ben: All right. Yeah. Yeah. So I just scroll, I just rolled over to my little bookcase here and I'm just gonna read the books that have made the cut. Regular expression cookbook. Again, I loved
[00:52:05] Tim: hmm. You love, you, you, you love them?
[00:52:08] Ben: Eloquent JavaScript. This was just a, I don't know. It was just kind of like a different
[00:52:14] Adam: on the cover,
[00:52:15] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I have two copies of Muscle Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder which is one of my favorite books of all times. William Gibson's Neuromancer. Which I've just never been able to throw out it's, it's, the book that the matrix is more or less based on the way I understand it, test driven development, which I don't think I've actually ever read. It's very much aspirational.Elegant objects was a book about object oriented programming. So I've never really been an object oriented programmer at best. I'm a procedural programmer who puts their procedures inside of objects. Sometimes that's kind of where I am. And eloquent objects was just a really fascinating look at object constraints and how to think about.
[00:53:03] Ben: Wiring data together. Anyway, I don't remember all that much about it, but it was just fascinating. build APIs. You won't hate, was just a book about designing JSON APIs and JSON schemas and thinking about RESTful and interfaces and then, chemical pink, which was just a book about a female bodybuilder fiction, but, uh, hot. And that's, that's it. There's a couple of other books here. That, you
[00:53:33] Tim: We don't need to get the fetish section of
[00:53:34] Tim: your, of your
[00:53:35] Ben: That's it. But that, that's it. That's, that's the, those are the books that have made it through all of the, the cuts over the years.
[00:53:41] Discord Comments
[00:53:41] Tim: Yeah. So I, prior to the show, I kind of put out a little teaser that what, what I was, asking people in these interviews, not telling them that we were going to do this as a topic. So one of them asked if one of the books was Charlotte's Web, I said no, but I was referred to in an interview as some pig.
[00:54:00] Adam: These are comments from our discord
[00:54:02] Tim: Yeah, from our discord channel. Yeah. and then, so Adrian mentioned that one of his books, which is not a software book, but it's a, it's a book called made to stick why some ideas survive and others die, which is actually, it sounds pretty interesting because the premise of the book is that, you know, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.
[00:54:24] Ben: So why is it like, we've all heard that apocryphal story about, Well, most of us of a certain age have heard about, what's his name? Henry Ford,
[00:54:33] Tim: no, no. If you want my body and you think I'm a sexy singer, Rod Stewart. We all heard the apocryphal story about Rod Stewart and what he had to get his stomach pumped for. No.
[00:54:44] Ben: I
[00:54:44] Adam: don't think i'm of that age.
[00:54:45] Tim: Oh, you're not of that age. we, we scratch all that. We've all heard like a story that was complete. Utter lie, like the, the, the kidney, harvesting scam, right? That was, all those stories are complete lies, but yet everyone has,
[00:54:59] Tim: everyone's
[00:55:00] Adam: another And I think another example from that book because I read it too is like the idea of razor blades in halloween candy
[00:55:06] Tim: Yeah, exactly. Right. So these lot, these, these stories that just have traction and they do not die, no matter how much you try to kill them, the modern age, it's like, I can put this wall of text on my, my Facebook that says you're not allowed to use my data, right? It's like, it's like all that's complete crap, but yet they have traction yet where.
[00:55:24] Tim: People have very important things to say that are completely truthful, completely bound in reality and very scientifically proven. They say stuff and goes nowhere. So how do you make an idea stick? And like that somewhat applies to software. So I thought that was pretty interesting.
[00:55:41] Ben: You, if I could just go off on a tangent for one
[00:55:44] Tim: You, that's what you do,
[00:55:45] Ben: And, and the, the,
[00:55:47] Adam: I've stopped arguing it. Just go ahead
[00:55:49] Tim: right? We'll never stop you, Ben. Just go ahead and go. Just say this is the tangent.
[00:55:54] Ben: is a tangent. Okay. I, I, I don't have a well-formed thought here. what's called the attractiveness, the enticing. The general experience of something is so powerful that it almost outweighs any other value characteristic of something I find, you know, when you talk to people talk about, that you could build an amazing product, but if you can't market it, well, like no one's going to buy it, you know, like, like the worst product.
[00:56:24] Ben: We'll win if it has the best marketing. And I think about some of the, the, the frameworks and the libraries that exist in the world today that I don't personally like all that much, but have clearly one, and I think so much of why they won is because they just had a little something special that made them stand out from
[00:56:46] Tim: A better
[00:56:47] Ben: things. Yeah. Better story, a better, if I, okay. So if I can make it concrete and I'm probably going to make a lot of enemies here for a second. I, I don't understand tailwind. Like I just don't get it as a philosophy and as a framework tailwind CSS. But I, I think that Adam Watham is, has, has a wonderful design eye.
[00:57:09] Ben: If you, if we've ever talked about, or if anyone's read refactoring UI, he wrote a book, basically designed for developers. And it talks about all of the aspects of building beautiful interfaces and how to tweak things and talk about line heights and paddings and things lining up. Basically he took all of his design sense.
[00:57:26] Ben: And he poured it into the defaults of the way Tailwind works. And I think that was so powerful that it allowed Tailwind as an idea to become so palatable to so many people so quickly. Like if, if, if the default CSS look and feel of Tailwind was crap, I have to imagine people would have tried it once and be like, Oh, not for me. It just because it didn't look good. It's like the same way that, bootstrap, you know, call it like wildfire. And I think a lot of people who use bootstrap end up not regretting it in the longterm, but like you, you get to a point where you're fighting it. Like you want to do some things and you're just fighting it, but it looked so freaking good.
[00:58:06] Ben: It looks so much better than anything you could do as an engineer by default. You, the Royal
[00:58:11] Adam: going from zero to 35 percent of, of amazing, like super easy, right? It took you getting over that initial hump really easy, but then you find all of a sudden the work to get from there to something unique, that's still good is very hard. So you're kind of stuck in this cookie cutter.
[00:58:29] Ben: So my, my poorly formed thought here is just how, how valuable it is that we, that the story, that the experience, that the vibe of something is really a key ingredient to its success. And I think at least from an engineering perspective, we probably often under value that angle of it drastically. Anyway.
[00:58:57] Adam: I can't disagree.
[00:58:58] Tim: Yeah,
[00:58:59] Adam: Tangent
[00:59:00] Ben: Nailed it.
[00:59:01] Tim: hang on it.
[00:59:03] Ben: One take.
[00:59:04] Tim: Yeah. and
[00:59:06] Adam: First try.
[00:59:06] Tim: and someone else mentioned a book. I had a really cool sounding name. I, I, I kind of would like to check this out by Sandy Metz,
[00:59:16] Adam: Oh, yeah.
[00:59:17] Tim: 99 bottles of OOP and P-O-O-D-R.
[00:59:21] Ben: The pooter book pooter.
[00:59:24] Tim: Boer,
[00:59:25] Ben: I think that's what, right. It's like practical object oriented. Some,
[00:59:29] Ben: Yeah.
[00:59:30] Tim: Yeah. So, and, and yeah, so that sounds pretty, it's like, you know, it's, apparently it's a way to get exposed to great concepts like. Make the change easy warning, this may be hard then make the easy change
[00:59:42] Adam: That's out of, Test Driven Development by Kent C. Beck. Over there, behind, Ben's shoulder on the bookcase.
[00:59:49] Tim: unread, unread.
[00:59:53] Adam: I read my copy. It took me like a year and a half, but I read it.
[00:59:56] Ben: I almost feel like this was gifted to me. Did you gift this to me? Test.
[01:00:00] Adam: I don't, I don't think so.
[01:00:01] Tim: Yeah, well, let's just say yes,
[01:00:03] Ben: I, I
[01:00:04] Adam: Yeah, of course. I'm so mad I never got a thank you note.
[01:00:07] Tim: yeah, right. Let's all be passive aggressive about it.
[01:00:12] Ben: well, let
[01:00:18] Tim: the rest of our listeners kind of maybe send us in on the discord channel. So hop in on the discord. If you got a book that you think we need to read or that really challenged you or changed your life, or, you know, you just think is awesome.
[01:00:32] Tim: That'd be great to
[01:00:33] Adam: for sure. Yeah, we have a we have a channel in our discord. It's called podcast Jason if something from the podcast sparks your your brain, you need to talk about it. That's the place for it
[01:00:41] Tim: Or, or if it's just a, even a non coding book that you just think we should read for, you know, social reasons or, you know, try not to get canceled reasons. put it in book club.
[01:00:54]
[01:00:54] Patreon
[01:00:54] Adam: All right. This episode of working code is brought to you by the new cast of working code who haven't gotten themselves cancelled yet
[01:01:02] Tim: Hi, my name's Bowen Yang.
[01:01:06] Adam: And listeners, I think you just got yourself double
[01:01:08] Tim: Double canceled. Hey, if you're getting canceled, I'm getting canceled all
[01:01:10] Tim: the way, baby.
[01:01:13] Adam: and listeners like youif you're enjoying the show and you want to make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, You should consider supporting us on Patreon. Our patrons cover our recording, editing, and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them.
[01:01:25] Adam: Special thanks, of course, to our top patrons Monte and Giancarlo.
[01:01:28] Thanks For Listening!
[01:01:28] Adam: You guys rock. We are going to go record the after show, which is basically if you support us on Patreon. One of the perks you get is, you get a special feed where the outro music plays and then we keep talking about whatever, for however long we feel like.
[01:01:42] Adam: and not only do you get that, but you get it early ish. Uh, we have been so good at recording on schedule lately, so, you, you get it. and you get it when you get it and you, you don't get upset at it. heh heh heh.
[01:01:56] Tim: Thanks dad.
[01:01:58] Adam: anyway, after show is for patrons. If you want to become a patron, you can go to patreon.com/workingcodepod. We'd love to have you join the squad, join our discord. We've talked about it numerous times throughout the show. Go to workingcode.dev/discord. That's going to do it for us this week and we'll catch you next week. And until then
[01:02:15] Tim: I don't care what the book says. Your heart matters.
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