Coding Blocks - 200th Episode Extravaganza!

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

We step back and look at how things have changed since we first started the show while Outlaw is dancing on tables, Allen really knows his movie monsters, and Joe’s math is on point. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode200. News Thanks for the review nickname222Apple

you're listening to coding blocks episode 200 200 that's so amazing what a big number nobody has ever gotten to 200 in the history of pipe oh they have never mind okay all right well don't take it away from us we got to episode 200 it only took us like you know nine and a half years but we got there and that's the important thing so uh if you haven't already subscribed to us, you can find us in all of the major podcast platforms, iTunes, Spotify,

wherever you like to find your podcast, visit us at coding blocks.net, where you can find our show notes, examples, discussion, and more. Send your feedback questions and rants to comments at coding blocks.net. Follow us on Twitter at coding blocks.

And Hey, we got a website coding blocks.net. It's been up there for 200 episodes now. And we've got a bunch of social links there at the top of the page. And with that, I'm Joe Zach. That's right. Guess who's back? Back again.

Michael's back. Tell a friend. Okay, well, that got awkward. You know, it's like when you don't have the sound. I needed some more snare in my headphones. That's what I was missing. That's right. So, yeah, I'm Michael Outlaw.

I am the non-singing Alan Underwood. And today, I think we're just going to talk about all the things that we've learned or enjoyed. Not all the things. Some of the things that have stood out to us over the nine and a half years we've been doing this podcast i mean you know what's funny like we've hit 200 right like that to us that's a pretty big milestone um there's lots of podcasts at 200 the first year you know but i mean in fairness anybody that's been hanging out with us for long knows that we do these every two weeks.

Right. And they're usually, it's not us just sitting around, you know, chatting about nothing. You know, we have to do a bunch of research and all that stuff. So we're,

we're pretty excited and pretty proud that we've made it this far. Yeah. How about we're the best show to make it to episode 200? I agree. I concur. There we go. Well, I mean,

think about anything else that you've done for nine and a half years. Are you, you know, is there something else nine and a half years ago? Was there something you started nine and a half years ago besides like a Stephen King book? Is there something that you started nine and a half years ago that you're still doing today? Because it is a really long book. I mean, we can, we can agree, right? You're probably still reading It. All Stephen King books. And nobody's ever finished one, I don't think. Yeah, I can't think of anything. I mean, it's funny.

We were talking about this behind the scenes the other day. I mean, there are definitely times that it's like, man, I don't want to do this this week. I don't have time. I'm tired. And then we're all kind of like dragging each other across the finish line so at various different times right so yeah it's pretty awesome yeah indeed and i don't remember anything i've done for nine and a half years i do know that was three jobs i've got three jobs in that time you did it's pretty crazy that's right only three

was it yeah only three one was really short we've been through well no actually yours would have been four if you count the acquisition oh yeah okay yeah yeah even though i don't know maybe it does feels pretty different yeah so all right so real quick let's get into the podcast news and as always outlaw will lead us off with the names here all right so from itunes we have nickname two two two apple heart very nice so i'm assuming they meant heart so i think so yeah yeah uh speaking of hearts uh january is coming up uh january 20th 23rd we've got the third annual coding blocks game jam uh about to start up again. And it's going to be a lot of fun.

I don't know if you all thought about what you're going to do this year. I was hoping to steal Outlaw's audio capabilities again. That was a lot of fun last time. I was definitely thinking that I might just do random audio stuff and put it out there for everyone to use. That would be amazing. Yeah, excellent. It was a lot of fun like recording all the pew pew yeah do you guys remember the nissan commercials where they would like sample the the trunk closing and the doors opening the horn honking and they turned it into a song that's what it reminds me of like you're

just gonna throw out a bunch of little mixes that people can do stuff with okay awesome watch out oh no yeah that was good so much fun excellent all right so uh i guess jay-z you kind of put together like what we should talk about on this so you should probably lead it yeah i thought it might be fun to kind of talk about some things just kind of over the years uh so if you've been with us for a long time you know this show is for you and if you're uh brand new uh i mean it's still gonna be it's gonna be great this show's for you this show's for you it's for everybody uh so yeah i thought it'd be fun just to out the gate to talk about any episodes that kind of stuck out in your mind any ones that were like favorites or things that you just really enjoyed talking about so i guess um one of the ones that i had listed up there that it's funny like over the years i did never think about it but it it

opened my eyes to a lot of this and it was we still don't understand open source licensing and man i learned a lot from that episode, right? Like, hey, don't just willy-nilly throw any open source project into yours because you might be making your source code available to everybody and not even realize it, right? That was one that was truly eye-opening and changed how I view just grabbing free code. What about you, Allah?

Well, I mean, do you have to ask? Do you not already know? I can guess. If you had to guess. Yeah, so, okay. So, episode 90, our canonical episode now of the comparing Git workflows. I really enjoyed that one. And consistent with that theme, I came at it from the approach of series that we did.

So I super loved the Git from the bottom-up series that we did just recently. As long as we have all been using git and as much as we felt comfortable in you know working our way around git it was uh just that much more like i don't know eye opening or whatever however you want to phrase that but uh just getting that much more in-depth knowledge about git you know just kind of like made the matrix flex around me. You know, I felt like, ooh, now I super know it even better. Or, you know, at least feel more comfortable with it, you know, working my way around it.

So I really enjoyed that episode or that series. But then consistent with that series idea, I couldn't, like, originally I was like, let me just pick my top three, right? And as soon as I did the Git from the bottom up series, I'm like, well, I can't just pick one. And I, I couldn't. So I, I looked back at some of our past stuff and there were three other series that I was like, there's no way these can not be discussed. So designing data intensive applications, that series of, uh, or that, that book and series of episodes that we did.

I super loved that series. Just, uh, you know, like as I don't know, as, as anyone, like we can very easily take for granted things and not think about it. So you can teach me data structures and you'd be like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay. I get it. You know, sure. And you don't like really put it to practice. You don't really think about it. And I don't know why, but for some reason, this book series just kind of put into like things clicked with like the behind the scenes of databases and thinking about like, oh, yes, there's document

databases and there's, you know, relational databases. And then you have all the different, you know, streaming type technologies like a Kafka or whatever. But the thinking about like the data structures behind those technologies and why that might matter and impact, you know, what your use case is and to think about like your use case. And it just, it was, it was, uh, I don't know, kind of an eyeopening kind of kind of experience if that sounds right. Um, so I really enjoyed that and had that whole whole series in that book i mean that was

like one of i think collectively it was like the one book that i think that three of us all agreed on is like a top favorite book that we've done over the years fair oh yeah totally i remember i'm looking at the different databases remember that uh the website lets you like compare db engines and stuff and just kind of like looking and like having a better understanding just like based on the categorization of like what that database is good for and that was really good it came at a really good time for us too because like we were kind of switching technologies and stuff at the time and getting into different databases and so it really just kind of hit that sweet spot of like the things i really was interested in and needed to know at the time and to to piggyback on that i mean we talked about last

episode it was one of our favorite books um collectively as well but one the book is written so well which is huge for such a thick um learning set of of information but and impressive from somebody in a technical field. Right. But I think the one to me that I thought was most important is if I were going to pick any one series, like you said, episodes or book that could change or launch your career, this is probably it. Because depending on what you're trying to do, I mean, a lot of people are stuck in a database world or a lot of people are stuck with just a search engine world or whatever. This book will open up your eyes as to why you would choose different technologies for different use cases. Right. And, and I think having that understanding is just massively important when you're making decisions on what you're going to base your your applications on or what what feature of your application on so yeah i agree this was by far my

favorite and i still think this will be one of the few books that we actually finish beginning to end that's that's a big one do you remember the first book that we started? Like the first kind of book club thing? How to be a programmer? Was that it? Was it not Clean Code? Was it not Clean Code? I don't remember. I thought it was the How to Be a Programmer, but we can look that up. It looks like Jay-Z's already looking that up. So while he's looking that up, I'm going to go back to the next series that I thought had to be mentioned.

And that was the DevOps handbook series. I already is big fan of DevOps principles. Um, I thought that this book like helped or this, this series that we did, um, based on the book helped, I don't know solidify some some ideas or concepts or things that like um you know that i already thought about related to the show or related to the concept you know but it it and it helped clarify things where like you know where like i had wrong you know like where i had misconceptions or i was just wrong on, on certain things. And it helped to like, oh, okay. Technically that would be, uh, you know, not, uh, you know, that'd be anti DevOps or whatever, you know, something like some things like that. But that in, in really like there was the

accompanying, uh, book, the unicorn project, which we didn't talk about. It was more of like a fictional story, but, uh, at the time that we were going through the DevOps Handbook, I did, not only did I read the book, but I listened to the audio of both the DevOps Handbook and the Unicorn Project. And I really liked the fact that here's this technical concept that you're reading about. And then here's a fictional story to help put those technical

things into into practical uses so that you can kind of like better um grasp the ideas that the author was trying to get across i thought that was a pretty neat idea yeah i liked it um for me too with that one i wasn't as in love with with the DevOps thing as probably what you were when we first started that one. But I think by the time we were done with it, I was full on from an outsider looking in, I definitely saw a change in you, in your behavior, as it related to DevOps principles, from your view of things before we went into that series. And then when we came out of it, I was like, yep, that wouldn't...

I could tell it left a mark on you i could tell you could always tell because that i was the one that started arguing during meetings like hey you guys need to be thinking about this garbage right where's your dashboard right yeah yeah it definitely i mean it that's what's exciting about doing some of these things on the podcast right is is things that you didn't think about or that you didn't think you cared about. Like when you deep dive it, you're like, oh, man, this makes a lot of sense. It could make our lives collectively a lot better. Yeah. So many ideas that you didn't even know that you needed to care about.

And then somebody points it out to you in the book. And even reading it for the first time in the book, you can be kind of like a adversarial to it, you know, where you're like, well, yeah, but no, I don't think so.

And then, and then eventually like you come around to it and you're like, Oh, okay. I get it. Yeah. I get why. So,

uh, the last, the last series that I'm, I'm going to throw out there. And I know this is like my, the fourth series, but I thought this was another one of those that just could not go unmentioned is the imposter's handbook.

And the thing that I loved about this book was, or the series in the series that we did on it was there was just so many great nuggets of knowledge that were like compressed, you know? So it wasn't like super verbose but you know you got the information that you needed to take in and also to it was like things that you might have been taught you know when you were in school like at you know college or university but you never like really thought again about, you know, and

then forget about it or whatnot. And so it was like just a great refresher on, on that kind of stuff. Um, you know, so I don't know. I, I super enjoyed that, that series. All right, go ahead. I saw you on mute. Oh yeah. I was just going to say, uh, I did, uh, some, some research there. And, uh, the first book we talked about was how to be a programmer in 2016. We did that series three parts, and then we got into clean code in 2017. But you know, what's interesting. So if you look back just at our older episodes, and like even the books that we talked about in the beginning, very focused on like, code, like, in boxing and unboxing interfaces, like uh even the tips we gave were very oriented around like you know develop like a you know being in ide and kind of writing low-level code and then now if you look at like the books we talk about and read about like we're looking at devops we're looking at different databases you know just uh the kind of the scope of the show i think is has kind of changed i think it has to kind of lined up with our career growth and so

the kinds of things that we think about and kind of struggle with or you know research on the side is that has kind of uh just changed over the years it's been interesting to see yeah hey real quick on the imposter's handbook too so or actually all the ones you mentioned so it's it's kind of interesting that his all line up basically with what Jay-Z and I had said on the last episode. So maybe again, that gives some weight to what we think would be valuable and important to you. If you are a person that's coming along in their career, just starting off your career, like the information that we've gathered over nine and a half years of heavy research, right? Like this wasn't casual learning because we were having to do it for the podcast. And these are all the ones that impacted us a lot. And so that's, that says

something. But the other thing I mentioned was designing data intensive applications. Totally feel like that could change, um, like how well you do in your career, depending on where you stay, whether you go cloud or whatever like there's a lot of good information the imposter's handbook i believe is one of those types of books and that series of information that can help you get your foot in the door somewhere because it'll refresh you on the cs terminology it'll refresh you on things like graph algorithms and and all that kind of stuff. And man, that's the kind of thing that if you're interviewing with a Netflix, a Google and Amazon,

that's the kind of stuff that they hit you hard with when you come in for an interview. So that is a great series of episodes that we did in that book in general, that can help you get your foot in the door at one of these larger um you know tech companies yeah absolutely and uh oh uh first of all my favorite episode so uh some some of the ones that i picked out that i really liked and i'll go in order here uh one of the first ones i really liked was actually boxing and unboxing and dot net remember that one i do that was like episode two two yeah yeah yeah i remember picking out the stock image for that one uh i still like that one had that like

a lady boxer it was cool but yeah and it was just cool because i got to like learn some things i did some experiments i could experiment with like iolasm or dasm and there's just some things that i always kind of wanted to dive into and so it's cool to do that also docker uh that was one of my favorite episodes because you know it was like at the time where like there's just things changing in my career and also just in the development world and so it's kind of cool to like it we weren't on the like cutting edge of docker you know there are people that were kind of doing stuff with it before and obviously containerization has been around for a long time but it was just cool to kind of like um have something that we kind of researched that like paid such huge dividends over the years uh the elastic search episode i really liked same

thing there it was just uh it was really cool to to be learning about that and that was uh around the same time we were reading the ddia book and so that um it was just cool to learn about that kind of database and how it worked underneath the covers and the reverse index and all that do you remember this one uh the recursion show show recursion show one of my favorite show titles yeah love that one uh it's kind of funny you can see that we experiment even with different titles and episodes like they're ones that were like kind of more funny where the first one was like eyes for interface you know kind of like the sesame street thing and others that were like very direct anyway uh show recursion show i just like the lack of i remember at the time like going through and uh kind of looking at just different languages and like tail recursion and how like recursion

like really worked underneath into the frames and all that stuff and then kind of the stack and the heap and it was just like some stuff i learned a lot from uh also another one that's kind of more recent uh i i can't believe this episode is actually in 2021 but it's the why is python popular episode remember that one yeah as we know i'm not the biggest python fan so i really wanted to know it's like why do other people like it so i tried to try really hard to kind of figure that out it was just cool to kind of learn about the ecosystem and the evolution and like i kind of think of things from a less technical angle and more of just like a kind of a cultural angle so that was one of my favorites and i think we all understood we came to the conclusion that your favorite uh why it was so

popular were the virtual environments right that's what you love out of python oh yeah definitely yeah and the python two to three switch nailed it uh going back to the boxing and unboxing thing i like the one thing though that will stick with me for the remainder of my life though was that you know we we thought we were like you know digging into some like weeds with boxing and unboxing right because like how many times do you ever have a conversation about boxing and unboxing any kind of variable in like your day job right so here we thought we were like you know like really uncovering something we're going like super deep on some like super nerdy topic that nobody would ever discuss at the work you know at the at the water cooler and then randomly like the next day or two days later, after we recorded the episode, might've even been after we released it, somebody randomly who hadn't listened to the podcast

started talking about like, well, yeah, but why are you going to do it? You're boxing the variable. And we're like, what just happened? Right. Right. That was Vlad, wasn't it? Yeah, it was Vlad. Yeah.

Yeah. Of course it would be Vlad. Yeah. What do you do for fun? I write web server. Yeah. Really? I'll web server. Really? I'll be doing well if you're out there.

We love Vlad. The timing of that episode and that random conversation in the wild happening will just always stand out in my mind. I knew as soon as you started talking about this that that's what you were going to say. Because I remember all of us were kind of slacked on it. Like, wait, who talks like that? Like, no, really? Uh, yeah. And there are some like show titles that, you know, cause like behind the scenes, like I always put together, you know, I try to like come up with a show title that, uh, depending

on like the tone of the episode or whatnot, like, you know, to try to come up with a show title that, depending on the tone of the episode or whatnot, to try to match that. But sometimes I like to have fun with it. And I especially like to have fun, if you ever notice the opening paragraph to any of our show notes pages, I always like to have fun with that. the old uh uh top gun or not top gun top gear episodes with uh you know the three amigos uh clarkson and uh captain slow and uh which richard no richard hammond yeah jeremy clarkson and i was trying to say i was trying to think of that richard was his last name and i'm like no that's that's not right but yeah um so like, so like in, in the event, in the spirit of like their old, uh,

top gear, like that's always kind of like what's been in the back of my mind when I'm writing that opening paragraphs, I like to have fun with it, but show recursion show was definitely one of those titles where like it was, uh, you know, one of my,

uh, you know, kind of favorites. And it was, and it was a play on Joe recursion, Joe, who is one of the, you know, one of my, uh, you know, kind of favorites. And it was, and it was a play on Joe recursion, Joe, who is one of the, you know, community members in our Slack community and long time listener. And so I was kind of like having fun with both of them because we referenced him in, in the episode. And so it was kind of like had, had a double, you know, double win there yeah yeah yeah that's tough so i because i totally agree with

the ones that that you guys listed above i didn't really add very many more but there were a couple that i really enjoyed um when we were going over the hierarchical database patterns um when we were talking about path enumeration and adjacency lists and all those, like, I don't know that we would still do that in those technologies nowadays, depending on what we were actually trying to do. But, man, those were great eye-opening things to solving problems in unique ways, basically using datauring as as your force driver for it so um i really enjoyed those uh back in the day and i'm sure there's there's tons more but those were really good oh yeah totally yeah i mean nested set models we did a lot of it we did we did a lot of it yeah how do you not how you not uh in love nested set model so you know yeah it was really quick uh surprisingly fast and yeah that was a really cool episode and

that was another one that paid dividends for us well it was actually it was it was uh there were two episodes for it oh yeah it looks like somebody deleted the other one um oh you're you're doing the tags on it got it um yeah so yeah really good stuff what about events any uh particular events that stand out to you guys man the first one you got listed there ndc when i did that one went over and met jamie and um oh man this is terrible. Zach, James, Steve Gordon. Yeah, I mean, so many people. And that was so much fun. Like, I totally enjoyed that when we went over to London, met up with a bunch of people from the podcast I'd never met before. That one was an absolute blast. I will say I got less sleep in a week's time doing that because I was up every night until two or three o'clock in the morning tweaking my slides, trying to make my presentation better.

You know, like it was it was a little nerve wracking, but man, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, I remember all the names because I was so jealous. I wanted to meet all those people. And then that was right before COVID hit. And so everything shut down. It was just a yeah, was right as covet hit yeah pretty much it was that january right january 2020 it was the end of january beginning of february and i don't know if i told you guys this and probably have mentioned it to those guys as well on my flight back from london at the at the airport they were, have you been to China in the past 14 days? And I'm like, no, I'm in London. And when we get back to the States, it was like the next week,

the, the sort of everything hit the fan and there, and this COVID thing comes out and then it was only a couple of weeks later and they shut down the country, right? Or the world. So, yeah, it was definitely interesting because I was right at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown stuff when we were leaving. Yeah, and I got a couple other here. We went to a lot of CodeCamps. The two that we went to that we actually were all together for were Atlanta CodeCamp. I think we did at least one of those. And then Orlando CodeCamp, I know, was it two of of those we did i forget yeah i think so yeah and then we're supposed to do more and then yeah you were at you were asking like which one stood out it was

i'm pretty sure it was the orlando one that super stood out for me yep uh one of them that we did i don't remember because there was like a, we had the night before there was a dinner. And I think both of you gave a presentation at that one, but that was definitely like pre-pandemic kind of timeframe. So it was a super happening crowded time. It was back in the time where like, we were so innocent back then. Everybody would like get together and squeeze, you know, like whatever the occupancy capacity was for a room like we would definitely like you know that times two right and squeeze in and uh yeah so that that one was a super uh fun time yeah that's what i was like you'd be like where's outlaw it's

like oh he's being carried around by people oh Oh, now he's carrying other people around. Now he's standing on a table dancing. Now he's... I kept my shirt on. That's right. Yeah, that was a good one. That was a really social event in contrast to the last couple of years. It's been crazy.

South Florida Camp was a really cool one for me. I got to meet some really cool people. Hello out there, Griss and crew. Tampa Code Camp, also really cool one for me got to meet some really cool people so uh you know hello out there gris and crew uh tampa code camp also really cool um yeah so just a lot of fun you know doing there's a lot of meetups and stuff here to do that i didn't put in um i don't know if there were any meetups that we actually all made it to together um but uh yeah just just some really cool times hey we did go to one meetup where scott hanselman was down there in orlando remember that that's right yeah that was really cool hey little fan uh-huh that was fun wait we were there like all three of us alan and i were oh was were you not i was there yeah alan was there i don't think all of us okay so yeah my bad my memory i really don't remember this yeah yeah i forget why what were you down

for me i was probably down on vacation and we hooked up as my guest yeah i don't know yeah and john came over from uh tampa yeah yeah it was a good time yeah i also want to shout out the this is a virtual event with game jams we've had two of them which has been awesome like i've been going back and watching the videos and stuff you know promoting for the next one and it's just so cool to see like all the different games and different takes on it's just been awesome like i've been going back and watching the videos and stuff you know promoting for the next one and it's just so cool to see like all the different games and different takes on it and just so much like color and just like i don't know i just think it's super cool like there's like this new stuff in the world that people just made out of their brains and quickly right like i mean we're talking over well i mean minus some of the submissions that

you could tell basically just jump from Game Jam to Game Jam. But for the most part, they were all, you know, fairly new and unique. And it was a lot of fun seeing that. Yeah, totally. And, you know, it's crazy. Like, the window is basically the weekend, right? You get the 20th to the 23rd coming up. But a lot of people spend four hours in that weekend.

You know, they got just life stuff going on. So, you know, just because it's open for windows, I mean, people are spending, you know they got just life stuff going on so you know just because the it's open for windows i mean people are spending you know 48 hours you got sleep in there all sorts of stuff and so it's just amazing to me to just see what people come up with and whatever time that they want to put in yep oh and i got a big one here uh so remember when we started a slack isn't that crazy yep uh do you remember the first person joined besides us besides us i think it was techies uk i'm not totally sure on that but i think i think you really first yeah yeah i can find out really yeah you could pull the user list and see

they're they're in order computer no no like you could use the api to pull the the user list and they would be in order um and that that's how so i know that because i previously had a script that is now broken and i haven't taken the time to fix it yet um due to the credentials but one of the things that it did was it would go download the user list and uh so so you know you you see how like i'll share pet pictures as part of the episode uh cover art you know or hero art where everyone call it the hero image for the episode and uh the way i was doing that was i had a script that would go in. Anyone that posted things to pet pictures, it would go and scrape that channel for the pet pictures. And I would save them with whatever the user's name were so that I would know who to contact to say, hey, are you okay with me using this and um the so the user list that slack would report you would see like when

they create it when they came back and like it it's default ordering was just in order of um or at least it was at the time it was in uh order of creation it's not in order if you go into the website but uh just really quickly i looked up and he joined in january of 2016 and i joined in december of 2015 man that's awesome two weeks yeah i do remember james like giving outlaw some garbage when he first joined like get closer to the mic it's like it's like the very first memories i have on slack yeah yeah that was awesome the crazy thing is is that between the three of us i'm the closest one to the mic and i'm also mike so that's double mike yeah you got double miked what's going on man

yeah that was awesome yeah we got a lot of people from wales joined to remember like right in the beginning so all those people that we mentioned earlier actually were like some of the earliest uh earliest joiners yeah and yeah like who would have thought like uh i think we're over 7 000 uh total people and that's of course not the number of active people um but uh it's just amazing to me like i didn't think anyone would join it was just kind of like a little experiment and really took off and like so many of these people now i've been talking to for you know 2015 2016 oh my gosh however many you know 22 minus hold on give me a few minutes 22 minus 15 geez let me get a calculator out uh 70 70 70 years high we've been hanging out

for 70 years now i mean that's amazing uh yeah we have made some really good friends we've met people like it's been truly amazing like when we do the meetups we'd run into people who like man i've been listening to the show and you know if you ever want to see outlaw in his element go to one of these meetups man like when we did the code camps and all that kind of stuff because you, behind the scenes information here, we're going to go ahead and throw it out there. When I approached these guys, 2013 is when we started this, right? Yeah. 2013. Um, we were constantly at work doing kind of what we do on this podcast. Like, oh, how are we going to solve this problem? What do we need to do here? And we'd have hour long conversations on what to do and if we're

standing around like hey man we should start a podcast i know you listen to podcasts i listen to podcasts let's just start one he can't be that hard and jay-z i thought would be the one that would be like no no i'm not doing this because he's sort of the more quiet calm you know laid back guy he was totally like let's do it and thenlaw, who is the talker, the boisterous guy, he's like, no, man, I can't do that. I'm like, what are you talking about, man? He's like, no, man, I can't do it. I'm too nervous. I can't talk in front of people.

I'm like, you're not talking in front of people. You're talking in front of a microphone. Let's do it. We had to drag him into it. And so you'd think that he would be the nervous guy, man. You put him in front of a booth at an event, man, he's in his element. I'm a people person. I'm good with people.

Yep, yep. So, yeah. But what I was saying with that, the slack,'s sort of bled over into real life, right? Like if we get an opportunity to go somewhere and there are people in that area, then we're like, Hey, let's hook up. Let's go do dinner. Let's eat lunch. Let's, let's talk. Let's do whatever. And it's, it's been amazing. Like we've met a lot of really awesome people and we've said it many times on this show. Our Slack channel is full of some of the most incredible people around in dev because usually,

I mean, you can see what happens online. Um, like usually people aren't very nice. There's trolls. We have an incredible community of people and they are super willing to help and very nice to each other. Yeah.

It's amazing. Like the number of like instance we've had over, you know, 70 years is, I, it's just incredible. It's been like two, you know, it's amazing like the number of like instance we've had over you know 70 years is i it's just incredible it's been like two you know it's been fantastic yeah and that many people yeah it's just nuts so yeah it's been amazing so i've been i that's like definitely my favorite thing that's come out of the podcast in general and like talking to people in uh oregon or colorado or you know w Wales or New Zealand or whatever. Ohio. Yeah.

And like there's people that we met from Ohio that were like, I don't know, probably 15 at the time. Right. It's crazy. I'm just kidding. Sorry. They're adults now. Yeah. And they're adults now.

They're working at, you know, very large like thing companies and just the trajectory of like how their their career has gone, their lives have changed you know gotten married had kids like it's just crazy to just think that that stuff may not have happened if we hadn't tried making a slack so we're at least it would have happened we just i wouldn't have known about it right yeah that's probably true well the thing is is if you recall it too like the whole reason why we went slack was i super wanted to start a forum i wanted a forum of some kind but the thing that i didn't like about forums and and like any kind of like social media platforms too was just like the uh you know the the persistence i guess it just being there forever like sometimes you just wanted to have a conversation and like, you know, it's okay if you missed the conversation, like, you know,

you don't get to go back and follow up on it. Right. That happens in your real life. Right. So why, why should it be any different in, uh, an online experience too? And so, uh, and plus I didn't want to have to like moderate the forums, you know, with like to make sure that, you know, it was staying clean and whatnot. Because I've seen some where they got out of control and you're like, whoa, okay, now this is evolving into something else. And so that was the thing that I liked about Slack was that on their free tier like the history is just you know gone you don't get you don't get it and i'm like yeah okay that way things can just age out naturally you know as part of the conversation and you know if you're there for the conversation great you get to hear it and listen and partake and you know if you missed it that's okay too

whatever yeah it's kind of weird to think about like people coming in 10 years after you made a forum post or something and like seeing what you said or thought about and's kind of weird to think about people coming in 10 years after you made a forum post or something and seeing what you said or thought about and maybe thinking that you still think that way or kind of resurrecting old threads or whatever. It's just kind of weird, almost creepy to think about people you're not thinking about and don't even know yet reading what you're saying. And the things that could be completely taken out of context, too. Like one statement that was made 10 years ago and then taken out of context. And you're like, well, I mean, if you're part of the conversation then it seemed like so that was that was the one thing i liked about the free tier on on slack and uh you know why i was like a big big proponent for it yeah it's funny everyone's while slack will just upgrade us randomly to be like hey you're on

the pro slack check it out for a little bit and it's like oh actually can we turn this feature off like yeah we don't want that we want that there's some downsides to like i hate there's been times like that advent of code is going on right now uh so there's a channel for advent of code that you know every december it gets real active and then it goes away for the rest of the year and if you join the slack in june and go look in that channel there's nothing there because this aged out so there's like all these kind of ghost towns but sometimes they spin back up so we've been reluctant to close them it's a little bit awkward but just you know if you want to join this like come on in

it's a little awkward it's a little weird but uh you know so are we so come on in the seller jay-z's are closer so uh yeah i guess on that like some of the things have kind of changed when we started like uh Jay-Z's are closer. So, yeah, I guess on that note, some of the things have kind of changed when we started social media. I think all of our views on social media and just what social media even means and is changed a lot over the last nine and a half years. Was Instagram even around 10 years ago?

Well, we left MySpace for Facebook, and now we're back to myspace yeah no but no you're right though i i think instagram like it had just started right like it was fairly new yeah so it launched in ios for ios in 2010 but you know it's still pretty pretty um you know minimal but um the the date that i always kind of think of instagram is like really starting is when they released their windows 10 app in 2016 that's that's the kicker for you no sorry i said around their windows 10 mobile app oh back when there was windows phones remember that was the thing for a minute there i missed windows phone you had one didn't you i did i loved it nice yeah when was the earth uh instagram purchased yeah i was gonna say that's the date that everybody really cares

about yeah 2012 so that's when they bought it so okay so we were we were right after that yeah but yeah i mean remember that movie that came out about social media um there's like the social network what was the documentary on netflix that just kind of talked about the downside social dilemma social dilemma yes that with other movie facts yeah that just kind of changed and so it's one of those things where like we're kind of a you know a social media company in a way and that we pursue produce media and we're social but uh also like you know we are also leery of facebook and twitter and TikTok and all those things. So it's kind of a weird thing where if we didn't have the Slack, I think it would be really hard to communicate with people because we kind of stay off those platforms in a lot of ways. Well, I think a lot of those that so there's definitely been things that have happened in recent years related to like your views of social media but also

i think where the start of that happened at least maybe for me was the um the snowden release happened after we had started if i recall and his revelations or maybe it wasn't before now now i'm thinking his was before in like the 2009 timeframe. Because that's when like, as an industry, things started to get hardened down, right? You know, like a more, you know, industry wide concerted effort to go from HTTP to HTTPS, like simple things like that, you know, like encrypt all the things and um you know like

are you really gonna put all that out there because you know somebody's watching yeah it's like 2011 looks like okay so it was before i think for for us like like i mentioned with the slack it's generally like a bunch of just people being pretty nice to each other. I mean, they crack jokes, whatever. And it seemed like social media went in an opposite direction over the years where there's a ton of negativity.

And we were just like, man, I don't, there's actually been that there's actually some interesting, um, like documentary or like interview type things on that. Like there was one from one of the Google heads. I don't remember who it was,

but I think it was like one of the two founders. And he was talking about like, you know, if you think about it from like a Facebook or Twitter kind of point of view, you know, picking on those two, since they're like the two, the two big social platforms keying off of what you just said, Alan, it's easy for their algorithms to promote... Let me see if a nice way to say this. If you think about the things that are going to generate an emotion

and a reaction out of you to cause you to do something like to click a button or a reshare, you know, usually more often than not, it's going to be the things that are like, um, inflammatory. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, like, and so, so these algorithms innocently, you know, created can start to elevate some of that type of to do that sort of things he's like well yeah i mean it makes sense why that type of speech was happening you know for for years and they've definitely been working to try to curb that you know um because it is it is a hard problem but then you know you go back and think about like oh well how many like machine learning kind of conversations have you ever seen where it started with Twitter sentiment analysis?

And you're like, okay, well, I guess we need more of that. Right, yeah. It makes sense. You think about if you're browsing for videos or something, are you going to watch a video about something that seems like a level-headed, nuanced accounting of uh you know different sides are you going to watch the thing that's like either ticks you off because it's so opposite of what you think or it's the thing that like you agree with it's so obvious that other people don't get you know it like it tends to it tends to just kind of promote those like things that cause like you know conflicts and uh it's you know scary and so yeah it's definitely changed how i view social media and like all that stuff is like really kind of come to the forefront in the last couple years there's been a lot of stuff from where the cambridge analytica thing and um you know snowden like you mentioned the snowden actually

snowden's thing happened in 2013 it just kind of started a little bit in 2011 oh so it was around that time okay and there was like i mean wikileaks you know elections we talk about people talking about like manipulating and now it's like there's a lot of bots and so there's a lot of talk about like kind of fake accounts from real accounts and you know things being generated and that's not even getting into like nfts and like right like pump and dump like there's been a lot of like kind of financial issues around like cryptocurrencies being misused or kind of scams going on there like i mean it's just uh it's crazy so it's somewhere that we've grown to be a lot more cautious i think over the last nine and a half years now that doesn't mean we don't

love it when somebody adds us at coding blocks or whatever on twitter like we love that and we'll share it and we'll reply and we'll do all that kind of stuff but um we aren't as active as what we had initially planned to be there just just for that reason right so yeah because we're not we're not trying to be controversial we're trying to help people right like we're trying to help people grow their careers and us grow ours and and all that right and so yeah it just worked out the slack ended up being the place that people seem to get along really well which is really odd yeah it's that it's like if you want to do well on twitter you got to post like here's 10 javascript threads uh 10 javascript tips a thread

and you need to like leave one or two things out so that people like you know can go in there and say like can't believe you left a bugger off because that's how you get interactions but uh slack like how you have good interactions is like you talk to people and like you put good interactions out you get good interactions back in like that seems just so much better to me yeah uh so so slack the ultimate social media platform yeah who knew um right uh mentioned this earlier so it will not dwell on a bit but like um when we started i mean we're heavy dot net users like all of us were dot net like cutting blocks dot net like that was you know we had intentional kind of branding there where we really wanted to kind of focus on.NET.

And then a couple of years later, I'm like, I haven't touched.NET and who knows how long, you know, I still like it. You know, it wasn't it wasn't something that I actively tried to get away from. It just that's just how things went down. So I do miss.NET, but, you know, it's kind of changed the scope of the show, definitely from how we thought we'd be doing things well you know what's funny about that is like yourself like i haven't done a ton of dot net development in a couple years but we pretty quickly steered away from just doing all dot net right up at the beginning right like we did the boxing and unboxing um even i as for interface, we sort of focused on that. But right after that, I think all three of us had a conversation.

We were like, you know what? There's a lot of good information that is cross-cutting, you know, across the entire industry. Let's just let's focus on making people better developers and not so much on a particular language. I think it largely just went with our own personal um interest to the time like as our personal interest would change you know so did uh so did the show yeah sure and you know what's funny is all of our interests have gone in various directions right like i would say that outlaw was the one that was like let's do devops handbook. And I was like, eh, okay, I'm along. And it was something that I really liked, right?

And designing data-intensive applications, I think Jay-Z mentioned it. I was like, I'm in, right? And I think that was one where Outlaw was like, yeah, I don't know. I guess we'll do it. And then when we got into it, he's like, this is fantastic. And that's kind of what's been cool is, you know, if I had just been on my own looking at stuff, I probably would have gotten that designing data intensive applications. I've never looked at the DevOps stuff. Right.

And there's probably several paths that we've all taken along the way that sort of pulled each of us down. And it's made us all better for it. And that's pretty cool to see over a 10 year period. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. for it and and that's pretty cool to see over over a 10-year period yeah yeah absolutely uh i guess and we kind of mentioned our careers being um similar the show format uh remember in the beginning we like really wrote things out like i mean basically i think episode two was the one that we threw away and we recorded because we kind of wrote out like what we were going to say almost like it was a book yeah i couldn't stand it together it was line for line yeah i was like this is not gonna work yep like you shared a

screenshot too of like one of the first episodes like i think it was eyes for interface where uh you know when you were editing and the cutting of cutting up of it and i was like there is no way guys like we gotta just go through like you make a mistake, just move on. Like, okay, it's okay. We can, we can talk around it. Yeah. We can, you know, the mistake, the mistake talking about the mistake is better. It makes it more entertaining.

Otherwise you're just, it's a book. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt, but no, no, no. I think speaking of mistakes, I mean, that's actually one of the things that there've been a couple episodes that i think that all of us have collectively been like oh we didn't love that one but then we're just like let's put it out there and and sometimes we got some major kickback on some of those right like the first get series one that we did where we read that one dude's article and it turned out

half the stuff he said and it was wrong and And me personally, I hadn't verified some of it. And, and we got tons of kickback on that one. And it's like, you know what? Hey, we'll just come out with the next episode and be like, yeah, sorry about that.

No learned our lesson moving forward. Coincidentally, our most discussed episode on Twitter and Facebook. So, you know, exactly what Jay-Z said, put something wrong out in the world and people will nail you to the wall yeah yeah so i do miss the surveys a little bit but it's also nice to not

have to do them like there's some overhead just some additional steps of doing like the show notes and stuff for survey says oh yeah yeah although although that stuff could always come back right like we yeah totally i mean i can't that's what we i think over time what we really wanted to focus on was getting information out there but having fun right and that's you know i mean we've we've gotten some feedback over the years we're like you know people come in expecting like professorial type talking and we're like yeah that's not us um that's what you're looking for you can go find somebody else that's totally fine but but yeah we wanted it to be fun and loose yep yeah i was kind of coming at it originally from like almost like this american life angle where like you know this every story had like a every

episode like a story arc or something to it like you had a you know beginning middle end and yeah that's just not not sustainable like those people have full-time jobs uh and some of the stories if you're listening to like the radio lab or it's like some of the big time the most popular shows like serial or whatever like some of those that the people like the the reporters on the show will spend months on just one episode they'll kind of go off and work on that and come back so they have these big teams of people that actually get all the episodes out for a year yeah i was going to say there's also a team of people trying to put together that story and like edit all the pieces together and help out with that you know versus just three people and they're getting full-time salaries

right like we're not getting that yeah we are by and large mostly doing this um because we want to help people out if you want to help us up sign up for the patreon yeah there you go you know we never did a picture that's another one of those things that just started oh yeah you know funny thing is i was looking up things that kind of started uh while we were uh you know kind of already doing the show no js was started it was first released in 2009 but the year it gained popularity was 2017 wow so when we started the show like node.js was still like you know kind of a fringe like not really such a big deal it's kind of crazy i remember somebody i remember somebody talking about it to me before i'd even met you guys and i was like get out of here j. JavaScript on the server. What are you talking about?

I was wrong. Ain't nobody got time for that. So what about your media consumption habits? How have they changed over time? Yeah, I mentioned, you know, kind of Twitter and Facebook, you know, like using less of those for sure. I don't even know the last time I've updated my Facebook. But I do a lot of YouTube nowadays, which I didn't really do before. Not that it wasn't around before. It just,

you know, different. I still check hacker news and read it all the time. I haven't been to slash dot in forever. And that's probably something I would have said nine years ago. Yeah. I don't even know why. Yeah.

I think it was Reddit. Reddit killed slash dot. Did it was Reddit. Reddit killed Slashdot. Did it? Probably. What about you? What's your media consumption outlaw? I mean, it's definitely changed. I was thinking it more, like, some of the things you suggested or said were more from, like, a creation point of view.

And I was coming at it more from, like, the actual consumption. Because my consumption has definitely changed. I mean, you know, lack of commute plays a part. And then I don't know, like we were already not commuting before the pandemic, but for some reason, the pandemic just changed my, my you know, listening habits. so yeah I've definitely pared down there used to be a truckload of podcasts that I burned through and now I've

pared it down um so yeah I guess it got less yeah that's interesting I I'm actually so I I took what Jay-Z said is all consumption like the reddit and all that kind of stuff I figure that's probably where you're well I guess I meant that you he said something about he started with like Facebook and Twitter and you and then moving to YouTube and I took that as like creating posting things but mine is definitely consuming from YouTube because like YouTube to me is like the DIY network like on-demand DIY network. And I love that whether I'm learning something like coding or, or how to build something or whatever, it doesn't matter. Like it's one of my number one go-tos now.

I too have cut back a lot on podcasts. I'm not sure why. I think it was the pandemic also for me. It was like, I needed a break. I'm going to find one. I'm going to find this video i know alan you're gonna love it and and if you've already seen it then stop me out i won't bother but uh this guy i guess he lives in his parents basement like the majority of the time

and uh or you know spends the majority of his time in his parents basement but the basement was you know concrete walls like there's no windows to the outside world and so to combat that he wanted to have a window and you know obviously he couldn't because he's underground so he put in three uh like ridiculously sized tvs but mounted uh on their on on end so they're vertical, as the windows. And then built them in. So it looks like they're windows to the world that he could just display whatever he wanted to display. Melting the polar ice caps.

And you watch him build this thing. Hold on, wait. It started. You watch him build this thing, and you're started you watch him build this thing and you're just like oh that was a cool idea oh so here's the video for that i'll put yeah i want that but like alan said there's something like late stage capitalism about like having pictures of the outside here tv show right yeah yeah you know what you can do you can go out there but well but i mean but no no no no in fairness in fairness if your

office is in the basement right you know that's your office right and so there can be from from like uh it can be like mentally taxing on you totally to like not see daylight or you know changes of the seasons or whatnot yep and so that's what he was talking about you know at the start was that he wanted to be able to like work in his, in the office, in the basement, but you know, feel like he could,

you know, see the water flowing down a stream or something. I was definitely being facetious on that one, but, but yeah, I mean, I've listened to more audio books now for, for that escape.

Right. And I think that started happening during the pandemic. Cause it's like I was spending so much time working that I needed, I needed that escape and, and podcasts, mine were mostly tech or programming oriented. And it was like, man, I gotta, I gotta get away from this. I need some fiction in my life. And, and so I think some of those things change. And then YouTube, again, I just, you know, how to build some bookshelves or how to, how to make this or how to code or how, whatever I love, man, I've talked about it before. Give me a YouTube video

and the ability to jack it up to 1.75 speed, man, I can consume some information that way. I love it. I absolutely love it. And I never got into TikTok. Like, obviously, there's some privacy concerns there, a lot of privacy concerns there. But to me, like, the way I use YouTube is still very, like, I search for something specific and I watch a video,

maybe I queue up another one, and then I go watch something else specific. So, like, just the kind of, like, content discovery thing hasn't really been that interesting to me? You know, other than when the next video starts auto-playing, sometimes I keep it going, but usually I'm, you know, it's more targeted for me anyway. Same. Yeah. Oh, I love this next question. Yeah. Have you had any viewpoints that have changed? I want to start off on this one. Yeah. So,

so this one was sort of exciting for me in, in my career development. So when we all met, I think probably most of us were living in a database centric world, right? So whether it be SQL server or Oracle or whatever, like your application, the heart of that application was always in the database. And with that, I would have even argued at the time, like all your business logic should be there because that's where your data is. And that's where you can perform that logic on that data, right? If you, I can't think of a business use case right now, but you would craft your joins and your unions and all that kind of stuff, and it would be right there. And so your application could just grab that and then send it back, right? Like you didn't have to worry about anything. Well, I think the way we used to refer to it, it was like data logic.

Yeah, yeah. So like data logic belonged in the data tier. Yeah, totally. And over the years, I have probably almost 100% flipped from that. Because at one point you would have had to have fought me to have taken that logic out of the database, right? And as you start getting into scale issues, and I think that's a big one. But I think the one that was even more important to me that grew on me from

outlaw was testability. Like, you don't have the same ability to test your business logic. And this is one place where designing, uh, our, uh, what was it? Domain driven design. This is one of the big impacts that particular book had on me is you can put that logic in your application tier and test it forever. Right. And it's easy to test. It's easy to reason about. You can reduce your errors and all that kind of stuff. Now, there are other challenges that you face now when you're trying to get data out of a database and pushing it across places. But that was one of the biggest flips for me mentally was your logic belongs in the application tier where it can be tested, hardened, and all that kind of stuff. And that was a huge one for me.

Yeah, I definitely thought of the databases being the heart of the application. I think even when we talked about like where to do procs or whatever, I just always kind of thought like you should do it in code so it's testable. But, you know, I struggled because I still thought of the database as being essential. So it's like the lowest level you should put it there because it would be most consistent. Because all code that you write in the future because the database is the king. And definitely that perspective has just totally changed. Yeah, it's interesting too. I thought you were going to go a different approach.

Like, well, you know, I used to like you guys and now. I mean, that's actually one thing that I think has worked out well is, I mean, we were all, we were friends, we were work, work associates and stuff together. But I, I mean, absolutely would consider you guys like two of my closer friends. And that's happened over a 10 year period, right? Like they haven't always been glorious times. Like there've been times where we're like, no man,

don't do that. Or you don't do that. Or we can't do like, we disagree. And that's one thing that happens, right? Like even on approaches. And,

and I think that's actually made us all better developers over time as well. And again, like good friends. So, yeah, I mean, while there are times that we probably want to put each other in headlocks or whatever, we, actually made us all better developers over time as well and again like good friends so yeah i mean well there are times that we probably want to put each other in headlocks or whatever we i don't think we ever aired any of that so um nobody's actually kicked jay-z in the shins yet because once they meet him they're like oh he's bigger than i am and it just doesn't happen i've thought

about it i've deserved it seriously like ah get that guy next time yeah i mean yeah you really should at the cc of me like oh wait no i think you can take me so the other one was technologies we use what did you mean by technology was this just like in general technology not necessary technologies that we use, but technologies that have changed over time? Like, you know, GraphQL is a thing that started that came up afterwards or like what were you thinking? Yeah, I was just like the rise of cloud computing, like, you know, AWS was I went to the first re-invent in 2011. So that was still, you know, like AWS like aws like saying hey we should have a conference for this cloud computing stuff you know so when did like s3 come out so like or here's a better

one when did azure come out it was before we were recording for sure yeah okay 2008 so yeah i actually know 2010 febru 1st, 2010. Okay. So yeah, it was still pretty new. You know, like a lot of like, you know, AWS is like the number of services. Like, I don't know. It's probably like under 10 or, you know, somewhere around there. And now it's like 2000 or something ridiculous. AWS is a little.

Oh, it was announced in 2008. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's changed a lot, right? Yeah. How you think about things? Like, I mean, obviously containerization is a huge one there, like Kubernetes. I don't know. It seems like everything existed longer than I think, but definitely people weren't talking about it like they do now. No, you know, one of my biggest rants on cloud and it drives me

absolutely crazy is it's, it's amazing what you can do with it, right? Like if you don't have a whole team of people, like you can just use a service and it works. It's amazing, but you can also lose so much money on it with things that you just don't even realize you provisioned and didn't kill off at some point or whatever. Like, I honestly believe that cloud was designed to be the place. It's like that subscription you didn't know you at some point or whatever like yeah i honestly believe that cloud was designed to be the place it's like that subscription you didn't know you signed up for right like oh man i'm still paying for xbox live i don't even have an xbox right like it's that is cloud to me and it drives me crazy you can spend 20 of your monthly out whatever you're spending and it's on things that you don't even

use right yeah or or uh you know runaway things like you think you're you think you're being good you're like okay you know what i'm gonna do things in kubernetes i need my pods to spell their logs to uh cloud logger uh you know so that i can go through them. So that's going to work great. And then you don't realize that one of your pods goes nuts and just starts spending out logs randomly until you get some obscene bill. And you're like, what just happened?

Wait, how are my logs costing more than my CPU time? What is that? I don't even care about the logs. Like what? Right. Yeah. Totally. So. Yeah. Like, I don't even care about the logs. Like, what? Right. Yeah. Totally. So, yeah? Yeah. How have we changed the most?

I don't remember what I was like before, so I'll just say. I think I'm the same. Yeah, probably. I'm the same. Oh, that would be bad, really, to not grow after nine and a half years. Yeah, I think that I've've grown hopefully in good directions jay-z's more outspoken now than he used to be i believe like in in meetings or whatever like he won't just sit there and let everybody drive the whole thing not my crank here just you won't let things go right like

used to his strategy i'll kick that horse still yeah yeah his strategy used to be let everybody argue it out and then come in at the end and be like okay so we're gonna do this right and and i think he he's definitely grown more of a voice to where he'll be up front with his opinion on some things now, which is, which is good because his are usually pretty level headed and, uh, unlike mine. Thoughtful.

Oh yeah. Unlike you. Uh, I think, I think I listen better than I used to. Like I used to butt heads a lot because I'd be like, no man, you're wrong.

And you know, I mean, so I think I've gotten better at listening and trying to evaluate and finding a better way to approach a controversial subject. This one's going to sound so bad. But in that regard, like that's one thing that the show and the listeners let me know that I was bad about like interjecting and cutting off. And, you know, so I've tried to over the years get better about not cutting someone off mid-sentence and trying to listen. But being active, active listening is definitely a skill that you have to practice and hone. And, you know, you think that you have it down pat until others tell you, nope, you don't have it. And yeah, so I've I am by far not great at it you know i i will i will admit that i still have my flaws in that regards but i over the years it has definitely been one of those areas of self

improvement that i have tried to you know get better about or you know i'm definitely more cognizant of it and you know self-aware so yeah there's nothing like putting yourself out there on something like a podcast or a video to get the freaking feedback of the world right like yeah if you ever wanted to know everything that's wrong with you the internet will tell you like you put out your one statement of like hey here's this c-sharp project what do you think of this and they're going to tell you like what they don't like about your hair yeah yeah i mean it's uh on one hand it's sort of humbling on another it's really frustrating because it's like whoa it's real easy to throw stones when you're sitting over there you know just consuming um and not spending you know 20 hours preparing for something

like i i get it um and and that's I guess that's another way I've changed is I've been brutal on reviews about like meetups that I go to where somebody just doesn't seem prepared. Right. And and I still don't like those. Right. I still don't like to go to something where it's like, hey, wait, you took the time of everybody in this room on the, on the notion that you're going to present them something useful. You come out and you don't. Um, but having put myself in the presenters shoes now, maybe you don't know what the people wanted. Um, I don't know that it's a great excuse, but, but it is is it is definitely different when you put yourself out there right like the three of us have and you get feedback that you're like oh that kind of sucks and then you have to say well is that something i need to change and and so i think again for

probably the three of us how have we changed like we talked about the social media thing we you know we're talking about this and it's we're probably more guarded than what we would have been on 10 years ago in, in, in certain respects. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. Uh,

you know, something that we've been doing for a long time now that we always forget to mention every episode, uh, besides the newsletter which also you should go join it's working again sorry about that uh so uh if you send a self-addressed stamped envelope do you know we would send you stickers we've been doing this for years but we always forget to talk about it but uh yeah we totally still do that yeah and and actually mad

viking god um i said i was gonna send you a hat out like, I don't know, six months ago. I'm going to do that still. I'm going to do it. Um, so, uh, outlaw, I'm probably have still the hat for me and, uh, and I'm going to get that in the mail. Uh, but yes, if you haven't been there, coding, not code coding, coding blocks.net slash swag and send us, uh, you know, the directions are up there. Do your thing. all right well um it's that time of the episode where joe makes it weird all right do i get to do it again

wait i don't know i thought about this and i'm like i it is the 200th maybe i should like let's see let's see where we're in i will say learned i will say uh you know i started talking about leaving less than five star reviews how many of the reviews that we've gotten since then have mentioned wanting to give us less than five stars i think one i think one i thought it was two anyway at least two okay it was one on one on audible and one on itunes okay so those are reviews that we may not have gotten without now they both left five stars but i think letting them know the door is open uh for they also had the free upgrade coupon too so they wanted to leave a three but we because of the coupon they they got upgraded we do yeah we will upgrade so

if any any uh reviews that you want to leave us that are less than five stars we'll go ahead and give you those extra stars for free so you can just go ahead and put in the five don't worry about it that's right there might be someone listening that thinks that we're being serious that we could change their star rating like you know i'm imagining like some you know like a young kid who who's listening for the first time or whatever like new to programming and they're wow, they can change the reviews. Okay, fine. I'll leave the three star and let them upgrade it to a five.

He's totally joking. He's joking. We need the five. No, I said that I send the email to the apples family and they go there and yeah, they run Apple. You send it to Tim Apple.

That's amazing. But I forgot what I was doing. But if you want to leave us a review, that's that net slash review. See, this is why I don't talk. This is why Allah doesn't want me to talk about the reviews, because I went rambling about like five under under five stars and some people named the apples

and didn't actually tell you what we want you to do. But what we want you to do is to hook us up with a review. We need it. We love it. And it doesn't have to be a long one you can go to codingbox.net slash review we try to make it easy you've got a couple links there you click that sometimes you have to sign in i know i'm sorry but it's fast and then you can just say like hey the show's great love it five stars and that would help us out a lot not that

jay-z didn't sell it well but if i were to put that in my own words i would just say that you know like after the nine and a half years after the you know the previous 199 episodes we had greatly do we do greatly appreciate reading those reviews they do mean a lot to us and and you know motivate us to keep going because some of the things that are shared, they're not always through the platform's review mechanism either. Sometimes it comes as a DM on Twitter or an email through comments at codingblocks.net or whatever. Sometimes we get the most sincere stories shared to us about, you know, how we have, the impact that we made on someone's life and their career and, you know, how they're thankful for it. And it really is, you know, it really does touch our hearts. You know, it really is meaningful to us because I'll tell you, like,

I never imagined that we would have had that type of, you know, I never imagined that I could be part of something that would have had that kind of impact on anyone, even in my, you know, local city, let alone around the globe, you know, in countries that I have never visited. So it really does mean a lot to us when we read those. So if you haven't left us a review, we would greatly appreciate if you did, because it really does honestly mean a lot to us. And I want to, I'll keep this real brief. This is up there with the site community, right?

Like not only people talking about their careers, but just having another person in the room with them, right? Like people that are working on an island by themselves. And they're like, man, I just don't have anybody to talk to. And I feel like I'm a part of something when I'm listening to the podcast. And when we get stuff like that, it really is. Like Outlaw said, it warms our hearts. And it's amazing to see that we're helping people both mentally and career-wise.

It's awesome. If you've been sitting on those one stars for a while, you can drop it right down. Oh, good God. All right. So with that out of the way, it's time for my favorite portion of the show. Survey says. All right. So this is episode 200 so uh jay-z you will go

first what is this survey says or is this family feud well isn't survey says part of family feud yeah it's a survey but it was literally where the phrase came from, right? Is it? Because they surveyed 100 people. Oh, you're right. Oh, my gosh. You're right. Yeah. I'm keeping with the theme here, man. I know what I'm doing.

You're right. My bad. I got this. Mommy. All right. That's right. All right. So, Jay-Z, you will go first.

All right. Fill in the blank. Jumping blank. Jumping jumping blank that's it yeah fill in the blank oh man i mean jehoshaphat what ship jumping ship okay um Okay. No. That's an X for both of you. No. The top answer was Jumping Jacks. Wow. The second, that was 75.

Boring. Right? Wow. Number two, Jumping Bean. Okay. That was my second. Was it? I should get those points. Yeah. I don't think so. That. That was my second. Was it? I should get those points.

Yeah. I don't think so. That's not how this works. Jumping rope was the third. Who are these people that are even like eight year olds? Like, right. Yeah.

Jumping frog was the fourth answer. All terrible answers. All right. Yeah. Log your zeros there. Okay. That is in there for the history books. Jehoshaphat.

It's got some panache. It does. It's like, wah. Okay. Wow. We might have to go to like more than three. Name something that can be inflated or deflated. And Alan, this one is for you to start us off.

Oh, I get to go first? Inflated or deflated. A float. A float. All right. And Jay-Z? A balloon. A balloon.

Oh, that's really good. All right. So float. No. a balloon oh that's that's really good all right so float no balloon is the fourth answer so we finally get some points on the board all right 13 float how do you inflate a float what like a like a bull float oh i'm thinking of like like the rose bowl parade or something like you know amazing day parade i'm thinking of a float i'm like is he i and i wasn't thinking of like the balloons that they you know the snoopies that would be escorted down i was thinking like the things that you know like you know miss america would ride on or whatever put on your kid or pool float something

like that yeah okay okay so maybe i'm not an ex am i still on there no no you're still that's terrible oh i haven't given you the other answers okay so let me so top answer in and jay-z i'm definitely disappointed in you for this one oh top answer was tire or inner tube oh man i do that all the time come on cycling you don't do that and alan cars come on i didn't think i'd do that all the time. Come on. Cycling. You don't do that. And Alan cars. Come on. I didn't think I'd do it all the time. I actually bought something that'll do it. All right, go ahead. And in this one,

I'm definitely looking at you, Alan. Why this one wasn't your first pick. The second answer was ball or football, man. How did you miss that? Of, of all the people here, you didn't think sports ball as your

first choice mr basketball like let me tell you a little behind the scenes marsh madness comes along every time we're recording alan is watching marsh madness as we're recording even if that is like on an on a phone he's watching it as we're recording. He's kind of close. Not March Madness, NBA playoffs. Yeah, NBA playoffs is where I am. Is there a difference? Colleagues versus pros.

It's whatever. It's true. It's true. I'll have it played. All right. So number three was ego or emotions. oh wow yeah uh four was balloon the last one was air mattress i was gonna say mattress that was but that would have been like two points or something so i don't think it would have been eight okay you you would have you would have at least been you know uh

in in the game on the board right now you're man i could still win though he's only got 13 on me this this one this one you can redeem yourself though you ready uh jay-z you you will start us off all right name a word that rhymes with soup i mean can i can i say this on a podcast you can it's not that bad okay i mean the obvious answer is poop okay what was the original word soup soup um so it's either scoop or coop um um coop I definitely won this one yeah you did number one answer on the board

36 points poop dang it number two answer with 25 points coop dog on it man hey at least you're on the board though I am that was a good answer I couldn't win that one because he got the number Coop. Doggone it, man. Hey, at least you're on the board, though. I am.

That was a good answer. I couldn't win that one because he got the number one. Let me log in these 36 points here and come back later. Almost double. 95% answer. Whoa. It was 36 points, so yeah, it was pretty high. Man, I realized that we've already done three

and I kind of wanted to do a couple more. You want to do a couple more? We do one more. One more, one more, one more. Okay. I need a chance.

All right. So, uh, definitely, you know, it's the score is 49 to 25. Joe is in the lead. Yeah.

Uh, but Alan, you will lead us off name a movie monster you think could take dracula in a fight oh man movie monster okay but now all of a sudden i can't think of any movie monsters um let's go with uh let's go with godzilla okay that's the only one i can think of yeah all right okay um i'm trying to think like anybody made out of wood is the wicker man made out of wood wait but that's not a monster yeah yeah it's groot um yeah i mean i i think i have to go with frankenstein just because i think there's a movie

that's true he's got no you gotta have no blood right uh to be vulnerable yeah so um is it frankenstein or is it frankenstein oh and you know what it Frankenstein or is it Frankenstein oh and you know it's Frankenstein's monster Frankenstein was the name of the doctor so much for this being quick by the way sorry so uh I'm just gonna go with uh

Frankenstein oh man this is so exciting laughing okay the number one answer on the board Man, this is so exciting. Okay. The number one answer on the board was Godzilla. Wow.

Look at that. The number two answer on the board is Frankenstein. Wow. Number three to finish it out is King Kong, followed by Wolfman. No way. No, Wolfman's going to die. Then Freddy Krueger. Okay.

Good answer. Then Jason. Okay. Yeah. Now here's where it gets exciting. Which one of you do I say first? Okay, Alan got the first answer. Hey, we're going to go it this way.

Godzilla. You ready for this, Alan? I'm excited. 43 points. More than poop? Wow. Godzilla. points more than poop wow godzilla 20 i'm sorry frankenstein 19 i need less than less than 20 26 points oh man i still lost all right yeah when you called out godzilla i was like he's he just won he just walked away with it he just

stole the win from jay-z and then jay-z was like i don't know do i pick frankenstein or do i go with somebody else and i'm i'm like in the back of my mind i'm like oh my god please pick frankenstein please pick frankenstein wow that's close that was fun that was all good. So, uh, you know, going back to the, to the body of the, the episode here, um, I had listened, like,

what are the top three things that you've gotten out of the, you know, the podcast over the years? So it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be a, it wouldn't be a Michael thing if i didn't like have some fun with it right so uh the top top thing i've learned is like definitely alphabetize all of the methods you know like order them alphabetically in your class file you know um so that you know for

readability and findability of the things in the file like just alphabetically list them i'm dry heaving obviously i'm joking uh you know that was one of the things that we learned from uncle bob's clean code series where he introduced me to the concept of the organizing your class files the code in your class file in what he referred to as a newspaper format. And I completely, innocently like just did not think that that was going to be like the, to do that. It became a, you know,

the discussion, the amount of discussion that we would get. And it definitely wasn't done to like, you know, going back to, to Jay-Z's Twitter comments about like, you know, leaving something out or saying something wrong to purposely get an

interaction. It wasn't done anything like that, but the amount of discussion that came back about why I was crazy to organize my files alphabetically. I'm just in, in my defense, like literally it was in the ID as like a easy button item where it's like, you know know resort reorganize it

you're like yeah why wouldn't you do that because the get chaos it would create on the pr yep i always think about them there was a we did design patterns a few times didn't really go super well but i think i was in charge of the mediator pattern and i just ruined it i've never never got more feedback in my life on anything alan do you have a top three um yeah the friends and community i i absolutely love it i mean i love doing this with you guys and and like i said when when we go to meetups and and you know code camps and all that kind of stuff, it's truly just amazing. Yeah, it's a real answer.

Community, community, community. Yeah. Now, if I'm being serious, like another one, we kind of already hinted on this one, but just to expressly call it out, like going back to that comments that I made about designing

data intensive applications like one of the top three things a better understanding of database technologies and the impact of their underlying data structures you know is definitely something that i've taken away uh from the various discussions we've had over the years not necessarily just about that that book series although that book series was definitely a big part of that for sure. Jay-Z, you got one? No. Sorry. I think I basically just agree.

I'm just thinking about how much of the database technology has been transformative. I mentioned the LSM trees and stuff before. We never really did an episode on Kafka, but like rocks db and some of the things that we were kind of like working with at the time like even like um like kafka some of the things that at the time seemed like just weird you know kafka being weird kafka being kafka and like uh difficulties with like partitions and changing them and things like i thought like why shouldn't why don't they handle

this you know and then you like dive into the technical details behind it and realize why they don't or why they expose the parameters they do and what it means to really change uh some of the numbers and like even today like we were talking about um recently about um something in kafka and uh if you want to have uh i'll skip the all the annoying details but it's basically like if you want to have, I'll skip all the annoying details, but it's basically like if you want to have a certain kind of message delivery, you've got to go change these two settings on the producers and this setting on the consumer. And then you can check this and that and whatever. And you think like, oh my gosh, this is such a common ask. Like, why isn't there a single setting? It's like, well, because it's complicated.

There's multiple actors. There's various flavors that people might kind of want. there a single setting it's like well because it's complicated there's multiple actors there's various flavors that people might kind of want but uh you know it's just how it is the difference of like a message that is a fire and forget and you don't care if the recipient got it versus a guaranteed delivery type message like yeah guaranteed only one talking about yeah yeah delivery it seems like something you'd just be able to like set that like that's something that people you know ask about technology is like does it support uh guaranteed once delivery yes so you think there'd be a setting that says yeah turn it on but it's much more complicated than that i shouldn't say much more complicated but it's uh it's definitely

a read a blog before you do it kind of thing right it's not flip a switch yeah yeah so for me the the second one the thing that i got out of it is the application tier i already mentioned it earlier it should be one of your most powerful things right so put your logic into the thing that is going to be easiest to test scale change all that so that that that was a big one for me over the years i'll say that's that's definitely one that like between the three of us i think that we've definitely grown to appreciate more not that we didn't have necessarily appreciation before but uh we've definitely like grown stronger in regards to uh the scalability of that application tier. And, you know, if you put things there

and they're testable things and whatnot, then it's easier to grow that thing than it is some of the other things. And, you know, you go back to like data, for example, and like hoops that you would have to go through in like a, a relational kind of world, but now like the appreciation and again, definitely going back to that data intensive application design data

intensive application book. Like you think of the complications of dealing with data and anytime you're trying to like scale something, the stateless bits are always super easy to scale. It's those stateful things that are hard and challenging. That's, that's where the complexity of every application comes from. And, you know, when it comes to data, scaling readers, isn't that hard, right? Like that's not, that's not the hard part of that problem. It's the rights. It's, it's how do you deal with the rights and, and the trade-offs that you have to make. So,

um, yeah, I think the three of us have definitely gained an appreciation for that. All right. So, so your third. So, so the last one, and this is, this kind of goes back to the comment that I didn't want to chime in on this earlier when you were talking about it, but you were talking about the books that, you know, Alan, when you were talking about, like, I was wanting to do the DevOps handbook or Jay-Z wanted to do data-intensive applications, and one of us might throw a book idea out there and the others will be like, I don't know. But then eventually, you grow to love that book. One of the big takeaways from this thing, though, is from doing this podcast,

it's just been the forced learning aspect of bettering myself to being forced to like, oh, let's go look at designing data intensive applications, because that might not have been a book that I would have picked up on my own. I might have like just, I don't know about, I was going to say mistakenly picked up a book like that's more language focused. And I don't know if you guys have done that where like, you know, you just, oh, well, how, let me, let me learn all the ins and outs of the.NET CLR or all the ins and outs of Kotlin or whatever, JavaScript. But there is something to be said for going back to these higher level architectural books

that don't care what language you're coming at it from. It's looking at things that I'm at a much higher level and why you need to be aware or pay attention to certain things. And, uh, you know, I might've otherwise skipped those books had it not been for, um, either YouTube or even the community saying like, Hey, what if you did this book? And so, uh, that, that it's kind of forced me to better myself in aspects that I might have otherwise overlooked. You know, I wouldn't have thought to go dig into. Your turn, Jay-Z. Do you have another thing?

I mean, I think just really community, community, community. But like outlaws, like I'm agreeing with everything you're saying. So it's kind of like, you know, aside from alphabetizing all the things in your class, which definitely don't agree on that one. Everything else is totally. All right. My last one is don't make whatever your one technology thing is be your hammer and everything's a nail out there. Right. Like, I think this also came from designing data intensive applications and just our experience over time as well is we've talked about, like, if you have a relational database, that thing gets abused. Right.

Like, it becomes your analytics platform. It becomes your actual database. It becomes your logic platform. It's like everything. And that may not be what it's suited for. And so one of the things I've grown to appreciate and sort of hate over time is there are tools that are right for the job, right? i'm sorry i apologize for my three pound chihuahua making all the noise in the world up there vicious yeah right um but somebody was just murdered yeah probably at least the toe was um but but that whole notion that you know don't try and make your database a search engine. There are search engines out there for it, right? Don't try and make your search engine your database.

There are databases out there to answer those problems. So there is overhead and complexity that comes with adding things to your stack, but you should evaluate those things and figure out how important is it to my stack, right? Like if, if a search engine is, is 50% of the importance to my application, then maybe you should look at investing in a search engine. Right. And so that whole notion that you should not just, just try and cram everything into what you already have is is a big one for me so that was huge yeah to expand on that though like another thing that bothers me that you see too um it's easy to say like don't don't make that one tech your hammer and people like look at that as like you

know uh don't use sql server for everything you know right like your search engine example kind of thing like you know get a get an elastic search or whatever but you see this also too often to where it's like well the language that the author really knew was python so he did everything in python and now you coming along second hand have to support all the python stuff because everything was written in python and it's like well there are some things that python is really great at that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be the language used for everything pearl has some great some things that's great at it doesn't mean that you have to do everything in pearl for example right like you know and the same for like a dot net or a java or whatever the language might be like i just see it too often to where well you know you know, I know Java extremely well, so I'm going to write Java.

I'm going to write all my stuff in Java. And then we end up with Node. And, you know, so now everything's written in JavaScript. Yeah. I mean, it's true. It is true. So it doesn't have to be like, it could be like, you know, that could just be a language too. Right.

Don't be afraid to expand out and, that there are languages that have their place. There are things that they're good at, and don't be afraid to take advantage of them. Yep. All right. Well, there will be links to past series that we've done and things like that. I promised you a YouTube DIY video for how to add windows to your concrete. Yeah, so there'll be some links in the resources we like. And with that, we head into Alan's favorite portion of the show.

It's the tip of the week. All right, I'm starting this out with us. So as I've mentioned several times on the show, I'm a big fan of obsidian, which, uh, you know, just to recap quickly,

let's see work locally with markdown files and gives you like a nice app experience. Do you searching and tagging and some other nice things? Uh, well, the way I'm using it at work, I don't, I,

it's all purely local, right? So I don't want anything that I type in like work notes or something being uploaded to some cloud or something, you know, that's, that's not approved by work. So I want my files locally. However, we do have a couple ways to share files. And sometimes I want to be able to send files to my notes to, to coworkers, right? And I don't want to send a copy of them because i want to be able to make changes you know and keep it live and so um what i've started doing is dropping it into uh you know one of the tools like a google cloud or you know some sort of company approved drive

and then i can share the links but the problem with that is these are md files these are markdown files so if i send you a link to a markdown file, you're going to see, you know, Markdown. I want you to have rich text. I want you to see it the way that I see it, right? So I found out there's actually a setting hidden in Google Docs. And I looked at a few of the others, like Dropbox and a couple other things that already had better ways of dealing with this. But there's actually a preference you can set to automatically detect markdown so you go into tools preferences and automatically detect markdown uh set that

setting and then whenever you view a file that looks like it's got markdown it changes it over to rich text which works for me but not the people i share it with so uh that's a per file thing too per user per file oh crap it is isn't it yeah yeah you have to open up that specific document and then that stinks that stinks okay so then i'll give you my second tip that i didn't put on here uh there is actually a plug-in a chrome plug-in that i uh looked at using briefly and i got it working on my home machine i didn't install it work because i didn't know what they're doing with it right but uh yeah there's a chrome plugin for adding support to google drive but that's a bummer that i didn't think about the same file what i did use it for though um was that uh just by having it um you know for me uh it's nice because you can copy paste out of it easier than if you copy paste out of um what you call it obs nice because you can copy paste out of it easier than if you copy paste out of what you call it obsidian because obsidian you copy paste by default it's going to copy paste

the markdown into email or whatever if you want to send it but if you do in google docs it's defaults to the rich text which is okay but not enough reason to swap it but yeah i didn't even think about it being per document man that's just google i got some i'm gonna get hold of the google family we're gonna talk about of the google family we're gonna talk about this the apple family i i the whole time you were talking about that like i know it wasn't it would be tedious to do for note-taking but i was thinking about like how uh the github ui it's rendering of markdown and how like i love readme's in the code you know to where the the readme can uh version with the code yeah you know and like i can't have enough readmes i there doesn't have to just be one at

the top level you can have readme per you know individual section of the of your application or whatever or especially like in a mono repo world oh man you want like as many read me's as you can get in there and i love the you know you navigate through the repo in the github ui and if there's a read me in there it just automatically boom shows it renders it you know it's great oh big fan of that yeah and the plug-in by the way that i was using or uh it's up there there was markdown viewer i'll have a link to that all right um so for my tip of the week uh i have one this is like somebody's probably like well duh and you know like why didn't you already know that michael so you know how we've talked in the past about how when you're doing like database development, like database routines, for example, right? Like that's a type of technology that doesn't lend itself well.

Like if you come from an object-oriented kind of background and you're like, well, you know, like I need to have this parent class and, you know, this will inherit that, blah, blah, blah. You know, and you break everything out into nice little meaningful chunks. But database development doesn't necessarily lend itself well to that type of modeling, let's say. So you can end up with stored procedures that are large, right? Fair to say, yeah? Which might be one of the biggest complaints that uh we all have with it so in a way i found myself where in a situation where i was maintaining a rather large routine and i was using data grip and there was i was trying to update the routine and, you know, like whether it's SQL server or

Postgres, like before you can update or alter an existing routine, you know, or even create a new, and the first thing that it's going to do is like run it through a compiler to see like, you know, make sure it's fine and then try to apply it. Right. Well, data grip would just give me this like useless message of like, Hey, uh, there's an error near, and it was in my case, semicolon, there's an error near semicolon at position, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it, it wasn't very helpful because one, uh, this was a Postgres routine. So there were semicolons abound. I mean, they were all over the file, right? So that didn't help to clarify which semicolon.

And also, two, the position wasn't a line number. I'm assuming as part of the compilation process, like whitespace and new lines and things like that and comments are stripped out and it was putting it in a more compiler-friendly format. So the position was meaningless to me. I had no idea what position that it was referring to. What I didn't notice at first though was that the the data grip was automatically putting the cursor where the error was and i totally missed that i don't know how i missed that but i i did i mean i i looked at this file for the better part of an hour trying like what is going on like where's the error trying to like figure out and, and the error was totally benign to like data gripped. It didn't even like show you any kind of like red squiggles

or there was no, there was no hint or indication that, Hey, this is wrong. You, you might want to fix this. Right. And I, and like I said, when I would try to apply the routine, I totally missed that it was, um, moving the cursor because I was already in that area of it. And all I was doing was just like selecting the whole thing. And, you know, like, uh, I was on a Mac, so like command a, and then, uh, command enter to run everything that I'd selected. So I didn't notice that it was moving it because I was already in the area. And so, but so, you know, hint number one, it puts the cursor where the error is, even though it gives you this meaningless position message. But also too, another thing that I noticed that I had never noticed before was that I had, if I scrolled and yes, I had to scroll up to the top of the file,

then, um, you know, there would be like a red exclamation point for a red circle with an exclamation point for like, Hey, this is the block that was failing. Right. I didn't realize that that exclamation point was also clickable. And if you clicked it, it would navigate you to the specific thing that was the error. So that was also interesting, but also too, or third related. So related to that, and this is like, even when I did pick up that it was putting the cursor at the line, I've noticed in some cases whereGrip will, there might be like an error in say like a select statement or something. I don't remember the exact use case,

but it wouldn't necessarily put the cursor at where the error was in that case, but it might put it at the start of that block of code that it would want to execute. So if it was a select statement or an insert statement or whatever, it might put it at that block of code that it would want to execute. So if it was a select statement or an insert statement or whatever, you know, it might put it at that, at that block. So like if you had a create table and you had like a wrong data type, for example, you know, I don't remember the exact examples, but it would be something like that where, you know, it might not put it at that

data type. It might put it at the create table statement. So that was part of the reason why I didn't recognize that like, oh, it was actually moving the cursor to where it was until I clicked that red exclamation point. And it went back that it happened to like, wait, it's very specifically navigating to this thing. Like, what is this? And this was, this was a, a CTE block and I had like CTEs that were calling CTEs. So they were, um, I guess like a cascading set of ctes i'm not sure like what we what that's called a mess yeah that's right yeah aside from that but yeah uh don't judge my code um that's what you have to do right there's no other and that's what you need to do in that situation so so in in short what i found was like i had gone back to my

old uh sql server days i don't know if you guys did this too and i don't know why this habit got ingrained in me but whenever i would start a cte do you guys have like like if i were to say like ask you to like give me the first five characters of your of how you would start your cte could you what would you say cte underscore you mean naming the thing or i forget yeah i don't remember anymore so i always did for whatever reason in going back to my sql server days semicolon with. Yeah. Postgres does not like that leading semicolon. Oh, really? Well, it terminates the previous block, right? Or something like that.

Yeah, but why? It doesn't matter. There was nothing there to... So, because SQL Server isn't as specific about semicolons that Postgres is. So there was like, you know, it was just ingrained in me that for like CTEs, I would always start it with that,

merge into statements in SQL Server. You had to end it with the semicolon. But other than that, like, you know, in SQL Server, you didn't really care about it as much. But yeah, Postgres super cared about that semicolon. And it looked so benign. There was no indication. But yeah, DataGrip was about that semicolon. And it looked so benign. There was no indication. But yeah, DataGrip was trying to give me a hint.

But all I saw was the error at position in this number. And I'm like, where is that position? So at any rate, that was this weekend, dumb things that Michael did with Michael. So the other Uh, so, so the other thing too, uh, like we've all shared our love of mini cube and, or the one thing that like,

we haven't really talked about. He, and, and it was surprising. Like when it, when the idea dawned on me, I'm like, Oh man,

I want to like go back and I want to, I want to get in my delorean go back in time and remind myself of this feature so that i could like save a bunch of time that i've wasted you know in recent in recent years with minikube if you've ever found yourself in a situation with where you're doing some um obviously you're doing some development that requires a Kubernetes environment. And so that means building Docker images, compiling Helm charts, installing those Helm charts to get those Docker images into your Minikube environment. You know, you might have like set up some data or whatnot,

but then whatever reason you need to pivot to something else, like maybe your priorities to change, like you were working on a new feature and then somebody comes at you and like, hey, they tap you on the shoulder and oh, by the way, there's this major Sev1 bug that needs to be addressed. Like it's all hands on deck to go look at it. And whatever the reason is that your need to pivot would require you to spin up a new Minikube environment. And you're like, man, well, I guess I could trash my current Minikube environment.

Like, git stash all my code or git commit all my code, as Jay-Z would obviously have already done it. He would have committed it. But you know, if you tear down that mini cube environment and, and delete it specifically and you'll then have to, you know, you'll lose all the Docker cache and any kind of like third party dependencies that might've been installed as part of your Docker building and whatnot. So that can be, that can be a major time suck, right? Like that can, that can be a problem. I don't know why this didn't dawn on me sooner, but with Minikube,

you can create as many, that's the beauty of Minikube. You can create as many environments as you want running different versions of Kubernetes or, you know, for different, you know, whatever your different application needs might be to, or, you know, for different, you know, whatever your different application needs might be to, to, you know, you're working on two things concurrently and you want to, uh, you know, be able to pivot easily back and forth between the two, uh, development efforts with Minikube, you could pass in a dash dash profile and give it a name, right? So, you know, you might, you might just leave, leave the default as mini cube to do all your main development on your main trunk development.

But then, you know, Alan comes and taps me on the shoulder and he's like, Hey, I need you, you know, there's this big bug. I need your help. And you're like, okay, let me spin up a new mini cube environment, dash dash profile, uh, you know, equals bug for Alan and, you know, spin up this whole other environment. And then it's really cool too. Cause like, if you're using tools like scaffold and canines, right. Scaffold, you could specify the cube context that you want it to use with dash dash cube dash context and tell it like, Hey, use bug for Alan as the cube context and canines.

If you had already spun down, if you had already stopped your other, your default mini cube environment, uh, canines will immediately pick up the other, uh, bug for Alan, um, uh, Kubernetes environment and just immediately start showing you that obviously you could go back to in canines and do like a colon context and see the other, um, ones that are available if you didn't spend down minikube but in my case because of the size of each the the number of resources that i needed each uh minikube environment to take i you know wasn't going to be able to easily run them concurrently so i was bring you know stopping one to start the other. But yeah. So the point is, is that if you're not our,

if you needed another reason to fall in love with mini cube, here it is. Like you can, you could dash dash profile and name it whatever you want to call it. And you know, there you go. It is weird though, that they call it profile.

Like I thought that was an odd choice of, uh, you know, no McClendon for it. Instead of just like calling it like name name yeah a whole lot easier more obvious yeah because it is two separate vms or multiple right all right so mine i cheated because um i needed to and uh i grabbed one out of the tips and tools slack channel tips and tools yeah and so as he often does Mike RG put some good stuff out there there is a free excuse me let me cough off off audio

here there is a free ebook you can get called sequel for devs. Um, and if you go to sequel for devs.com slash ebook, you'll see this. And it is from a person that he follows on Twitter by the name of Tobias Petri. And apparently this guy took all the tips that he's put on Twitter forever for various different SQL tips or whatnot. And he compiled it all into an ebook. And so for the low price of basically putting your email in, you can go download this thing. And it looks to be, there's a ton of information in it. They have a table of contents. And, uh, and if Mike RG is, is saying that something's pretty good, you can almost take it to the bank. So I highly recommend going and checking this thing out. All right.

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