Coding Blocks - 2023 Resolutions

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Michael spends the holidays changing his passwords, Joe forgot to cancel his subscriptions, and Allen's busy playing Call of Duty: Modern Healthcare as we discuss the our 2023 resolutions.

Hey guys, what's up? What are we doing? Hey yo, new year, new you. I thought we said 200 and done. Are we still doing it? What happened? What's going on? I think we're broken. Are we doing another one?

Isn't 200 and done like a phrase that people say? Like, you know, we're going to do 200 and done. Maybe overflowed and starting back at the beginning. Yeah, we're here now, so. Okay, well, alright. Another 200 then? Maybe. Let's do it. maybe overflowed and starting back at the beginning yeah we're here now so okay well all right well another 200 then maybe let's do it maybe that's 10 more years right yeah well now we'd say it like that i don't know if i had i didn't realize that was such a commitment when you when you put it in terms like that uh okay well fine then all right so we'll do another two

this will be 201 and we'll do another one. All right. You know, so I guess subscribe to us if you haven't already. We're in places. That we are. Okay. So you can also send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodyBlogs.net. See, we're so on script here. You can also follow us on Twitter at CodyBlogs.

Alan's like twitching like, I don't like change. Why didn't he say the normal things? I don't know where to go from here. Yeah, mixing it up. We also have a website, CodyBlogs.net, which has links to things at the top of the page that you might find interesting. And I'm Joe Zach, by the way. I'm Michael Outlaw. And after 201 episodes, I'm Alan Underwood.

No, you're after 200. We haven't done the 201st episode yet. At the beginning of the 201st episode, I'm still Alan Underwood. You might change after this, though. I may. I may. So 202, episode 202, watch out. That's right. What would... It couldn't be...

Like, if Joe is Josephina and I'm Michelle, what would Alan be? Alina. Alina. That's pretty good. Okay. Yeah. See? Okay.

We're calling the draw. I'm ready. Yeah, but I got you all beat, though, because I got a Guns N' Roses song, so, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or a Beatles song, too. Well, there is a Josephinephine song though so i guess you're okay i don't know about an alina song though i'll find something wasn't there like

what was the recent movie though the uh battle uh when you know the one time out alina the battle guard or battle angel battle angel or something yeah what was what was the name of that movie oh come on alita alita there you go but there is like come on. Alita. Alita. There you go. But there is this, like, come on, Alina. I think you're, that's a stretch. I'm going to change my name. Worth it. Everyone should have a song in their name.

Okay. All right. Well, we had some new reviews in, and thank you very much. They were really great. We really do appreciate it. We got one in from email, too, that I wanted to call out. Special thanks to Nace in email form. But from iTunes, we got – I love this one. It's a potato.

Courageous potato. It's a potato. Billhead and JD Mil milo so yeah awesome uh also hey uh game jam it's officially by the time you listen to this jamuary and we've got a game jam going on so if you ever wanted to make a game you ever wanted to dabble you ever just wanted to give a shot then you should do it you should sign up and make a game. Take what time you got. Take what skills you got. Take some time, experiment, and learn some new things

and have fun. It's really awesome and really colorful and really cool and, I don't know, life-affirming. So you should sign up for it. We've got a link right here. You can also go to codingbox.net slash CBJam. I want to make sure that works.

By the time you hear this, that will definitely be working. We, uh, yeah, we should also call it too. It doesn't have necessarily had to be like you create the game. It could be like, you want to work with others in like the Slack community,

for example, or a friend or coworker. And, and maybe you want to do like the assets to the game, right? Like the graphics or the audio, uh, you know, to it. So uh you know to it so you know it doesn't necessarily have to just be about uh the code yeah and if you're looking for partners you

want to find some people to team up with oh we got a slack channel a game dev wannabe where you can uh join the slack and uh hop in there and say hey i want to team up with somebody. Now, in the past years, we have live streamed our efforts. I assume we're doing that again. Yeah. Yeah, we should. Yeah, I should probably make sure my stuff is in good working order before the day of like last time. Just off your Twitch account? Yeah, man.

Yeah. So I'll be doing that. I think I need to try and take a day off for it because I actually want to have some fun with it this year. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, too, if I remember right. Because like recent years, I made the joke about Twitch. But I think last year we went to YouTube, right? Wasn't there like there was some. Am I remembering that wrong?

I did Twitch. Oh, you did? Also. Yeah. For some reason, I was thinking that there was an advantage of going to YouTube over Twitch that we discovered right at the... Okay. Well, I'm remembering it wrong then. So, you know, 200 episodes, I'm allowed to make a mistake. That's the first one.

That's true. Not bad. I've made one mistake. That's amazing. Speaking of mistakes, mistakes uh alan you got a topic here yeah so i got something and i wanted to ask this one on air we started to talk about it before we started recording here and so there was a last pass breach right that i guess started back in the summer and then and then more information has been revealed about it over time. And I guess maybe something got piggybacked on it. I'm not exactly sure. But here's the deal.

So Outlaws read a little bit more about it. We were talking about it beforehand. And it sounds like not everything was encrypted in what they had. And what that means is, sure, your passwords were encrypted, but maybe the usernames weren't and the URLs weren't and that kind of stuff. So while your passwords may be secure, if your username wasn't encrypted, half of what makes your account secure might have gotten leaked. And it's unclear right now, at least it sounds like it's unclear as to what was done so we had a little bit of chat over the previous few days like hey is anybody planning on leaving last pass and here's my question to you guys this is why i wanted to wait until we got

on the air what we found out about this leak is, excuse me one sec, is this seems to be a mixture of what they store on-prem and what they store in the cloud and how they do their storing of these things, whether it be secure, encrypted, or whatever internally. So a lot of that is like inside information. So even if you were going to move off LastPass, how would you feel comfortable moving to another provider? Unless they just tell you every single thing about how they store every single thing, which would also then open them up to attacks from other people. Like how do you, how would you find a good replacement for this thing that we've been using collectively for almost 10 years? Yeah, I can tell you what I used to do, which I felt was more secure but so much less convenient. I used to keep KeePass, which was a local database or encrypted database.

So basically, there was a password there. It was encrypted on disk, and it was yours. It was yours no network it was just wholly on your computer and i put it in dropbox you know and so the sync on my device and so i could access it uh but it didn't have the kinds of integrations that last pass had so uh it was basically you know a deal killer it's such a pain to go and copy paste you find that thing and you know we'll make sure it's updated in dropbox whatever copy the password out you can't share uh you don't get reminders about uh you know like using duplicate passwords or older passwords you don't get any sort of well i think you might get history action on them but uh it was uh far less convenient but i do feel like it was more secure

but i i can't go back to that. Too many accounts, too many places. Like, no way. Okay, so first of all, a couple things. One, just to add some clarity to this thing, too, it was three breaches, as I understand it. It started in August with the initial breach, then one that was announced in September, and then the latest one that happened uh i forget if it was like late november or early december something like that um but that that's my understanding of the time frame and it was you know one one is believed to have led to the other etc because at first the original announcements were like oh uh we've noticed unwarranted access to dev environments. And then it's believed that through that access it got through. So I'm definitely not trying to be like the source of all truth and information about that.

So, you know, go read up on it on your own. The frustrating thing from my perspective on it is a lack of details around some of what is available and what isn't available. I've read, so while you were talking, I did some Googling too, just to see like other sources. I've read other articles where security experts were saying that users, myself included, were under the assumption that your last pass vault was basically one entire encrypted database. And some of the security experts, things that I've read,ames and passwords in the notes in form field data are all encrypted. Why do you have to get that from Ars Technica? You know, like, why isn't LastPass telling us that?

I did find a list, by the way. We'll have a link to show notes to the fields, and notes are encrypted. And along with usernames, passwords, there's several of them. But there's like 30 URLs. The URL is not encrypted. Yeah. So, uh,

so yeah, exactly. And that, and that's my point there. There it's frustrating because I just wish that last pass would just say, we realize the, the folly of our ways. Here is the list of things that you should be concerned about,

because these are the things that are not encrypted. And at least then, you know, you as an educated consumer could make a choice and be like, oh, well, I'm not impacted or, oh, I am impacted. Let me go change these things. Right. And, and there's just been a very, you know, last pass's answer to it has been, well, if you followed our recommendations, then you're safe. Basically setting themselves up as if to say, well, if you did get breached, it's on you because you clearly didn't follow our recommendations, right? Which is kind of like, I get it. Yeah, sure. Like if you used a short password or if you reused a password as your master password, like either of those two things would be really

bad, right? Like a short and or reused master password would be silly. So yeah, you do take some of that, but some of it was like in the defaults for the number of iterations that the password is hashed as part of the password-based key derivation function, right? The number of iterations of that, which if you're a long-time, old-school, last-pass user, that might have been a really low number compared to what's now recommended as their default, right? So did you go and update that? You know, if you've been a decade-plus user of LastPass, and I have, then did you go and update that? Now, fortunately for me, I had updated that a while back, but how many did, you know? So that's been part of the frustration for me. Now to your question though, to, to Alan's specific question, I kind of look at it like

this. How do I know that anyone else is more secure? I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like let's pick one password as an example, right? Like they're probably one of the top competitors to last pass. Bitwarden, I believe, is probably somewhere in there. And then there's the old school methods that Jay-Z is talking about, like a key pass, right? So let's throw key pass off to the side for a moment since it's not a managed service like the others are. But do I really trust that they're going to be any more secure than LastPass?

They might be. I just don't have. How do I really trust that they're going to be any more secure than last pass? I, and I'm not, they might be, I just don't have, there's no way for any one of us to have the guarantee that they are. But what I do hope is going to happen is that, you know, due to the scrutiny that now last pass is under from this, they're going to be under the gun.

They're going to make some serious improvements is my hope right because what zoom did right like when when the pandemic started and zoom was like under like heavy fire they went crazy on improving security and all that and they didn't just have one you know um uh i don't want to call it a breach but let's say like bug or problem or whatever you want however you want to phrase that because theirs wasn't a to call it a breach, but let's say like bug or problem or whatever you want, however you want to phrase that, because there's wasn't a breach and it wasn't technically, I guess, an attack. But like wherever the zoom bombs was an example. Right. You know, it wasn't just one thing they had.

They had a series of things, but then they hardened it right as a result of that. And so what my hope is, is that, you know, last pass has taken their punches, but they're going to come back stronger. They're going to learn from it. They'll fix it. going to come back stronger they're going to learn from it they'll fix it they'll come back stronger and so i'm still in it for the long haul for the time being until until i learn otherwise now i have looked at um you know uh because there is like you know since the beginning of the last past like uh now chrome for example has password management built in and edge well it's probably part of chromium yeah and uh password has a better password man uh firefox sorry firefox has better password management built into it and um things like ios for example has it built into it and all of those seem great but

you're also kind of locked in you know and you could definitely make a an argument that like well of like if you were to compare google apple and last pass let's. Let's talk those three for a minute. Sorry, Mozilla. You could make an argument that Google and Apple are financially motivated and have the resources to really stay on top of things more so maybe than a smaller entity like a LastPass. You think that's a fair statement? I mean, LastPass is incentivized, but do they have the resources?

Right. And iOS has come out with some really cool things over the recent years, but I don't know that I like the like Apple, Google, and the Mozilla options are limiting into like the integrations. Yeah. It's for websites, right? For the most part.

Well, maybe not iOS type. not the iOS one. Yeah. And, and to be honest, like with the Google stuff, I just,

I don't know. It's like one more thing for them to track and trace and follow you everywhere. I don't feel as bad about Apple. Like, I mean, yes, they're all, they're all capitalist companies that are trying to make money and, and they want to harvest stuff.

Apple seems to be the less evil in that regard, but, but still, I like having a company that is focused on securing my data completely as opposed to having split brain on a bunch of stuff. But well, there was a, there was a recent um announcement over the last few weeks i forget exactly when it came out but where uh apple announced hey we're encrypting your backups in iCloud now and i'm like you weren't already right yeah really thanks thanks for letting me know what i didn't know like okay thank you i appreciate that thank you for honestly thank you for putting that that. Thank you for, honestly, thank you for putting that thing in there. Also, by the way, why weren't you already doing that?

So, I don't know. I do, also too, though, to the frustration with LastPass's response, though, past his response though so i i am frustrated in in the lack of it but also at the same time i do appreciate that they aren't being too quick to say things and then have to like make corrections like oh we messed up we we said we misspoke that's not incorrect and and constantly like trying to correct the record because then that would just create more confusion so i do i do appreciate that when they are saying something it's more thought out i guess but it still leaves you wanting which i guess is probably going to be the case regardless yeah and what really sucks is we're talking about the thing that handles the most sensitive of things right so it's it's an impossible situation i think i'm sort of with outlaw on the you know they got egg on their face they're probably going to try real hard to rectify that um but i don't know it makes you just

it makes you just feel sort of disheartened at the entire world of security because like if you can't trust the thing that you pay to trust what can you do like bouncing somewhere else isn't going to make me feel better well i mean there there's been like in some of the articles too there's been talk about like uh i forget how they worded it but it made it sound like there was other customer type of things that were, that were leaked, like maybe not credit card information, but I don't know. The point is,

it's like, I just wish we could get a, a list from last passive. Here are the things, here's a list of the things that, that were leaked here. And here's the, what's encrypted list of the things that that were leaked here and here's the what's encrypted and what's not right yeah exactly a list yeah totally you know so uh you know if you haven't already definitely go and iterate you know change your master password

re-evaluate your uh your your the um i forget the acronym, how to say the letters of the acronym, but it's the password based key derivation function. Like those, the iterations, PBD, KF, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Something like that. It's impossible to remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And also, cause I think they leave out a letter too, if I remember right. Uh, probably. so, um, like the B in one of those, I don't know. Um, but yeah, so, so definitely reevaluate that if you haven't already. And, you know, I, I've been spending the holidays as, as we all should updating my passwords. Yeah, not so much. It's been so much fun.

Yeah. Yeah. I also didn't love their response. They didn't tell people to update their passwords. That's one of the first things I did is I went and changed my most important passwords and I changed my master password. It does seem like there's some, I don't know, risk there. So I'm not 100% sure it was the right thing to do. They definitely didn't tell me to do it.

But I did it. Well, that's what I meant by their response of like hey if you followed our recommendations you're okay which their recommendations were like i believe a password no less than 12 characters um 12 was the minimum and then a hundred thousand key derivation things i believe yeah yeah so uh i believe their default is a hundred a thousand one hundred yeah so so one zero zero one zero one zero zero one zero zero is the their default for it i don't know it was just still want it left you wanting so i don't know i've beaten that horse yep that's an awful expression too i'm sorry beating that horse or beating the dead horse. Beating that horse.

How did that even become a thing? I mean, it's nicer to beat the dead horse than it is the live horse. I didn't specify, so take it. That says something about you. Which way you decided if I was beating the dead horse versus a live horse. That really says something about you more than me. Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Can we agree? Yeah all right so so on to the the main portion of the show which is what we do every year where we sort of look back and say hey this is what we want to do this coming year right like these are the things that we're interested in this is what we we plan to do and we'll accomplish 8% of it, right? Oh, crap. What? I will? Oh. Yeah. Well, maybe. Hopefully. I thought these were resolutions.

So these are the things that I'm guaranteeing myself to break. Yeah, you just sweep under the rug as soon as the new year starts. That may be possible, too. So I guess with that, Outlaw, you're kicking us off here, right? Yeah. So I noticed that some of the ones, uh, that you guys had weren't necessarily, I stayed, uh, you know, code focused, um, with, with my choices, but number one on my list is I really want to get deep into Kotlin. Uh, so that's number one on my list. So I'm really hoping this year that I can, uh, figure out a way to work that into some of my projects and whatnot. Um, you know, I'm really hoping that I can, uh, you know, I'm really hoping that I can, uh, figure out a way to work that into some of my projects and whatnot. Um, you know, I'm really hoping that I can, uh, figure out a way to work that into some of my projects and whatnot. Um, you know, what's, what's that learning technique, like total immersion, uh, you know, where you, you sink or swim kind of thing. So, yeah, I want

to, I want to get into that. And, um, I mean, we've talked about it on the show over the, over the recent years, right? Like it's made its way into the tip of the week several times. Like different features of Kotlin have made its way into the tip of the week several times. And so like, you know, I have some knowledge of it tangentially, right? But I haven't had a chance to get deep into it. And so, you know, if I can't get into it from like project work, then, you know, at the very least, maybe I can get more, you know, get deeper with it in like the way of code wars or things like that. It's kind of, you know, what my thought process was on that.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I will say if you go that route, if you go to the deep immersion, I honestly feel like Kotlin is one of the easier ones to learn, especially coming from C sharp already. But it's not, it doesn't have as many complex nuanced features. It seems like they really focused on simplifying the,

the developer experience. Now, there are some things that are interesting, but it's more of a fun one to learn than I think most other languages. I think like I tried a couple of years back, there was some effort where I was like, you know, I had had like a week off or something like that. And I'm like, you know what, let's sit down and try it. And I think at that time, though, I might have bitten off more than I thought that I was ready for. Because at the same time, and this was like, you know, 2020, maybe I was digging into Kafka, and specifically trying to use Kotlin with Kafka. And so depending on the source that I was for documentation that I was looking at, a lot of it was in Java, not in Kotlin.

And then I'd have to try to figure out how to like convert the Java into the appropriate Kotlin. And there are some features with like, take IntelliJ, for example, where IntelliJ has this feature where you can copy the Java into your Kotlin file and it'll automatically do the transformations for you. Yeah. But that wasn't working for me. Oh, that's interesting. At the time, it wasn't working for me. So I was like, well, okay. So at first I'm like, oh i guess it converted it it looks awfully java like and like exactly like what i posted but

maybe it was our copied but maybe it was already like you know kotlin friendly or something so uh yeah that that definitely threw me for a loop so um i'm hoping that you know just better resources and more it's had more time to mature and whatnot that like, you know, it will be a thing. It won't be as, as, as cumbersome. And, and, you know, if you can get like dedicated focus time, cause it's like, you're, you know, a project that you're working on and not just something that you're doing in the side, then, you know, you know, you'll just, you'll just have more time to focus on it. So I'm hoping that that'll, that'll fall into place.

That's my hope. Cool. So real quick, before we move on to Jay Z's, I noticed you have some, some things associated with it. Well, so this is my, was my number two uh thing my number two resolution so i i want to get deeper into uh some streaming technologies so like kafka for example uh from like an administration kind of style like i have that conceptually down pat administration of it down pat you know that's not a problem there but there's weeds related to like, uh, you know, like with Kafka connect or, you know, uh, with Kafka itself that I haven't had a chance. I haven't had a need to get into. And so again, going back to Kotlin, like, you know, hope I'm not setting myself up, uh, but for failure again, but I want to use Kotlin specifically against those technologies. But also, too, a newcomer to that list or newcomer, I don't know that we've talked

about it a whole lot on this show, but Flink. I want to get more into Flink, which I think I have an idea conceptually about what it is, but in a lot of ways, it's kind of a black box to me only because I haven't had to get into it. But, you know, in my mind, I kind of think of it as something kind of similar to like a beam, which I could be totally wrong. But yeah, so Flink is definitely like on my radar of, you know, here, here are the, here are the technologies and tools that I want to, um, you know, by the end of the year, I would like to be more proficient at. All right. So, so two things real quick before we, before we go further into that one, for anybody that hears streaming technologies, um, it's sort of a shared term in tech. So we're not talking about like video or audio streaming. We're talking about real data coming in. Like, so usually Kafka is at the center of that because

it's a super fast read, write type, um, implementation. So when we're talking about streaming data technologies, it's basically as soon as data hits our Kafka cluster, then we can react and do something with that data. Right. So that's what he's talking about with streaming. And then the only other thing I wanted to share here for you to be careful of when you get in here is Kotlin's amazing. One of the biggest problems that you will run into Maven. Oh, sorry. Well, Maven's always fun um but especially in the streaming space and jay-z i think i think we've both hit this at some point is the type coercions are sort of weird on some of the java libraries

and they will cause you real pain when you are trying to write your your streaming code with kotlin and when i say type coercions like Kotlin, they have their own version of a string. They have their own version of a long and all that kind of stuff. Right. And for the most part, when you're writing with Java libraries, it all just maps out just fine for some weird reason. And my guess is it's got to do with serialization or something like that. And a lot of the streaming libraries, they don't type cores properly and you end up having to do a lot of weird stuff to get their string to map to your string. And so it's not a straightforward conversion, right? Like what you were talking

about. It works for me in IntelliJ, right? I go find a chunk of Java code that I want to be Kotlinized. I paste it and it just magically rewrites it and it's all good. That same type thing typically won't work in just a pure streaming application, not because it shouldn't, but because of these weird type coercions that are happening behind the scenes. Okay. So tangent alert, but wouldn't that be like a function of like the serialization? Like if you did, if you did the default, like a JSON serialization like if you did if you did the default like a json serialization to kafka i could see maybe that'd be an issue but if you use like an avro format where the schema is known of what the message structure is shouldn't that address that it's

the library so what you're talking about is the actual data you're getting right which which format is a message yeah yeah the the message itself is an Avro format, right? And the library is taking care of that, you know, converting to and from it. It's more with the actual library pieces itself, right? Like the jar files and whatnot that you're working with. So I don't think it's actually with the messages. It's more just, I can't remember exactly. I just remember it being a massive pain point and jay-z

do you you remember some of this yeah i just know that i spend a lot of time like an inordinate amount of time with like cert a type stuff like serialization deserialization and types and like uh like casting or trying to figure out especially if you have like polymorphism or just kind of like bigger bigger objects that have like more complicated you know kind of implementations uh it just gets really nasty and like somehow i spend a lot more time there than i want to for thinking like i should just put like you know object in serialized object out deserialized i shouldn't have to think about it i think i understand what you're saying it so so if i were to dumb this down i think what you're saying is that like you might be thinking you're using like i'm going i were to dumb this down i think what you're saying is that like

you might be thinking you're using like i'm going to make up some namespaces here you might think you're using like java.string but in fact you're using kafka.string and kafka.string not equal to java.string as an example and so like there might be like functions that are or things that are available on one class that aren't the other but they might have like similar looking names right because i've seen that sort of thing happen and it's super annoying and it's usually with kotlin's library versus the java um libraries and that's it's really unfortunate but it can absolutely kill a ton of time when you're trying to figure out hey why is this string and then going back to the avro type stuff i do remember they do something weird with their longs um to where it's not the same length as the long in java and so length or

size or like max value the length of what they store so um i'll give you a perfect example coming from a database background when we first started getting getting into Kafka streams and stuff, right? You'd say, Hey, well, I have an ID here and it's a number. I should make that a long for the key. And then my value will be whatever the object is. Don't do that. Make your key a string in Kafka and just be done with it. If you try and make it a long, you'll get all kinds of conversion errors trying to get from the long that Kafka gave you back in the Avro format to the long in Java.

Like it'd be like, hey, one, six, one, six bytes and the other one's eight bytes and they don't they don't match out and it would just blow up. And and I got so much feedback because I started writing on various different communities like, you know, what am I supposed to do here? Like I'm just putting a key in as a number and they're like, change it to a string. already writing on various different communities like yo what am i supposed to do here like i'm just putting a key in as a number and they're like change it to a string everybody that was the message don't even try and mess with any other type of key in there make it a string and be done with it so it sounds like the difference of like a mismatch though like like like let's not even talk about it let's talk like if it was sql server for example like on your it sounds like it's the example of like you have it as an int in the database but uh along in the in your c sharp or vice versa to where like you know one is could overflow the other

because of the you know the max value you would, but they would both be longs. You'd actually have the type as a long going into Kafka, and then you'd use it as a long coming into Java, and it'd blow up. It was like, I give. That's the thing that's always bothered me with databases, though, is how come we don't use similar terminology? So in the database, it would be called a big int. Right.

And in the server side, be it C Sharp or whatever world, it'll be a long or int64 or whatever. Yeah, there are website pages on Microsoft dedicated to that type of thing for SQL Server, right? Like here's how you map to the various different languages from SQL servers types to Java, C sharp, whatever. And it is super irritating. So I guess I'll just, uh, close it out then since you guys have like, you know, things that aren't necessarily, uh, uh, code related, just, you know, like hobby, I guess, fun stuff then or whatever. Um, you know, I'll throw in music just like having a better understanding of like um some theory type things related to music and whatnot or like techniques uh in terms of playing you know something that has been of interest lately that i'd like to better understand very cool

yeah nice so all right well yeah i got a couple things here so first off i just want to say there's a couple different categories i'm going to focus on one but uh the way i usually think about goals is like financial health personal development which is like stuff like music and then kind of career management and hygiene uh oh i thought those were like four things that you wanted to do that's why i threw the music one in there. Oh, well, no, no. So those are the broad categories. And I wasn't going to go into finances other than, hey, you know, scheduling, scheduling a certain amount of like money transferred into a savings account or something. Good idea. Health stuff is important. Personal development. Yeah. But for the show, I was going to talk about the career, kind of dive into the

career management angle. And actually, I added mine as I was talking because you kind of convinced me to change it a little bit. Oh, I did? Yep. That was my first resolution was to convince JC to change something, and I didn't want to say it until I did it. So, mission accomplished. He's already accomplished 8% of his successes. That's good.

Yeah. And it started out, I actually had a big list of all the things I wanted to kind of do and work on and the things I cared about. But in Rally, I think what you said about immersion, basically, diving in and spending your time focused on one area is really important. So I think it's important to not kind of... That cracks me up every time, Alan. Why?

Hold on. Doc Brown's calling. Old school. hold on doc brown's calling old school sorry we had a in case it doesn't come through we had a phone incident phone incident so ridiculous marty your kids yes 1980 called they want their phone back is that a sports illustrated phone it might oh my gosh nice uh oh yeah so i just pared my stuff down i basically stripped a couple things i cared about less i still have too much on here so i need to uh you know kind of work on that but here's what i'm thinking uh spring my life would be much better if i just spent a lot more time with spring it was really comfortable and whenever there was some kind of weird issue

or i needed to upgrade spring or something like i was uh really fluent in the language of spring in the way it kind of works. Alan, you were talking about various different types between, say, Java and Kotlin and Flink or something. Throw in Spring there because there's a lot of different copies and stuff, and it's so frustrating when you

ever see an example on a webpage of how to do something, and they don't include the imports of course, right? Baldung. Yeah yeah baldung does that sometimes so you grab the code you kind of paste it in and then you need to import the libraries and your lovely ide you'll say oh yeah sure uh you're looking for um i don't know uh time class sure uh which of these 18 classes uh would you like to import like oh is it the spring one is the java one is it joda is it uh cotland time is it the Java one? Is it Joda? Is it Kotlin time?

Is it, you know, whatever. So I just made that up arbitrarily. I don't think there's actually a time one like that. But you'll see, like, there's just multiple choices, and you've got to kind of figure out which one you need. And it turns out that it's actually class-defined later in the example anyway. And, well, crap. So, yeah.

I just want to get good at Spring. I want to be able to really know. Well, I think it's really powerful and I think it'd be really good for me because I like focusing on kind of JVM and that sort of thing. I think that anything I do with spring is also going to kind of supplement those other kind of skills that I want. And along with what Alice said, streaming is up there. So you mentioned Flink. I just there's some muscle that i need there that i don't have it's kind of awkward to get uh locally so it's a hard thing to play with uh

kind of on you know your local computer because you know it's it's kind of hard to generate that kind of data unless you're uh you know have something to to do like it's uh you know if i was building a website if i was trying to learn to react or something i can make a portfolio or i can make a uh you know web page for my dog or whatever but if i'm trying to do a streaming project like i kind of need some data flowing and you know if you don't have that you're kind of just playing pretend and it's hard to kind of keep focus on that so it's a hard thing to get into and i just want to mention uh you know game dev is definitely something i want to do more of i really just enjoy it and that's totally opposite of spring

and streaming maybe there's some way i can figure out how to kind of align those a little bit better and i've got leetcode just because i uh i paid for elite code pro last year and i forgot to cancel they don't do refunds or prorated so i guess i got it for another year so i'm gonna try and use it more this year because you know keeping the skill the the saw sharp i guess is big deal but then um i did have a couple questions so based on you know how i was trying to think about like what i wanted and what i cared about and stuff i kind of had this idea of like figuring out like career wise what's uh opposite me and what I cared about and stuff. I kind of had this idea of like figuring out like career wise, what's opposite me and what's adjacent.

What I mean by that is like, if I'm say a primarily these days, like a kind of a backend engineer, then maybe I should consider learning front end technologies because it's kind of polar opposite. It's a different perspective. There's things I'm surely taking for granted and there's things that maybe trade-offs that I am kind of losing on with my language and technologies that I don't really realize that I'm losing out on if I don't know what it's like on the other side of the hill.

Or maybe you're using every year. You don't realize that you're using something as a hammer yet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. So, you know, I think that's good. So the, I think there's a lot of value in learning things that you really don't know anything about. And also it's not just about spending time there. I think it's also important that you really try to appreciate the benefits. So like I gripe about Python all the time, right? But what I really should do is spend more time with Python and focus on what's good about it, what it can do that other things can't.

And forget about the griping and just focus on what it's really good at and what it shines on. Learn to appreciate it. And then I think I gain a better appreciation for it, of course, but also I better understand the things that I'm losing by sticking with the technology choices that I spend time with now. And then also, of course, what's adjacent. So what are skills that are next door to me that would be easy for me to pick up and kind of cheaper to pick up because I already have a lot of kind of skills or knowledge that's going to transfer. And so it's going to make that stuff easy to pick up. So why wouldn't I? Because it's kind of cheap time-wise for me to learn those things that are next door. And then, of course, you can kind of work your way around this hypothetical wheel.

So I thought it'd be fun to kind of question and ask, are there any skills or technologies or anything that you think are particularly interesting that are either opposite you or adjacent? Well, so just to add a little bit of color to that, though, to say opposite almost sounds like if you think of the t-shaped kind of developer right like opposite makes your t wider and adjacent makes your t deeper yeah right it's kind of the way i'm thinking of it yeah i think that's a fair analogy so so now your question was like what do i think is opposite or adjacent to me, for example? Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that's kind of where I'm coming at it

from the streaming world, you know, because like my 22 has definitely been more focused in like a lot of DevOps stuff and a lot of, I don't know, like data research and exploration kind of stuff. I don't want to call it like a data science type thing or machine learning, but it's been more research kind of focused a lot of part of my year. So, you know, if I were to go into, and it wasn't in, you know, streaming sets of data sets.

So I think that if I did go into streaming, then it would be, uh, very opposite what my 22, 2022 was. So, uh, is there anything like, you know, like you may not be choosing to go after, but is there anything like next door to you that you think would be nice for kind after, but is there anything next door to you that you think would be nice for filling out your skill set? The only one that was coming to mind that's adjacent that I would like to get better at is unit testing in Angular.

Okay, nice. It would definitely make my stuff better i'm definitely bad about it like unit testing on i don't know why i just have this like mental block for me for some reason and i don't know if you guys have like whatever your mental blocks are that like for some reason you just can't get over it but like unit testing on like a the server side for example in java or c sharp or whatever makes total sense i'm like yeah you know i want to make sure that this function returns what i wanted to do for some reason though dom elements like trying to do that in angular i'm

like nah nah all right what are you even talking like fine. I'm glad that you have that in your mind sorted out. But yeah, I'm going to stick to over here. So I would definitely like to get better at, I think it revolves around like trying, needing to know like a good pattern for those use cases. And that's what I haven't been able to like formulate in my head. So for example, like if you were to say, uh, Hey, I want to make sure that if, if the value is positive, that the, that this DOM element has a style of a green background, you know, and if it is, so it has this style that means green background. And if it's a negative, then it has this, uh, style that would equal a red

background, right? Like things like that. But I'm like, why would I ever write a unit test for that? That seems so weird. Like, do you know how often styles change or like how often we're like, you know, deciding like, deciding like open up i don't want it to be red i want it to be tangerine and i don't want it to be green i want it to be lime you know or whatever you know and and class names change and so i mean that's that's one way i mean you could you could totally look at the dom elements but there's also the methods in Angular that are business use cases, right? I'm trying to think of one. But I'm not trying to test my AJAX calls, though.

No, no, but that's what I'm saying. So if you get a piece of data back from the server, then it needs to toggle some value. So for instance, Angular and React, they all rely a lot on state, like modifying state values. And so there are totally methods that you can write in Angular that are, you know, should display this div, right? Something like that. And that's a terrible name, but you see what I'm saying? Like it takes in an input that you got from your Ajax and then, and then spits out something that's to be used on the front end and you could test that method right yes maybe maybe i'm just writing like maybe the the angular that i'm writing is just too dumb and that's why

because like even in the example you gave though i'm like well wouldn't you just do like an ng if on that like why would i write a function for that when there's already like angular, uh, you know, functionality for it. And I, I realized it was a contrived example, so it's not fair that I pick on that,

but, but you understand what I'm saying though. So like, you know, a lot of, a lot of the functions that I do have in the, the, um,

on the TypeScript side of it are, are just like wrappers to the AJAX calls. Right, right. And so maybe you don't need unit tests for that, right? Maybe you've covered that on your AJAX side. But I would definitely – that is like the adjacent thing that comes to mind. What are you on? On the opposite?

I think probably more front-ending stuff like what you were talking about. I've been buried in back-end stuff for doing database or moving data around or whatever for a couple years now. So I haven't really touched much of the UI. And I used to be heavily involved in all of it. So, yeah, I think maybe for me, it'd be touching more of the UI and then adjacent. Um, I too, I am very much a big fan of learning more about spring. So that's one thing that I, you know, I've actually taken online video courses and like from LinkedIn learning and that kind of stuff to even get me to the point to where I am now. Um, so I'll probably do more of

that. And then the other thing more adjacent and we'll get into this when, when we go through my list is like more big data stuff. Huge fan of it. Love all of it. Love the challenges with it. And that's where I want to go. Nice. Cool.

And just a follow-up question. I had the idea of like looking at books, courses or certifications. And the only one I had was really, I really want to finish designing data-intensive applications. I was kind of slightly interested in CCAD, the Certified Kubernetes User Administrator Developer,

but I don't know. I've been feeling uninspired there. Yeah, I was curious. When I saw this, I was like, finish a book? Yes, that is a resolution. Finish a book. Yes. That is a resolution. Finish a book. So I would agree with the designing data intensive applications. One of the few books I've ever gotten into that I'm like, I want all of this. Um, even not even from the podcast perspective, just from a personal perspective, I love that book. And then I also have been thinking about

CCAT. Like if I've been thinking about it for several years and i've just never gone after it and at this point it's funny when i first started looking at it i didn't know squat about kubernetes now i feel like i know quite a bit about it it's like i guess i just need to take the time to polish up on some things i just i don't know maybe my problem is with that though like I think by now the three of us, like we, we, we know enough of Kubernetes definitely enough to be dangerous.

Right. So let's, we'll say that's fair. What would I gain? What would I want to do with that certification? What would that certification get me that I don't already have? And that's, that's the thing that i'm like

i don't know that i would want to go after that personally so i'll tell you my answer for that is that the reason why i would be interested in even though it's something that i feel pretty comfortable in is i think that there are probably holes in my knowledge that i don't realize because i do the same kind of thing so like there's areas where like i'm really overdeveloped like i'm really strong and doing this or that but there's things that i don't like um i was reading about flannel the flannel plugin for networking or something the other day and i realized i didn't know anything about that and it was like flannel versus something else i'd never heard of and i kind of thought maybe these were just like kind of fringe you know plugins uh but no actually turns out like pretty much anyone who sets up a

cluster is picking one or the other and i forget which one of them is kind of built in. Something cat, right? Yeah. Flat over skates. It's on the Calico. I mean, that's fair. Filling in Calico. Calico.

Yeah, it's a CNI provider. Kind of the same way that you have the, I forget what it's called now, basically the core Docker container engine, OCR or whatever. But it's a side of it that i'm completely blind on yeah that's fair uh you know to fill in the blanks but i guess i guess another way to say what you said then is you're using the certification as a way to force you to fill in the blanks yeah and it's not the certification that you care about it's the blanks that you care about because that's the thing it's like i don't care about the certification so that that's what i was saying is like what having that certification like unless you were on the

on the prowl for a new job like who cares yeah right and yeah so that's why i don't care about it it's also one of those things though, having those certifications, which I haven't gone after any in years and years, but, um, in, in an environment in like in an economy right now, like where companies have laid off thousands of people, it's not terrible to have some of that stuff by your name, right? Like, even if you're not hunting for a job at the moment So you're kept. Yeah. Just either. So you're kept or so if you do happen to get let go and, and you, you need to go get something else, you have that there.

Right. So really pessimistic view you got there on like that's, that might be the most pessimistic thing I've ever heard Alan say. Yeah. I mean, optimism over here is like, by and large, I am.

Yeah. I'm, I'm not a pessimist when it comes to things. But yeah, as as somebody who was a consultant for years and years and years, like I was you broke Alan. I was always the I've always been like cash on hand was king because when when you're a consultant, like you get paid hourly. Right.

So you take a week off. You're paying for that week. Right. So if you go on vacation, it's like a double hit so i guess like i've always thought i've always had those thoughts in the back of my head like you know um be prepared have have have some reserves available and i see a certification sort of as reserves right like if you're not actively hunting for a job it's not bad to have in your stash so you know whatever i'm not saying it was bad but yeah you know why so so it was like why so you're saying that the why would be like uh job

security is coming you're coming out from that approach no mine would be a balance of both it would be exactly what jay-z said like hey what don't i know like what what parts of am i missing and the other one is hey it's nice to have that little badge on there right like um i just started playing call of duty again and it's nice i don't know it's it's exciting getting those new badges you're like oh yeah yeah baby so does call of duty offer a ccad badge now i didn't realize i'm hoping so i'm hoping so i'm going to get it that's That's like one of the missions. You got to run, hide, duck, install a Kubernetes cluster. Deploy. Yes, deploy.

Dang it, we're out of nodes. Coming this fall, Call of Duty. Were there any other books from either of you guys? Was there anything else that jumped up at you or no? Nope. I mean, that book, Designing Data Intensive Applications, is definitely the one that was coming to mind. Isn't that crazy?

I mean, so all of you that have been with us for a while, like 10 years now, or, or maybe half that time or whatever, like you might think the three of us work on projects together all the time because we work at the same place. We don't like, we are all working on different things.

Like, like outlaw said, he was doing a lot of dev ops stuff. Um, Jay Z and I have, have worked on a project together for a little while now, but we're typically off doing other things too. So it's not like we're all immersed in the same exact things every day,

but the three of us have gravitated towards this book. And that's, you know, I think that says something about the content of that book as much as it maybe does about us, but I mean, it's just so good. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, not, not keep uh tooting this book's horn but uh i mean we've talked about it before just the practical approach that the author takes to it in trying to like you know starting with like hey let's just talk about like what if we were to create this thing from scratch like how might we do it what kind of about what if we were to create this thing from scratch? How might we do it? What kind of data structures do we need to think of?

And walking through the pros and cons and starting from the bottom. It's like a Drake song. Started from the bottom, now I'm here. I just super really appreciated it. So like it, it helped solidify even after like years of experience, it helps solidify things that I hadn't like really taken the time to think about or like really appreciate. But in regards to databases, for example, in the data structures underneath them,

like it it it really put it together more than you know even past conversations of data structures for example you know so so it's kind of like it's kind of like you learn a and you learn b and you learn but you learned them independently and you're like yeah whatever and you don't realize this thing this cool thing c over here is like a combination of those two things but you learned them independently and she's like, eh, whatever. And you don't realize this thing, this cool thing C over here is like a combination of those two things, but you just take C for granted, you know? And then like you take, then this book is like forcing you to realize like, like, okay, let's,

let's evaluate. We want to get to C, but let's start with A and B and then figure out like, oh, hey, here's how we make this thing. And it's just such an awesome appreciation from it so yeah and it totally applies to the interest that i think the three of us have now like especially like in streaming technologies though you know so yeah hey hey and we should just put ourselves on the spot here if anybody wants to get 2023 off to a good start leave a comment on this episode at codingblocks.net slash episode 201 and get yourself a chance to win this book oh yeah because we love this book and we should share this book also uh if you've

been playing along with coding blocks drinking game for every time we mention uh designing the intensive applications uh we're sorry you were you were properly wasted at this point uh well well how about this how about this if you're well, I don't even know what I would say for a chance to win that book. How about what do you think should be the next book? What do you think is a book? They're like, hey, why aren't they talking about this book instead? Like this book is equally or better. And we take that challenge because that's some tough shoes to fill.

Hey, I like that. Hey, and also being this is the New Year's resolution one, why don't you drop some there so you can go back at the end of 2023 and figure out if you actually accomplished what you wanted to. You can go ahead and disappoint future self by writing things you know you're not going to get to.

Put it out on the interweb and leave it there forever. There you go. All right. Who's got the next one here yeah well i wasn't sure if one of you we're going to say this part but i can if you want you can okay because it's probably better if i did it not joe right can we agree definitely okay okay as long as we agree so uh if you would like some stickers, for example, uh, we have, you can go to coding box.net slash swag and,

you know, send us a self address stamped envelope. There's a, the address and all that is on coding box.net slash swag. And we'll send you some coding box stickers. Now we have a variety of them. And also, uh,

you know, I mentioned the reviews. It's, it's potato um we mentioned the reviews at the start of the episode and uh we always we we super love them um they they always do really mean a lot to us i don't know if you guys have read those um i think it was Bill's who like his, he literally had like a career kind of change. Kind of, if I recall, he was like in, was it aerospace or something like that and had no programming knowledge and ended up becoming like the lead developer for his team. And I think if I understood it now, he's like a new job.

So it's super, super inspiring, I guess, is the point I'm getting at. Like we super appreciate it. You know, we read these things that you all write into us and, you know, it's inspiring to us that we inspired you. And so we do greatly appreciate. So if you haven't already left us a review, you can find some helpful links at coding box dot net slash review. And with that,

we'll head into my favorite portion of the show. Survey says, Hey, real quick before you go too far into it. Oh, it's not, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned the NACE email that he sent and I didn't even see it until you'd said that. And I read it and it's amazing. It's another one of those just feel good things, right? Like he's been traveling all over the place. And, and I think it's totally fine to mention this because he's on YouTube. Um, so this guy has been traveling across all 50 States in the United States. And he said that he was listening to a bunch of podcasts and he came upon us and then just started listening to ours exclusively, which is amazing and, and just crazy to even hear anybody say that, but his review was amazing. But, but if you want to go see something kind of fun, um, we'll leave a link in the show notes here to his YouTube channel where he's been,

you know, videoing things as he's been traveling across all the States and learning while he's been going. So, um, you know, thank you for the email and learning while he's been going so um you know thank you for the email and for sharing that and maybe this will be something fun to get some people to go take a look at what you've been doing so all right now back survey says survey says how would you do that back says right so uh yeah you nailed it uh so yeah So we're back to survey says this is 201. Alan, you will go first, according to Tucko's trademark rules of engagement. And let's start with, you know what? New Year's Eve, you know, is a big party time.

So let's start with this one. Name an American city where they know how to party hard. New York City. Okay. New York City. Okay. I have one. Oh, man.

Yeah. Jeez. This is tough. I guess Los Angeles. But I feel like there's better answers like Panama City or something. I was going to say Miami, but yeah. Yeah. I'm sticking with LA since it's headed.

All right. So Alan says New York. Jay-Z says Los Angeles. New York is the number two answer at 21 points. All right. Man. LA right. Man. And LA is number one. LA is the number four answer with 10 points.

So at least you got some points on the board. Yeah. I'll take it. Number one answer, New Orleans. Oh, geez. 31 points. Of course. Wow.

Yeah. Yep. Las Vegas, number three at 19 points. Oh course. Wow. Yeah. Yep. Las Vegas. Number three at 19 points. Ah, why didn't I say either of those? Be thankful. You didn't say Miami at number four with four points and rounding it out is Chicago with four.

Okay. All right. So Joe, you're going to, you're going to start us off here. In horror movies, name a place teenagers go where there's always a killer on the loose. I mean, party is the open-ended answer to give. I'm not giving that.

Where the killer is on the loose, a place where teenagers go i the woods uh so cabin is my answer okay dang it that was kind of mine um i was gonna say like a campsite uh let's let's say the lake dang lake okay okay so uh cabin or woods jay-z said as his answer alan you said lake number one answer on the board is cabin slash camp slash woods

so my camps like 49 points they shouldn't have lumped those together though 49 different things but yeah i'm the winner lake lake is not on the board of course it's not yeah so uh number two answer and there was a recent uh what was it like a geico commercial or whatever that like was recently parodying this do you know what i'm talking about? Yes, I do.

They hide in the shed with all the like chainsaws and knives and, uh, yeah. So, uh, number two answer for 12 points graveyard, number six movie theater or drive in number. Uh,

I'm sorry. That was the number three answer with six points. The fourth answer also was six points, basement slash cellar. Fifth answer was closet for five points. Sixth was bathroom or shower for four points, then bedroom or bed for four points, followed up with a party for four points. So let's be real here. The number one answer was 49 points and every answer after that didn't even matter.

It would have been points on the board though. Now you have a serious deficit here. Yeah, that was rough. I feel like late counts towards camp. Well, you can't say the same answer. You can't say the same answer. I would have gotten the...

Okay. So this is your chance to redeem yourself, Alan. Name an occupation that begins with the letter J. Job. Wow. Begins with a letter J? I can't think of a single word that begins with a letter J right now. Wow, do we have to put a timer on this?

This will be a first. Let me get the Jeopardy theme music queued up. Man. Job. Can't be job. This has got to be a, man, I don't know, Java engineer, Java software engineer. I got nothing, man. Okay.

Joe? There's only one I can think of, and it's janitor. Okay, janitor. Oh, man. All right. up in his janitor okay oh man all right so um alan says java engineer and joe says janitor java engineer not on the list dang it janitor says joe 50 is the number one answer on the board. 100. Oh, my goodness, man. Yeah.

You're with a bang. So you beat Alan by an even 100 points there. I think it's safe to say you won. I think so. Second top answer was Judge or Justice with 19 points. Jeweler was number three for five points. Jockey, number four with four points. Journalist tied for four points.

And Juggler was three points. And I don't even understand that one. If I got the number one answer, I would have been back in the lead. That's crazy. That's why I gave you a chance to redeem yourself. Wow. I i had a total blank i was like i don't i can't think anything i i had some other i had some other ones at the ready but i'm like let's make it interesting because you know fun yeah yeah yeah geez you want to do another one just for fun sure sure you can i can get number one again yeah yeah with a hundred points

all right so let me let me let me you guys decide which theme you wanted to go down path of do you want it to go down in the theme of cars or marvel cars yeah i have a chance at that definitely i know more about marvel than cars but uh yeah alan said it first and uh he needs all the help i do i need a lot of help okay what's something you keep in your car just in case well it's not that kind of car question is it um um uh tire iron tire iron okay or jack or whatever either one i'm not gonna win i'm so far ahead that i'm gonna say my real answer which is hot sauce sauce yeah well if it makes you both feel any better, both of us, both of you tire, are you, you would think it would be on there is not, uh, the closest to tire iron would be spare tire,

which was the fourth answer with 15 points. Um, and then of course, like, I don't know, surprisingly hot charger on there, a phone charger. It's got to be number one. Money and coins were number one. 19 points. Really? So I almost said that, but I was like, why do you even need it anymore?

Yeah. I was thinking for tolls, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Old school. Go through those Florida tolls where they have, like, you got to throw your money in the thing, or like New York tolls where you got to throw your money in the thing. I guess.

But now it's like a know a lot of readers but uh uh yeah so it goes money coins number 119 points food water 18 first aid it was number three answer with 18 spare tire 415 map uh next with seven points jumper cables seven uh spare clothes or shoes five points gas can two points and flare two points how about how about matt we interviewed 100 people over the age of 60 right yeah for real i i i know that you two would have answered that the the marvel one though like there would be no question you would have gotten it yeah name a marvel avenger iron man iron man number one jay-z yeah i mean yeah iron man or captain america captain america number one answer 22 points come on iron man tied for number one. 22 points. Okay. I was like, man, that's not right. Yeah. So and that's your your family feud fun.

Got my hiney kicked. Yeah. Yeah, you did. So you win every other one. This is the. No, I think you've got three in a row now. It's not. All right.

Yeah. And if you connect for. Oh, wait. Different game. Right. All right. So what And if you connect for, Oh wait, different game. Right. All right. So what are yours, Alan?

What are your, your resolutions for the year? Okay. So yeah, I, you know, Jay-Z was way more organized with his categories. I'm just going to throw out what I was thinking about whenever this came up.

And one is like health and fun. Like, I don't know what it is. I think ever since the pandemic, like I was locked up in my house working nonstop and that sort of just continued this past year. And I don't know, man, I need to get out and play more basketball and get outside and do stuff and just have some more fun instead of just working all the time. So that's a big one for me and how I accomplish that. I have no idea, but I'm about to, I've got to, I've got to add that in and call of duty is an example.

Like I used to love playing call of duty, right? Even though every kid that can play at 12 hours a day is going to be better than me. I still enjoyed it. And, and I got it for Christmas and I've been playing it right. Like I've been enjoyed it and and i got it for christmas and i've been playing it right like i've been enjoying it and it's been a lot of fun so but i don't think that call of duty checks the box on health though right is it maybe not on modern health care yeah yeah maybe not the health but the fun hey i could do like one of our buddies um one of our friends actually years ago i forget it might have been elder elder scrolls or what one of those games right like he put an exercise bike in the

room where he played oh it was halo it was a halo yeah and so he sat there on the bike and he was pedaling the whole time he was playing it you know maybe that's the way there you go yeah like like uh no not ultimate what's the hardest one called like uh something with an l uh legendary i don't know legendary yeah he played it on legendary yeah so beat it several times so so that might be a way to get the health but yeah i gotta do that um so the other one this came from my wife as a matter of fact i got a text messenger from her the other day she was on our about us page why i have no idea but she's like you have to update that thing like we wrote that each one of us wrote that 10 years ago now yeah and she's like you have more than two kids now you do you like there's all kinds of other things i was like yeah so i i'm going to update

my about us portion for me and i'll probably leave the old one there and put like circa 2013 or something and then uh and then add some new bits i like how she called out that you uh you left out some of your kids like right yeah hey do you love all of the family equally well you know i didn't know about that family back then so yeah um so yes i'll be i'll be updating that if you want daddy's love and you want to be on his about us page you better behave that's right that's right and you know the funny part is when I put this on the list, I was like, Hey, this is something I can actually do. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

Okay. So same vein as both of these other guys here streaming, like me specifically, Flink is what I want to get more into. We've looked at. So between Jay-Z and myself, we've done Kafka streams. We've done Apache beam. We've done spark streaming a little bit. And in Flink seems to be the most mature of all of them. And yeah, this, I plan on spending quite a bit more time in that world.

I like it. I think it's really cool. And then big data for me, outlaw and I had actually started doing this a couple of years ago where we were looking heavily into like data lakes and, and how to mine data out of them and how to get useful information into them and the proper ways to do it. And we'd even mentioned at the time, the, the Uber engineering blog, which is absolutely fantastic because they have massive scale things they deal with. I forget at the time how many petabytes of data they had, but it was insane.

It's just cool how they're so open to different – not everything has to use this data. They're so willing to spin off pieces of data for two. I'm sorry. I, I, I didn't mean to tangent. No, you're totally fine. I mean, it was, it was a fun exploration and a lot of the things that we're looking at right now revolve around big data and, and how you get useful information quickly. And then that's always the challenge with big data, right? Is how you get quick information versus information that can take a couple minutes and you're okay with, right? Something serving the UI for a user versus something you want for a report. So I want to go further into that.

And then this one I've been thinking about. It's been bouncing around in my head again for a while now is the need to get back, excuse me, to making more content again, right? Like some YouTube videos, um, maybe even setting up something and doing presenting again, going to conferences and doing that kind of stuff, even at a code camp. Cause even when we were talking about doing the code camp this past year, which we ended up missing, um, you know, I had no plans to, to put together something. Cause I mean, we've talked about it before, you know, you got 40, 50 hours and just creating something for an hour long talk. So, um, I don't know. I think I'm getting a little bit of the itch again. And,

and I think if I'm going to go into the streaming stuff pretty hardcore, it'd be a great way to help learn and teach at the same time. Because that's one thing I've found with streaming technologies is it doesn't seem there's a lot of coherent information out there. Which is, it's a bunch of piecemeal information. And that makes it really hard to get what you want out of something. So, yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking about. I know Code Camp's coming up. What time? When is it?

It's in March, right? I know Code Camp usually. They're a couple years off. Let me see here. I know what time it will start. The day, March 25th. March 25th. Hey, look what I'm wearing.

It was actually inspired this morning oh nice yeah i'm wearing my old orlando code camp t-shirt where we had gone down there so yeah i i'm thinking about it like if if i can force myself to set aside some time and create some of this then i think uh yeah i want to dip my toe back in again because i i enjoyed i enjoyed it a lot but it was a lot of work so uh i don't know i think i mentioned this in like one of our slack um conversations and i will send you guys a link real quick we'll put this in the show notes but um the group that puts on the the code camp here in atlanta that you were referring to that we missed this year, Lana, the Atlanta developers conference,

they've started another one, the Atlanta cloud conference. And I believe it's in, uh, 20 or 2023. I believe it's in March. Uh, yeah.

March 25th is when that's coming up. It's the same group, same place. Um, but yeah. Okay, cool. And same low, low cost as, And same low cost as the normal Atlanta Dev Conference.

So I'm kind of curious to see how this one's going to go since it's like the normal Atlanta Code Camp isn't, like topics can vary. Like they could be all over the map because it's not necessarily uh siloed into just one specific thing so i'm curious to see how this one will go since it is going to be siloed to cloud very cool but yeah 10 to 20 for it so um yeah so i had this i had this uh this question though that kind of came up as we were talking. Okay, so we've talked about all these things that we want to do.

What are things that you absolutely don't want to do in 2023? What are the things that you may have done in 2022 or even before that you're like, nope, no more of that. I'm done. I don't want to do any of that. Wait, wait. Hold on. I feel like you should answer this first. Are you giving up on Git?

I knew it never um no i was i was thinking like okay i i i'm okay if i don't touch jenkins for a while yeah like if i don't have to touch jenkins for a while i'm okay i'll be okay with i'm good with that uh i don't i don't really know anything i want to avoid oh sure make me out to be the bad guy i didn't do much this year actually i can think of one that jay-z might actually grab onto is is upgrading piecemeal parts of spring framework oh yeah well that kind of goes with what his uh his his resolution was that too right right because spring was yes and no we had a we had a weird odd situation to where you couldn't just upgrade a full version of spring um Um, there were dependencies that broke backwards compatibility that we couldn't do. And so we had to upgrade certain, upgrade certain portions to fix, um, security breach type things. Um, but we couldn't wholesale upgrade the entire

framework because of other dependencies we had that were going to break it. And so it was, it was like going through with a scalpel and trying to figure stuff out, which I think he came up with an elegant solution to it. But, man, it is not fun trying to figure that stuff out. You're right. There is something I want to avoid all upgrades. I mean, I know they need to happen, but they don't have to be me. You know what I'm saying?

But I guess the larger thing, though, to your point, Alan, it doesn't even have to be spring. I mean, like really what you were describing, you could just summarize as like managing dependencies is a pain, regardless of language or technology or anything like that. Like they're just they're such a hassle. Every, every single language I've ever programmed in, as soon as you start running into conflicts and that kind of stuff, it is gnarly, right? I did it with Ruby. I did it with C sharp. I've done it with JavaScript. I've done it with, with Java.

Now, like what, what's amazing to me, and we've talked about this before, there's really just no great way currently to manage the matrix of things that work together. Like Spring tries to do a pretty good job of throwing everything up on the page and showing you exactly what they are. But then when you start looking at their transitive dependencies and how they intersect with everything else, man, it is just, it's a nightmare. So yeah, I mean, to your point outlaw, every language dependency management is hard. It is, it is not fun. I ran into this weird issue before the holidays where, um, this was a, this was in a.net project where, you know where we do all of our building in Docker. Specifically, I actually love using Docker for the build chain because then it's documented. Here's the versions. Here's the tool set.

It's a known entity, and you go to do it on your own. You don't have to worry about like hey do i have the right things installed and i ran into this issue where like it built fine on the server side but yet on my side it wouldn't build and it turned out to be this weird uh versioning thing inside of the the project that if i removed it then it worked fine in both places, but it was like only on my machine. So yeah, like dependencies suck. We can just say like it managing dependencies in general.

And it was a weird one where it was like, you know, you're talking about transitive dependencies. This was super like that because it was related to like an abstractions library that comes along for the ride because you call a logging library that was also just trying to like abstract logging away from me. So yeah, it was, I feel your pain,

I guess. Yeah. I would like to avoid all of that. Um, I don't think I'll get to, but I would love to. Yeah. All right.

So Jay Z. Hey, you had, uh, more uh so i thought it'd be fun fun to ask you any predictions about you know the year anything major tech trends or you know i don't know the things changing in the next year that you're predicting hmm um are these should these be like positive uplifting predictions or either way uh no i don't i don't know like the only things that come to mind are like super kind of negative things and i'm like i don't know like now i sound like a really bad guy if i say those things yeah uh oh i mean yeah so i don't know i don't i don't i don't have anything you know i am this i don't know that there's a prediction for 2023 but i am curious how far is too far with the amount of data that we keep in in in the world, right? Like in our industry, like how many hard drives are,

are in data centers that are, that are storing data that nobody ever looks at or uses or cares about anymore. Right? Like, I mean, logging cloud logging, everything's like, there's just so much data. At what point do we say, hey, we have too much or we need to find a better storage mechanism or what? I don't know. But it just it seems like. That's actually one of the even harder things when you start considering things like GDPR, the things over in Europe. What in the world? How do you even keep track of all of it nowadays? It's insane. So I don't know. I think something's got to happen with data retention and the amount of stuff that companies in general keep around now. Yeah. So I wrote that down also um you know i was trying to think if there's anything like

any new language or framework or like anything that's particularly like kind of missing and you know i know rust is uh you know kind of popular right now so maybe i can see like some new rust uh web framework kind of coming up that change things you know maybe i would shake things up but aside from that i don't really i don't really foresee anything but uh generated content now that's one i do think is really interesting you know like earlier this year we saw the github one i forget what it's called now uh now chat gpt people are using to generate like good chunks of code so if you have like a computer programming assignment in school you know it's like hey write a program to figure out if uh three lines create a triangle or something like that i mean you could probably ask that to chat gpt probably generate a program

for you and whatever like you want that's going to work there was pretty interesting speaking of chat the the github one that you were thinking of is co-pilot ai pair programming um and the chat gpt thing that you were thinking of there was an article i only saw the headline but the the person wrote like i used chat gpt to write my entire uh you know thesis or or whatever it was for their their final class and they passed yeah i was like that's pretty awesome also scary right i've heard about people using it to write their reviews so they can kind of just say like hey uh i'm reviewing uh you know let's say you're reviewing brad pitt right and you're like uh hey chat gbt write a personal review for uh br. Talk about how great they are at their work and now they have a good heart, but I don't know.

There's sometimes some of their work is sloppy. Right. And then there you go. Five paragraphs. There you go. Your three 60 review is done. Really? Yeah.

That's unreal. I haven't done it only because when I went up to the site, it's like, Oh, you have to create a login. And I'm like, man, I don't want to create another login. And then LastPass just got breached, so they're going to have it anyways. Well, that was like some of the negative things that I was thinking of in terms of predictions.

It was like, oh, LastPass was one of the things that came to mind. Yeah, like Jay-Z wrote, data privacy, do we need it? Dude, I've been saying this for years now. Like in all honesty, I don't know that there's any way to secure anything like really, really secure anything. So like, at what point do you stop caring about the emails that you get that, Hey, you were, your information was in another breach. Like I got so many letters mailed to me over the past couple of years where it's like's like oh yeah your health insurance provider was hacked and breached oh yeah this was breached it's like at some point you just become numb to it you're like well somebody will have my

social security number at some point and then you know they're gonna have a lot of stuff like i i don't know like do you worry about it anymore can you, I don't know that you worry as much as you just like keep doing what you can, you know, like best practices to protect yourself and do what you can and not worry about the things that are out of your control. But in terms of predictions, like one that did come to mind though, I don't know if you guys have been following this,

but as far as predictions i would say that like maybe the u.s might be going in the route of a um uh oh gosh what's the acronym uh g uh gd gdpr um oh type of information yeah it seems like it seems like you know we might be moving in a similar kind of route now. At least the current proposed legislation seems more focused on certain types of entities. But I don't know, maybe. Because I know that, I don't know about you, I super love all the pop-ups about cookie management. I'm so thankful for it. I think it's really

helpful and doing a lot of good so thank you europe for that i love how how um terribly for they are about trying to trick you about them too oh yeah they're awful like oh except all or no um choose only these but wait you didn't actually open it up and deselect them all like yeah completely against the vein of what gdpr was supposed to be and the tricks that they do where sometimes like you got to read it carefully because sometimes like turning that toggle on or off isn't what you think like it's the inverse yeah and you're like oh this is so dirty yeah yeah i hate it so yeah maybe we can look forward to more of that so what else jay-z what you got prediction wise it looks like you have one more down there oh i just mentioned a i wouldn't

have for the notes talking about kind of ai ethics and the ethics of using for example chat gdpt to generate your reviews are also just kind of the notion of being like, I had a sentence and I expanded it algorithmically into five paragraphs. And that kind of sucks because this real sentiment, the heart of what you're trying to say was really just a sentence. And so there's something sad about overly inflating it just to kind of make it look more substantial than what you're really

saying yeah i found the article i'll include it in the links it was a wall street journal article the title is chat gpt wrote my ap english essay and i passed that's so crazy man yeah so yeah now imagine like as a as professor, you, when you already had like plagiarism was already a concern, right? Then the internet became, became more rampant and it was like, you know, I guess more challenging to try to find those plagiarism things. Now you could have it written by an AI and now you gotta like figure out like okay i gotta i actually have to read and pay attention to the tone of the paper to see if it was even if i even think that it was written by a human let alone did they copy a human and also if if if it doesn't seem like it was written by a

human is it just because the student is just that bad or was it really not written by a human? And like, I'm trying to say that politely, but you know what I'm saying? Like there's sometimes you read things and you're like, come on. What? Really?

What are you trying to say? Yeah, man. All right. Well with that, let's head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. Oh, and Hey, I'm first. Well, with that, let's head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. Oh, and hey, I'm first.

So, Bobby. Bobby's amazing. Talk about Bobby a few times. Bobby showed me that you can pipe output to code, which is really nice if you're doing a build or something. You know, I used to basically, if I wanted to see the output of something that was like too long i would run a command and like pipe it to a file or um you know the arrow trick to to uh output it to a file and then i'd open the file up and you know vs code right well why do that when you can just pipe it directly to vs code so you run your command you pipe code and then in newer versions of code you actually have to have a little uh dash afterwards it's kind of weird but if you look at at the show notes, it's basically just code dash.

And it'll open up in a buffer, and it'll tell you what the buffer name is. And sure enough, it'll just pop it up in your active code window. And there you go. And it'll stream in just like you're tailing a file. And what's nice about it is you can also do pipe transformations. So, for example, instead of just piping it directly to code, you could pipe it to, I don't know, JQ first to format JSON and then pipe it to code. Save you a little step there. That's crazy.

It's so nice. It just opens up in the tab. There you go. I guess we'd already talked about this, but I just searched and no, we hadn't. So, yeah, cool. Thanks. That's a nice one. Yeah.

Put that one up to the. To the for the books. OK, well, i will go then since we're only doing like one is that our new year's resolution from now on like one tip of the week alan okay it's amazing when i have any yeah so so i've been meaning to share this one for a while and uh i can't i kept forgetting but um so who here we all have macbooks that have uh the taptic feedback mouse pads now right where you're not technically pressing down on anything right like like it feels like you're super pressing down on something but really that's just the So we all have those. So, um, my son has his air has that. And, um, he came to me one day and he's like, Hey, my mouse isn't working anymore. Like you can't, you can't do anything with it. Right. And I'm like, well, that's super weird. Like you're really not even like, it's not moving.

Like, why can't you do anything? Like, I don't understand what's happening here. And it turned out, and this is the dumbest thing ever, but, um, I was, I was kind of like, I was a little angry with him when he told me what had happened. And I'm like,

well, of course, why would you even do that? So, so if you, you can get gunk built up in like that little crevice around the trackpad, gunk can get built up there. So if you just simply take a piece of paper, don't force anything. Just the amount of paper that you can squeeze into that to that crevice is whatever you get don't force anything and just run it around some of the edges to clear to to remove the gunk

and all of a sudden boom your trackpad works again and you're not and i don't mean you that you're trying to like push the paper underneath like underneath it either like and so i can't i can't stress enough like you know my dad beat into my head like the first rule of engineering is you never force right right so so uh i mean that makes my dad sound bad that he beat it but that he beat me but um i probably deserved it uh at any rate but yeah so uh stop eating cheetos while you're typing, right? Like that's, that's the barbecue sauce. Oh, why are you? First of all, why do you need your computer while you're eating?

Second of all, barbecue sauce. Like, what are you doing? So, yeah, but it turned out to be that simple a fix. Like, I thought, like, oh, we're going to have to ship this thing off. Like, it's done. You broke something. And it was just as simple as that. So, yeah.

And then, okay, so I threw this one out there since we were talking about, like, password management and all that. I'm not yet sure how this feature works. I read all sorts of documentation are like different articles talking about it. And it's still unclear to me what this feature is, but I noticed in iOS, there is a feature to use, uh, an MFA app, like a multi-factor authentication app for verification codes. So like if you have say like a google authenticator or the microsoft authenticator or an octa verifier whatever whatever your uh you know i think even last pass uh has has a a code generator app you know whatever your app is a choice like whatever you have installed will show up in this list and you can select that as the app to use for verification codes.

So you would go to settings, then passwords and password options and you'll see the list there. Now, what's minor from my understanding works in, uh, Android where like anytime you're prompted for an app, it'd just be like, Oh, do you want to use this from this app? And you're like, yeah, just use that. And I only had to like, I no need to switch to the other app. No need to copy anything. Just it does it.

It's nice. Very nice. I have not yet seen this work in action. And from everything that if my understanding is correct, then I don't think it's ever going to work for me because I think that

so I'm putting this out there because I'm hoping that if somebody uses it they'll be able to clarify or maybe it's just limited to certain apps or websites. I don't know yet. But I think it might be that you have to have iOS managing the password. Because I did see that if you have a saved password, like I created one in iOS just to see this. And there's a thing in there where you can set up the verification code.

And I think that that is what's required for it. And that's why I say, I don't think it'll ever work for me since I don't use iOS to manage my passwords. Right. But I'm dying to know, like if somebody does use this, it seems to be,

uh, something new to iOS 16, but Apple's dot Apple's documentation on it is not, it's pretty sparse. So it, you know, it's much like, I think the, I think, but Apple's documentation on it is not, it's pretty sparse. So it's much like, I think the people that wrote the documentation on this feature for Apple left Apple and went to go work at the press,

the PR for LastPass. And that's why we're in both situations. We're like, but I want more information. They're like, no. We like vague. Yeah. So at any rate, yeah, that's out we're in both situations. We're like, but I want more information. They're like, no, we like vague. Yeah. So at any rate, yeah, that's out there. All right.

So mine, I actually borrowed from our coding blocks like channel, which we haven't mentioned this episode, I don't believe. So if you are not slack channel, I always say it on our slack community. So if you're not a part of it, you should be a part of it. Go to coding blocks dotnet slash slack and join that because there are truly amazing people out there. So this particular one is pretty cool. So it's called jump around and I'm not talking about the crisscross song that we all know and love from back, you know, 30 years ago or whatever it was. So this tip came from the a garage and,

and, uh, you can let me know if I said that even close to right. I hope I did. So this is something for your command line that is actually pretty cool. And it uses a thing called Frequency. Yes, I said that correctly, incorrectly. It's a combination of most frequent and recent. And so what it allows you to do is, at least with this particular one, we'll have a link to the GitHub page. You type in Z and then you sort of type in a regex of what directory you want to go to. And it sort of keeps track of the most recent directories you've CD to and, and the frequency at which you've done it. And it uses like a weighted algorithm to say, hey, if you more recently went here, then I'm going to float that particular directory up to

the top of the list versus if you more frequently visited it, but it was like six months ago, then that one's going to be weighted lower, right? So it sort of ranks more recent things over the more frequent ones. And so for instance, the example that they give is if you did Z foo, then it's going to go try and find a directory that looks similar to foo that you've most recently visited, right? And then it'll just drop you into that directory. So instead of having to do CD slash DER dar one slash dar two slash dar three slash foo, it'll just know to take you straight there. So very cool. Um,

I know that I just gave a really fast overview of that. Um, hopefully it made a little bit of sense. I was hoping that this, like you have to type in Z not CD. Z Z. Yeah. Z is jump around.

So it's like their CD thing, but you have to use it in order to be able to use stuff. I was hoping you could just add it to the shell and it would change what CD would use. So that way, but yeah, I see that now. Also, we need to correct your spelling here. Chris Cross is just the one S. And also, we should pour one out for Mac Daddy because he died back in, what was it? He died a while back.

Did he really yeah 2013 oh man so oh we're we're topical we're on time it's only 10 years that's right well yeah i mean it's about we started this yeah um and then and then another one i want to share here is from brad knowles and there is basically the equivalent of that same feature in PowerShell. So if you're a PowerShell user, here you go. You can go to this link. So thank you to both of you for leaving that on the Tips and Tricks channel in our Slack community, and that's what I got.

And you got to love that the author of the PowerShell one, Bad Motorfinger. Isn't that awesome? Nice, yeah, old school. Yeah. Old school. Yeah. All right. Well, with that, you know, like I said, to start, you know, if you haven't already subscribed to us, you can. I don't know. Maybe I didn't say it. I probably didn't.

We're using a new intro now, I guess, is the thing. So, yeah, but if you haven't, you can find us everywhere. Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes. Um, there's helpful links at the top of the page for all of those two. If you haven't already left us a review,

we would greatly appreciate it. If you did, um, coding box.net slash review. And I have been getting reports that, um, apparently, I don't know if this is an end of the year thing,

maybe, um, you know, because of holiday sales and whatnot, but people have been getting free upgrades on their reviews. So additional stars have been automatically getting added. So I don't know how long that sale takes advantage. So you probably shouldn't expect that sale to be around

and just go ahead and leave the five-star because that's probably what you wanted to do anyways. Concur, concur. Hey, and also somebody notified us that the newsletter signup was broken, which had been apparently for like five months. So that is now resolved. So if you want to get on the Coding Blocks newsletter,

you can. While you're at codingblocks.net, make sure you check out our show notes. We have all kinds of examples, discussions, and more your feedback questions and rants to somebody on our slack channel somebody at somebody i think is is the technical one yeah yeah indeed and hey uh we got a twitter still uh at codingbox and if you go to codingbox.net you'll find all our social links at the top of the page. With that, I'm going to break my rusty cage and run. That's right.

Well played, sir.