Coding Blocks - How to Spend $2,500 on Developer Gear

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

We're back with another installment as we challenge ourselves to compare how we'd each spend $2,500 on developer gear as Allen waxes on about the loudest quiet keyboard, Joe teaches us how cheese is made, and Michael puts some neon on his computer.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, Episode 70. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. And check us out at CodingBlocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and more. Send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net, follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks, or head to www.CodingBlocks.net and find all our social links there at the top of the page, which were recently redone and look more consistent and pretty. Thank you, Michael. With that, I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zak.

And I'm Michael Outlaw. This episode is sponsored by Linode. Start your next project using Linode to get your server up and running in seconds. With SSD storage and a 200 gigabit network powered by Intel Xeon E5 processors. They have data centers in Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe. Mess up your network settings? No problem. You can still get into your instance using the Lish virtual console. Linode has a robust set of developer APIs to control your instances programmatically. They have custom stack scripts to build instances that meet your needs.

Get started with Linode today and get $20 off using the code CodingBlocks17 by heading to www.codingblocks.net slash Linode. That's L-I-N-O-D-E. All right. And with that,

let's go ahead and get into our first part of the show, which is our reviews where we like to thank everybody for doing so. And for today, I've got iTunes and that we've got Caducey long run games. Android version has ITP traumatized 85 or traumatized 85, a mixa and Pfeiffer DC. So thank you all you guys for writing us and leaving us reviews on iTunes

and on Stitcher we have JoeIsMyWayFu Raspberry Lulian ProofOfWork BarryLs and StarLord777 I just looked up WayFu, by the way. Did I pronounce that right?

Moving on. Yeah, I think so. It's an interesting term. I have no... I probably... I might have just said something really bad and offended somebody.

I don't know. We'll talk about that at the show. Oh, God. Thanks again for... Thanks again for the reviews. We have one more. Pod Chaser, Martin Smith, 1968. And Pod Chaser is really cool because you can do per episode uh thanks again for uh thanks again for the reviews we have one more uh pod chaser martin

smith 1968 and pod chaser is really cool because you can uh do per episode uh which is interesting so thank you very much we really appreciate those reviews uh they help us out immensely man this has so many different meanings we'll we'll discuss later all right we both are like quickly jumping over to Google. Like, wait a minute. What did I just say? Right.

Oh, bad. All right. So, uh, one of the things we talk about quite a bit is our Slack channel because it's awesome. And there's a lot of really cool people in there.

And with that, you can go there. It's a coding blocks, that's like.com. Or if you want to slide, sign up, you can go to coding blocks.net slash slash slack. And you can go ahead and put in your email address there and join the cool fun. But one of our awesome slackers is Sean. And he asked a question the other day that I thought was

great, which is what does it mean to be a senior developer? So basically his manager asked, I guess, a group of people there, you know, Hey, do you guys think you're senior developers? And he's like, I don't know how to answer that. And so I thought it'd be an interesting thing to bring up here, right? Like, what is a senior developer to you? Who wants to go first? I guess that'll be me um to me i think it means you convince somebody to give you the title which um you know it's gonna be hard after year one but really that's the biggest deal

and a lot of companies know this that they know that people want that title and that title is immensely beneficial to you so sometimes you can find companies that will pay a little bit lower and they'll call you senior and it's a win-win okay but hold on hold on all right so there's definitely the title which is is one thing but if you hear that somebody is a senior developer on your team what do you expect from them i guess is the bigger question to be older i would say at least three years experience. And anything past that is meaningless. There's no strong distinction.

They have been using the JavaScript framework du jour for the last three months. Oh, man. You guys are not helpful. No, I'm pretty sure Sean's going to write in and say we nailed it. I mean, I actually thought about this. And when he said that, I was like, man, there's such a, like, you can't say it's all technical knowledge, right? Because the problem is there's too many technologies. So what are you calling yourself senior in, right?

Is it SQL? Is it JavaScript? Is it, you know, C Sharp? Is it C++? Is it whatever? Go ahead. I mean, I guess my like real answer, if I had to like, you know, if I was held to the fire to like say something more meaningful than just old people, which is probably still

accurate. Yeah, it is sort of. Um, yeah, maybe, maybe a developer that needs less direction is like immediately what comes to mind. You know, you, you don't don't have yeah you don't have to do as much hand-holding in order to get something done but that's kind of where i'm thinking i i like that and i think to stack on top of it it's the it's the ability to do that work more independently but do it in ways that make sense right like they have enough knowledge

of the technologies and the business problems and all that to make intelligent good decisions going forward right i like that and that's that was a huge assumption there and that's the thing is such a i mean senior developer is such a you know like you said some company decides to give it to somebody because you know they're the most senior person on the team like it's it's sort of like this not real term. But I guess if I if I'm working with a senior developer, my expectation of them is I really don't even have to think about it. Right. Like I hand them something and they get it done and they do it in a way that makes sense that other people can come behind them and improve or use or extend or whatever right like it and it means there's a lot of different things that roll around that that are nuanced communication ability to think ability to work on business

problems ability to use whatever languages are there like there's so much but it might mean something to my company than it would somebody else's company you know so if you want to be a senior just don't ask for help is that what i'm hearing no and i think that's actually a flip side right a senior will ask for help right they're not going to sit there and completely spin their wheels until they're just completely ground to a halt right and i think so here's my thing too, though, is resourcefulness, right? A senior person is extremely resourceful. Like you give them a problem, they sort of know how to look up the solutions

if they're faced with some problems, right? Maybe? Yep. Yeah, I mean, I've looked at things before that have tried to kind of quantify that and be like, can you make a website? Can you do this? Can you do that? And like, I'm telling you, if you go off those lists, you will never be a senior or you're going to be there.

You're going to be calling yourself a senior way after everybody else that you're working with is. And that's not fair. So, I mean, the sooner you get that title, rush to it and then live it up. Personally, I don't like the title. Yeah, it's terrible. Because it is ambiguous. It is extremely. I mean, places like Amazon have their one, two and threes or, you know, architects or something like that.

Those seem to be more meaningful. But yeah, I agree. I'm not a fan of it, but it is interesting when some people wear that title you know what does it mean do you have white hair do you have you know go ahead oh no i was just agreeing i think you know amazon 2 could be better than uh you know uh somewhere else 3 you know it doesn't really even the word better is kind of weird so yeah i mean it's a bad term we have to come up with terms though like how else could we you know talk about stuff and reason about it though you know

it's so it's it's a hard problem and um i don't know maybe you don't have to come up with a road we'll figure it out who says you have to come up with with terms like that ibm doesn't do that we need an unambiguous uh ubiquitous language so that we can like move between jobs and whatever no i remember at ibm you you fell into like one of two categories like assuming you were technical you fell into like one of two categories for most people in within the company it was either you were an it specialist or an it architect and those were the things now there were numbers that also went with it they were the band levels but that had more more to do with, if I recall, pay. It wasn't necessarily skill level.

Yeah, I think a lot of times these things are made up literally just for the feelings side of things, right? To make sure that people feel good about where they are. I don't know. But yeah, I guess, again, to all our points here, it is ambiguous, but you do as a person expect more out of that one wearing that title. Right. So. Well, I think that it's, I don't know if I agree about the part about it and trying to

make it feel good, but I think what they really want to signify is, I think it's more of like, well, we don't want a junior because that sounds more negative. It does. Because a junior developer, it sounds like that's somebody I have to sit with and I have to walk them through and coach them through and they're going to need a lot more of my time. And so therefore, I don't want that guy. So if I'm trying to hire somebody, then I want somebody who's a senior developer. And so that's why that kind of terminology gets used. That's my thought on it.

That's probably right. Yeah. So it's kind of like, yeah. It's the inverse of the negative connotation to it. In lack of a better way to describe it. Yep. I agree. So with that, hey, we have stuff.

Stuff that we would like you to have. So if you would like to have the stuff that we have that we want to give to you, you should head to www.codingblocks.net slash swag. And there you can find information to get yourself an amazing Coding Blocks shirt. If you want some stickers, you can send us a self-addressed stamped envelope. And on that swag page, you can find the address to send that to and we will get that out to you yep yep also want to mention uh we talk about slack all the time and you should join it but i recently did a a presentation at our local podcast meetup and it was kind of um the the actual owners of the group were out at blizzcon they do a wonderful hearthcast uh podcast about world of warcraft and so um they kind of uh um got me to

uh to do a little uh presentation there it went really well and for the most part it was basically just about all the awesome stuff that has come up in slack of the two years that we've we've been running one uh it's been really amazing. I had a great time. And so I just wanted to say really just a thank you to our Slack group for being amazing. I don't even want to say our Slack group because the people in there that are just killing it and crushing it and helping and being amazing. I don't even know if we're in the top 10, like the three of us. We're visitors.

We're visitors in our own house. And happy for it, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, big thanks. And we mentioned Sean. Yeah, there's a lot of it that I don't want to name names because I'm going to be excluding so many people that deserve it. So, just want to say thanks.

Definitely. You rock. All right. And so, with all that, that's the end of our news for this particular episode now it's time to jump into the meat of it so joe had this great idea crazy idea crazy idea hey let's take you know some budget and tell others what we would spend that money on if we were going to set up our own little you know what whatever we wanted to set up maybe it's your your own work environment or whatever but so we're going with a budget of twenty five hundred dollars wait a minute it had to you can't it can't be whatever okay because we weren't allowed to go

buy guitars or mountain bikes and things like that okay fair enough it had to be like you know uh coding somewhat related right or or where you would be coding or whatever so $2,500 was the budget we chose and and just to justify this a little bit that's less than the price of a fully loaded out macbook pro less than the price of a loaded out surface book pro so So, you know, it's, it's not unreasonable to say that, Hey, if you're going to set up something that $2,500 is a decent budget to start with. So anyways, justification aside, uh, one other thing I do want to note for this particular show is this is going to be like, there's tons of links to like Amazon products and stuff on here. So just a heads up, the links on the show notes will be affiliate links,

basically meaning if you do go up there and buy it, you know, we'll get like, you know, 50 cents for it or something. 50 cents. You wish we'd get 50 cents. Right.

But the thing is it won't cost you anything. So it's just a way for you guys. If, if there's anything that you like on here and you plan on going on and buying some of this stuff, you know, please do use the links and, you know, get the stuff that you want and, you know, help us out in the process. So that out of the way. Another way to say that it's, it's an opportunity for you to give back. Yes. Without actually having to give us anything, you know, you get what you want and then we get

something for it. So, uh, very cool. very cool all right so here we go i'm going to start out with mine and i've put them in somewhat of an order just kind of building up to what my and this is actually like can i guess the order you can alphabetical it is not actually it starts out completely inverse we that's right man i go the newspaper flip um so mine is i don't know what either of you guys did right like none of us really know what any of us chose here mine is kind of if i were going to set up my my home office and and i wanted to have my little development area that's kind of what i went at so the first thing that i have on my list is a chair that I absolutely love. I mentioned it before on the show.

It's called the WorkPro Quantum 9000 because that doesn't sound geeky enough. It is, it's the chair that I sit in every day and it's been called the baby Miller, the baby Herman Miller. It's essentially the mesh design of like a herman miller without the nine billion adjustments on it it does have enough to like slide the seat forward and and you know move the the backrest up and down and all that kind of stuff so that thing rings in at 300 dollars and 19 cents no 319 dollars and 99 cents right. The thing goes on sale on occasion. Yeah, it's not $319 right now.

With that link that I had? Oh, oh. You didn't put a link in there, but when I searched for it, it was. $347 right now. Yeah, so the thing goes up and down constantly. So basically, this is the same chair that you can get at, I think it's Office Depot. And the price fluctuates on it all the time. You can get it anywhere from two 70 to three 50. So if it's something that you're interested in, I would

definitely give it a look. Love the chair, sit in it way too much. And it's pretty comfortable all the time. And, Oh, and by the way, if you spend 150 bucks on a chair, expect for it to just be garbage pretty soon. Yeah, it's frustrating. So you spend $150 and expect to spend another $150 in a year or two. I've had this thing for going on three years right now, and it's in perfect shape. But you can't even see it. What do you mean? I'm spending $300.

I want to look at something. Well, you can look down. I'll adjust my camera next time for you maybe you can't i can't i can't see nothing oh that's awesome all right so the next thing this one's quite a bit cheaper but this goes hand in hand with the chair and this is rollers for the chair oh yeah so here's the thing chairs now like if you go buy an office chair anywhere they usually come with these really garbage plastic rollers they do two things one they wear down over time and two they gather a bunch of crap and if you have hardwood floors they'll eat the finish off your floor and what a lot of people do is they'll go buy like a clear plastic mat and put on the

floor so it's ugly as sin but it protects their floor don't do that these rollers are awesome they're 26.99 man i need to put these links let me describe what he's trying to find these are basically like the rollers from um rollerblades that's exactly what they are they're basically the wheels from the rollerblades soft kind of plastic yep and i have a link in in our show notes right now if you guys want to see it that's the only thing i i feel like okay man i gotta figure out how i'm gonna do this to where i don't give all the all the stuff away you guys will be clicking around while i'm looking at stuff yeah no we're gonna go ahead and spend your money go ahead all right so those those

are amazing i've had those on my chair for a while. Like literally, I kept the old garbage ones on there for quite a while. And it did eat away the floor, the coating on the floor, which really took me off. And when I was shopping around, that's how I found them. Love them. Wait, in the three years, the other ones that came on that chair, the Work Pro? They didn't wear down. They wore the finish off the floor. That's what I'm saying.

They wore the finish off your floor saying they wore the finish off your floor yeah because because they pick up like dirt and stuff and then it just kind of grinds it against the work pro chair no it's it's the same wheels that come on everything they're complete garbage so yeah definitely these roller blade ones are amazing all right so the next thing that i've got is a sit stand type thing. Oh, wait, what? A sit stand. So, you know, I've got my sit stand up desk that I love. Oh, right. But, you know, I custom built mine. I bought the electric legs and all that stuff and I built the top. Well, that's kind of, you know, if you got a workshop and you do all that kind of stuff, awesome. If not, that's a bit, you know if you got a workshop and you do all that kind of stuff awesome if not that's a bit you know that's a bit much however this this uh sit stand desk thing that i've got right here

that i've got a link for it's called the vivo height adjustable and it's 36 inches wide so it's a good width it's a thing that you can place on any desktop and you can lower it all the way down and then you can work on your desk just like regular right if you want to stand up at your desk this has a like a little lever on it you pull it up and it'll it'll raise up and it's even got a place for the keyboard to hold it out separately so literally you can go from sitting to standing and you can put it on any desktop you want and this thing's 189 dollars right that's quite a bit cheaper than what you'll get most places and it's convenient because you can stick it on any countertop desktop that you got so big fan of that uh let's see what's what's my next one okay so let me let me get this link over here for you guys

so the next thing that i have you just overwrite the overwrite the links, by the way. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. All right. So the next one I have is a mat for standing on. Because if you're going to be standing at a stand-up desk, standing on hardwoods for a long time or any kind of hard floor at all is crazy uncomfortable. Brutal on your back. Yeah, man. Back, feet, all of it. It's bad.

So Amazon has, like they have with everything now, and I feel kind of bad for everybody, they have gone and created their Amazon Basics version of the floor mat that is going to put all the other companies out of business because it's $28 as opposed to $70. So, yeah, man, this thing is 36 inches wide, so three feet i mean you know that's i will say this one um that you that you linked to the amazon basics version it's got like a diamond kind of pattern on it so it kind of feels like almost like carpet or something well i was gonna say like a truck box oh it feels kind of kind of redneck but i know that's not what – that's just a bad picture. Yeah. But there is another one, though, that I found that wasn't – that was just a solid. Yeah, that's what I have. And, you know, because you don't have – so, you picked it for a stand-up desk, which is great.

But even if you wanted it for, like, maybe in your kitchen your kitchen for like at the sink or something or at the stove or whatever you know totally yeah any place where you spend a lot of time standing and the thing is that's inexpensive like i think the one that i bought back at the time there wasn't much competition it was like 65 or 70 bucks right like this thing's 28 and it's got 633 reviews and almost four and a half stars so pretty good stuff all right let me grab the next one out now this one is actually something that i'm trying to work on personally because i have absolutely horrific posture from sitting at a desk all day long every day there are lots of companies that have been coming out with these things that help improve your posture basically

it'll pull your shoulders back and try and straighten up your back. And this one has great reviews. I don't think it's that expensive. I want to say it was like $19.97. I feel like James mentioned this in the Slack channel one time. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Okay, so I totally missed that. But, I mean, dude, for $20 to help improve your health, I mean, literally bring your shoulders back because we slouch over. You sit at a computer so long. Yeah. Forget why he said he needed it though, but he really, he really liked it. Yeah. So that's, I mean, again, this thing has 1,576 customer reviews and four and a half stars. I mean, that's, that's pretty incredible for 20 bucks.

If only it was a five star review. Yeah. Those things are, those are unicorns, man. All right. So that, that gets rid of that one.

All right. So my next one, this will be no surprise to you guys. Is the sculpt ergonomic. Oh my God. So I will preface it. This is the sculpt ergonomic oh my god so i will preface it this is the keyboard i use i love this keyboard i've been using it for like four years now i hate this keyboard man i love this keyboard love it love it love it and so there's a couple things i'll say and we've talked about it in the past probably even two years ago during our gear episode i think the reasons i love this keyboard is because

they type like the old school macbook pros like you know 2011 on up that have a real good tactile feedback did i not put it in there it's okay i know what it is all right i think i'll put it in there i'm sorry okay um so here's the cool. Because they came out with a new version of this, this thing's now $60. You know, it used to be $100. I thought you were going to say it's now vintage. Or now it classifies as old hardware. Yes, this one's antique. But, like, seriously, the reason why it's amazing is because it's really thin or not very wide.

And so you can put a mouse next to it. And so you're not having to move your arm very much when you are having to come off the keys, right? Which is nice. You can get things done and it kind of removes some of that tension. I use it for my Mac. I use it for my PC. I use it for everything. The only two annoyances I have.

Three. I'll give you three annoyances can i give some you you can so the first is there is no standard key cluster for like the home end all that stuff it's down the right the right border of it i can't stand that it takes a while to get used to i'm still not used to it and it's been years right but well it's not your standard like what 104 key yeah okay yeah it's not that the the second thing is it's got this function toggle switch at the top so that your keys are either function keys or they're those built-in you know microsofty type keys yeah that i'm not a huge fan of but

whatever i've gotten used to it to where i flip it and i know exactly how it works so whatever and then the only other thing that i really don't like about it is the the top row of function keys they're not real keys they're like little they're like half a key yeah they're terrible they're absolutely horrible but i always hit f12 enough wrong f11 wrong wait do you have the sculptor go yeah oh my man all right so now check it out i just told you the negatives now let me back that up and give you some positive reinforcement the key tactile feel is just perfect like straight up perfect i love them if you're not going for full-on mechanical and you like the chiclet keyboard these things are amazing the second thing is the the angle for your hands is just amazing i mean like seriously i i love it it's incredibly

comfortable i have the the riser on the front of it and it just it feels right it seriously feels right um what about the numpad to use the separate attachment i you know i had it out there for a while and i found that i never used it so same i just got i mean it's sitting in a drawer somewhere now the other thing i want to say that is absolutely stellar about this thing i've got rechargeable batteries in it right i'm using the interloops or whatever they are, which those things don't have as much juice in them as your standard alkaline batteries or anything, dude, I think I've replaced the batteries in this thing two,

maybe three times in four years. It's amazing. That's unbelievable. Like seriously, it is a wireless battery operated keyboard and I never changed the batteries in it. I know you want to wax eloquent on this thing what else you got wax on sometimes um i don't know how this happens this happens but i'll like i'll open up a

spreadsheet which is like not common for me you know it's a once every couple days thing and i'll start to kind of arrow around and this whole spreadsheet's moving it's because i'm somehow managed to hit scroll lock ah and it's in a weird spot i don't know how i'm doing this but it's like every like week or so i managed to turn scroll lock on somehow yeah yeah that's if you reach up to hit that that pause break or the print button it's a it's not any great And again, it's just the shape of it. They put things in odd spots, and it's not the best thing ever. I'm going to keep my DOS keyboard.

You're not convincing me. That's the thing. If you like a mechanical keyboard and you're not into the ergonomic thing, there are other options, right? But the Ergo's made it for me. So, are you done waxing? I i'm done waxing you can talk okay so so i wanted to check uh the one thing that that i don't like about it which is actually just a

comical thing is that it is the loudest quiet keyboard i have ever heard because it never fails. We will be on some video chat call and I can hear the bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like on the,

on the desk, on the keyboard. And it's just Alan banging away on this keyboard and the keyboard makes no noise, but yet I can, I can hear his fingers banging on the keyboard through the desk coming all the way through the microphone that thing is loud yeah i might have it a little too close to the microphone but yeah okay that's fair that is fair you need uh you need a a mouse

mat for your your keyboard uh dampen some of the vibrations there. I think I did. That is the loudest quiet keyboard ever made. But man, it feels amazing. All right. But it's nothing like you guys when you start banging on your mechanical keyboard. Because it feels like little hammers in your ear. When you hear a mechanical keyboard going, it's like little bits of heaven.

It's like, oh my God, that sounds amazing. It's like the little dude on our logo. Yeah, it's the dude on our logo sitting there chiseling on your eardrum that's really what that is it's that good right oh no it hurts it is the little guy all right so i've got the next link in there for you guys and this is the mouse i use and here's the thing it is so cheap it's a 15 mouse cheap it's a $15 mouse and it's the vertical anchor. And I love this thing. It's, it takes getting used to. So the thing is, is like at some point in my career, I don't remember five, six, seven years ago, like I would start getting wrist pains, right? Like, and I guess it's called RSI. I don't have carpal tunnel or anything, but I would notice after using keyboards and mice for a

long time, it would hurt since I've gone to thept Ergo and this vertical mouse, dude, it's like I never have pain in my wrist or my hands at all. Didn't this used to be more expensive? I don't. It's $15. That's what I'm saying. And it's amazing. The thing tracks perfectly. It's got three DPI resolutions, I think.

Like, it's excellent. Now I did put in the wired one. There's a wireless one as well that I like, but for some reason, 2015 MacBook pros, when the CPU would go hot, it would disconnect all the USB stuff and it would drive me crazy. So anyways, both the wired and the wireless are excellent. Now I am going to put a disclaimer in here. I had the, I had one previously for like a year and a half and one of the button things started getting really loud and i couldn't take it so i literally trashed it and bought another one for

15 bucks but it's 15 this is baby this is basically like holding on to a baby shark to navigate your your desktop it's so good man man. I'm telling you. And then banging on your keyboard at the same time. Hey, you have a vertical mouse that you tried too, right, Joe? Yeah, I got the Anker, and I really liked it, but I actually ended up getting the Sculpt keyboard with the mouse. I showed it to you, but it's filthy.

And I actually really liked the mouse that came with it. It's got a little slant to it, not nearly as much as the Anker, but it's still kind of the same deal. Cool. So, I am getting some tingles sometimes again though so you gotta get the anchor man you gotta get the anchor i think he means he needs to go to the bathroom all right okay so my next one and i don't leave tingles when i all right sorry i don't i don't feel like you can not finish that sentence. So the mouse.

I know. It's the mouse. It has three DPI settings. I love the English language. Trying to save you, Joe. Moving right along. So I know that we can all agree on this next one. And let me go ahead and put the link in here.

This next one is important to all of us. You need good headphones as a developer. Straight up. Now, I have had my fair share of headphones in my life. Now, I'm not saying that these are perfect for everybody. But here's what I'm going to tell you. This set that I'm putting in here, they're the Zero Audio Carbo Tenore or Tenor. Not sure how they go. ZHDX200CT. Way too many letters, way too many characters. Here's the thing. These are $42 on Amazon and they're what I'm wearing right now on this podcast. And they sound amazing.

Straight up amazing. But they come hand in hand with my next offering. Comply. Comply foam tips. You cannot buy these things in good conscious without buying the foam tips. And the reason is the tips that came with them, they don't seal properly. And if you ever wear in ears and they're not sealing, the sound is the tips that came with them, they don't seal properly. And if you ever wear in-ears and they're not sealing, the sound is awful. Like it feels like you're losing bass.

It feels like you're losing other things. So, so in fairness, your total price out the door with these and the comply foams would be about 56 bucks. Yeah. Right. I mean, I'm with you on the headphones, but like when we had that, uh, that as a survey, I don't remember what everybody said, but when we had that as a survey. I don't remember what everybody said.

Because these are basically in-ear headphones. Yeah. So they're kind of a hassle to take it off and be like, wait, wait, what'd you say? It's so beautiful. There's a reason. Yeah, that's a good thing. Yeah, exactly. People come by. You can make a big deal of it.

Like, man, oh, God. Hold on. Let me. I got to get this out of my ear you know if you do all that then people will kind of be like man i'm not gonna mess with that old man alan over here right i just pulled three pounds of wax out of my ear those hairs coming out yeah you know that wasn't necessary it is it is as a matter of fact i think that you should probably even string something on there so you pull it out and discuss people but anyway you should definitely look at it whenever you take it out every time yeah totally and now here's the other upside to this because i know we talked about this in the past when you used to travel a lot you i think

you had the shore something oh yeah i don't remember which ones but you know you said you put them in, and it would help your ears with pressure and all that, right? Yeah. It's not that I've never used the in-ears. It's not that I've never had them. I just feel like there's a time and a place. And if you travel, then that's definitely a time and a place

because in-ear headphones are extremely small to travel around and to carry in your laptop case. And if you use the comply tips on it, then you're going to get, number one, most importantly, much better noise isolation than you're going to get from any noise-canceling headphone. I don't care how much you spend on the noise-canceling headphones. Without the weird feeling that noise-c give your ears too. And you don't have, your ears aren't going to pop because the pressure doesn't change because it blocks it so well. Yeah. So that was the other thing,

the noise isolation with the comply foam tips with these particular in ears are just amazing. Like literally I can put these in and you guys have seen my house. There's like a circus going on in the background half the time and i can barely hear it and that's that's amazing so excellent audio quality that's why he doesn't recognize how loud the keyboard is probably so yeah i mean huge fan of these headphones again for about 56 bucks like that is that is a killer deal on some high audio or some high quality audio okay now i gotta ask because you probably already can guess where this question is going to go i don't know really i'm surprised what about the bass the bass and these are good these are not these are not

super bass heavy headphones but they're good they're accurate like that's and that's where you know personal taste will come in here like that's and that's where you know personal taste will come in here like there's other in-ears that definitely give more boom than these but for just listening to good audio with some good sound stage separation all that like these are these are excellent so there are bassier headphones out there but these aren't these aren't going to be your drop it down low stuff. All right. So my next one, and this one's going to be a little bit odd, I think, in this conversation.

But I think it's important. And this, along with the next one, will matter. And I think I pasted it in there. This is the ATR2100 microphone. And it's a dynamic microphone. And I think all three of us have this thing and we've all hooked it up to our computers at one point in time. So the reason I like this thing and look,

there's 1,624 customer reviews on it. It's $64 and 59 cents and it's almost a five star. Now here's the deal. I feel like a lot of times, you know, pictures and videos speak louder than them words. And so there's two reasons I recommend this. And one is if you're not doing something on your own out there outside of work, you might be selling yourself short. We've talked about a lot of times, you know, get on GitHub, get, get involved in the community, do things, make videos, do something, get your name bigger than what you are on a sheet of paper

on a resume or something, right? That I feel is important. On top of that though, this goes in hand with my next piece here that I will paste in the link. And that is, if you were trying to describe something to a product team or a business stakeholder in your company, or even with other developers or your manager or whatever, a lot of times, if you record a quick little video and show what you've done or show what a problem is, it's a whole lot easier to describe in a one minute video than it is typing out five paragraphs that people aren't going to read. And so if this, this thing that I'm talking about is Snagit, it's a piece of software that is like almost the baby brother to the big boy, like Camtasia for Windows or yeah, Camtasia, which is by TechSmith, the same company who makes

Snagit. But you can like for 50 bucks, you get this awesome screenshotting tool that allow you take a screenshot, put annotations on it, draw arrows, do text boxes, all kinds of stuff, right? You can decorate it real nice. It's almost like a OneNote that you're not paying us or an Evernote that you're not paying a subscription for. And on top of it, it'll allow you to record video. And if you have that ATR hooked up, then you can put good quality audio on top of the video. So I like that because it gives you all the tools you need to a be able to communicate well within your organization, send out some stuff that's easier than reading paragraphs

of text and B it opens you up to doing your own YouTube videos or, you know, other things like that. Even if you want to game, right, you could use this thing for gaming. So I think that they're they're two good things joe i'm curious if you have any any thoughts on it because i think you have snag it as well right i use jing which is similar um doesn't have as nice of features uh but i also use like the free version of machine i'm not sure if there's like a pro. Okay. Okay. Cool.

All right. So if you want a free alternative, then Jing is not terrible. Yep. Yeah, definitely. Oh, it's TechSmith as well, actually. They're owned by TechSmith. And it looks like they retired Jing Pro and they're like, hey, just buy Snagit. Yeah, because I think.

It's like Snagit is Jing Pro. I think Jing allows you up to X number of minutes of video, right? I don't remember what the cap is. Yeah, real short. Yeah, there's a limit on it. Whereas Snagit removes that for 50 bucks. allows you up to x number of minutes of video right i don't remember what the cap is yeah real short yeah there's a limit on it whereas snag it removes that for 50 bucks so um and my last thing and this is where a bulk of my money so before this let's see before this my grand total for everything there oh it's not giving me my sum. What's that about? Dude, that was... $19.95.

Not quite. Ah, doggone it. $1. Well, I don't know what happened. Anyways, all right, so moving on here, it's going to be somewhere, that's going to be somewhere in the ballpark of $1,100. Now, granted, most of that was on the chair and the sit-stand desk, and probably the keyboard were the high dollar price things there.

My last thing is the big hitter and this actually isn't released yet. So I feel like I'm cheating a little bit, but I did that review recently where I compared the HP specter and the Lenovo Yoga 720. So Asus is now coming out with what they're calling the Zenbook Flip UX561UD. And I'll have a link in the show notes. This thing looks like it is the perfect combination between that Spectre and the Lenovo. Like some of my things that I that Spectre and the Lenovo. Like some of my, some of my things that I didn't like about the Lenovo were it didn't have like an SD card port. It didn't have an HDMI port. Right. And that's irritating. And then some of the things I didn't like about the Spectre was it, the lower spec processor, the lower spec graphics card, this thing right here

looks like it's going to be ridiculous. It has got basically everything. The latest core eighth generation Intel 8550 quad core processor. It's going to have the GTX NVIDIA 1050 on it, which is amazing. And then a couple of things that go along with it to boot is you can have up to a 512 gig ssd plus a two terabyte hard drive in the thing oh that's great this is a two-in-one also so it's the convertible where you flip it around on the keyboards on the back uh what else 4k 4k screen it's got the stylus with a screen as well which i like a lot for creative type stuff like if you're going to do videos or you're going to annotate things, awesome.

Comes with windows 10 pro 10 pro, which is amazing. I don't care about the sound because that's all garbage, but there were other things like if anybody ever tells you a laptop has great sound, man, I can't, I can't be talking to those people.

So the other thing it does have though, that it seemed like a lot of the current generation or the seventh generation Intel processors, they had Thunderbolt ports on them, but they were only half lanes. They were only using two of the four lanes. It looks like this thing is using the full lanes on the Thunderbolt ports because it says it'll do 40 gig data transfer. So this thing looks like it's literally what I had said at the end of that comparison video, which was, dude, take all the guts of this thing and mix it with some of the things of this. And I think you have the perfect thing. And this is approaching exactly what I think I would want to work with as my daily personal driver. So that's why i'm saying it's cheating my guess is this thing will be in the ballpark of about 1650 so if you look at hp's offering and and lenovo's offering in the same

realm 1600 seems to be about that price point and so i think that's about where this thing will be so you went over no no all no. All of a sudden done. You're 1,100 plus 1,600. Oh, no. So I was wrong. No, yeah, yeah. I take it back. No, when I was done with everything, yeah, my math is not so good.

When I was done with everything, my grand total came to like 2,468 or something like that. So let's. Did you write the iOS calculator app? Because they have problems with math too. I know. For iOS 11, did you write the iOS calculator app? Cause they have problems with math too. I know iOS 11. Did you contribute to that? That's horrible. My, my, my thing's all jacked up.

I don't know why it's not working. So, yeah. Uh, anyways, that is a list of all my stuff here. I'll tell you exactly what my thing. I want to see this when you get it. Although they say quad speaker Harman Kardon. I think they're trying to say they got good speakers. Dude, that's such garbage.

So, I mean, I will say. Okay. So, my grand total came to $24,829. So, if we take out that, equal that, minus $16.50. So, I'm really terrible. Carry the one. $830 for my total other stuff. So, it wasn't that bad.

But, yeah, man. Like, seriously, that thing looks amazing. 830 bucks for my total other stuff so it wasn't that bad but but yeah man like seriously that thing looks amazing and if it does come out and it's somewhere in that ballpark it will be mine straight up it'll be mine so that's my shopping list that's uh yeah so just to kind of sum it up from i mean you got from chair disc or you know desk um accessory mouse keyboard headphones microphone some software laptop i mean soup to nuts like you got a pretty solid like a really solid setup with um some some nice to haves yeah for 2500 yeah man i i was pretty now i will say i spent some time on my fictitious shopping list here there's no question.

I like how he bought a mouse and keyboard for a laptop. Well, you got to. Well, I mean, now think about it, though. That sit stand desk, right? That thing you put the laptop on top because that's going to be your monitor because I almost budgeted for a monitor. But I was like, no, I'd rather have the laptop hardware. So you stick that thing on top. You put the keyboard mouse down below it.

Dude, you're good to go. All right. So it's almost a complete dev setup dude that yeah that's some really nice features and we should mention too um we always have really awesome show notes because outlaw is amazing and we're going to have links to all this stuff and they are going to be affiliate links which means if you click these links and if you buy you know pencils or whatever you are supporting the show which is awesome and we really appreciate it so whatever, you are supporting the show, which is awesome. We really appreciate it. Go check out the stuff. Buy other stuff.

It'd be great. Joe, tell us how you spent your money. Yes, sir. Okay. You guys already know that mine's going to suck, right? I'm just not a hardware guy. I pretty much just always ask I mean, you guys already know that mine's going to suck, right?

I'm just not a hardware guy. I pretty much just always ask you guys what I should buy, and then I just buy it. I don't know that I would say that I was expecting yours to suck. I am expecting that yours is going to be like 90% links to Steam games. That was a consideration, except I already have every Steam game. I couldn't find $2,500 games that i didn't already own so well i mean it didn't stop alan from picking things he already had no i didn't at all that's true i doubled down very true

all right and so you know i tried to kind of think about like okay how can i contribute and so i kind of came up with um with three ideas. So we'll just roll through them really quick. So the listeners, dear listeners, you're getting it looks like five shopping sprees. Because he's three in one right now. I'm a jerk. He has three alternate shopping. Wait, you're going to give us three? Yeah, so basically he's giving us $7,500 worth of stuff.

Yeah, so I came up with some rules for a contest and then I crapped all over them. I'll tell you what, man. If I had known that, I would have opened my world up a lot. Did you expect anything different? Okay, I'm listening. All right, let's do this. Shopping list number one yeah can we play this like a you know what's behind door number one door number two and door number three i think we should yeah all right well shopping list number one um i found a macbook pro

that is 2400 dollars or sorry 2499.99 cents uh and yeah Let me paste it in there. There we go. You pasted the price, man. There's not a link there. It's not pasting my rows very well. It's okay. We get it. MacBook Pro, we've seen them. Tell me this, though. Without seeing

the link, did you go for a refurb model from Apple or did you go... See, I think that's what i would have done he probably he probably went like he took one of the off-the-shelf configurations so he didn't increase the ram he didn't increase you know uh yeah i was happy with the ram though um so that wasn't what that wasn't a big deal but um i was a little bummed that i only got 256 but i didn't want to go down to the 13 inch and so um that's that's what it was so i hadn't intended on sticking with the default because i know you know you should update something right man i gotta say this is comical he's pasted something like 12 times in a row and we still don't have the link watching him it's all the way to the talk and paste at the same time is hilarious.

This is awesome. I've got sub-totals, quantities. You scroll all the way to the right. We're pretty much getting a bill of materials pasted into this. Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, there is one. It's way off to the right. It's like 20 miles out to the right.

Yeah, I kept mine in the spreadsheet. So this one was obviously not that hard, right? I mean, this is kind of the obvious answer. You have $ 2500 to build you know build out like a dev system like that's what i do i get a 2500 laptop right um but you know that's not very much fun right so i decided to um i'll just tell you what i like my real answer though like let's just kind of ignore that like what i really would do in real life this is like honest honest to goodness like if i had $2,500 i had to spend like on tech gear what i would do is um argue my way into going last after both of you two and i would pick the items from your lists that you've researched and basically

build a dev setup based on your guys' recommendations because that's how i always buy my stuff like i always basically like pick your guys brains and then go get it what was the hardware review that we did last year let me go and pull that up there's my shopping list right yep so so uh i mean i've already written down the the desk uh stand-up desk um thing that's That's definitely on my shopping list now for Christmas. The Vivo? Nice. Yep.

So, I'll be getting that. But I did make, so that's to my list right there. So, the second list was in actually, I didn't actually make it. I'm constructing it as we go along. So, are you ready for the one that I put the most time into? I am, man. All right. uh so are you ready for the one that i put the most time into i am man all right so uh just to be even more annoying i'm gonna go one item at a time second list so i had some money left over and i wanted to get the most out of my you know my shopping here so um you know i kind of thought like, what would Scarface do, right?

If he had $25 worth of tech, just brand new boxes sitting on his desk. I feel like he would have like a big pile of illegal illicit drugs, right? So, that's what you're spending it on. That's not interesting to me. However, this is taking forever. I'm so sorry. No,

no, I did find the tensions building on Amazon or 1299. You can buy a big super fat bag of Kraft cheddar cheese powder. Much more interesting to me than illegal drugs. Oh, man. This is real. And not $1,299. Let's not confuse

that with $12.99. This is $12.99. Yeah. I mean, I had like $13 left over. This is a one pound99. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had like $13 left over. This is a one-pound bag of cheddar cheese powder. Aw, yeah. And that one's mostly for looks. Joe has his Vivo desk there, Bob.

Bob's cheddar cheese powder. Say hello to my little friend. With little orange chiclet keys on his surface keyboard. Yep. Well, see, I thought about that, right? You don't want to make a mess. And so I've protected my hardware, and we'll get to that. But this is not me being crazy.

This is actually very well thought out. Are you sure it's not you being crazy? Oh, man. Well, we'll see. Let me know if this is crazy when we get to the end here. And this is very – actually, this sounds crazy like cheese powder, but it's very much on theme with the next couple items. It is.

Well, you'll see so for 1620 i found a book i went with a physical copy because i got a good deal on that cheese powder um when bigly in a world where facts doesn't matter this is a book by the uh the um the dober guy basically talking about uh just some crazy political type stuff. But I just thought that would look good on the desk too, next to my big pile of cheese powder. And this was another filler. I'll admit, you know,

I wanted to get the most of my money out and this just kind of fit. Right. So I've got a book and we've got some cheese powder. Yes. Now let's take a turn i'm afraid like we'll see who gets it first next i'm gonna need three usb hubs i found really nice usb hubs did a little bit of research great reviews 27.99 each was expensive for a USB hub,

but they've got a really nice power supply, and they're really good about just delivering good, consistent power to all of those 21 ports. Okay, so this thing just... Oh, I know exactly where you're going. Okay, so this thing, to be clear, is only a charger. This is not a USB hub. This is only a charging port or dock yeah it's almost like power like those strips right that you can maybe mount to something and plug in a bunch of usb peripherals i kind of want to instant message you don't do it

you know it you know it i do i know you know it. The next item, it's getting closer. Let me see what we're up to total-wise here. We're balling right now. We're like $57. No, $113. Well, the next item

goes to those USB chargers weren't cheap. For all three of them, it's $83. Almost $84. Now, the next item is more expensive. I found basically a wine cooler with a clear front. So you could fit 36 bottles of wine. But if you take those racks out of it, then you've got a nice refrigerated see-through computer case.

Oh, man. I know exactly. $172. How am I not in on this? How are you doing humidification control there, sir? I haven't considered that. Okay, just wondering.

You open the door every now and then. Wipe it out. I put some... You know what? I take some of that uh cheddar cheese powder and it maybe will absorb kind of like baking soda wood for you know normal human beings that way it becomes like a block of cheese good call sir good call that's actually how you turn it into cheese right that's how you hydrate it i like like it. That's how you make cheese. Yep. I got it. Got it. So that's how cheese is made.

That should be the show quote. All right. Now, by the way, I'm also going up in price. So every item is considerably more. Next is a really nice power supply. So this one is $325. I kind of forget why I picked it. It's rack mount.

It's kind of small. I think it had two plugs, so you could actually plug 210 whatever lines into it, which was really important to me. So I wanted to be able to kind of plug it into two different outlets, maybe even on two separate walls.

So I thought that would be really nice. And I need that to power my USB hubs. Alright. I love this, man. My final item. I see the one power. Really? So we've got just to recap and be more knowing, we've got the cheese powder, we've got

Win Bigly, we've got three USB hubs, we've got a really expensive computer case slash wine cooler uh we've got an expensive power supply now i have found a really good deal on some usb bitcoin miners Bitcoin miners. Each one is $89. And if you get 21 of them, that'll bring my total to $1,888. And it'd bring my grand total to $2,499.77. And I'm going to plug these 21 bad boys into that USB hub.

I'm going to put them in the fridge and I'm going to mine Bitcoins and I'm going to make that $2,500 back and I'm going to buy even more stuff. So it's infinite worth. Oh, that's so beautiful. Hey, wait, did you, you didn't put the links to those, those Bitcoin miners in? Oh, I do. I do have them. I will get them for you so i was just usb bad i was so close go ahead oh um yeah and so part of the deal here is is i do work from home so i can kind of keep an eye on things um with me and my cheese powder um also i can write off my power right that's uh you know home office so my electricity bill uh is a text write-off so i can be a total scuzzball and uh and get text benefits for the power i spend i also run a warehouse where i play some music where i don't pay for power so i thought

about installing it up there so i don't have to worry about the insight, like basically having, you know, 220 volts running day and night. Hey, how many of these did you buy? 21. So that's 700.

Dude, this is kind of impressive. Now let's, so first off, I got to say, I halfway knew what you were doing. I thought you were going to buy a bunch of raspberry pies to plug into it. I was close.

So this is kind of interesting. Your little Bitcoin miners only consume 35 watts of power, which is not bad. Because how many did you say you did? I can't remember. 21. 21. That's only 735 watts of power that is about the equivalent of a high-end gaming rig right that's that's doing that so so that's not terrible like if you 700

watts is what you calculated so he's maxing out his eps he's maxing out his eps almost right because it was a thousand right no it was a 700 oh it was a 700 so you're maxing out your ups volt amp okay but 735 is not bad for 21 bitcoin mining machines if they're actually any good right like this thing only has you know three and a half stars so well i mean it's shipped and sold by bit miner joe so i feel like this is joe did you make these joe no i didn't um you ask like the number one question on all the the bitcoin miners which i looked at which i looked at a ton actually uh one night when watching a movie and that's like the number one question i don't remember what this one said but basically people were like

how much do i make per month and so you see all sorts of crazy answers and like none of it really makes sense. You know, it's like pretty much impossible to even answer. But somehow, some crazy like math while watching Stranger Things 2, I figured out that it would pay for – the whole thing would pay for itself within three months. Really? Anything after that is just gold. You think it would really? I think so. based on very little hey hey look man i'm actually happy with your research i feel like you've done a disservice to me now because i'm probably gonna go try and buy this

hey man just buy a usb thing you know see see how it goes uh you know 89 bucks and i mean that's much cheaper than a single bitcoin well that's uh that's kind of interesting i like where you went with this that's fun yeah and so now the the desk full of cheese powder doesn't sound so crazy right i don't want to go after joe though it's not fair joe we'll take a little break we'll do the survey you know it'll be fine well where's your third shopping list we still got another shop that was the third one the second one was he was going to pick off hours that's what he said right the second job that's what i would do in real life i missed that yeah okay i didn't realize that was. Oh, okay. I got you.

The first was like my real answer. The second list was what I would do in real life, which is, you know, very different from what we talk about on the show a lot of times. And the third list is my Bitcoin mining rig, which I'm going to use to make infinite dollars to buy infinite amount of other stuff. Hey, I do want to say though, on the MacBook thing, here's a pro tip for people. If you are actually shopping for a MacBook Pro and let's say that you want one that's specced higher than what you're willing to spend, if you go to the refurb store on Apple's site, you can usually get a $300 to $400 discount on a piece of hardware

that they will warranty the same as they will a new piece of hardware. For some reason, though, I expected your pro tip for buying. As you said, like, hey, here's a pro tip for you. If you're shopping around for a MacBook, don't. That's what I expected that you were going to say for some reason. I don't know why. It's probably not far off. But no, yeah.

Seriously, if you go to the Apple site and you scroll down to the very bottom of the page under the store section, there's refurb. And typically you can get some ridiculously high end things for three, 400 bucks off, which is a 10 to 20% discount in some cases. Sometimes you can get higher. You do want to check and make sure the model year number and all that kind of stuff. But for that same $24.99 that you spent, you might even be able to get a higher spec one for that same price. And if you're really lucky, you can get one without the smart bar. Oh, my God, yes. Oh, the touch bar?

Yeah. I haven't even tried it, actually. You should. It's not terrible. Man, I am not an early adopter. I think we're past that phase yeah yeah all right well uh let's take a little break here and ask you again to please leave us reviews we really appreciate it it means the world to us it's really opened a lot of doors for us and really interesting opportunities and it's been uh just super huge huge and we love reading them we love getting them

we love sharing them it really helps us grow as a show and opens those doors for us so if you could please go to www.codingblocks.net slash review and you'll find links to like leave reviews on like stitcher or itunes or pod chaser or whatever you you know, as easy as for you. Um, it's just really fantastic. So we really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Uh, slash review. And so with that,

let's head into my favorite portion of the show. Survey says, all right. So last episode we asked, how often do you replace your phone? And your choices are every year, because you got to have the latest tech, every other year. And lastly, not until it breaks. And maybe not even then.

All right. So let's go. Let's go, Joe. I was thinking like you went first, let's go. Let's go, Joe. I was thinking like you went first too. Yeah. So, Joe, you go first. Tell me what you think is the popular choice. Most popular choice.

It's really tough. I could see things all across the spectrum. So, I'm going to go ahead and go with every other year because it's kind of in the middle. And I'm going to put it at 37%. Okay. Okay. I'm going to say every other year only because most of our listeners are in the U.S. And here, cell phone plans are sort of geared around that or have been for years and years and years, right?

You get the replacement every two years. And it's sort of built into your plan. At least it used to be. So I'm going to say that. And I'm going to go 38%. Ooh. 37 and 38. That's right.

Going by Price is Right rules. That's right. You're trying to. I'm trying to win. You realize these could be fractional, but okay. 37.01. Right. Too late.

No, you said 38. Yes, I did. Okay. That's01. Right. Too late. No, you said 38. Yes, I did. Okay. That's interesting, though. You both had some, I thought, some very thoughtful answers, like good logic behind them. I mean, you're both wrong. Are we? Yeah.

Then it's never. You're both wrong. It was, yeah. Not until it breaks and maybe not even then. My people. This is my tribe, yo. That was actually shocking. I expected it to be more in the, I expected the other two to be more popular.

Like how are we talking? How much percent are we talking? Oh no. I mean, it was like 60%. Yeah. Awesome. That makes me so happy. 60% of the vote was in the not until it breaks category.

Did somebody post this on Facebook or something to a non-developer group of folks? Like, how did this happen? Yeah. Every other year. Now, that was number two at 34. So, it was a strong number two. But still, that's... I really thought every year, though.

I expected more out of every year. They're just too expensive nowadays. Honestly, that's the only reason why that one wasn't a thing. I mean, dude, I mean, we've all talked about it. A mid-range phone now runs you 400 bucks. Yeah. Right? But the reason why I thought that it would be more is from the point of view of developing

for them. That developers might be buying their own. But I guess, yeah, it wasn't as high as thought that it would be more is from the point of view of developing for them. That developers might be buying their own. But I guess, yeah, it wasn't as high as I thought it would be. Yeah, man. That's interesting. So, for this episode's survey, we're heading into the holiday season and on your shopping list, you might be tempted to put, you know, your favorite tech gadgets that you, uh, might want on your, uh, Christmas list. So the survey, the question is, do you trust your family to buy the tech you want?

So your choices are, I trust them. Why wouldn't I? Or I'm hoping for the best, but please include gift receipts. Or no way, because not even with a very specific list, things will go sideways. I love this one. I know my answer. You know, the joke, this is like a running joke in my family because do you remember stompers? Do you remember those?

No. No? Okay. Okay. So, it was a toy from way back, but the joke was like, you know, you ask for a stomper and instead I got a stamper, right? So, it's like, you know, if you ask your parents, like, you know, if you had like on the list like, oh, I want an Xbox One or something like that. Instead, you get like, here's a box of ones.

I don't know what you're going to do with them. That was a weird thing you asked for, but here you go. I got them as phone numbers so you wouldn't hurt yourself. If you say so. Oh, speaking of the Xbox One. So I got that, the Xbox One X, right? Mm-hmm. It's pretty awesome.

I don't get to play it near as much as what I'd like to, but I mean, it's an expensive piece of hardware for what it is. But the graphics are amazing. Like straight up like okay beautiful absolutely gorgeous but it's like 60 frames 60 frames well it's now here's the interesting thing that they've done with it they've actually set it up very similar to what you do on computers you can tweak the games it depends on the developers who make the games you can tweak it to say i want a higher frame rate or i want better graphics right oh really yeah yeah they've actually gone the route

of the pc you know tweak your settings which is kind of cool i will say like forza is gorgeous right like well that's pretty much the only game that they have to really uh no there's like a hundred of them no no no i'm talking about like games that highlight the Xbox One X's capabilities. Forza 7 is the game right now, right? That's what I recall. So they basically took, there's like a launch list, even though they're not games made for it. There's a launch list of like a hundred games where developers have already enhanced them. So Forza was one.

I want to say Call of Duty World War II was another one. There's several out there. But yeah, Minecraft, ironically enough, is enhanced for it. I mean, because that one, otherwise those big blocks would look pixelated. Look, man, this is going to sound stupid, but I bought it for my daughter. Those blocks look really good dude minecraft is so relaxing like you go you build a little house like you make a little dungeon whatever little castle man you're doing it wrong it's amazing you're on the wrong server man

you gotta play like hunger games on it oh dude connect to the right server man but yeah i'm i am impressed with it although i have to say this thing has a one terabyte drive in it that's not gonna be enough no dude they're not four games and i spent the entire first day downloading updates for them like yeah like seriously gigabytes like probably 200 gigs of updates for four games and i was like man i don't have time for this yeah so so here's a pro tip for anyone listening uh if you are tempted to buy a console for maybe a family or whatever uh for the holidays and you want them to be able to open that up and play Christmas morning, you can do them the favor and go ahead and open it up during your leisure, set it up and install the games, download the updates so that Christmas morning, it can actually be played. Otherwise,

it's not going to be played until Christmas evening, if then. That is such a perfect tip too because you also ran into the thing i think what was it last year the year before no it was like it was like a couple years back like right after the hackers right yeah it was right after it was like lizard squad or something like that what was the name of that group that took down uh xbox live and playstation network and so you couldn't even you couldn't even use the device nobody played on christmas day that's terrible yeah yeah it was awful yeah very cool so now it's your turn yeah well do you want to do a quick uh google few oh we don't know that we've done one in a while we must

and uh since since you did bring up um xbox and gaming it kind of made me think, you know, you brought up Call of Duty, World War II. So why does Call of Duty... There are eight great choices here. So they're reasonable. There are eight great ones, yeah. Hey, did you get the new World War II, by the way? No. Are you going to?

Wow. Yeah, right? Yeah, it's surprising. Wow. All right. I got an Xbox now. We can play. I need to know a game.

But that wasn't one of your choices. I saw your game list and i'm like oh i got that i got that oh you do have all right cool i mean some of the ones that you had i was like yeah okay all right cool yeah we need to play anyways um call of duty why does you said why does call of duty yeah why does call of duty crash oh okay I'll take that one. Weighing in at number two, why does Call of Duty WW2 keep crashing? Also,

I will accept why does at number four, why does Call of Duty Ghost freeze? Okay. Joe, can you top it? I'm number two on the board, man. Costs so much. Oh, man.

That's a great one. You nailed it. Number one? That was number seven, though. Oh, sweet. But he did nail it. Why does Call of Duty cost so much? Yeah.

So, Alan wins the board. Sweet. What was number one? All right. Number one. Why does Call of Duty lag? Ah, okay. Number three, to fill in the board. Sweet. What was number one? All right. Number one, why does Call of Duty lag? Ah, okay. Number three, to fill in the blanks here, why does Call of Duty have different developers?

Number five, why does Call of Duty Infinite Warfare lag? I guess it was specific to that one. Number six, why does Call of Duty have bad graphics? And last one, why does Call of Duty sell so well? Because it's amazing. I thought they were all great. Yeah. Yeah.

Wait, what? How did you just give a look? You don't like Call of Duty? No, I was just surprised that the answer is like, like the bad graphics, particularly it's like,

what? Yeah. I don't know that one upgrade your video that's haters man yeah there's gonna yeah exactly very nice all right so with that let's walk into or step into my uh my list here and uh let me get some link stuff going so that i can uh send you guys links. So I took a different direction than you guys. I mean, I'm actually really surprised by this. I thought for sure there would be collisions in what we would pick between the three of us. I thought there would at least

be one collision and there wasn't. There's not a single one. So that is impressive. So for my first pick, I went the direction of – and I also went the direction of a little bit different than definitely you, Alan, where like truly if I had the money right now and I was going to go out and buy something that I didn't already have. Excuse me. Okay. So, so, you know, prepare to be surprised by some of these or maybe not, but, um, so starting out with for the build and I categorized some, some of these. All right. So for the build is what this category is. So you're building your new PC and, uh, you know, you're looking for things for the build. So, um, you're going to notice a pattern here. These are going to start out kind of blingy. This is the Corsair lighting node pro. So this is, this is, uh, for 49 99, you can add led lights to can add LED lights to the inside of your case, your computer case. Now, obviously, I'm assuming that you're going to have a case that you can see through, which works out well for Joe's refrigerator.

I mean, refrigerated case. Yes. So, it comes with four magnetic back strips that you could place anywhere in your case. And if you need to, uh, actually, uh, you know, it does include like an adhesive if you needed it, but each channel or each strip can be on its own channel. So you can customize the colors of each strip,

or you can have them work in unison, um, together. If you've never seen one, it's really cool way to, uh, decorate your, your,

the inside of your computer and see it and everything. You know, pretty. I like it. All right. Yeah. Number two for the build is, let me walk down there.

Keeping in mind here is the Corsair HD series RGB LED fans, which can plug into that same node controller. All right. So this way your fans, the color of the fans can be in sync with the LED lighting strips. So, you know, this was a $79.99 for three fans. You know, I know you're shaking your head like, am I really going to spend $80 for fans, Michael? You just got $2,500. Why not, right? I spent $80 on mine. We talked about that. Yeah.

And plus, I mean, why not? These are pretty. These are some cool looking fans. And the fact that they'll sync with the Lighting Node Pro is huge, right? Now, here's the big one, though, kind of keeping in the spirit of this. Let me close that. And next in the build category is a must-have, the Corsair Hydra Series High Performance Liquid CPU CPU cooler. And I only picked the H60. So a single radiator, single fan. Okay. And obviously I'm swapping out the fan for one of my led fans, but, uh, I picked the single because it just felt like, well, I probably don't need all the other overkill,

but I want the space savings. I don't want to have a giant heat sink taking up all the space because I want these led colors to be able to shine around. You know, I want them to have some room. And so that's why I want the liquid cooler CPU. And so basically what you could do with the radiator is just put it where your stock fan probably already is on the back of your case, right? So you're not like using any additional space. Now, if you do have, you know, maybe one of the current style cases where you have space on the top, you could put it there if you wanted to. But I was just thinking like you would replace the fan that was in the back that would normally be in the back, right? Yeah, that's really what you said. The space savings is the key component

of these things. They're tiny. It's pretty much the only reason. And if you look at this thing, man, it's got over 2,400 reviews. All right. With a 4.3 star rating on Amazon. That's a pretty strong rating. Yep. All right. Next in the list. Now this one, I do expect you to not like this one. This one's totally blingy. Again, you're going to notice the theme. Where did it paste? Corsair. This is the Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM.

So this RAM lights up. Now this one is a big ticket item on my list. I will give you that. But if you go shopping around for any kind of RAM that's got lights on it, yeah. None of them. Man, I want my stuff to look good. So, let's put this in perspective though so the price tag on this is 394.99 you're basically paying about 120 for some lights on top of those four sticks of ram i'm good with that i really am it's never occurred to me to search for ram lighting you're trying to guilt me into this but you know what you're gonna buy that ram once i'm good with it oh my god man i honestly have and in fact i

actually considered because like a corsair does make a another um uh it's like a it's almost like a heat sink that sits over the ram that can also uh you know has it has its own led on it but i was like you know what if you've ever seen a computer that had the um ram that had the leds built into it it just looks so cool and and really the thing is is that the one that really looks really cool is the um the g skill trident z series have you seen that i have one oh man those look amazing but um if i remember right the reviews weren't there't... I read some bad reviews on it. Wait, how do these things hook up? What do you mean, how does it hook up?

Where's the lighting? How do you configure the light on it, the color? Yeah, that's attached to the stick. It's not an add-on to the stick. No, but I mean, do you buy the color you want, I guess is what I'm getting at? No, no, no. So this is the reason why i picked out corsair is so that you can control it all through the same software but how's it how are you controlling oh i guess it's gonna be part of whatever is going into the

ram right yeah never mind it's programmable all right so that so that's the key that's the key reason why i didn't put the uh g skill tr Trident on there was because I thought, well, if you're already going to spend that kind of money on it, and I read some bad things on it, and it's like, well, why not just get everything the same brand so that it can use all the same software so that everything can be synchronized? Because then, I'm telling you, if you ever see one where it can be synchronized because then i'm telling you if you ever see one where it is all synchronized it's pretty it is it is a pretty build right so that's for the build and then i thought well if we're really going out like you know because the 400 memory wasn't really going out on a limb not yet buddy we're getting there oh good so so it wouldn't be a build worth having without your samsung 960 pro series 512 gig nvme drive so for 289.99 that bad boy could be yours yeah i agree with that that's the first one yeah i got one no no i actually no i like all these the ram was the

only one that i was like whoo whoo so yeah go ahead yeah yeah no this the hey look man i actually bought the uh i bought the i bought this one the pro version yeah i bought the pro version it was on sale at the time i got it for like 250 but yeah rub it in same exactly one same one here yeah oh and that was an important note though is that i did go with the pro so you get the the faster read and write speeds but more importantly is the lifetime uh of the drive is much greater for the pro than it is for the non now why didn't you go with the two terabyte stick just out of curiosity because that would have been 1200 in my in my budget hey look i actually thought about this okay because you know what i could have been really here was like one thought before I go on.

I thought about it. I was like, you know what? I could be really lazy about this and also be very predictable in my pick and be like, okay, I want the – this is the way I'd have to say it. I want the Apple iPhone X, the Apple Watch Series 3 GPS plus cellular, Apple TV 4K. And then like maybe throw, like literally if I picked the iPhone 10, I added it up. The iPhone 10, the latest Apple TV and the watch, I would have been at like $1,800 just for those three items. And then I was like, well, you could just hack on an iPad and round it out, right? Jeez.

And it would have been like a very easy way to do it, very lazy way. Now, I'm not saying anything against Joe's first shopping list. That one was great. But it would have been very expected for me to say something like that, and that's why I didn't. This might be the most research we've ever done for an episode all right so so you know and then another thought that i had was i could build out like spec out a build for an entire machine with that 2500 which you know joe had the classifications of like oh here's what I'd ideally like to do. Here's what I'd realistically like to do. And here's what I would theoretically do. Right.

And realistically, if I had the $2,500 that I was just going to randomly spend, maybe that's how I would, I would probably, you know, if I had, if it had to be spent towards a, um, you know, sort towards tech that technology gadgets that i would use things like that that maybe that's what i would do but uh i thought well that might be a little bit too easy as well right that similar as to like me just picking the four apple products right right um so so i didn't want to build out the rest of the pc so that's where the the build series stops and we we now get into uh our favorite category gaming this one is important because every developer and i know what you're saying but michael that's not what you need for development so you can't pick

anything gaming whoa whoa whoa whoa time out because we all need for our own mental health we need to take a break every now and then right step away from the keyboard get up off me this is what i'm picking yeah so step away from the keyboard what right right well i mean you know if you're like me you step away from the keyboard now that means is you turn to your right to get to the to the next one which is the xbox one x 499.99 for that bad boy so that is next on my list that is the must havehave for the Christmas season, which would not be complete without a proper headset. Oh, okay. I don't know. So, I picked the Astro Gaming A40TR headset plus MixAmp Pro for the Xbox One.

And these are great headphones. If you've never seen them, you can use them for your PC or your console of choice. Now you have to pick which console you want. So they sell them for both PlayStation and Xbox, but you have to pick ahead of time which one you're going to want. So unfortunately, you can't use the same headset with both, which is a little unfortunate. But it comes with an amplifier, you know, an amp for it. And these are very modular headphones. So you can, the mic, the boom mic on the headphone unplugs. It just uses a, what is it, like an eighth inch plug.

And you can also customize them them so there's some cool things that you can do with that but these are 249.99 these are the headphones that like if you go to any kind of gaming competition you're going to see these things plastered all over the place this is what everybody's going to be using there and to clarify it's not just 249 for the headphones you also like he said you get an amp but really what that means is it's like this wireless thing that you keep with you that you plug your headphones into and you can turn up the chat i used to have one they're not wireless uh these aren't wireless the uh the ones i picked the amp no the amp looks like it is these are not no okay

but the the cool part is on that mix amp though, you can turn up like the chat volume or turn up the game volume or, you know, balance them out and all that kind of stuff. Like you're not just spending $249 on the headphones. Yeah. I mean, you could get, if you wanted to go and save yourself some money, you could get just the headphones without the amplifier. But I feel like you're really cheating yourself at that point. You might, you know, get the, go ahead and get the amp. It was my feeling on it. So, uh, that,

that's where, you know, I spent some of the money in, I did get the wired. They do have a wireless version. It is more money, but for me, I like the wired, just keep everything simple. Everything's fast. It's always connected. I don't have to worry about batteries, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Um, but yeah, they're, they're great. They're comfortable. They sound great. These are over the ear headphones, which are, you know, I'm a big fan of. So keeping consistent then with my strategy so far is that if you're going to game with the Astro A40s, then you're going to have this blinged out case. You need to bling out your headset as well. So here's the mod kit for it.

And I picked the Halo mod kit. They have, you know, different kits for this as well. This is $60 for the headphones and it changes out the earpad cushions. It changes out the boom mic. There's the, what do they call it? The noise canceling part on the outside. They call it a noise canceling. I don't know how they really claim that though. I think what they really mean is that you can use these headphones as um uh what's the it's not open ear but where the sealed uh sealed versus open uh headphone right so there's a plate that sits on like over your ear that you can either have on or off depending on whether

or not you want to be open or closed so you you can replace the plate. You can replace the top part, the cushion area. So that's what this kit is. And I thought, hey, why not? It's $60, right? Hey, don't. You definitely basically put like neons on your car. That's what you've done to everything. And not just anybody, right?

Mr. Monochrome. Yeah. Mr. All black, unless it's a skull. A white skull. Well, did you notice, though, keeping with the monochrome theme, that the headphones were white. And the mod kit that I picked is a dark gray and black.

So it is still sticking with the monochrome theme yeah it's like a monochrome and clown car no i will say yeah yeah no i will say though i will say in all fairness to his picks here so the headphones were 250 bucks with the amp and the headphones and his mod kit 60 bucks so he's only at 310 which by the way is what any set of beats will cost you so he's got full-on high-end gaming you know chat and audio stuff custom for the same price as a set of beats that you could also use anywhere you wanted but also keep in mind these this set of headphones man i mean these are modular that's what i'm saying yeah so if you broke that boom mic hey no no worries go buy another mod kit and you got another boom mic yeah right i mean it's

that's what i'm saying like it's actually it sounds ridiculous but really when you compare it to any kind of headphones you go pick up at Best Buy, it's really not that bad. And you've got competition gaming headphones. So I'm a fan. So, uh, keeping with the gaming theme, then,

uh, still in my gaming category here, I thought, well, you know, you need a place to, to plant your butt. And, uh, we've talked about the Herman Miller. I'm a, I'm a fan of it, but I thought, well, if I had,

if I had to buy a gaming chair, um, you know, if you go to the competitions, they all have, you know, the big brands that you're going to see there are the Maxonomic, uh, Cougar and DX Racer. Those are going to be like a few of the brands that you're going to see there are the max nomic uh cougar and dx racer those are going to be like a few of the brands that you're going to see scattered throughout uh the competition right through the arena and um so i found that form the dx racer formula series 289 dollars and uh i thought hey you know now i i obviously don't have the chair i have sat in sat in these at you know the events but um but but not for like you know 12 hours a day um so you know your mileage may vary on that but i mean this this one has really good reviews for what it is you know um

what was it like four and a half stars for it so i did pick the uh you know just a plain black one but for that same price yeah okay this is where jess gonna be mr monochrome right for that for i believe at that same price oh no i'm sorry they were more expensive. You could get, you know, DXRacer has a store on Amazon where you could go and see like their special edition version. So for example, if you wanted a Call of Duty Modern Warfare chair, or maybe keeping in line with the gaming, maybe if you have your favorite teams, so you want to follow Counter Logic Gaming, or maybe you want to follow Optic Gaming, they have special edition chairs that you could get and those are a little bit more expensive at $379. So I didn't pick those.

I went with something a little bit more, you know. Frugal-ish. Maybe frugal ish but lastly uh for the the gaming lineup is that you know we think about this we got this we got this awesome rig that we've built now that has our um uh you know all of our beautiful lights inside that case right i mean it's it's i know joe called it a clown car but let's let's be serious it looks it looks amazing all the lights are synchronized and um and you can see them because you don't have a big cooler or heat sink in the way um and then it's super fast because you know you're using this like amazing uh ssd in it right and then we buy this xbox and it comes with this crappy drive inside of it

that's a terabyte. And you know you're going to run out of space on that thing, right? So I decided to add in an SSD to my Xbox. So I'm adding in the Samsung T5 portable SSD that's one terabyte, USB 3.1 connection for $377.99. Now that's an expensive little boy right there. But what I can do with that now is I can take my, all the games that I'm not going to play as often and leave them on the internal drive in the games that uh you know that i'm going to be playing most often or that are the newest you know call of duty world war ii uh i can leave those on the ssd now all my transition scenes are super fast my load times are just amazing i'm not waiting on anything i'm not waiting on you alan Alan. I hear you. I thought that was a decent, fair pick.

The thing is, I couldn't find a... Looking for an inexpensive external SSD, you're kind of limited there. The one thoughts that I had was, well, you could just take

the drive. Have you ever seen those like, I think it's like Adair that makes them that you just plug directly into the hard drive. Yep. And not even have the hard drive in a case, but you could just like plug it directly in. I thought about something like that, but then I was like, eh, it's kind of lame, right? Yeah. So, there's that. So, and then, you you know because there were some big

ticket items on there you haven't gone over 2500 yet right isn't that isn't that yeah it's pretty amazing and i got some pretty cool stuff i thought right yeah there's some fun stuff making fun of my clown car now, are you? Yeah, who wants to go for a ride? All right, so I thought, well, you know what? No developer would be complete without some books on his bookshelf. So there's a couple books that have been of interest to me that I'm really think that at some point, maybe, maybe there'll be topics that we get to. Um, and the first one is by Michael Feathers

and it is working effectively with legacy code, which, uh, you know, it's both of these, both of the book choices were, were kind of like, you know, quote, like the classic kind of must-read series, right? So there's that one, and then there's the by Martin Fowler, Refactoring, Improving the Design of Existing Code. So both of these were in the same kind of genre of, like, you know, working with something that is already existing. And because that's reality, right? And that's why these two books were kind of, they've been in my list. Because I feel like, you know, even the code you write today, it's just tomorrow's legacy code. So you might as well get used to the idea of you're going to have to figure out how to support that stuff eventually anyways, right?

So in those two books, depending on like you get them in a variety of ways. So, you know, depending on if you want a paperback or hardcover versus Kindle versus new versus used versus rent. So, um, I think with the direct links that I have saved in there, um, technically I'm over by like nine bucks. Um, but if I picked the paperback version, for example, uh, I could have, I could have, I could have easily saved like 20 bucks on one of them just by picking the paperback version of the refactoring book. And I would have been under the $2,500. I think that's a, that's a fair, that's a fair save.

So, so yeah, that's what I figured. Like I was like, well, you know what, I'm just going to, I'm just going to put a version of the link up to,

you know, you know, on the list here for the book and, you know, you pick whichever version you want it. But yeah, so I, so I,

I blinged out my, uh, my desktop, got, got my on, and I got some books to read. Yeah, I like it. I mean, I would say probably the only real extravagant thing that was just sort of crazy was your external one terabyte SSD. Even over your memory. I mean, the memory, you're're gonna spend some money on memory anyways but the external ssd for your xbox one seems a little little ludicrous but you know it's awesome it is it is awesome this is from experience it is i mean i have on my current xbox i do have an external uh drive attached to it um and i can't remember if it's a three or a four gig drive terabyte sorry sorry yeah thank you uh yeah you weren't gonna you

weren't gonna download a thing on that right uh yeah you're right there's actually a minimum it won't even let you connect uh anything larger smaller than i think 250 um uh well at least not for use for gameplay right uh but um yeah it's like a three or four terabyte drive already and yeah i mean your problems with like filling up that one terabyte that that that that's real man it doesn't take long to do that. And even with the drive that I have on there, it's already kind of like, well, okay, I got to delete this and delete that. And I already play this game of like, let me shuffle the games around because the internal drive is the hybrid. So technically it is the, you know, the quote better, right? But I've always wanted to put the SSD on it, but I just can't get the capacity. And I've never been able to talk myself into buying the smaller one.

But I thought, okay, well, in this theoretical game, if I have $2,500, then fine. Well, check it out. I mean, to go on to your three terabyte and four terabyte thing, you're saying that you're already filling that up. They're saying that with the Xbox One X, because all these 4K things, like the rendering and the additional things for it to make it do that like it's four times the size right like they're so if you're filling up a three and four terabyte drive right now just imagine how fast this is going to go i mean literally i have four games and there's yeah it's already installed a couple hundred gig on that thing find this stat or a hundred gig at least it's ridiculous but i did like the list i like

both of y'all's list actually i'm gonna go build a uh bit mining a bitcoin mining machine here pretty soon there you go let's see i'm trying to buy really expensive like they make like uh ant miners like units you can go buy like a three thousand dollar like very special computer just for mining bitcoins oh dude they've got them that you can go buy like a $3,000 very special computer just for mining Bitcoins. Oh, dude, they've got them that you can buy like a $10,000 one that has like X number of video cards. It's insane. Crazy. I'd never even thought about the whole USB

thing. There's this page that I found, USB Bitcoin miners or whatever. There's all kinds of them out there for anywhere from $30 to $400 for USB plug-in ones. Yeah, and if you're considering getting into the business, then you should check out our links and hook us up with that sweet, sweet affiliate juice. Definitely. I can't find the link now, but

I remember Major Nelson, I remember reading something from Major Nelson, which anybody in the Xbox world would know, like that guy is the pretty much like the face of all communication Xbox, right? And he had some stat that he posted of how much storage he had connected to his Xbox One. And it was like, I want to say it was like four different RAID arrays. Each one was around 16 terabytes, all of them full. That's ridiculous, man.

That is insane. But he was probably using it as a media hub then too, right? It would be my guess. Because that was always kind of the promise of the Xbox, was it was going to become your media hub. So, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I'll have to see if I can find it again. If I remember right, at the time,

I thought it was like games that he had. Good God. Because that's the thing is if you are on Xbox with Xbox Live, Microsoft sends out emails like, hey, here's the free game of the month. And you can just go get the free game because of Xbox,

assuming you have Xbox Gold, right? Right. Which I'll be signing up for here very soon. So, yeah, that was pretty fun, guys. I like it. Hopefully everybody else listening enjoyed that. I thought there was some cool takes on that stuff. So, resources. Go ahead.

Before the show, we talked a little bit about maybe doing a giveaway but i think we forgot to mention it oh we did yeah so do we still want to do that yeah totally oh well i can't you can't bring it up now yeah no that's right no we're not no we need it yeah nothing to see here folks no Yeah. So what was our giveaway? We said we're going to give a $50 gift card away to somebody who commented on this blog post. Yep. So codingblocks.net slash episode 70. Leave a comment on there.

Doesn't matter what it is. You know, just put something there. Say hi. Say, you know, say bye. Especially if you have advice on how to make money mining bitcoins yeah totally we'll take that too that's amazing i'm thinking my math may have been off yeah i don't think three months was gonna happen man like when you said that i was like yeah yeah like i just like copy pasted stuff around. I think at one point I saw $0.15, and I thought it was $1.50. So maybe it's like three years.

That makes more sense. And then your electric bill on top of that, it's probably not going to be all that awesome. But that's a write-off. Right. I'm just messing around. I am not actually a tax thief. I just like to talk about it.

Don't take any advice from us on this. If you're listening to IRS, I'm just kidding a tax thief. I just like to talk about it. Don't take any advice from us on this. If you're listening to IRS, I'm just kidding. All right. So with that, now it is time for my favorite part of the show, which Joe still hasn't picked his favorite part. It's the tip of the week. So Outlaw is going to kick us off with his tip. Yeah.

So I think it was last weekend, this past weekend, uh, went to a, um, Google developer conference and it was, it was interesting. Unfortunately, you know, there were a lot of machine learning talks that I had hoped to go to. And, uh, several of them were canceled all for different reasons. Uh, So that part was sad, but it did open up my schedule so that I could go to another workshop, which was a dedicated workshop, just working, just sitting there with, you know, an engineer talking about Haskell. And, uh, so I, I had, I walked into this workshop with zero Haskell experience or knowledge. I walked out of that with some experience and still no knowledge, but it does give, I did want to say that it, it looks very cool. Like there are some really cool patterns and things in Haskell that,

yeah, it was like, as I was, as I was listening to what he was saying and trying and writing code and some of the, you know, various, you know, projects or whatever you want to call it that we were doing.

It was like, man, if I were trying to write this same thing in like a java or a c sharp or even javascript it's like well hey if you could imagine how many how many lines that would be and like here it was in haskell and it was like oh that's two lines or you know less and and there were some really cool concepts in there um and uh so i'll give you a link to try haskell.org as well as the haskell lang itself um so if you haven't ever tried it out you should give it a go take a look at it it's a purely functional programming language it's very mathy you know a lot of the it felt like maybe i'm

saying this wrong but if it seems like a lot of the concepts there were like, well, how can we just mathematically prove something? And then let's approach, let's approach programming as a mathematical proof. Right? And then build upon it from there. So let's not talk about like trying to model things like the real world, but just model things as math and then keep expanding on it from there. That's interesting. I don't know what kind of program you're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I wasn't doing Haskell, but now, yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, I'm playing on the Haskell.org. It's kind of cool how you play through it. Right? It's definitely a different world. Yeah. There were definitely some mind-melting moments in there, but I spend a lot of my time trying to think, as I was listening and learning it, trying to relate it back to other languages that I have worked with in the past and yeah it but there were some parts there which is like i can't i can't make a connection to any other language this this this doesn't exist outside of this language that's weird cool man well mine i've actually got i've sort of got two here really the first one is i talked about last year and this one kind of goes in line with this episode in the you know things

that we would get or things you know we do for like a developer type thing and i've mentioned konimu in the past which i use as my uh console replacement in windows because it just you can maximize you can resize you can do all kinds of things tabbed you know just really cool stuff well since then i've gotten or i i'd started a new build and you know i searched for kanimu and this thing called commander came up or cmder and i was like well that's kind of interesting is this a new kanimu and it turns out it's actually a wrapper for kanimu and and i can't remember why I went with it. It was probably because it was a shiny new toy more than anything else. I mean, if I'm being completely honest, but I did find some things where they talk about,

and maybe I should copy this in here where they talk about some of the differences between Connie Moo and commander. And there's some, there's some cool stuff here. So it builds on, like I said, it wraps Kanemu. But on top of it, it's also got a minimal version that you can throw it on, like a USB drive that's like 10 megs. And you can basically run it anywhere, assuming that it has the C++ dependency that it needs on the system, you can do crazy stuff like it has, it's super customizable. There were some other things that were kind of interesting in it.

It has, it can support like graphical applications, can work with DOS box. I mean, there's just a lot of neat things, at the end of it it's just another nice replacement or addition to windows if you want to work in in shell because it's got things that you can work with like linux like today i just went in there and did ssh into something from windows and didn't have to think about it because i had commander installed so you know pretty cool stuff wait i missed something what was the difference between it versus economy man i don't remember there were some things i like i said it might have just been the shiny new toy but i think it has things like

um the the portability of it to where you can just run it as an xe without installing it was one i think maybe um dude i i really don't remember it's it's absolutely terrible that i don't know but like i said shiny new toy i like it um and then the other thing i was going to do so we've mentioned in the past and and being that i do web development and most of us do, or there's lots of people out there that do, I should say, I'm always trying not to tie myself directly to Chrome all the time, even though I love the development experience in Chrome. But one of the things that we talked about is when you have different accounts open up,

if you've got an Azure account that is not necessarily linked to the same account that maybe your Office account is or something like that, it's really annoying because you go to log into Azure and it's like, oh, you're already logged into Office and it tries to use that account and you're kind of hosed. And in the past, a lot of people would just open up like an incognito window and then go in there. Well, what stinks about that is now you're only tied to two because your incognito sort of runs in one space. So even if you open up a new incognito window and then go in there. Well, what stinks about that is now you're only tied to two because your incognito

sort of runs in one space. So even if you open up a new incognito, it's still running in the same space as your other incognito. So you could technically only have like two accounts running at one time, right? One in your regular and then one in your incognito stuff. So there's these profiles in Chrome that we've talked about to where you could literally set up as many profiles as you want that we could have, like on your personal computer,

you could have a coding blocks, you could have your work one, you could have your personal one, you could have a number of profiles. And anytime you want to open up that browser in a new context, you just use the profile you want to do. And you could literally have as many as you want. And they'll all sort of be sandboxed to that one profile. Well, I decided to make the switch here recently to Firefox just to see what I've been missing. And, you know, I like the idea that they don't harvest your data like everybody else does. Firefox has profiles too, but it's a little bit weirder to get to than Chrome. Chrome makes it super obvious. You just click on the person up at the top right of your Chrome browser and you can get to it. In Firefox, you can do the same thing, but you have to do about colon profiles in the URL and it'll bring

up a profiles tab to where you can actually add new profiles to Firefox. And if you want to switch to a new one, you can go to it and say, Hey, launch me a new version of this profile. And so you can have your own context in those. So I thought that was worth talking about. It's pretty cool. Um, it's a, it's a nifty, I don't know why it's so hidden there. I don't know why they did it like that, but it is a useful piece if you work in Firefox or if you need to test and you have different accounts or something like that. Did I understand you correctly, though, that you were saying that in Chrome, if you had two incognito windows,

they run, oh, the same profile, the user profile, but it wasn't like they shared session or anything. Well, no. If you were to log into Gmail or something, let's say that you open up an incognito and you log into gmail and then you open up a new incognito guess what you're logged into to gmail actually i'll do it right now just to make sure yeah yeah it stinks i did that yeah it's always been one of the things that was frustrating for me is like if i launch a new one a new incognito and go to gmail again i'll already be in there yeah yeah and so i'm not making myself out to be a liar cool it did work that way um just i wasn't trying to call you a liar it's weird now but uh no but that that

is the thing is you always had like two spaces that you're working in. And with the profiles, you can have as many as you want, really. I never noticed that. Yeah, that's why if you're ever working in an incognito window and you're trying to check caching and all that stuff, you've got to close all of them to kill whatever context it was running in. Any incognito window you had, you have to kill them, you know, context it was running in any incognito window you had, you have to kill them all and then relaunch it to get back to a, like an empty,

you know, there's no session going on anywhere. I guess maybe I've always gotten around that though, because I usually have the developer tools open and I have the checkbox to disable caching. Right. So I don't catch that. But yeah.

Oh, interesting. Learn something new every day all right jim what you got you still like something new yep yep still here um yeah uh i was just photoshopping scarface and cheetos um for the slack anyway as you do so yeah yeah it's in the i put it in the episode discussion channel already um so i wanted to mention the imposter syndrome podcast and this was done by swix who uh is awesome uh friend of the show and uh what he did is he went through a boot camp and he actually interviewed a lot of the students that were in there at the same time. Some of them were new to programming. Some had been doing Java and other stuff for a long time but wanted to kind of get like a refresh.

And he just kind of went through, interviewed, talked about like what people wanted to get out of the course, what they were doing, what they were excited about. I just thought it was a really inspirational listen. And it's still going strong. So I think he's got like 20 episodes or something now. So I am, I'm behind. Yeah, 25 right now.

So you should check it out if that's something that you think you would like. Very cool. Yeah, we got the skinny on good podcasts. So what? We got the skinny on good podcast to listen to. We definitely do. And you know the sad part is he's already a third of the way to

catching up to us. And episode 25, machine learning. Yep. Yeah. Cool. And I guess that's about it. I mean, this episode we talked about kind of we did the shopping spree thing. When

we first started the podcast, we did an episode that was kind of similar. We talked about the dev ones. And I think we did one maybe the second year. And we missed last year. We got a lot of feedback asking us to do it again. So here we are. We hope you enjoyed. And thank you very much for listening.

Totally. Yeah. And be sure to write in how you might spend some money in the comments for this for your chance to win. And we look forward to reading that. So with that, subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. Be sure to leave us a review by visiting www.codingblocks.net slash review. And while you're up there, check out our show notes, which Michael, as mentioned, does a fantastic job of throwing together each and every episode and get

involved in the discussion up there. Yeah. And send your feedback questions and rants to the Slack channel, codingblocks.slack.com. And you can sign up by going to codingblocks.net slash Slack and make sure to follow us on Twitter at codingblocks or head over to codingblocks.net and find all our social links at the top of the page.