Coding Blocks - Software in Audio and How to Lead

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

In this episode, Allen, Michael and Joe discuss the latest update with the Reddit saga, software for designing audio and reproducing analog sounds, an open-ended interview question and tips on how to be a great leader. Reviews Huge thank you for that! News Episode If you were going to create a web service / api […]

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 215. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your... Oh wait, I guess I can't say Stitcher anymore. Man, that just rolled off the tongue. I didn't even... Yeah, we're going to kill that, don't we? Alright, whatever. Yeah, I mean, we're there.

Find us. We're there. Visit us at CodingBlocks.net. You can find show notes, examples, discussion, and more. Look at codingbox.net you can find show notes examples discussion and more look at outlaw i think it's because it's early in the day that we are we're going to do this where outlaw looks defeated i'm not sure you can send your questions feedbacks and rants to comments at codingblocks.net and uh yeah we got uh an x account at codingblocks or you can uh go to codingblocks.net and find all our other social links at the top of the page

although we're still updating the various logos on them. Always. Oh, I guess that means we have to update that logo. That's what you mean by that. That's right. They changed it, didn't they? They did.

I forgot about that. Yeah. Alright. So. He didn't say it. Did they rename it? Playback. Playback.

Playback the role. Oh, you did? Yeah. Here, let's play back a slow-mo. I'm Joe Zack. I'm defeated. I'm Alan Underwood. All the people

playing at two times speed actually heard our names for the first time. Normal, that's right. Yes. Alright. We got some reviews. As we always like to say, thank you to those that left us a review. Thank you, Mr. Furley.

Real quick, I actually want to thank this person for reaching out. They said that they wrote their first review of us like eight years ago. And they said we're still their favorite podcast. I assume it's a he with a mister. So, yeah, thank you. It was like, you know, still my favorite. Keep doing it. So thank you it was like you know still my favorite keep doing it so thank you very much that that means a whole lot appreciate that so they were able to leave two reviews how'd they do that how they did it they logged into somebody else's account is my

assumption so if you've only left one review you're doing it wrong i like your takeaway mr furley is leading by example here. Follow his lead and leave at least a second one. I mean, what else you got better to do? That's right. All right, Joe, what you got up here? Yeah, I just want to mention that DevFest Florida, the conference speakers is closing. So hopefully we'll be posting the schedule pretty soon.

But it's going to be a cool event if you're in Central Florida region or feel like taking a field trip, you should come on down. It's going to be in October. The weather's going to be perfect, so you should come down. Trust them on that. All right, so we've brought this up in the news a couple of times, talking about the crazy things going on with Reddit. And actually, just hours before this episode was being recorded, there was a new article that came out that basically says that they think the protest is finally sort of over at Reddit. And it's basically because there were, there were these

John Oliver rules that were taking place in some of the major subreddits to where everything had to be something like about John Oliver and that's kind of died off. And so what I guess the company Reddit thought was going to happen, which was everybody was just going to eventually be over it and move on sort of has happened. I think they said there's only one other big subreddit holdout and that's uh slash r slash fitness and they're like yeah whatever so yeah i mean i guess sadly joe you'd even mention that you know kind of people were getting mad at the moderators yeah it kind of tides kind of turned and eventually people said all right uh we want our content back so uh it's been interesting just to watch how this all kind of played out and how the public's opinion kind of changed over time. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe the loudest people.

You never really know with this stuff. Just because the people are being loud doesn't mean it's a majority or whatever. I don't know. But again, I mean, following that, that Reddit following in the footsteps of Twitter, when Twitter did the same thing with, for their app, you know, I mean, everybody got over that and consolidated around the Twitter app eventually. So I don't really think that's any surprise that Reddit was going to win out in the long run. Yeah. I think the big difference though, was the moderator thing to it, right? Like Twitter was just sort of free open stuff, but then Reddit was sort of getting free labor out of it, which I think was sort of the sticking point. But, um, there was something at the bottom

of the article that was sort of unrelated directly to Reddit, but I thought it was interesting and worth calling out because I've been having thoughts on this as well. So I'll read this last little paragraph. We're at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire Internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit's scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderator's attempts to fight back. So the reason I called this out, and it is really, really interesting. When you think about what Google's model is for making money, it's always been relevant ads or shopping things or, you know, getting links and clicks and getting people to

drive marketing campaigns on their stuff, right? It's not their only mode of revenue, but a lot of it's ad driven. And with the onslaught of ridiculous websites that have popped up recently and the content that is obviously AI generated in a lot of circumstances, like the effort it will require to spin up a new website with content you never wrote, never even had to think about, you just ask a question and it generated an article and now you have a bunch of Amazon affiliate links, you have Google AdSense, you have all this kind of stuff. It reminds me of what I had mentioned about my usage of ChatGPT and what I find it really nice for is asking a question that I actually want an answer for, right? As opposed to going to Google, searching for the same thing

and having to sift through three or four pages of, you know, maybe irrelevant, not completely irrelevant, but a lot of shopping things and a lot of ad driven things. And it's like, man, I can't tell you how many times I'm overseeing top 10.com something, right? Like, like, I don't want that one information, right? Like, I'm tired of these clickbaity things. So I wonder how much this is going to change. I wonder how much or how useful people are going to see things like Google if they don't start changing the content that they deliver when somebody asks a question of it. Yeah, search is rough now. Recipes are a prime example. What's a recipe for meatloaf?

And you go and it's like the whole history of meatloaf and the recipe down at the bottom. It's not just recipes, though. That's content across the board. You're like, how do I tell if my dog has a tick? Or how do I find the shotgun in Super Mario Brothers? Or whatever it is. It's just people figured out how to game the system, and it's really not fun to use.

It's really a pain. So, like, Reddit is one of my kind of primary search engines when I want, like, something written by a human. And now that's kind of going away too. I don't know if you've seen them. So the funny things were like, uh, sometimes in,

in like kind of arguments on Reddit or, uh, just other websites. Sometimes, um, the, one of the arguers will get outed as a bot. It's kind of funny ways or like,

um, it'll say something like, uh, certainly, but you should talk to your health care provider before, you know, whatever, like someone insulted or whatever.

And I'm kind of like trigger. It's one of, it's kind of like defense mechanism type things where it's like someone I'll be arguing. And also now it's telling that you can't offer legal advice because it's not a lawyer. Here are three links. Hey,

we have been arguing with the bot the whole time. It's kind of funny. People are like, um, kind of priming these bots with whatever slanted viewpoint they want and then sending them out to go argue or try to make points on the internet and in some way or another uh so i think that yeah i don't know content on the internet is is pretty funky it makes me question the centralization of it like i wonder if you know you think back to like the days of like random forums that you know

like for whatever your your interests were then you'd have to go and like seek out those forums and whatnot but you know they weren't always the same software so you couldn't like necessarily write something that would you know be applicable to all of, like in the case of this bot that you're describing. But because we've, over the years and decades, or recent decade plus, consolidated these into a few platforms that do have these APIs, then it allows people to take advantage of that by creating these bots that can now argue with Jay-Z

about how to make a meatloaf. I mean, you're not wrong in that. Like, that's pretty interesting. Like, the more feature-rich you have something, the more you're wanting to just go get something off the shelf, right? Because, I mean, that's why WordPress is so popular. And what was the old popular, like, the forum? Was it PHP forum? The Bulletin. PHP and TV. Yeah. wordpress is so popular and what what was the old popular like the forum was it php forum or

php yeah yeah so i mean there's there's tons of them out there but that's the reason why because they they made it easy for you to stand one up but that's that's a really good take on it um you know the recipe thing drives me crazy too jay-z like i didn't want to read 12 pages of stuff i want the recipe. Sometimes it's even hard to find it between all the ads and other garbage on the pages. All right. Well, I'm hungry now, so I'm going to go get some meatloaf.

I'll catch you guys later. Which happens to be one of Outlaw's very favorite things. I've witnessed this firsthand. Oh, really? Meatloaf? Yeah. Meatloaf is amazing. I haven't had one in like 40 years. Are you kidding me? I think his mom's meatloaf is the biggest smile I've ever seen on his face. It's one of the best things on the planet.

So, I mean, it just makes sense. I agree. All right. So, I have one more thing that I'm putting in the news. I was going to put it down in the tips, but, I mean, there's probably a lot of people that never make it to the test because it's an hour and a half in. So I wanted to put it up here because I cannot, I know that I'm not the only person who hates the fit of Apple in ears. And I'm specifically talking about the AirPod pro twos, even though they're in ears, they still don't fit my ears. They fall out. I don't care what I'm doing. They will fall out at some point

and it drives me absolutely insane. Um, and I was actually talking to somebody else and they returned them and went and got some beats pros and they said they have similar problems with those. At any rate, make a long story short, if you want to make them not actually suck and will stay in your ears, um, there are things called comply foam tips. And back when I was doing headphone reviews, those were one of the things that I absolutely loved. They have tips for the AirPod pros too, and they're foam. So you compress them, you stick the thing in your ear and then it expands out and it will hold them in place. And as far as I can tell, there's zero degradation. As a matter of fact, it might sound a little bit better even with those in and they stay snug.

I haven't had them fall out of my ears, not once with them. So I'll have a link in the show notes for this, but for anybody listening, cause you know, maybe you're listening on those at the beginning of the episode and it just fell out while I was saying that, you know,

now you can go get you something. I don't, I guess I'm just unique and like, I don't have that problem with it i i mean the old style the the earbud style just sat in there yeah those those were ridiculous like i don't see how those ever stayed in for people i always had issues with it and it was one of the things i was super hesitant about getting them in the beginning, but you know, a friend that I ride with, like he would, he would use those on mountain while mountain biking. And I'm like,

how do they not fall out of your head while we're mountain biking? But, uh, the, the, the new ones though, the, the two, the air pod twos, those I guess I'm just lucky i don't know i'm blessed hashtag blessed is that what it is maybe i don't know i think there's like half the people have the problem i do and then the other half are perfectly fine with them but the thing the thing that drives me crazy is they're really good headphones like if you have ios or mac os type things if you're in that apple ecosystem they have a bunch of nifty tricks. Like Outlaw is the one who told me about them.

Like if you're watching on an Apple TV, you can have a feature turned on to where if you turn away from the Apple TV, you'll actually hear the sound shift in your ear from, you know, like you turned your head away from it. Just like if you're listening to speakers. And it's really interesting. But man man it was driving me crazy so i mean i was getting to the point where i was about to go like find something else but when i found these comply tips i actually liked them again so yeah in the the beats headphones the i forget what the first uh what they called the true wireless ones were called um but they were flex are you no they have wires no no they were wireless and they were called they were called true wireless

because it was the same technology as the airpods but they had the over ear clip that went with them i love those like those are my when i go cycling that those are the ones I prefer to use because there's just like there I'm at peace. Like I have no worry that those are going to fall out. Right. Right. And your ear would have to come off. Yeah.

Like something really bad happened. You know, I wasn't going to go as dark with it as you did, but yeah, something really bad had to happen in order for that to fall off the i would love to have the new ones i would love to upgrade but they they removed that now so now it's got like this uh weird like little clip or not really a clip thing but like a another piece that's supposed to fit into the curve of the inside of your ear to keep it in so i'm like well that's

cute and all but man i really liked the other style yeah but you know that's where that's where i'm unique that's what that's where i'm different right like this isn't right so we can't ever we can't we can't have nice things that's right that's the takeaway all right so let's get into one of the things that I thought would be somewhat interesting. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We'll find out. So on an interview that I actually was the interviewee on, I was asked a very open-ended question. And I thought this would be kind of fun for us to go through.

Wait, how long ago was this? It's been a few years ago. I was like is this an awkward way for us for you to tell us you're interviewing no no no this is this was many years ago as a matter of fact this is probably god has been seven eight years ago at any rate i think it's still relevant today because a lot of the same pieces go so here was the question hey um you're gonna have to write an API, a web service that is going to be consumable by outside people. So think of like the Reddit thing, right? Like you're going to write an API that anybody can consume.

All right, go. And when they said that, I was like, huh? Like, I mean, what are the parameters? Like, what do you, I don't know. Just tell me, tell me what your thought process would be. And I was like, huh? Like, I mean, what are the parameters? Like, what do you, I don't know. Just tell me, tell me what your thought process would be. And I was like, okay, so go ahead. You two start away. What are the things that you would be, that you would be thinking about?

What are the things that you would be conscious about? What are the things that you'd want to include and all that kind of stuff? API versioning would be one of the things. Okay. Okay. Authentic. Like, is it like, is this something for security? Like, do I need to deal with authentication? And how do I deal with authentication?

So if I have to deal with that, that also makes me think of like, okay, you know, security encryption, like that sort of thing needs to be in play. Okay. So we got security and authentication we have versioning i feel like somebody's cheating right now this is supposed to be an interview question i was looking up stuff oh i was just taking notes uh i see you're doing it too okay and we said um yeah so for me my first

thought uh honestly and this is speaking of cheating uh is i'm gonna google for the best resource i can find on making an API. Because even though I've done a bunch of them, I'm curious to see what other people have kind of gelled on. Like how the communities kind of come together and what they've kind of figured out as being the most important. And then I would probably start thinking about kind of technology stacks that I would prefer. Or, you know, depending on if there's any sort of parameters. Without any, you know,, the answer is it depends. But there are definitely some things I would kind of lean towards if there was no other information.

I would probably lean towards even making a Java, or a JVM-based, I should say, even though it's got its fair share of problems. If I don't know anything else going in and I have to write a web API, like I know Spring has got so much configuration and security stuff and all sorts of good stuff that I'm probably going to want just right out the gate.

So I would probably be Googling for modern day, like how to write an API and then I would probably be unless I found something else that kind of stole my interest there, I would probably be looking at getting started with, I go a spring API type guide. Okay.

I'm going to change my answer. I T I'm going to Google. Yeah. I mean, chat GPT. How do I. Okay. So,

so in fairness, the Googling thing would have been a great little tack on at the end, be like, you know, and I'd probably Google some things too, but when you're in the middle of the interview saying, I'm gonna go ahead and google this they're gonna be like no not right now you're not so um so a couple of things so specifically like more than like I would literally like want to google like what are people doing today what is the newest greatest

hottest like you know or is that everybody using rust on Like, you know, is everybody using Rust on Rails? Or, you know, like, what are the top three frameworks I should be considering? Or what are the top three technology stacks I should be considering? Because I can't trust that my information is necessarily, you know, up to date or the best. And so I want to see, like, right out the gate, what are my best starting options so i that's why i'm going to go to uh best api frameworks.com for 2023's list of best frameworks you know unfortunately you can't because i guarantee you that domain is out there and it's got a blog post and it's written by a company that sells some product that they're going to try and sell you and so you can't believe anything

because all content on the internet is garbage now throw it all away throw that thing in the trash so what i heard jay-z said was he was going to use micronaut because i think that was the last thing that he tried to to make i did like yeah yeah i would probably go spring now yeah so so here's a couple of interesting things i thought about after the fact i don't even think i mentioned this in the interview because i was you know anytime you're called to the rug on something like that you're thinking through it and you I don't know if there's a little bit of panic that happens or what, but, but like, there's a little bit of panic, right? Oh, one of the things that I thought about after the fact it first, I would say that you want to look at companies that do a lot of these things like AWS comes to mind, right? Like their, their web look at companies that do a lot of these things like AWS comes to

mind, right? Like their, their web services, they've done a lot of things. So one of the things that I hadn't thought about, I don't think during that interview was paging. How are you going to handle paging? Because if somebody queries something like the, the product catalog for Amazon, you can't return it all at once, right? So you're going to have to think about paging. How are you going to page or how to handle paging? And a lot of those companies say, what? Well, another thing with that is, well, a lot of these companies, when they do these things, it's not like, Hey, just go to page two. They'll give you a token because they probably cash the first, I don't know,

thousand results and that token will give you the next entry into that set of results because they don't want to research the thing. So another thing you have to think about is how do you not crush your backend? Right. Um, Yeah. Oh oh oh my gosh i changed my answer i would just go dot net you know like a soft has just about everything like um like 90 percent of everything and it's consistent and it's nice and you google and there's one way to do it oh my gosh what was i thinking spring i take? I take it, erase that. Erase that, editor. That's so funny that you say that

because that's actually got some truth to it, right? Like we've talked about it before is one of the reasons we all love Microsoft is because they sort of have a prescribed way of doing things. And when you go into the Java world, there's like 9 million opinions out there on what the best way to do things is.

And it can be really frustrating. Yeah, I think you can focus on any little part of the, like the.net kind of framework and solution and say, well, there's something better out there for this one particular thing, but as a whole package, it's tough to beat. Yeah. It's really good. So another thing that I thought about after the fact is, so we said the paging serialization, do you want JSON results back? Do you want XML results back? Do you want, you know, I don't know, do you want it in a GRPC type stuff? XML, right? Definitely. Definitely XML. So serialization is a big one, right? And back in the day when you'd write these things, and even before this interview happened,

maybe you wrote things to write XML or you wrote things to write JSON. And things have evolved so much now that you think about, I just need to get things into the proper object or structure because there's all kinds of different serialization models that you could just throw that thing at and it'll spit it out in those different formats for you. Right. So, so that's another thing you need to think about. How are these things being called? Is it GRPC? Is it web API? Is it whatever? Right. So that's, that's another one. I'm trying to think what, what were some more things that came to mind. Authentication was obviously a big one. Logging. So for me, logging, I think has become so much bigger for me in my world because now that we're all doing distributed type computing, it's really frustrating trying to

tie the dots together. So I think logging what's happening in those service calls is going to be very important. So you can find out when things fail, why they fail, all that kind of stuff. Right. Tracing. Tracing. Yeah. If it's going to be like a public API that I'm like selling or is going to be actually published on the Internet, then I'd be really interested in like documentation generation solutions. Like, you know, there's Java docs or whatever, stuff like that.

But I want more than that. I want people to be able to, to add corrections or, you know, I want that whole process to be kind of part of the package that I deliver. I won't be able to make corrections and make changes to the documentation without it being pain. Cause I don't want to do it. That's, that's actually really good. I hadn't even considered that. That's a big one. As a matter of fact, See, you look at all the stuff that we've already named, and this is why we just be like, forget it.

Yeah, we're not actually going to make it, right? This is just a thing. I don't have to do this. If I have to do it, I'm going Node.js and serverless done. I'll be done in an hour. But if we're just talking hypothetical, then, yeah, I'm going to need a couple weeks on the whiteboard. Right?

Another one, caching, right? Like I already mentioned, typically, if somebody does a request and your service allows paging, let's just assume that you've got tens of thousands of things, right? You're going to want to cache those results because you don't want, even if you've got Elasticsearch or something like that on the back end, you don't want to hit that every time if you don't have to, right? So chances are you'll probably cache the first three pages of results, right? Because even Google, I want to say that less than 2% of people ever click through past the third page or something, right? So if you were to do something like that, you'll save your back end and make it to where this thing's still fast. Right? So caching is another consideration that you're going to do for that.

I mean, it's amazing. Like, like, uh, I think outlaw just said, we've already got a huge list here and this is not even talking about the implementation of it. It's just all the things you need to consider even going into it. Build pipeline. Oh, look at you i mean so i feel like all we've done though is like just buzzword like you know you're you're in the interview so you're just throwing out all these buzzwords but like the actual like this

isn't how you're going to go about it in the real world you're going to start with something like what Jay-Z said. He's going to, you know, find some node package or whatever and start small and then, you know, iterate on it and then realize like, oh, okay, it's getting to a level where like, oh, I really wish I had a build pipeline to just, you know, do all this for me. Oh, I wish I had some logging. Oh, I guess my logging needs tracing, you know? Oh'm i'm abusing the the database server i need to add a caching layer like you're not going to start with all of this from day one for sure unless you're unless you were a mature organization that already has some of these things at the ready like if you were a google for example or a microsoft or an Amazon, and you already have like, there's already a

logging layer available company wide, right? Like a Google log explorer or something like that. And it's like, okay, no big deal. I can dump that out to there. I think it's more about just how much, how many touch points have you experienced as a developer is really what they're trying to hit, right? What are the things that you know off the top of your head that you need to at least be aware of and be thinking about going into building an API that people in the world are going to be able to hit.

And, and that's, what's interesting is just, you sit there and you think about it. You're like, wow, there, there really are a lot of pieces to this one little thing that was just this vague question that was thrown out at you.

You know, so. Yeah, that's what they want to hear. They want to hear that you're thinking about security and build pipelines and documentation. You know, that's all they're really looking for is like make sure you have experience with that sort of thing. Yeah, performance. Basically, all the stuff we've talked about, right? You forgot, hire someone to do all of that stuff. Yeah. that sort of thing yep performance basically all the stuff we've talked about right you forgot um hire someone to do all of that stuff yeah yeah i'm gonna manage this project yeah higher up and

they're like but wait that's what we're interviewing you for oh snap what's called a perk fiverr there we go yeah fiverr jg jc just hired out his api at fiverr that's amazing i'll be playing ballers gate see you later i mean they advertise you doing exactly that so you know whatever oh that's amazing all right so that that was fun a whole lot easier when there's three people collaborating on it i'll just say and you're not having somebody sitting there judging whether or not you're going to get the position or not while you're answering. It's like you, them, and the ticking of the clock. That's right.

So the next one I had, and this one's interesting. So I'm kind of curious your guys' thoughts on this. And this can apply to any type of software being applied to the physical world. So here's the background. I'm very interested in building some DIY speakers. And I think I just heard my wife make a noise over there. She's probably going to attack me in the middle of this episode. So when I say I'm interested in building these DIYs,

it's not that I'm going to go completely from scratch and do this, right? Like there's sort of kits out there that have drivers, but you can build the crossovers and all that if you don't know anything about crossovers don't worry about it too much here's the big thing that i want to throw out at you every speaker that you buy has all kinds of measurements that come with them right and i know outlaw remember this because he was big into subwoofers in his 20s a year or two ago. And those subwoofers, if you look at the true specs of those things, there's 20 or 30 different specifications that tell you how they perform, the amount of error that needs to be in whatever enclosure you're doing. Seriously, tons of different like physics types things.

You can plug all those things into some software that will tell you, Hey, if you want it to go down to 20 Hertz, this is the size enclosure you need. You need these kinds of ports. You need all this, right? My question is how much can you trust that? Like, I know, I know that software is really good. We're really good at taking math and turning it into things, but there's, there's a part where the real world meets things that you can't necessarily define in an algorithm. And that's the part that bugs me, right? Like, okay, I'm going to go build this enclosure. So I'm going to spend a week cutting wood, gluing wood, screwing wood together, doing all that kind of stuff. I'm going to build this and it's going to sound like garbage. And it's not even going to go to

the 20 Hertz that I thought it was going to do or the 12 or whatever I was hitting that. If you guys ever had that, like, like, were you looking at you like, yeah, I just don't trust it, but I don't know a better way to do it. I mean, I would say in this regard, you know, like you said, this is, we're talking math here. So I would say from the start as a starting point. Yeah, sure. I would, I would have a pretty good confidence level that it would confidence level that it would help me find a very good starting point.

But sure, it's not going to be able to take into consideration unless you're going to go to extreme detail in modeling the room that you're going to put it in and the specific corner and all of the things that are in that room that are going to affect it and whatnot like you know i think it's going to be an extremely good enough starting point okay i think that's fair that even if if you were trying to get to 12 hertz and it only got to like you know 13 well that's a fail let's be honest well but but you know what i'm saying though like you're not going to hear that anyways. It's going to be so low. Like you're, you're what, what you're going for at that point, at that level, at that, that low frequency is the vibrations that it's going to do in the room. Right. So the way it's going to vibrate. Yeah, exactly. Cause you want that earthquake kind of, uh, kind of feel when it, when that scene pops up. Right. And so the, you're not going to hear the,

your, your, your pet might, but you're not going to hear it. You're just going to like, Oh, the same stuff is rattling. And plus,

plus if that kind of volume anyways, or that kind of frequency volume anyways, like things are rattling around so much anyways, like that's what you're here. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely you're hearing yeah i mean that's definitely talking about subs i guess the part that bugs me is this so i've looked at i've read oh man so much and gone into so much but like in a crossover basically what makes your speaker only play certain ranges of sound right there's capacitors resistors and inductors that go into

that circuit well what's crazy is when you start looking into this stuff oh well there's capacitors, resistors, and inductors that go into that circuit. Well, what's crazy is when you start looking into this stuff, oh, well, there's audiophile grade capacitors and audiophile grade inductors and resistors. And you're like, well, what in the world? And let's take it to another step. You have to measure this audio equipment, right? Well, is everybody using the same amplifier to push this power to a speaker? Like, how do I know that this thing is giving me this range of sound when you're using a totally different amp than that person over there? And like all that stuff makes my mind explode. And I look at it, I go, software cannot account for this type of thing. And it drives me a little bit insane so i love software audio

i love it i love it love it love it a couple years ago i would not have said that uh but now i am fully convinced like messing around with like uh speaker emulators and software modelers for like tube amps you know tubes are you remember tubes like that you've been doing this too yeah yeah for like we need to talk all my, well for guitar stuff. Yeah. Okay. All my guitar stuff is all software.

Same stuff. Yeah. The way a lot of it works is they measure the impulse response of speakers. They literally like hook up device. They run a signal through it. They see how it compares and they say, okay, well here's the impulse response from a 1973 green back, uh,

ceramic speaker. And here's the one from a 1981, you know, whatever I'llico something or other and then they'll kind of plug them in the software and you'll switch around and it changes and it sounds dramatically different and it does sound different and if you compare what it sounds like like the real speaker and the software it's incredible you can tell sometimes that they're different but to say which one's better is much harder and even you know it's just tough and so i have a lot

of faith in uh in software's ability to kind of mess around with audio i feel like it's like a pretty solved problem but i will say too i also wouldn't go messing around with hardware because it seems like there's just a lot of factors really that kind of can change things and i i would just i would be afraid that like the numbers might look great on paper but i wouldn't like the sound of it uh but like a speaker that you can buy from the store you can go listen to it first see if you like it but i also think um the kind of audio that you're listening to like you you i don't know if you necessarily want a flat response on it but it's less opinionated like you don't want you know to

be punchy in the mids or whatever you know like if you're using it for multimedia type stuff you want it to to work for a wide range of things it's even worse though uh in the case of the guitar that you're talking about jay-z because so jay-z and i both have the same software that he's referring to and it can you can create a sound that you like you can model a specific amplifier you can create a sound that you like. You can model a specific amplifier. You can model a specific speaker with impulse response exactly like what Jay-Z was saying, and depending on which guitar you use as the input,

it might sound one night and day different from the next due to the pickups and the wood and the fretboard and all that type of stuff, which kind of goes to your point alan about like well you know you can set a baseline for the speaker you know that hey you know given this amount of wattage uh you know like this is the type of volume you're going to get out of it etc etc but the amp that you use versus the amp that i use you know we might get you know totally different signals out of it.

If yours is putting out a really dirty kind of signal versus mine is super clean, it's going to show. Yeah, it's insane. It's crazy to me that as much as I believe in software, I've been doing it for a long time. It's amazing to me that when the rubber meets the road and you start putting real world things in place to, to implement the things that were modeled in software, how you can get such drastically different results, just like you were saying the amp, right?

Like, I mean, if you look into the audio, audio file world of, of amplifiers, you would think exactly what Jay-Z said. You want a neutral approach, right? You want something that doesn't color it.

You don't want it necessarily to add any low end or mid or high or whatever, and you don't want it to take away. Well, it turns out you can go look at $20,000 amplifiers that aren't giving you a true signal. You can look at $100 amplifiers that are closer to true. And it's just amazing to me that when you start looking at all this stuff, you can't really model it because there's no way to say that, well, I've got this capacitor here. I mean, it would have to be so complex. The software would have to have every single permutation of every capacitor,ctor resistor on the planet to be able to give you what you would expect at the end of the day and and then to take it a step further like outlaw said you you still have the room effect of it or wherever you're putting these things that can

completely change it again right room reflections or whatever so i don't know. It's funny. Like, this is just sort of a view in my head of when I've been looking at this stuff, like how I can't I can't trust anything. I just have to trust what somebody's opinion of something was. about being like super confident in it being in it being a well-known problem though where i do take some issue with that because like even though we have that same that same software there are some things that to me uh you know they try to model like specific you know effects pedals and whatnot and you know i i will have that i i own like the real one. And I can definitely tell you, no, the real one sounds infinitely better than what that, you know, the modeling tried. And I'm not trying to take anything away from it. And if that's all I had and all I knew, I would be fine with it. But I have the other one and I can tell you there's a difference. And you know, there, there's some other things too, that there's just some dedicated hardware out there.

That's just better than what that modeler can do. Right. It's analog stuff, but yes, there's a, there's another thing that's kind of related to, you know, speaking of like the room and the,

the effects that that's going to have on it because, um, unrelated to speaker building, but kind of related to the whole sound conversation, there was a, so, okay. So any,

any Jay-Z is going to know. And like anybody who's ever played guitar will know that like a lot of guitar players are always talking about tone, right. And they're always like searching for the tone, you know, like that's the thing they want is that tone that they're going for. And there was this one player based out of, I believe out of Tennessee. And, you know, he was, he was,

he was making the case to where like, it's, it's, it's next to impossible to try to to get the tone that you hear on some album and then be able to reproduce that in a live setting situation. Because he said, you can go buy all the same hardware that that person used, right? And you can tweak all the dials

and change everything to be exactly what they did. But what you don't know is, well, what was the space that the room was in? Where was the amp situated in that room? What microphone did they use to capture the sound from that amplifier? Did they use more than one microphone? How far away was the microphone positioned? What angle was it positioned at? You know, then when it went back to the to the control room on the mixing board what was that guy doing like what were those settings so there's like so many factors they were going to go in that to like try to

recreate that tone would be near impossible and so instead just find something you like and go with it like don't yeah don't get caught away. And that's the same thing that applies here. Like, you know, and that's why I made that the point about like the 13 Hertz instead of the 12, like,

are you really going to know a difference? Like, yeah. Okay. Technically like if, if, if, if this is like this space mission and it depends on you hitting 12 Hertz,

then okay. Yeah. Then, then it's a fail. I get that. But in this case case i think that like you're using humans to like subjectively decide like is that good do i like that and that that's an opinion kind of thing and as long as you get it good enough right you could be extremely happy

yeah totally i mean it's funny as we were talking about this i realized we had somebody that joined us early on with the podcast a stag he probably would have a ton to say about this because he's been writing yeah he's probably mad at everything i've said right probably me too you know uh one kind of funny note um a lot of times uh music producers do a lot of stuff with what they called side chaining i don't know if you've heard of that but it's pretty interesting um so like for example um like the bass the kick drum and like the bass guitar like uh have or just any sort of bass you know instrument have a lot of overlap and so uh it's common to do things like where you side chain so that like maybe the bass compresses whenever

the kick drum hits and so it's literally a signal that affects what's been recorded but only when other things happen in other channels so like maybe i want to change the eq on the bass so it cuts out some of the actual like the bass tone but only when the the bass the sorry the kick drum is hitting and so the eq changes dynamically you know like second by second based on this other channel and so like which is done by software live yeah it sounds great it sounds fantastic you can hear everything you look really clearly good luck doing that live right yeah yeah i mean the software is incredible and what it can do with it i mean look at autotune right there's probably some people that shouldn't even be popular or famous yeah autotune made it so anyway yeah pretty pretty interesting yes i included that um link to that

video uh you know if you care excellent all right well with that uh if you haven't already left us three reviews we would greatly appreciate it if you uh, you can find some helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review. And with that, we will head into my favorite portion of the show. It's time for coding. Jeopardy blocks. Thor. Nicely.

Yeah. I'm workshopping it. I'll get there. Um, okay. So, Oh, I lost my, I lost my, my it's me it's cheat sheet

where'd it go wait are you seriously cheating no no no i had uh no no no oh there it is there it is i had to find all the the uh topics that i had oh okay okay so So, yeah, like Alan said, episode 215, according to TECCO's trademark rules of engagement. Alan, you will go first. Yes, sir. So, your choices are for the first category of topics, game on, current events, pop music, seven Seven Letter Words, Let's Take a Walk, or Autumn. Game On. Game On. All right.

One, two, three, four, five. What kind of level? Three. Okay. Sweden's Mojang Studios is best known for this video game where you can build volcanoes or underground cities. Got nothing, man. Can you say that one more time sweden's mojang studios is best known for this video game where you can build volcanoes or underground cities so alan do you pass populace oh come on joe all right right. Well, who is Minecraft?

Wait, I forget. What is Minecraft? That is correct. What is Minecraft? Is it really Minecraft? Is the answer. How have you not played Minecraft? I didn't know it was Swedish.

Okay. So, Jay-Z, it goes to you. Second round of categories. Okay. So, Jay-Z, it goes to you. Second round of categories. The In Memoriam segment 1922. Famous names on the map. Drama queens. It all starts with you. And the responses will start with you.

The letter U. Shakespeare or The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Oh, wow. Okay. That's a one in seven chance, right? Yeah, I kind of want to know. Let's try that one. The Seven Wonders. Oh, man.

That's a fail that you didn't pick Drama Queens. It sounded fun, but I wouldn't know. I'm trying to win here. Okay. What level question? One, two, three, four, five. Three. Three.

All right. I think you only did this because you're like, Oh, I wonder if I can trip up Michael with weird proper nouns. So here we go. The Pharos of Alexandria was one of these that stood on an island in the city harbor with a fire lit at the top every night. The Pharos, what? What was that part? The Pharaohs of Alexandria was one

of these that stood on an island in the city harbor with a fire lit at the top every night. Jeez. I I It's not a seven wonder I I'm gonna go

ziggurat I guess okay Alan what is the ziggurat I what is a harpy I think you guys are just making up stuff now also it's friday it's friday what is a lighthouse oh come on that's that's not one of the seven wonders i think it might

have been of the ancient world yeah yeah shoot all right i have a chance all right here we go Ancient world. Yeah. Shoot. All right. I have a chance. All right. Here we go. It's close. It's 0-1. Jay-Z's winning. So I really wish you'd pick Drama Queen because those looked like they were more fun, though.

All right. White House of Alexandria. Dang it. That really was one. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the topics. Brain surgeons terminology.

Can we just admit that that's the one we got to go with? Of course, we're going to know that one. Johnny Gilbert speaks the movie line. So I guess this is because these are where I'm doing like the celebrity based questions. So that's where somebody would read this. this so i'll do my best i guess uh so i'll change that to say michael outlaw speaks the movie line how's that we're good there we go colorful responses which that's all i have mascots historic history of yesterday, a look back, and lastly, but we repeat ourselves.

Colorful for one. Colorful responses for one. Oh, yeah, okay. This is where we debate on whether or not we should, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's the crime of making someone pay you to not reveal their embarrassing secrets what is blackmail that is correct yes sir very nice again i see what they did there now okay i get that tied it up and get that

uh all right so i guess i guess then we have to go to Final Jeopardy. This is the first. We haven't had to do this first yet. So for Final Jeopardy, for the tiebreaker, the category is Annual Events. And Jay-Z, we go to you first. Wait, wait, wait. There's got to be a buzz in there. Or we should have to type in the response or something and reveal it nah whatever go ahead alan's like i can't take the possibility that i

might lose i'm too close you gotta whoever makes the sound of a modem first it's like oh i got this all right a modem yeah okay i don't know if that was better or worse but okay here we go in 1986 larry harvey called a friend and said let's do this no one knows exactly why it involved and it evolved into an annual festival in the desert go ahead do you know this burning man that is correct oh come on all right he takes the win nicely that's like uh that's that's like two in a row right it is the trend is a streak yes i'm pretty embarrassed about these seven winners i went and looked them up and like i only know three of them anyway so the hanging gardens of babylon's one that's the only one

i remembered yeah the colossus the ancient or the pyramids of egypt that was one yep see drama queens i think would have been like so much easier you would have definitely gotten this one jay-z you ready why it was gonna be me lena because you were the one because it wasn't that yours it was your choice yeah that that was your choice and you and you didn't pick it and i'm probably gonna like mess up this name so this is like all the more reason for you to be happy with picking this. Lena Headley is Cersei Lannister, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms on this HBO series. Oh.

Game of Thrones. Yeah. See? Told you. That'll be easy. Dang it. And somebody can hit me up at how I mispronounced her name. You can hit me up at defeated on Slack.

Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to mispronounce some stuff. You can hit me up at defeated on Slack. Well, yeah, I mean, if you want to mispronounce some stuff, you should check out those, uh, seven wonders, right?

Oh, right. Well, actually only ones are bad. The mausoleum at how can ptosis something? Allotosis. Yeah. All right.

So, uh, yeah. So last episode, I was trying to convince you guys why you needed to read the software engineering at google book and i had talked about the uh anti-patterns to being a uh you know leadership anti-patterns or how to lead a team the anti-patterns edition but i thought well we should probably like go over the, the, you know, let's not all be all negative, right? Let's,

let's talk about the positive things too. And for the record, they, they were in that order in the book. So, you know, that wasn't my, my doing, but the first one is lose the ego. So the idea here, I'll throw out the idea and then you can like, you know, uh, yay, nay it. But, um, this idea here is trusting your team and their abilities and their past experiences to be able to do whatever it is that you need to ask. So don't micromanage what, you know, if you give, if you give someone on your team a task, don't micromanage that task to the point where you're practically doing it for them. Like trust that they're going to

figure it out. Yes. Mostly, mostly. Yep. Wow. I mean, I guess you, you have to know your team, right? So I guess if you give it to the right person, sure. If you get to the wrong person, maybe you shouldn't have given it to the wrong person, but yeah. Okay. I mean, I think my ego is pretty cool. So I don't know.

I don't know about this one. So you're a no mostly. Yeah. I need the ego. That's how we get stuff done no mostly. Yeah. I need the ego. That's how we get stuff done around here. Okay. I mean, you know,

in theory, in theory, you would never give the task to the wrong person because you would try and give it to the right person. But if that right person or persons is not available because they're working on other tasks, this is where I say yes. Mostly.

There are some people that do need more prodding than others right okay i'm gonna i'm gonna hate i'm gonna i want to get through a few of these and then i want to come back to that okay all right so so the next one here and this is totally jay-z be a zen master so basically the idea here is that you need to like be cool calm and collective like as things are happening like you can't your team is going to feed off of whatever you put out there right so if you put anxiety or stress or whatever or anger or whatever like your team is going to feed off of that too. Right. And they, they call out that like, um, if you were to picture from you up to your CEO, every layer of management, like you and every layer of management, including the CEO represent a, a cog of some shape, right. That have a, and each one is going to have a different number of teeth.

That, you know, by the time you're going to have fewer teeth, right? Your manager is going to have more teeth than you and et cetera, et cetera. So like every rotation that they make has more impact than the rotations that you're making right and you know you could imagine that if that ceo like overreacted or you know handled events in a bad way like the ripple effect that that has throughout the rest of the company because he's got more uh gears attached to him right dots totally i like that analogy too that's that's going and uh not heard of that one but but did we lose him no i was just thinking sorry i was thinking uh this is why my dogs are so chill that's what i I was thinking about. Yeah, I 100% agree. 100% agree. I would also say, though, it doesn't just have to be

chill because I've had bosses as well that emitted an exuberance, like an excitement, like everything that you worked on was exciting. And that also had a ripple effect, right? Like, oh, man, man if we get this done it's going to be amazing so just a positive whether it's whether it's the zen like you said like cool chill whatever or some sort of really positive type vibe that they put out both of those i completely agree with yeah okay so the next one and i'd always heard this one kind of phrased different. So it was curious to see the way they, they talked about it was to be a catalyst, right? And you've always heard this, like this, uh, that phrase of, you know, be the catalyst for change that you want to see,

like that type of thing. Like it's like a cliche kind of statement, right? Mm-hmm. But that's not what they mean here. And so what they're talking about here is, you know, at like, you can go back to your chemical engineering days, right? Like the catalyst being the thing that creates that cohesion between elements so that they bond, and there's whatever reaction you wanted to have happen.

And so here, what they're describing is as a leader for you to be a catalyst, what it means is to create a consensus and cohesion among your team and make sure that you're all on the same page is like, this is, this is our mission statement. This is what we're going to do. Right? And make that

clear and obvious to everybody. I like it. Didn't really sound like a catalyst though. No, it doesn't sound like a catalyst. Sounds like a It's the cohesion among the team that is the catalyst. Yeah, I like it.

Okay. I'll accept it. Man, I thought I was going to. When you talk about catalysts, I'm thinking about taking a look at myself and making a change. Change. Going to make that change. All right. Okay, MJ. So, uh, the next one was to remove roadblocks, which this one seems like,

you know, more of like a, an obvious kind of answer that you would think like, okay, yeah. You know, any, any level of leadership there, you would hope that they're going to like remove roadblocks from the team that's reporting up to them as best they can. And there, there might be roadblocks that they can't remove. Right.

But, um, you know, that's certainly the hope, right? So I'm not sure there's a lot to talk about that one. That one's kind of obvious. Agree.

Disagree. It was important. It's a really important one. Yeah. Now this one flies in the face of what alan was saying before though and this is why i want to talk about that one be a teacher and a mentor so the idea here is in the case of you saying like you know giving that person the the task that you're like i don't know that they're going to get that done there is something to be said about like giving them enough room to learn and to figure it out and uh you know you can give them feedback after they've tried right but don't just

say oh well jay-Z will never figure that out. Let me just give it to Outlaw because I know he already knows it. Even if it's the case where you yourself know how to do it and you can get it done in 20 minutes and the person you might want to give that ticket to or that task to,

it might take them a few hours because they've never been in that area and they got to figure it out, right? Let them have that space. So I completely agree with this. I like I love as a matter of fact, I love it when people in a position of leadership are teachers and mentors. However, I've also experienced firsthand that there are some people that it's not that they can't be taught. Maybe it's, they have no desire or willingness to, to be resourceful enough to

take that stuff and go with it. I don't, I don't know the right way to say it well, but again, I guess going back to the lose the ego thing, like there are people that are perfectly capable, but if you hand them the thing, they just won't pick it up and, and carry the ball on down the field. Right. Even, even if they have the skills, even if they don't have them and you try and teach a mentor, it's just a certain type of personality, I think is what I'm getting at. Like, there are just some people that are really hard to give something like that to. Did you want to say anything? Cause the other thing,

it almost sounds like though you're including or confusing the previous anti-pattern of ignoring low performers in with this one. So if you assume that you are not ignoring low performers, right? I think that's fair. Then, then the positive pattern is to lose the ego and be a teacher and a mentor. Well, tell me this, tell me this. If, if there are, can we agree there are people that can take a loose set of things and go create something out of it? And there are people that can't do that, but if you give them very specific tasks, they can kill them. Right? Like, so I guess that's where, I guess the whole thing of lose

the ego was you give somebody something, if it's not a very specific task, like add this to this page or do this or whatever, then hyper-specific tasks are much easier to just be like, yeah, definitely don't micromanage that, right? You already told them what the task was. You told them what to do. They can go do it. If it's more of a project, we'll say that's, I guess, where I'm getting, I may be confusing that. And I'm trying to keep the low performers out of it. I'm just saying that there are different types of people. There are people that are good at tasks and there are people that are good at projects, like taking a whole project from beginning to end. Yeah, I mean, I. I struggle with that, too, because I almost want to say that, like, if I have to be that specific with you on how to do something then you are a

low performer right maybe because like think about if we let's take this out of the context of software development right and i tell you like hey i need a i need a wall built for this house and here's the dimensions of the of the wall there's not gonna be any windows so don't worry about that but i need you to just go ahead and stud out this wall right if you come to me and you're like yeah but how how long do i need to cut this piece of wood is that it what angle do i cut that wood at where do i put this nail like what kind of saw do i use right like if you're coming at me with that level of specificity then i'm like okay you're really a low performer. You're just eating up my time.

And now we're going back to the anti-patterns. So I understand exactly what you're saying. There are people that you can just give that vague set. Like I need a wall, you know, stud out this wall for this dimension, you know, no windows or doors or anything. And they can just run with it. Yeah. Yeah. you know, no windows or doors or anything and they can just run with it. So, yeah. Yeah. So I'm trying to, I've been trying to Google and find this, uh, years ago in like some management training,

I had this thing where they talked about how, um, different skill levels need different levels of management. So if someone is like really new to a task, uh, then they're going to need more kind of handholding. And if someone's really experienced with and mastered the task, then they need less. And so I think it's less about the individual person like i don't you know when we kind of say someone's a low performer it almost sounds like the person is a low performer but it might just be a certain task like if you try to teach me how to uh you

know do it like a dance routine for a little uh you know a fun little project at work or something you know for doing a i don't know play days y'all have play days project at work or something, you know, for doing a, I don't know, play days. Y'all have play days, right, at work. It's going to be a problem. I'm going to need a lot of help on even the most micro movements that you would think a child would be able to do. But if you need me to chat GPT something, I mean, say no more. I got it, right?

But there's something there about how like how comfortable and familiar a person is with the kind of thing that they're doing now if you have someone that's constantly at that low level of skill for like all the stuff you need to do then you know that's a problem and you know i don't know how to level that person up or you know what you need to do there is different but um i do think there's something about that kind of that that person's skill level and how much you need to work with them but i would argue though that like if you're doing something for the second or the third or the tenth time like it's always going to be easier for that person right it's always going to be more difficult for the person to do it the first time. Right. And that's OK. It's OK.

That's where it's like that be a mentor, be a teacher part comes in. Like, you know, even though, you know, in kind of in also with the lose the ego, like you know how to do it. You could do it in 20 minutes, but let them learn how to do it. And, you know, it might take them a little bit longer, but you're going to be better off as a team for letting them do that. So I don't, I don't view that as the same kind of thing. I think it's more, uh, if you can't trust a person to, to do it period without you giving them explicit details, step-by-step then, they're low performers yeah exactly yeah yeah i i think i can buy all that i think i can buy all that okay good sold all right i did i did finally find that

it's called the situational leadership theory we'll have a link in the show notes all right cool set clear goals so again this kind of goes back to that idea of the mission statement that i was talking about before with the zen master you know like if you're if you make it clear to everybody what the mission is for the team and you're not wishy-washy about it and you're not constantly like changing the direction of the team then you know you're going to have a better more productive team in the end and and probably happier too right i find that to be true i find that to be sometimes difficult especially in smaller organizations right when when an organization's life may depend on whether or not they change direction to

accomplish some other task or goal right but but overall i think that morale and everything is way better when you're all shooting towards a goal and you can actually see that goal achieved as opposed to constantly moving the goalposts around i mean you could also argue though that in that small company situation that maybe uh you know, your mission statement needs to be able to reflect the situations you described there. Yeah, true, true. All right, so this next one is going to be controversial. You ready? Well, I mean, Jay-Z's the one that likes to argue things the

most so let's do it can't help it you're gonna love this one be honest oh come on now now you say that you say that but what they're getting at here, though, is that like two things, two things as a manager. One, don't feel like you have to pretend to know everything. Like, it's OK if somebody on your team comes to you with a question. You're like, you know what? I don't know. But I think I know where we can go find it. Right.

Like, it's OK to not know everything. That's one part of this. Be honest strategy. The other part, though, is when it comes time to give feedback, it's better to just be direct and honest about it, right? And let the person know. And in fact, have you ever heard of the compliment sandwich? Mm-hmm.

Yeah. They actually advocate to not of the compliment sandwich yeah they actually advocate to not do the compliment sandwich oh interesting because it seems like people have kind of turned against it because they say what's going to happen is the person receiving the the compliment sandwich they're just going to remember the last thing that you said they're going to lose it hey so for anybody that doesn't know what a compliment sandwich is it's when you give some positive feedback followed by some negative feedback and then followed by some positive feedback just to take the sting off right like so so that they don't feel like they're just being bashed on so that's the compliments which yeah i've seen people talking about too because it is like a blatant manipulation type

of like you're trying to get someone to take some piece of feedback in but then you're also trying to shape how they feel about it yes which is kind of slimy yeah so they specifically call out that like if you can avoid that and instead just be direct and honest about what it is the feedback that you want to give then that's the thing that they'll remember and can improve on. That's interesting. Otherwise, it can get lost in the messaging. I like it. It's interesting. There's also the marketing sandwich.

So if you ever go to sign up for something, and it's kind of interesting, it probably works on most of us all of the time, they'll try and sell you the baseline thing that's like you know five dollars and then they'll they'll also have this hyper expensive one that's a hundred dollars and then somewhere in the middle they're gonna have something that's like 39.95 and you could be like oh man i get almost all of the expensive thing if i go to that middle route and they do it on purpose because they know most people don't want to settle for the base. They don't want to spend everything on the most. And so they'll fall in the middle. And it's the same type thing. I mean, it's,

it's totally a mental thing that people latch onto. So I get it. It's the same thing with like the nine 99 instead of $10, right? It is 100%. Oh, it's not quite ten dollars i like i like the the be honest thing i i think that you have to be honest with the people that you are leading otherwise you create a false everything's false like i think we've talked about it before the morale of people underneath can get frustrated if they're seeing that, that somebody's not pulling their weight, but then the person that's in charge isn't letting them know in some way too.

Right. So it can, you can mess up things all over the place. Now that's not to say you have to be rude about it. You definitely have to be tactful about how you approach these situations. Right. Right. But yeah,

no, don't not say're not saying be brutally honest just honest honest pad the honesty okay all right so uh the last one for the positive patterns edition of how to lead a team is to track happiness so if you want to have if you want a productive team then you want a productive team, then, you know, a happy team is going to be a productive team.

No, you're already questioning this one. How are you tracking it? I can see. Oh, I'm glad you asked Alan. Thank you. Wow.

That's why the look. So they said the simplest way that you can do this is that like when you're meeting with members of your team, it could be it could be a one on one meeting that you have regularly with members of your team. You just ask them, like, what do you need? enough to, to where the, that team member can let you know if they, if they need something to, to help them be happy about whatever they're doing. Right. It boils down to something as simple as that. Okay. Right. Like, Oh, I need, I need a new laptop because mine's on fire and can't run the data center that I'm trying to spin up and they're like oh why are you doing it on a laptop you could you instead could you know just use this shared

cluster over here spinning up over there you know i think it's fair to say like if you ask a manager like uh how's uh person x doing like it would be nice if that manager could say well uh you know x is doing pretty good they just got a new laptop. They have a bit of an issue with the meetings that we have around lunchtime because they like to have lunch, whatever. That's important to them. But they're happy with the flexible work schedule. They should be able to kind of list a general sense of pros and cons as far as status goes as far as that person. And it can be professional.

Consider all those things to be professional things it doesn't necessarily have to be like oh they're a seven out of ten on the happiness scale because they uh you know their boyfriend got them a whatever xbox yeah i mean you're not trying to treat this like a an opioid you know smiley face chart you know like which on a scale of one to ten which one of these smiley faces best represents you and you're like i don't know five or this seems like this madness would be like how do you feel today and it'd be like a thing like 20 faces yeah right those are great it did remind me though like uh going back to the be honest section though like um because in your example there i was like oh wait is x the person that is being asked the

question or you you know, one manager is talking to another manager about how X is doing in that scenario. That wasn't clear in your example. And we're never going to know. You're never going to know. You're talking to Jay-Z, right? Yeah, it was his example.

Okay. Listen, it's Friday. I don't want to leave right now well i want to i want to go home well the reason why i say the reason why i brought it up though is like going back to the beyonce thing they they actually specifically called out an example of where like if you were to ask something about someone else and as the manager like you can't give out certain information about people you know so they were saying like they're not telling you to they're not saying you know to lie in those situations but you can say you know something kind of uh you know managerial that's like well you know i can't speak to whatever blah

blah blah you know type of thing so there's certain situations yeah yeah there's certain situations where you have to approach it carefully and you can't just like, you know, spill out everything just because you're quote being honest. But well, that's, that's the real answer as a manager,

anything that you can't answer, you'd be like, well, I'll have circle back to that. That's it. Then you're good. Okay. Yeah.

And you need to have a bag of phrases like that, by the way, it should be like the last item, right? It's like have a bunch of phrases, like circle back and put a pen in it for things like that. It is what it is, man. It is what it is. This book is so good.

I really did enjoy this book. If you haven't read it, again, this is called The Software Engineering at Google, Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by O'Reilly. And it's got a pink flamingo on the cover if you see it. It's an enjoyable book. There are things that you read about how Google is doing their builds and deploys and everything. And you're just kind of in awe of how they've done some of the stuff that they're doing. So, yeah. just kind of like in awe of how they've how they've done some of the stuff that they're that they're doing so yeah so with that uh we'll have some links in the resources we like section of the episode show notes including a link to this book and with that we head into alan's favorite portion of the show it's the tip of the week guess what i did y'all what you did i bought a mechanical keyboard wait you didn't already

forever i've never had one really never had one except i mean except maybe in like the 70s or whatever whatever wherever they come from wait but you have carpal tunnel type stuff why you do that yeah so it's silly uh so i'm buying my first mechanical keyboard. It is, I've already ordered. It's pre-ordered. It is. I did. I very much did.

It's not ergonomic. I can't even tell you what kind of switches are in it or if you could replace them or whatever. I don't care about any of that stuff. And let me tell you, first of all, let me preface to say like, I'm not a man that usually cares a lot about aesthetics, you know,

like whether stuff looks like, or it's themed or if it's kitschy or, you know, I just don't care. Uh, 99% of the time. But I saw this keyboard and I just went and bought it immediately. Uh,

and what it is, it is a keyboard made by this company, eight bit, eight bit dough, uh, which you might know for making game controllers. They make a lot of controllers for retro systems, but also just USB kind of game controllers. And they're getting into keyboards, and they made a keyboard that looks like the old Nintendo slash Famcom. You can actually pick which color scheme you want so if you're uh you know uap or us um you know whichever one you had uh and it looks just like it because of these

big stupid buttons uh usb buttons that kind of look like the controller buttons on a nintendo and i just saw it and i loved it and i don't know if i'm going to use it i maybe i'm just gonna like hold it and pet it and take it out to dinner i don't know but i just loved it and i wanted to share with you dave also mentioned this in the gear channel before i even had a chance i was going to go over there and say something about it and uh he he mentioned it there too and so uh we've always known that he has fantastic taste and i agree uh do you follow it so i think you're gonna hate this keyboard for your carpal tunnel probably a little bit um it's it's a small it's an 87 key keyboard so we should say that so it's a small one yeah um but it does have pbt key caps we've talked about

those before that whatever that means yeah um and then but it's got a switch i've never heard of let the kalaya box switch v2 i never heard of those am i saying is that they're v2 whites yeah i've never heard oh yeah the kale yeah oh am i did i pronounce that wrong? Yeah, I think those are the alternative to the Cherries. You'll see that a lot on these mechanicals. But regardless, Jay-Z's never going to use this thing, but he is going to mount it somewhere prominent that he can see it because it really does look like the old NES system. Yeah, the dials on it, even like if you remember,

there's like some little dials that were on the back of the system, and they got that for like the volume control. But they've also got the big red LED for when it's on. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's fantastic looking for sure, but I can't imagine him actually using this thing ever. I literally have zero ornamentation, no toys around my office, no nothing. But I just wanted this. I saw it.

I wanted it. i still want it so the the pbt keycaps are going to be like a stronger feel about we've talked about these before where like the abs plastic ones over time they get like super shiny and smooth but the pbt ones will have uh they'll those they'll have a textured feel about them not like sandpaper texture but it's a harder plastic so it it won't smooth out like the abs ones do it doesn't matter these things are never going to get touched it's so let me tell you though do you know what keyboard i use for work the microsoft scopeculptor Economic, it was, but then you switched to the Apple keyboard, didn't you?

Yeah, this is the keyboard I use for work. I hate those things. It's tiny. It's the Apple Magic Keyboard. It's tiny. I think it's another 87 or 88. It's somewhere in that ballpark. Yeah.

So it's the same. It's like if Fletch were to describe, ah, you know, 87, 88, whatever. It takes to get the job done. Yeah, exactly. So this new keyboard is actually a little bit bigger than this one. And I had like a I used to work with this one on a box. I use a touchpad for my work computer just because I was so used to working with Macs on, you know, the touchpad and actual laptop keyboard that when I started plugging in into a dock, I wanted to maintain that feel because i was just so used to it for mac os and so it's kind of helped me keep my like windows key memory and my my uh my

mac keystrokes kind of separate and so yeah i'm hoping it's going to work out if not i don't know maybe i'll be buried with it or something wow that i got super dark super quick yeah add it to the will yeah i i just wish that they i like the full-size magic keyboard that they had the like i guess it's the 104 key um i forget i'm trying to look it up what the smaller one is if it's an 88 but yeah i don't need a key um and you know technically this doesn't even support um mac os but i'm i think it will i think it's gonna work it'll be fine i just wish that the that they would produce a wired keyboard like i have no problems with them offering a wireless but i really preferred the the predecessor

to what is now the magic key wireless magic keyboard. There was the wired version of that. And that keyboard was amazing. Well, if you can't find that one, they've also, Oh, well,

this one's wireless to the Microsoft surface keyboard is basically a complete rip off of, of the Apple one. But yeah, that keyboard will work with Mac. You'll just have my gosh. Wait a minute. They make a mouse

to hold the phone actually i hate this mouse i really just like i'm gonna paste the link here but only because i hate it i see it the the n30 yeah oh man i'm so glad i didn't see this before about the keyboard that's hilarious man i hate this jay-z is is a retro gamer for sure i'm still not for this is this the is this the mouse oh mouse is terrible what you don't like the mouse that's your nintendo controller yeah i have vertical mice two of them and so this one is ugly to me what does that tell you yeah vertical mice are not the prettiest but man they're nice yeah well i mean i've also seen the keyboard you've pre-ordered so i question your judgment and what's the um i'm still using though the uh what is this one the kinesis gaming rgb i

believe is the name that's a good keyboard a good keyboard. Yeah. I still, I still, that my only thing that I miss is having that numpad. Like that's the only thing I miss on it. But otherwise this keyboard is great. It works. Yeah. You know,

I, I did change out the key caps cause it came with the crappy ABS plastics that, you know, Jay-Z has no idea what I'm talking about. So I put some PBts on there like a boss okay what's next i have another tip i forgot sorry uh yeah so um threat modeling tools i did a little bit of research uh to see what kind of tools were out there and um so threat law, if you've not heard of that, um, and basically it's a kind of, um, uh, I don't want to say it's like too formally defined. Like there's some books that have been written, some guidelines on how to create them, but still pretty, pretty loosely, loosely. of what a threat model exactly is. But roughly speaking, it's a way of documenting an application

and classifying the risks and what you've done about those risks and documenting them and generating data flow diagrams and stuff that are roughly standardized around some basic tenets, but there's not like one kind of authority on the matter. But OWASP actually makes a tool that's web-based that you can run in a Docker container and generate a threat model. And what's nice about this is that you can just run it on your own system locally, check your data in, and you don't have to upload it to anyone else's servers. Because if you look for threat modeling tools, most of them are going to be sass applications and you know what you're going to be doing if you're doing uh threat models is going

through listing all your applications what type of users use it what type of networks they're hooked up to you're going to be writing uh all your risks and classifying them and saying which ones are mitigated and which ones are not mitigated and that's not information that your company is likely to want existing on anyone else's servers right so uh yeah so i i think i immediately ruled out any companies that were sass only which surprisingly like nearly all of them uh so i was looking exclusively for open source modeling tools. And Toradragon was one. It's dead simple, though. It is not fancy at all.

It's very basic. It does have support for some of the kind of more popular models that people use. But I mean, it's it's super basic compared to some of the paid options. And Microsoft does have one that is open source but it's not great it's like strongly assuming that you're using azure like all the icons and stuff it's using like it's everything is azure first and it only runs on windows it's kind of like why like why bother it's it's a windows app instead of a web app you know it's just kind of funky and i found a couple other ones too that just that were a little bit more fancy, but they're also more opinionated. So I thought this one was really nice because of its simplicity.

So you should check it out. Reminds me of Vizio with very specified. Yeah. Very. Types of elements. There's like six different elements. Yeah. Which is,

you know, very, very limiting, especially like Microsoft want to have like every Azure service icon. This one's just six different elements, which is very, very limiting. Especially Microsoft want to have every Azure service icon. This one's just like, no, you get a box, a line, and a dotted line. Yeah. Interesting. So now Jay-Z has me looking at keyboards again,

and I'm reminded of, I looked at this one once before, the Cloud9 ergonomic split keyboard. And they make a split keyboard that still includes the numpad. And it's a traditional. I'll throw you a link. Let's see. I don't miss the numpad. I never hooked up the numpad for the Sculpt.

The Ergo FS. Yeah, you had to hook it up. That's why. That thing was kind of beautiful. So I'm going to throw a link out here. That's not a terrible price either. Yeah, the Cloud9. Yeah, it's like $10 less than the... No, that's not the one.

Here. That's the one I'm seeing. I'm going to throw out this link. It's called the, uh, the C989M. Well, on their website, it's called the FS. There you go, right below yours. All right. Anyways, wait.

Is that the same spot yeah weird yeah i don't know we can't have nice things is what i'm learning from this because uh you know the one difference though about this one is that the tenting is like in is fixed on the cloud nine you can't change it whereas on the kinesis you can change it to um like three different levels like if you wanted to so but you know on the kinesis i just leave it maxed out so i don't know i might not even notice a difference on the cloud nine yeah does it come with a giant pair of USB buttons? No, it's not accessorized like that one. Is it,

but it does, but you can color it. It does have RGB colors. So you know that that automatically sold me right there. You just need black, gray and red, right? Jay-Z.

Yeah. All right. All right. So your turn, my turn. So, right, Jay-Z? Yeah. All right. All right, so your turn. My turn. So a couple cool tools here. So I'm in PC building land here lately, and two utilities that I found very, very helpful. One, the first one is called Macrium Reflect.

So if you need to clone a hard drive and, you know, maybe you want to like go from, you know, a smaller drive to a larger drive or a spinning drive to an SSD or, you know, smaller SSD to a larger SSD, whatever you want. This thing will copy like all the partitions, everything for you. You know, it's like, I remember the old days of it being difficult to like clone hard drives, right? Even, even Clonezilla, like, you know, made things better, but it was still, you know, a pain, especially if it was the boot drive. Not anymore.

And this software is so ridiculously simple to use. And, um, they, they have a free trial that's like good for 30 days. So if you're building a PC, that is plenty good enough. I'm probably breaking some terms of service by saying that, but, uh, you know, I, I, I would imagine that like both this and the next utility that I'm going to tell you about, like you would have to be in the business of like constantly building or cloning hard drives or building machines to where you might want to purchase these because they do have, you know, licenses for longer term use or for like, you know, team or organization kind of usage. But, you know, for the one-time use,

they give you a fully functional license for 30 days. So that was enough for my needs to clone a drive. The next one, though, so it's called Revo Uninstaller. And you're like, but Michael, why wouldn't I just use the add remove functionality that's already shipped with the app? So a couple of cool things, uh,

of why you might want to do this one. This will make sure that like any artifacts that, uh, might have been left behind are removed. You ever like uninstall an app and you find that there's still a folder there for it, or there's some reference in the registry for it. This goes through and it gets rid of all of that junk, right? It'll perfectly clean it up. And what got me to like looking for this in the first place was I was in a situation where the app was crashing and the uninstaller was

crashing. So I had no way to uninstall it. So the way this thing works is when you, you pick like, Oh, Hey, here's the app I want to uninstall. It will first attempt to run the apps uninstaller. And then if it notices that it wasn't successful, then it'll be like, okay, well, we'll do it for you. And it'll get rid of it. And, you know, it does that. It lets their uninstaller do the bulk of the work if it can. And then it'll clean up, you know, anything left behind if it left anything behind. But, yeah, this is another one of those products where it gives you a fully functional version as a 30 day trial that if you're only going to use like once it's

fine, you know, work fine for you. But if you want to buy the license for it, cause it's something that you're like doing more often than not, then you know, you might want that kind of thing. So very cool.

All right. So I have a couple of things. One I borrowed from Mike RG, who we talk about all the time, cause he's always contributing awesome stuff. This one is basically just how to check to see if two SQL tables are the same. I'm sure this probably came out of, out of when outlaw was talking about one of the things that data grip he loves, where you're able to compare the contents of two tables. If you wanted to do it via code, there's an entire article here that will basically show you how you can do this. So go check that out. That's pretty sweet. And then the other one, I'm sort of torn on even sharing this one.

So it's one of those things where it can be super useful. So this thing is called Mac fuse. And basically what it is, is it allows you to extend Mac OS is native file handling capabilities via third-party file systems. Okay. So you might ask, well,

what in the world? Why that doesn't even make sense to me. All right. So I've talked about telepresence before on, on the podcast. And I truly love that product. If you're working in Kubernetes, telepresence can be an absolute godsend when you're trying to debug something and you're wanting to run it locally in an IDE or something, but have most of your traffic routed. Well, where this came up is I noticed when I would do a telepresence connect to my cluster. And if I went to do an intercept of, of a pod and reroute things or reroute a service to my local,

it would tell me that the mount wasn't available because of some problem with Mac OS, like something wasn't set up. And here's where it matters. If you have things mounted into a pod, telepresence, and I may even be saying this a little bit wrong, so apologies ahead of time. I need to go back and read it. I probably should have done it before I'm even talking about it, but whatever. It would basically allow you to mount stuff that was in a pod or something to your local machine. So if you had things like secrets or something, like an example is, if you start up a pod in Kubernetes, you might have files in it that are like keys for service accounts or something like that, right? Well, running locally might be a problem because you don't have those same keys and you can actually have telepresence do mounts

that will more or less get that same information available to you on your machine. So it needs this particular piece of software to be able to do these like virtual mount type things so that it could work. So at any rate, super useful. I'm not recommending that you go install it because I don't know. Anytime you're dealing with messing with things that can touch your file system like that sort of makes me a little bit, you know, squeamish. But it does have some pretty cool utility usage. So whatever, I'm throwing it out there. You know about it now, you know, use it your own discretion, but very cool

thing that telepresence actually needs if you want to do those mounts locally. So yeah. Very cool. Alright, so subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you like to find your podcasts. Be sure to visit us at www.codingblocks.net slash review for some helpful links if you only left like a single review.

That's amazing. While you're up there, I'm not looking at anyone in particular, but if I was, single review. That's amazing. While you're up there. I'm not looking at anyone in particular, but if I was, if you think it might be you. If you're feeling a little bit hot right now hearing that. If you're not sure, just go ahead and try to leave another one.

Yeah, just leave another one. It's not going to hurt anything. Is your ear itching? Yeah, I was talking about you that's awesome hey while you're up there make sure you check out our show notes examples discussions and more and send your feedback questions and rants to our slack channel at codingblocks.net slash slack oh and hey uh make sure to follow us on x at coding blocks or head over to coding blocks.net find all our social links at the top of the page.

And if you don't know what he's talking about, X is the new or Twitter is the new X going to give it to you. Yeah, that's right. You find all our, uh, all our Twitter icons and letters up there, I guess.

Yeah, there we go. That was like probably the worst, uh, you know, call out of that song ever. Yeah. I sounded nothing like him, so I'm sorry.

You did not sound like DMX there. Yeah, my Michael Jackson was better than that. It was. It really was. It was. It really was. You know what? Alan, can you take us home with some Lionel Richie, and then we can close the loop here?

Ooh. Ooh, no. I can't do it. My voice is, no, I can't do it. Okay. My voice is too deep. Can't do it. No dancing on the ceiling tonight. All right, here we go.

All right.